Writer and musician Anthony Reynolds recently interviewed Green Gartside, former lead singer of the band Scritti Politti. Miles not only recorded Scritti Politti’s “Perfect Way” on his album Tutu (Miles even planned to name his album after it), but he recorded with the band, appearing on the album Provision. He also became friends with Green. In this interview extract, kindly provided by Anthony, Green talks about Miles.
Green and Miles – © Scritti Politti Fan Club
The full interview will appear on Anthony’s website www.anthonyreynolds.net
AR: I’m a big Miles Davis freak and I then went back and found Cupid And Psyche in a charity shop in the village and so I got to hear “Perfect Way” with vocals. It was so weird.
GG: Oh yeah, it would be weird. I haven’t listened to it since I made it so.see, we’re off to America in a couple of weeks and I’ve a horrible feeling that people in America will want.I’ve never played live in America – and people will shout out for old songs. Which is.errr.I never know how to feel about that; whether you should oblige the people by playing a few or a lot. But anyway, we decided as a band that we’d have a listen to “Perfect Way” tomorrow.
AR: That was a hit in America, right?
GG: That was the one big hit – pop hit anyway – in America, so.
AR: You even did it on the Dick Clarke show, right?
GG: Yeah. American bandstand, that’s right. A lot of madness. That’s when it started to go pear shaped for me. I can remember that very day that it was… “Hang on this is not really the right line of work for me”, that’s what I thought. From that point in time ’till I was back in Usk [a village in Wales where Green settled down] a few years later.it just felt wrong. I thought I’d enjoy being a pop star and I was messing around with ‘pop music’ but I wasn’t really, I was just a bit of product. It wasn’t fun. I stopped at that point finding it amusing. It was…the insincerity that really fucking pissed me off. They don’t really care. It was just ruthless and heartless and it’ll do your fucking head in, I reckon. It did mine in anyway.
AR: Going back to my “Perfect Way” experience. When Miles covered that, were you a fan of his at the time?
GG: I had gone through a phase of listening to him when I was an art student but I hadn’t listened to him in a long time. When I got to meet him, because I knew my memory was so bad, I made sure that on the occasions I went to meet him in his apartment in New York or when I went into the studio with him, I made sure that when I went back to my own apartment I would write it all down. And I found one of the notebooks up in the attic not so long ago. What I found was an account of the trip to visit him in his flat and I wrote down absolutely every detail of what we talked about, what we listened to, what people were wearing what he said, what I said.its quite amazing reading. It’s only about three or four pages long.
AR: Have you considered publishing it?
GG: Erm.I’ll look into it. I’ve got film of him too, video of him me and Dave (Gamson – producer) working in the studio together. No one has ever seen that. I know the BBC wanted it a few years ago.
AR: That would have been the Provision album sessions, right?
GG: Yeah, it was interesting. I did spend quite a bit of time with him. He used to phone me a lot.
AR: It’s refreshing that you haven’t done an impression of his voice during the telling of all this. Almost anyone who ever met Miles seems to do their impression of him.So that’s pretty cool that you didn’t, I think.
GG: No, on this occasion I won’t do the voice. But then of course the bugger died. And that was a shame. But it was amazing to find these notebooks.
AR: I think a lot of his final works – Tutu in particular – have transcended their era now. I think maybe at the time a lot of people heard it as Miles trying to be hip and down with MTV or whatever, but I think it’s beyond that now.
GG: Yeah, I remember being at his place and he was still very actively interested in music and very discerning and listened to a lot. Including his own stuff. I remember he had a whole wall of recordings of himself playing live in various places and he would go very specifically to find one gig say that he did in Germany eighteen months earlier where he’d played something that he particularly liked. And he’s play it for us. And that showed someone who really did know where he was at. A lot of people thought he had lost it but not at all. He was also very into hip-hop and into listening to himself very critically.
AR: What did you think of the hip hop album he did?
GG: I haven’t heard it in such a long time I don’t know if it stands up.what was it called again?
AR: Ach. I can’t remember. Some kind of pun.
GG: ‘Hip-bop’ or something?
AR: Something like that. I thought the raps were a bit lame on it but everything else was.ok.
GG: I’ll have to go back and check it out.
AR: The raps were just mostly bigging up Miles but in a really lame way.”Miles with the horn/Sharper than a thorn.” Actually that’s probably better than the actual rhymes on there.
GG: They were pretty cringeworthy on the rhyming front, huh?
AR: Did Miles seek you out?
GG: Yeah he did actually. I didn’t.I made no effort. He rang me first and kept on ringing.when I got back to London he’d ring me at odd times of the night and day and talk about working together and asked me to write stuff.it was strange.
AR: Did you ever figure out why he was drawn to you? I can imagine, after hearing the Cupid And Psyche album that he loved the production of it as much as anything. Cos he had a very progressive…aesthetic.
GG: Yeah. He was interesting and he told me that as far as his interest in me and my work went, he liked the attention to detail and the whole approach to vocals and melody reminded him of some Latin American music that had interested him years before. I can’t remember the names of the singers but that kind of non-ornamented non-vibrato.in a way that like, I guess he played very often. So yeah we had some interesting discussions about that kind of stuff.
Many thanks again to Anthony, who’s also a big Walkers Brothers fan and has written a great [and sadly unpublished] book about them!
The full interview will appear on Anthony’s website www.anthonyreynolds.net
