Mission of Burma’s six-song EP
Signals, Calls, and Marches,
released in 1981, didn’t really capture the Rorschach rush of the band’s live fury. Thanks to its typically postpunk production (dry and clean),
Signals
came out “kind of arid, it just didn’t have the blood and guts of when we played live,” says Conley. The artwork exhibited significant postpunk damage, too. The cover was originally intended to be raw cardboard, the ultimate in minimalism, but for technical reasons, they used a photograph of cardboard, which actually made it even more conceptual. The lyric sheet took all the words used in the songs and arranged them in alphabetical order.
Mission of Burma made good on
Signals
’s sonic deficits with their first album,
Vs
., which was recorded live in the studio. “We’d do, like, short sets, five songs in a row, over and over, and gradually weeded out the best takes,” recalls Miller. It captured the overwhelming quality of Burma onstage, the clangor and barely controlled chaos. But although the album was critically acclaimed, Mission of Burma continued to have problems expanding their audience. Their noise deluge was mind-blowing, but the group didn’t traffic in the sort of period trappings (sonic or sartorial) that would make them fit the neopsychedelic scene. Their earlier singles had been well produced enough to become college radio favorites, but
Vs
. was too much of an assault. In 1983, they called it a day, mainly because of Miller’s worsening tinnitus condition, but also because they felt like they were banging their heads against a wall. Still, in their brief existence, MoB did establish an enduring following of brainiac postpunkers. This cult stature continued to accumulate after their demise to the point where, some twenty years after splitting up, the group re-formed and toured, playing to huge, fervent audiences that far surpassed anything they’d experienced the first time around, and as a result recorded a brand-new studio album, 2004’s
ONoffON
. At roughly the same time as MoB’s return to the stage, Wire (who’d already reunited once already, in 1985, to make a series of poppy albums) re-formed again and unleashed 2002’s
Read & Burn.
This
Pink Flag
–redux EP unloosed a scorching, almost vindictive blast of noise that made most of the neopunk then being made by kids thirty years Wire’s junior look hopelessly feeble.
THE LONDON VANGUARD
YOU STEP INTO THE ROOM
and immediately stumble against a typewriter lurking on the dingy brown carpet. A small tower of books perches precariously on top of the machine. Next to it lays a half-drunk mug of coffee, its surface coated with a film of green-gray mold. Jutting stacks of pamphlets, newspapers, and academic paperbacks sprawl across every available surface—TV, mantelpiece, even the top of the gas heater—while the bookshelves look close to collapsing. On the wall above the fireplace, poking through an overlapping foliage of gig flyers and activist leaflets, there’s a seven-inch single and a framed hammer and sickle with a used teabag dangling irreverently off the blade. And there’s…hang on a second.
Jesus!
What’s that dreadful smell in here?
On the front cover of Scritti Politti’s 1979 EP
4 A Sides,
there’s a photograph of the living room at their squalid squat in Camden, North London. It’s a snapshot of a lifestyle: theory-addled, amphetamine-stoked conversations raging until the crack of dawn, fevered debates about the radical potentials and counterrevolutionary pitfalls of popular music, punctuated by visits to illegal reggae parties and postpunk gigs at the Cryptic One Club. The group’s home and headquarters at 1 Carol Street was the site of an outlandish experiment in rock. Scritti conceived of itself as an anonymous collective involving not just the three band members but also nonmusicians whose participation might be “all talk” but nonetheless counted as a vital contribution. The core band consisted of singer/guitarist Green, drummer Tom Morley, and bassist Nial Jinks, but the total membership of the collective, which regularly gathered for formal meetings, was as high as twenty. “The idea is that substantial decisions about what the group is doing are made by a larger number of people than actually pick up instruments at present,” Green told one fanzine. Scritti aren’t the only band as commune in rock history (other examples include Jefferson Airplane, Faust, Amon Düül, and U.K. anarchopunks Crass) but the idea of a group where players were outnumbered by nonmusicians was unique.
Growing up in Wales, fifteen-year-old Green (then still using his surname, Gartside) and his school friend Nial Jinks had tried to form a branch of the Young Communist League. A few years later, Green studied art at Leeds Polytechnic at a time when conceptualist approaches were in the ascendant. But this brand of conceptualism was starkly different from the playful, process-oriented art school sensibility that informed Wire and Talking Heads. Influenced, like his Leeds contemporaries Gang of Four and the Mekons, by Art and Language’s hard-core critical sensibility, Green would come to think of that style of post-Eno art punk as “formalism,” decadent and disengaged, arty for artiness’s sake. Scritti had a
political
motivation for messing with musical structures. They wanted to create revolutionary consciousness through the radicalization of form as much as through their politically radical lyrical content.
Soon after arriving at Leeds Poly, Green had stopped painting in favor of producing only writing. This was conceptualism’s next step, keeping the concepts and ditching the actual artistic practice, the idea being that before you created anything, you really ought to work out what was actually valid. Initially, Green had been attracted to Leeds Poly by its free-for-all spirit and performance art, but now he found this self-indulgent and lacking in theoretical grounding. Provocatively, he started a kind of countercurriculum within the art department, a popular lecture series involving talks from members of Art and Language. “I was encouraging all these people to come and basically say what was going on in our faculty was a crock of shit and everybody was wasting their time,” Green chuckles.
