Bibbly O Tek \/ Doubt Beat<\/a><\/p>\nGreat third release by Scritti Politti on a Rough Trade and St Pancras Records split release, quickly following on from \u2018Skank Bloc Bologna\u2019 and the \u2018Peel Session\u2019 7\u2033singles from 1978.<\/p>\n
The band at this time were submerged in the North London (Mornington Crescent \/ Camden area) squatting scene, were\u00a0dabbling with Communist theories and were partial to a nice bit of grade A Dub and Reggae.\u00a0\u00a0The band\u2019s communal lifestyle, added to the mixture of influences, certainly gave them the edge when creating great slabs of music.<\/p>\n
Simon Reynolds piece on Scritti Politti first published in The Wire 2001<\/p>\n
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How do pop groups choose their fans? Like any romance, it\u2019s a subtle, near-imperceptible process of sifting through the general population, a trail of lures and signals. I\u2019m still not sure what it was that seduced me into a long infatuation with Scritti Politti: the sound or the idea <\/em>of the band. Back in 1979, the two were inseparable, of course. The urgency\u2019s of the post-punk era made the notion of music-for-music\u2019s sake seem decadent, trivial, absurd. And some of the best groups were more influential as concepts than fully-realized propositions.<\/span> <\/span>What grabbed my ear first was the name, I think. Just the sound of it: Scritti Politti, brittle and chiming like the guitar-sound on \u201cBibbly O Tek\u201d (first Scritti song I ever heard, John Peel, late 1979). That, and the sheer intrigue of what it might refer to. Eventually I discovered that it was a slight corruption of the title of a book by neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. Which only enhanced the image I\u2019d already gleaned from the music press of this shadowy collective operating at some fabulously uncompromising and far-reaching outer-limit of politics-and-pop. If even Paul Morley, reviewing two of their singles together for NME<\/em>, found them faintly forbidding\u2026 well, count me in! <\/span>If I\u2019m really honest, though, I think it was a photo that sealed the deal: Green, dragging on a cigarette, thin as a rail inside his baggy jumper. Clearly teetering on the edge of his nerves, with what looked like kohl darkly etched around his fragile, blazing eyes, he seemed the incarnation of intensity\u2013all the glamour of a life harrowed by thought. There was another figure in the photograph (or was it another pic altogether?), a white guy with blonde dreadlocks: back then, this was quite a striking fashion statement (nowadays, it just signifies \u201cnu metal, yuk!\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\nThe 4-A Sides <\/em>EP was the first Scritti release I actually got hold of: a 12 inch single (exotic in 1979!\u2026.at least if you lived in a Hertfordshire commuter town), with typography that mimicked a reggae pre-release (except Scritti wrote \u2018Pre-Langue\u2019, a pre-echo of Green\u2019s soon-come Derridean preoccupation with language). On the front, another intriguing photo: Scritti\u2019s communal squat in Mornington Crescent. A framed hammer-and-sickle above the mantelpiece harked back to Green\u2019s past as a Young Communist, although somebody sacrilegiously hung what\u2019s looks like a teabag or tampon off the sickle. The place is a tip: empty beer bottles, typewriter with a tower of books piled on top, 7 inch single nailed to a wall densely covered with flyers, broad-sheets, activist pamphlets. On the back cover, Scritti include a breakdown of the EP\u2019s recording costs, plus phone numbers for label printers, pressing plants, etc: demystification of the means of production, designed to encourage\/enable others to do-it-themselves.<\/span><\/div>\nGreen later loudly disowned the music of 4-A-Sides and the two other \u201cearly Scritti\u201d releases, but I still find it thrilling. \u201cSkank Bloc Bologna\u201d, the debut single, is a desolate, desperate ballad for exiles on the High Streets of Babylon U.K, its loping punky-reggae riddem overlaid with a clangour of close-chord-ed guitar and pierced by plangent carillon lead-runs that some sages claim are steeped in the influence of Martin Carthy-era Steeleye Span! <\/span><\/div>\nI found the song title wonderfully mysterious and evocative. Now, knowing more about the period, I wonder if it was some kind of \u201canswer\u201d to ATV\u2019s \u201cAlternatives To NATO\u201d: an imaginary network of dissidents stretching from Jamaica to Bologna\u2019s anarchist squatters, via Ladbroke Grove (the singles second B-Side, the frantic instrumental \u201c28\/8\/78\u201d, is overlaid with a TV news report on that year\u2019s rioting at the Notting Hill Carnival).<\/span><\/div>\n4-A Sides is first-phase Scritti at their peak. There\u2019s palpable joy and fervor in the playing. The rhythm section, Tom Morley (the guy with natty dreads) and Niall Jinks, provide the \u201coptimism of the will\u201d to counter the lyrics \u201cpessimism of the intellect\u201d. Niall\u2019s bass, squirming and writhing, is simultaneously the music\u2019s funk motor and melodic focus. And Green\u2019s minor-key twists and multi-tracked vocal babble can\u2019t hide his gifts as singer and tune-smith. The words, oscillating line-by-line between theoretical abstraction and the concrete quotidian details of everyday oppression, are as far beyond Gang of Four\u2019s schematic case studies of false consciousness as Go4 were an advance on Tom Robinson\u2019s tell-it-like-it-is protest. \u201cP.A.\u2019s\u201d, for instance, moves back and forth between the band\u2019s struggle to exist (rehearsal costs, debts, bailiffs) and fascism in 1920 and 1933: the mystery of popular support for totalitarianism, all its daft pageantry and atavistic ritual. \u201cHow\/Did they all decide?\u201d, wonders Green. \u201cWhat was irrational\/Is national!\u201d, before imagining, with tres 1979 paranoia, the same thing happening here in England, the land of \u201call things in moderation\u201d.\u201dThe language has shut down\u201d, goes one line in \u201cP.A.s\u201d: Scritti were poised on the cusp between Gramsci\u2019s notion of \u201chegemony\u201d (\u201ccommon sense\u201d as the ideological sleight by which the ruling class makes the-way-things-are seem natural, ordained, the only possible reality) and a post-structuralist conception of language itself as the conductive fluid for power. On the sleeve of the Peel Sessions 7 inch EP, a page from the imaginary book Scritto\u2019s Republic explores these ideas: grammar as the means by which the unformed self is constituted as a subject. The songs themselves seem like a regression to a less sophisticated approach to lyrics, though: \u201cMessthetics\u201d, \u201cHegemony,\u201d and \u201cScritlocks Door\u201d are party political broadcasts, mini-manifestos of anti-rockism. Only the unsettling \u201cOPEC Immac\u201d builds on the lateral thinking and uncanny connections of \u201cPA\u2019s\u201d and \u201cBibbly O\u2019 Tek\u201d. Green\u2019s voice, distraught and frayed-sounding, suggests he\u2019s on the verge of a theory-and-stimulants induced breakdown. Which, by all accounts, he was.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Confidence \/ P.A.s Bibbly O Tek \/ Doubt Beat Great third release by Scritti Politti on a Rough Trade and St Pancras Records split release, quickly following on from \u2018Skank Bloc Bologna\u2019 and the \u2018Peel Session\u2019 7\u2033singles from 1978. The band at this time were submerged in the North London (Mornington Crescent \/ Camden area) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-downloads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3441,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions\/3441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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