Green Gartside (Interview)

It's now been more than 34 years since folk icon Sandy Denny passed away. Her influence continues to live on, and this month sees the reissue of Denny's final trio of albums for Island Records as well as a tribute tour, featuring artists such as Thea Gilmore, PP Arnold and Joan As Policewoman.

Also on the Denny tribute tour is Green Gartside, better known as frontman of post-punk pioneers Scritti Politti. Recently, David Zammitt got the chance to talk to Green about the importance Sandy Denny's music has to him, as well as the future of Scritti.

It’s interesting to see you on the bill. What made you choose to sign up for it?

Well, I’m a Sandy Denny fan. I was a huge Fairport Convention fan when I was at school; they were possibly my favourite band for a while. They got me interested in traditional music. Before punk, the two things that I loved the most were traditional music and bands like Henry Cow, and experimental, left-field stuff. Then there was punk, then there was reggae, then there was funk. While I was at school the first album I could buy with my pocket money was an Island sampler. Island Records used to do these cheap samplers and there was one called Nice Enough To Eat which I bought when I was thirteen. The first track on it was a Fairport Convention track and I loved it. And there was also a Nick Drake song on it with Richard Thompson playing guitar which I loved. So as soon as I had enough money I went and bought Liege and Lief, which remains one of my favourite albums.

It’s pretty scary too because people like Jerry Donahue and Dave Swarbrick are on the tour and they were people that I really, really loved. I mean, seriously loved. I started singing in folk clubs when I was at school in Newport and Cardiff, and Fairport got me into things like Martin Carthy, who I always used to follow round when I was a schoolboy and when I was doing fine art, and I’ve recently got to do some gigs with Martin. A bit like doing the Nick Drake stuff, and the Incredible String Band stuff where I got to sing with Richard Thompson. It’s just incredible – scary and incredible. For someone like me, an incredible thrill.

Were the first songs you wrote folk-influenced?

Yeah, we played traditional stuff. It was indebted to Fairport even when we were down in school in Newport - a folk club down the docks there, run by a man called Dublin Moran. I would’ve been about fourteen and we’d go down there and play some jigs and reels, and a couple of songs that we lifted. We did get really interested in it. We went to the national library in Cardiff and looked in to Welsh traditional songs and we got interested in some Welsh tradition called the Mari Lwyd, where you go around scaring people with a horse’s skull, knocking on their door and basically challenging them to a battle – a bit like hip-hop – you improvise a rhyme and the people in the house have to improvise a better rhyme. I was deeply interested in all of that, but I wouldn’t have really tried writing anything until Scritti. I didn’t try to write anything, really, until punk.

It’s the kind of genre that you can really get lost in, in that it goes back hundreds of years, whereas something like punk doesn’t have the same history.

Well, traditional music kind of astonished… it was the very fact that these songs had no discernible author. And what happens melodically in folk music of the British Isles is exquisite. I heard Fairport and they introduced me to the idea of traditional music, the idea that these were anonymous songs, of such intricacy and beauty, that fascinated me and still fascinates me.

The parallels aren’t immediately obvious but do you see that tradition as influencing Scritti on any level, either in ethos, sound or melody?

Definitely there is, I think. I’m not sure that I could point exactly to a sonic example but, inasmuch that I spent as long as I did do being very much in love with traditional music, I think there’s bound to be a melodic influence that comes from it. Yeah, I guess I was mucking around with that stuff before anything else on a guitar. Some harmonic approach as well would come from it. So I definitely have a British – I was going to say English – but a British musical sensibility that comes – great chunks of it will come from The Beatles and some will come from Robert Wyatt and some of it will come from traditional music so yeah, I think it was a musical influence on me as well as a broader cultural one, because the folk music of the 60s still would have had something of an association with the left, wouldn't it? Think about the whole British folk revival, that suited me as well. That suited my inclinations, politically as well as aesthetically.

I would have assumed that Scritti were westward-looking, more influenced by what was going on in the US at the time, and the music is clearly hip hop-infused, but you see Britishness as playing a key part in your sound.

Yeah, I do actually. Later on I got interested in black American music, but I really didn’t understand, I don’t think. I neither heard much black American music when I was little, nor did I understand it in a way that’s hard to explain. And I didn’t understand the indebtedness of music that I did like to black American music.

Rock and Roll and R&B and stuff?

Yeah. Despite being precociously interested in pop music, I didn’t really know how much black music had influenced Rock n' Roll in this country. I didn’t know the black influence on The Beatles, I didn’t know that until much later in life and when I started listening to John Peel, he didn’t play much black music at all in most of the years that I listened to him. So even though I may have loved Captain Beefheart, I’d never heard Howlin’ Wolf. I didn’t hear Howlin’ Wolf until years later. That’s the way it was. I guess they did play black music. There were Motown artists in the charts but I just didn’t like it or get it.

And you might not make the connection immediately to the likes of the Beatles or the Stones.

Yeah. My getting fascinated with black contemporary R&B and hip-hop and all the rest of it was partly informed by getting to grips with reggae, which was obviously the music that punks listened to all day. But before there was that, before the Clash had won my heart, there was Fairport Convention when I was a kid. It’s a longstanding and deep affection I have for that stuff.

Looking at the tracklisting of your last album, there are songs on there like Mrs Hughes – obviously a very British name – and Robin Hood. On Window Wide Open you reference Parliament Hill and Greenwich. You can definitely draw parallels there to what Sandy and Fairport Convention were trying to do. Is it something you’re trying to make more obvious or draw more attention to in your own music?