This kind of combative meta-awareness infused the whole Scritti project. Scritti latched on to theory as a crucial tool for navigating the quandaries of “after-punk.” What “ways of going on” (as Green liked to phrase it) are misguided or counterproductive? This is where the nonmusician members—who coalesced around the group after Scritti moved down to London—played their role, forming a buzzing theory hive that subjected “rock discourse” to rigorous scrutiny, interrogating all its assumptions and conventions.
Fans of traditional English music, Green and Jinks had dabbled with playing “jigs and reels,” the singer recalls, but after the “Damascene moment” of seeing 1977’s Anarchy Tour when it reached Leeds, Green persuaded Jinks to abandon his fiddle for an electric bass and convinced their friend Tom Morley to blow the rest of his student grant on a drum kit. Although it was the Anarchy Tour bands such as the Clash that had inspired Scritti’s formation, Green and his cohorts soon became disillusioned by what they saw as the failure of the first-wave punk groups. In Scritti’s debut single, “Skank Bloc Bologna,” there’s a brief, sardonic allusion to the Clash’s idea of themselves as the “Magnificent Seven.” Green told one fanzine about how he read an interview with the Clash in which they compared themselves to the posse of vigilante heroes in the famed Western, “a bunch of outlaws that would come into town to put everything to rights.” The last verse of “Skank Bloc Bologna,” he explained, punctured this “silly over-romanticized notion” of the rock group as “macho gunslingers, the Robin Hoods of today.” The sound of “Skank Bloc Bologna” is a long way from the guerrilla bluster of the Clash’s
Give ’Em Enough Rope,
also released in the fall of 1978. The loping, white-reggae groove of the bass and drums, overlaid by Green’s plangent guitar (closer to folk rock than punk rock), sounds dejected rather than martial.
As for the song’s mysterious title, the “Skank” refers to the dub reggae that was the constant soundtrack to life in the Scritti squat. The “Bloc” alludes to a concept invented by one of Scritti’s favorite neo-Marxist theorists, Gramsci, the notion of the “historic bloc,” an alliance of oppressed classes uniting to overturn the existing order and overhaul the dominant, “commonsense” worldview of what’s natural, ordained, even possible. Revolution, for Gramsci, meant creating a new
reality
.
The “Bologna” in the title is another story. It’s often said that in Italy 1968 never ended. Unlike in other countries, that year’s political unrest didn’t subside but continued spasmodically through the end of the seventies, with wildcat strikes and industrial sabotage. Students seized control of universities, squatters occupied buildings, and an anarcho-surrealist tribe called the Metropolitan Indians staged mass shoplifting raids at luxury stores. All this insurgency was aimed as much against Italy’s established political Left (at its peak, Italy’s Communist Party controlled many major cities in the industrial North) as it was against conservatives. In early 1977, Bologna’s Communist mayor lost control of the city to a riotous coalition of autonomists and counterculture radicals. This “Bloc” of squatters, feminists, gays, students, nonunionized workers, and the semiemployed developed an ad hoc form of postpolitical politics. Self-organized and carnivalesque,
il Movimento
—as it was dubbed—aimed not to seize power but to smash it altogether, leaving everybody and nobody in charge. The Bologna riots of 1977 were as much a form of cultural revolt as a political uprising, what Italy had in lieu of punk, some say. But the mayor denounced the rioters as bohemian nihilists and enemies of the true proletariat and after several weeks called in armored cars to crush the insurrection.
The title “Skank Bloc Bologna” seems to imagine the Scritti squat as an
autonome
cell, the germ of a future
Movimento Inglesi
. Yet the actual tone of the song is desolate. The verses zoom in on a girl adrift. The hapless, literally
hope
less product of bad education and stifled imagination, she has no sense that change is even possible. Green sounds like he’s fighting his own despair. In sleepy London town, revolution seems a long way off. But even if the girl doesn’t know it, “Something in Italy/Is keeping us all alive.” Closer to home there’s “the magnificent six” (the number in the Scritti collective at that point). With their Carol Street schemes and dreams, “They’re working on a notion and they’re working on a hope/A Euro vision and a skanking scope.”
