Scritti Politti - White Bread, Black Beer

Genre rock Publisher Nonesuch Records External Links Official Scritti Politti Website Official Nonesuch Records Website

I was somewhat confused when the subject of Scritti Politti came up in the music magazines that I read in my teen years. They kept referring to a highly-respected post-punk band, but all I could remember is listening to "Oh Patti" on the Radio 1 Top 40 show when I was eight, its silky-smooth sound nothing like the band that people were gushing over.

Eventually, I discovered some of the long history of Scritti Politti, a band that started out as a punk collective, writing songs according to Marxist principles. Setting out to deconstruct the rock group from the ground up, early songs like "Skank Bloc Bologna" referenced to Italian anarchist uprisings, while the band often made up their entire live set while out on stage. Eventually, the band began to focus around the magnetic Green Gartside. Handsome, ideological, and blessed with a soulful voice, he locked himself away in the Scritti Politti squat, writing screeds and manifestos to justify Scritti Politti Mk II: Pop Stars. Still deliciously subversive, but ditching the angles and edges of post-punk for lush synthesizers and Linn drums, Green hitched the band to the New Pop movement alongside other acts like The Human League, Heaven 17, and ABC. A succession of chart hits such as "The Sweetest Girl," "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)," and yes, "Oh Patti" followed.

It's been many years since Gartside has released any new material, but here's White Bread, Black Beer, out on the Rough Trade label (in the UK-Nonesuch in the states), the band's original home. The austere, basic title, combined with his new beard might lead you to think that Green has got in touch with his inner Stereophonic.

Thankfully, single and lead track "The Boom Boom Bap" dispel any of those thoughts. Delightfully minimal instumentally, the track shows off Gartside's still amazing voice. It's a continuation of the Scritti Mk II formula rather than going back to their rougher origins.

As a whole, the album tends to run into itself a little, feeling like a CD that pours liquid icing sugar out of your speakers. At times, Green's voice is so smooth that it begins to grate somewhat. Normally, this is offset by a harshness in the lyrics or the sound, but for a considerable amount of White Bread..., that balance is nowhere to be found. But when it does appear, like in the "Spirit In The Sky"-referencing "After Six," or the beats funky as Pharrell leading out of "Mrs. Hughes" and the album's final call to arms, "Robin Hood," then it brings back all those dizzy heights of the early 1980s, when it really did look like a new intelligence was spreading through Pop.

That didn't turn out to be the case; the New Pop floundered and spluttered, reaching its zenith during the Paul Morley period of ZTT, reaching over to eat itself swiftly afterwards; the Thatcherite recasting of Motown as Stock, Aitken, and Waterman took the sheen of the movement and turned it into a production-line factory of pop and pap to be bought along with shares in TSB and British Telecom. The sad melancholy of "Snow In Sun" all by itself shows that one of Britain's forgotten geniuses is still going strong. Amusingly, White Bread, Black Beer was recorded in a similar manner to those early Scritti Politti releases, in Gartside's apartment in Hackney. And yet it sounds as polished as any of their major label releases during the 1980s. Technology has made the post-punk dream of do-it-yourself available to almost everybody. Will they fit their pegs politely into the designated holes or will the current generation be as revolutionary as Gartside strived to be?