Around the time that I was making that, I had gone back to listen to some of the music that I listened to when I was growing up so I could probably discern direct bits of that that have echoes of an interest in what you broadly call the folk music from when I was at school, along with the Robert Wyatt stuff or the Incredible String Band stuff. There are the echoes of that there definitely, and maybe even lyrically. Yeah, I think you could discern that influence pretty clearly in that album.

Going back to Sandy herself. She’s cited as an influence by Florence Welch while Yo La Tengo have namedropped her in the past, to name but two. Why do you see her as being so enduring?

It’s interesting – I’ve thought about this. Apart from the fact that she obviously was exceptional, there really weren’t that many women that came out of that British folk revival thing. Also with its American influence as well, but there weren’t many women that emerged from that as songwriters so she was a pretty rare commodity in that respect alone. And then I think it’s just that she was – I don’t know, she had a great sense of melody and a beautiful voice and the way she harmonised things was really lovely. It wasn’t flawless but that was good.

It is rough around the edges at times, especially the early stuff.

Yeah.

And I suppose, given the context of what happened her in later years it is touching that there is a vulnerability, as much as she was a strong woman. She does lay things bare.

Yes. Back in the day – it would have come out when I was 14 or 15, the first Fotheringay album, songs on that like The Sea which is exquisite, it really is so beautiful and that’ll do. You only really need to have written a handful of songs that good to deserve your place in history really, it’s as simple as that.

It was obviously a pretty short career by anyone’s standards but in her later work she touched on funk and soul, and you can see those influences filtering in. Where do you think she could have gone? Do you find that period as interesting as the folk-indebted period?

I know it less well, that later stuff - candidly. Obviously I’ve checked it out in recent months. I remember talking to Andrew Batt about this and about whether she would have ended up heading out to Compass Point or something. I think some people are less kind about the later stuff and the live album and things, but I think it’s pretty damn fine. I don’t feel uncomfortable with it.

I think towards the end people thought it was conceding to what was popular at the time but I think it showed that she could experiment.

Sometimes people don’t want you to have the right to mess around with…

...what they find so precious.

Yeah, exactly. And you will lose people along the way but fuck that. If you want to try it, you should try it.

Obviously there was a tragic end to her life but, aside from that, how do you think she should be remembered?

How do I think she should be remembered? Blimey. I don’t really care much for thinking in those terms. I don’t really know that a consensus about a reputation really matters. All that matters is that the songs are there and her voice is there. And as brilliant and as beautiful as they are, whatever will be made of them by people in the future, I don’t know. Basically I think her reputation is absolutely secure and it will probably just be enhanced as time goes by. It’s set fair as she may have said herself, using a nautical metaphor, of which she possibly used one too many.

She was a little preoccupied with maritime imagery.

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? There’s a lot of sea and sailors.

For a young woman to be interested in that – that’s striking in itself.

Yeah, well I don’t know what any analyst would make of that kind of thing. I often think that biographical detail is basically an irrelevance and it’s very difficult, even armed with the biographical information, to square that with the sound that that woman made, for some reason. I read about how many times she got drunk in a Soho folk club and she did this, and she worried about her looks.

And then there’s the beautiful music.

And then there’s the beautiful music.

I know songs like Jacques Derrida – and you mentioned Kant in one of the new songs – does that inform your stance whereby you see biographical details as an irrelevance and it should be the work itself that’s afforded analysis?

Yeah, pretty much. Even if it didn’t go back to the continental tradition of the death of the author, which is pretty much standard, that the author’s intentions are irrelevant, inaccessible and not in the music or in the text or anything else. Yeah, it would come from that… anyway, basically you’re right is the short answer.

I’ve got a few quick questions on Scritti. In general, how are things going? There are obviously are plans for another album, do you know when will we see that?

It’s really tricky. It’s long overdue, the album for Rough Trade. Geoff was there both nights last week. He has been incredibly supportive as he always has been. I’ve started way too many songs, shitloads of songs and getting round to deciding which ones to finish and how has started to completely do my fucking head in. And then, we just played in the pub around the corner from my house just for the fun of it and off the back of that came the offers to do some others gigs, and suddenly gigging is happening again quite a bit, which is fun but it’s tricky to balance the playing live thing with the knuckling down to get the album finished but I definitely will. If I don’t take on any more live stuff this year then I will finish the album, which is what I really, really want to do.

It seems like the studio is where you’re more at home.

Well, I’m getting better at being out. I’m having more fun than I ever thought I could.

In terms of the band’s sound, obviously you moved pretty quickly from punk to something that was a lot poppier and a lot more accessible yet remaining well-thought out. Do you see that mantle of intelligent pop music being passed on to anyone at the moment?

Who’s doing it now? That’s a good question. Well it’s a different world now but David Gamson, who’s the American half of the Scritti of the 80s, and then he and I did Anomie and Bonhomie together, he works in production and collaborative writing for - that kind of speculative work - for Top 40 people in America. I’ve gone out and done gigs with him for that kind of thing and I think it’s just, in terms of what makes the top 40, that’s become so – I don’t know, the record labels have become a lot more conservative than what they were and, you know, I’ve been there when the phone call has come in from the A&R man who wants a record that sounds just like the last Rihanna record for some young woman who’s just been acting on the Disney channel. And the people left buying music and downloading it legally are – the only people left are women between the ages of 13 and 30 and it’s very specific – I don’t know, you get out there are there are real rules to how Top 40 pop should be made at the moment and so, as a consequence, there’s very little that makes it into the Top 40 that’s properly pop music, that really makes me think, “That’s intelligent”, in inverted commas. The whole David Guetta thing – which I never thought America would fall for.

Thanks for your time, and hopefully we’ll get a Scritti album this year, if not early next year.

Yeah. I would really like it to be by the end of this year.