FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Scritti Politti - Cupid & Psyche 85
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FOR those who don’t know…
Scritti Politti are a legendary British band, originally formed in 1977 in Leeds, England, by Welsh singer-songwriter Green Gartside. He is the only constant member of the band. Their fifth studio album, White Bread Black Beer, came out in 2006. Most people would consider the group’s second album, Cupid & Psyche 85, to be their best. Released on 10th June, 1985, it features two of Scritti Politti’s best-known tracks: The Word Girl and Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin). Soulful, sweet, spellbinding and catchy, Cupid & Psyche 85 is one of the albums from the 1980s that you could play to someone who has never heard it and they would like it. I think that Gartside’s songwriting transcends time and history. There is something wonderfully hypnotic about it and his singing. The band are incredible throughout Cupid & Psyche 85. It is an album that I would encourage people to go and get on vinyl. There are a couple of features that I want to highlight. They give some background to Cupid & Psyche 85, and what Scritti Politti accomplished on the follow-up to 1982’s Songs to Remember. Whilst researching for this feature, I have listened to the deeper cuts on Cupid & Psyche 85. There is not a weak moment on the album!
Spectrum Culture wrote about Cupid & Psyche 85 in 2014. They discussed Green Gartside’s instantly recognisable soulful voice, recording some of the album in the U.S., and why its lack of a top-forty place on the U.S. album chart was no bad thing:
“One of the brightest synth-pop confections of the ’80s deconstructs the very pop constructs it celebrates. Its layered dance music productions marry the sacred and the profane, its love songs aware that love songs are illusions, and pop music propaganda. But its auteur’s personal and political message is couched in the most glorious pop music.
In 1984, Green Gartside (credited on Cupid & Psyche 85 as simply Green) told the London music rag Smash Hits that, “if you’d played me ‘Wood Beez’ six years ago, I think I’d have spat at it or something.” “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)” is one of the album’s most dense accomplishments, it’s music bombastic and light, vulgar and soaring, mechanical and human. The dedication to Aretha Franklin speaks to Green’s conflicted emotions about pop music, and to the conflicted emotions in pop music. “It’s the whole question of what pop is,” he told the New Musical Express. “Its relationship to language, power and politics. It’s also a question of music’s transgression and abuse of some of the rules of language. Aretha was singing what are arguably inane pop songs and had left her gospel roots. But she sang them with a fervor, a passion, though I hate to use that word because it’s been hideously tarred in recent usage. To a committed materialist whose interest had come round to language again—perhaps because of a bankruptcy in Marxism to deal with ideology or any artistic community—hearing her was as near to a hymn or a prayer as I could get. Obviously I couldn’t make that point in a three minute pop song.”
But he did. Green’s swooning blue-eyed soul works against the mechanical drum beats and real drum beats. “Wood Beez” has some appropriately wooden beats, but the vocals and synth melodies soar, the bright rhythm guitar line propelling the track through its hit-single contradictions.
Green formed Scritti Politti in 1977, naming the band after a collection of Marxist writings by Antonio Gramsci. You wouldn’t know from their early tracks for Rough Trade that he’d be the genius behind such enduring ear candy. But he always had pipes, and philosophy. Their first album, Songs to Remember, featured an homage to “Jacques Derrida” alongside smart love songs like “The Sweetest Girl.” But Gartside had musical ambitions that he couldn’t fulfill at Rough Trade. While making Songs to Remember he met David Gamson, who with Material drummer Fred Maher released a shimmering synth-pop cover of the Archies’ bubblegum classic “Sugar Sugar.” Gamson and Maher joined pop forces with Green, and the pieces fell into place.
The band recorded three singles in New York with legendary producer Arif Mardin, who had produced sides for Aretha Franklin. These sessions resulted in three of the album’s strongest singles: “Absolute, “Wood Beez” and “Hypnotize.” The album sequencing brings Green’s vision into an album that wasn’t just catchy and danceable but logical. Cupid & Psyche 85 begins with “The Word Girl,” its reggae beat suggesting the high of romance, its rising synth washes suggesting the search for love and almost biblical meaning evident in lyrics like, “How her flesh and blood became the word.”
“The Word Girl” was the album’s biggest UK hit, but this is a love song about the lies that love songs tell (“A name the girl outgrew/ The girl was never real).” Flesh and blood leads off the album, but the record ends with the girl who made you forget to believe in heaven in “Hypnotize.” The final words sum up the record and the quintessential pop sentiment: “It’s so hard to tell you that I love you.” Cupid & Psyche 85 has some of the most gorgeous pop melodies of the ’80s in “Absolute” and “Wood Beez,” but Green’s Romeo finally finds them inadequate to express his love.