Inspired by the Desperate Bicycles, Scritti grubbed together the money to record “Skank” and two B-sides and, with financial help from Rough Trade, released it on their own St. Pancras label. On the photocopied sleeve they went one better than the Desps in the demystification stakes, itemizing the complete costs of recording, mastering, pressing, printing the labels, etc., and even listing contact numbers for companies who provided these services. Released in autumn of 1978, “Skank” sold out its first pressing of 2,500 quickly, thanks partly to the support of Radio One’s John Peel, and eventually moved around 15,000 copies. The melody’s off-kilter beauty and the plaintive melancholy of Green’s singing (indebted to the “English soul” of Robert Wyatt), along with the intrigue of the lyrics and that cryptic title, captured the imagination. Even the group’s name, a corruption of the title of a book by Gramsci, stood out for its sheer sound, “scrit-tee po-littee,” brittle and chiming, just like the upward-spiraling peals of lead guitar that pierce “Skank Bloc Bologna.” It didn’t hurt that Scritti looked good, too. Tom the drummer had blond dreadlocks (at that time a striking fashion statement) while pretty boy Green was the incarnation of intellectual glamour—thin and frail looking in an oversize sweater, with kohl pencil etched around his blazing eyes.
Scritti played their debut gig on November 18, 1978, at Acklam Hall in Ladbroke Grove, on a bill that included prag VEC and Rough Trade bands Cabaret Voltaire and the Red Crayola. High-strung at the best of times, Green was almost crippled with stage nerves. Sue Gogan, prag VEC singer, recalls, “He was in hysterics and needed to have a substantial ego massage before he could be persuaded to go on and do a stunning fifteen-minute set.” The set was so short because the group only had four songs. Despite Green’s caveat that the performance be taken as merely “an open rehearsal,” it was rapturously received, with the audience insisting Scritti play the entire set again. At the end of the night they were offered support slots on two different tours.
“Mark E. Smith said Scritti had the best rhythm section in the country,” recalls Geoff Travis of Rough Trade, who put out the
4 A Sides
EP. Scritti gigs were edgy, combustible affairs, with songs being made up on the spot, a practice Green found draining, but which he pursued out of an ideological commitment to discarding rock’s stale routines. Adding to the turbulence and cacophony—blades scratched along bass strings, tons of echo on the vocals and reverb on the tom toms—the group was often joined onstage by as many as twelve associate members of the collective, who would contribute either musically or by their symbolic presence.
Journalist Ian Penman appeared onstage with Scritti sometimes, blowing free-form saxophone. “Or I would get up and, well,
rap,
I guess you would have to call it these days!” he recalls. “Cut up a Lenin text and cross-reference it with Lee Perry’s ‘Bafflin’ Smoke Signals.’ You have to understand, we took a
lot
of speed back then.” A member of Scritti’s “odd conglomerate,” Penman often hung out at the squat, where he might compose a Scritti communiqué or participate in some of the group’s interviews. He also acted as a sort of fifth column by sneaking Scritti jargon and buzz phrases into his
NME
reviews. Penman recalls his Scritti days as an amphetamine-filled blur of book swapping and cerebral frenzy. “New records would be seized upon and reviewed en masse, gigs attended and feverishly discussed for days and days afterwards.” The soundtrack to all this “speed talk” would be dub, Robert Wyatt, avant-jazz chanteuse Annette Peacock, and English folk minstrels such as Martin Carthy and the Albion Band. Anything but straight rock.
Overtaking the Desperate Bicycles, Scritti became icons of DIY, supreme exponents-cum-theorists of a willfully fractured style of music making, “messthetics,” as Green christened it in the manifesto song of the same title. In an interview with
After Hours
fanzine, he enthused about the new crop of “scratchy-collapsy groups” such as the Raincoats, saying, “We enjoy very much the enthusiastic, stop-start mistakes, falling-over sound they have.”
Scritti’s interviews from the early days created an intriguing image of a shadowy collective skulking on the periphery of the music scene and exploring some fabulously uncompromised and far-reaching outer limit of politics and pop. In a song such as “Is and Ought the Western World,” in which the lyrics oscillated line by line between the prosaic details of everyday oppression and the abstract contours of deep political structure, it was clear that Scritti had advanced beyond Gang of Four’s schematic case studies, just as the Gang themselves had moved beyond Tom Robinson’s tell-it-like-it-is protest.
Green became a kind of theory guru to many in the postpunk scene. His eloquence and the fastidious complexity of his thinking were attractive at a time when punk was fragmenting. In the chorus of “Messthetics” Green declared, “We know what we’re doing,” by which he meant that the music was fractured on purpose. But in a larger sense Scritti convinced lots of people that they did know something nobody else did, or at least were thinking more rigorously about the crucial quandaries than the competition.
Prominent among the ideas whizzing about was Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony,” a catchall term that covers the official ideology of state, church, and other institutions along with the more diffuse and subliminal “commonsense” assumptions that hold a social system together. In Scritti’s brittle ditty of the same name, Green personifies “Hegemony” as “the foulest creature that set upon a race.” He sounds racked, singing, “How do you
do
this?/How can you do it to me?” like he’s desperately struggling to free himself from hegemony’s mental tentacles. In the chorus, the group derisively recites the sort of mundane platitudes that serve as hegemony’s glue: “A honest day’s pay for a honest day’s work,” “You can’t change human nature,” “Some are born to lead and others born to follow.” At song’s end, they mock the clichés that preserve rock’s own stasis quo: “Rock ’n’ roll is here to stay,” “But can you dance to it?,” “Walk it like you talk it.”