But this is where Green was wrong. “Perfect Way,” the biggest US single from Scritti Politti’s second album Cupid & Psyche 85, plays on the most basic of love song tropes: “I’ve got a perfect way to make a certain a maybe/I’ve got a perfect way to make the girls go crazy.” But the Welshman’s inventive and catchy wordplay is more personal and challenging than it first appears. The concerns that Green brought to Cupid & Psyche 85 may have gone over the heads of its Top 40 audience. But it succeeds through one of the great means of communication: music, accessible enough to sing along to, dynamic enough for the dance floor. If Green’s lyrics express frustration with pop music, the ambitious production values of this classic album show that he knows of no better way to communicate after all”.
I like Wales Art Review’s assessment from 2019. They note that, whilst there are musical touches and hallmarks of the 1980s (not all of them good!), the lyrics from Gartside transcends the album beyond anything commercial and cliched:
“How very 1980s. And the sound of the album is no less redolent of the period. Let the listener beware: there are keyboard bends and there is heavily processed rock guitar, and in one place there may even be a steel drum sample. But the glory of the record is its musical and rhythmic sophistication; not every LP released in 1985 sounded as exciting as this. Green and his collaborators likened the process of assembling the tracks to the workings of a Swiss watch. Individual parts of only two or three notes accent and punctuate the vocals, instruments leap from one speaker to the other, and hidden melodies are revealed only on repeated playbacks. It’s clearly the result of hours spent at the mixing desk but the hard work is made to sound effortless.
And then there are the words. In 1984 Green had told the NME that he was ‘steeped in language’ and the evidence of this is scattered across the album’s lyrics. There are references to love letters left incomplete, margins of error, pages torn out of rule books, and (on ‘Lover to Fall’) ‘a new hermeneutic’. Even the copyright for the album is credited to a company called Jouissance Ltd. Green was happy to expound on all this in interviews at the time of the record’s release. This is how he explained the origins of album opener ‘The Word Girl’ to Sounds:
I was taking stock of all the lyrics of the songs for the new album and, lo and behold, in every song there was – this girl, or that girl. It seemed a good idea to show awareness of the device being used, to take it out of neutral and show it didn’t connote or denote certain things. It was important to admit a consciousness of the materiality of referring to ‘girls’ in songs.
It’s fair to say that you didn’t get this kind of thing from Billy Idol. The sheer weight of references and allusions on the album should suffocate it, but Green had by this time found a surprisingly light touch with a lyric, and coupled with the inventiveness of the music, ensures that it’s anything but a deadly listen. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know that in the song ‘Small Talk’ the line ‘If a thing’s worth doing / It’s worth doing badly’ is his attempt, as he told another interviewer, to summarise an idea of the philosopher A N Whitehead. And most people who bought the album wouldn’t have had a clue that the photo on the back cover is inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s unused image for the cover of Vogue depicting a piece of meat wrapped in cloth. What counted were the songs, and there was plenty of evidence that people understood those well enough as the album reached number 5 in the UK. In the chorus of ‘Perfect Way’, the band’s biggest hit in America, Green sings that he’s found ‘a perfect way / To make the girls go crazy’. If you want proof of that, just go online and witness the screams that greet his appearance on Mike Read’s Pop Quiz.
Sadly, the sheen would eventually wear off Scritti Politti’s pop crown. The next album, 1988’s Provision, has many of the sonic devices and lyrical complexity of its predecessor, but little of its beauty, with the exception of the exquisite ‘Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry for Loverboy)’ and an accompanying trumpet solo from Miles Davis. The album had taken a long time to make and Green sounds tentative on much of the record, his voice mixed curiously low in places as if even he doesn’t completely believe in it. Of course, we know now that the attention that came with the popularity of Cupid and Psyche had not brought Green much pleasure, and he had not been able to maintain the ironical distance from the corporate side of the music industry that he had envisaged. At the time of the release of 2006’s White Bread Black Beer, he said of the earlier period that success had felt as bad as failure. After Provision, he again fled to Wales and it would be another eleven years before the release of the eclectic Anomie and Bonhomie.
Cupid and Psyche ‘85 remains a hugely satisfying listen, and one which possesses magic that has outlived the particular time and place in which it was made. I bought the album when it first came out – my copy of the LP still bears the £5.99 price sticker from Andy’s Records in Norwich – and though I was a gauche, suburban 15-year old, even I could tell that its production values represented some new high-water mark and that the lyrics were a playful, brainy delight. I still smile at the line ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do / Including doing nothing’ in ‘Wood Beez’, but if there’s a French poststructuralist lurking behind it, I couldn’t tell you who it was”.
A wonderful album that is so full of rich and quotable language and imagery. Such a gorgeous sound and some of the finest music of the 1980s. Cupid & Psyche 85 is an album that should be in everyone’s vinyl collection. Failing that, definitely spend some time now listening to it. A wonderful L.P. that immerses you from start to finish, Cupid & Psyche 85 contains…
NO wasted moments.