Amongst the social debris of the twenties it’s not untypical for someone to disappear for a time and come back having reinvented themselves; in the early eighties however the term was most frequently used for this self care was, applied with some derision, “Dropping out”.
Green Gartside had relocated from Leeds, where he was part of a post punk scene that included Gang of Four and Girls At Our Best to London, but whilst releasing EPs as Scritti Politti the accompanying squat lifestyle had seriously jeopardised his health. Returning to his parents home in South Wales, daydreaming he wrote a theoretical construct in which pop itself could be revolutionary.
Songs To Remember as a result was his tablets of stone, with a musical envelope that rejected post punk entirely, leaning instead in to soul, ska and reggae. To this chart friendly gloss Gartside added lyrics both cribbed from philosophy and in part that riffed off the juxtapositions conforming to deform afforded a bright young thing like himself. Whether the obvious seperation mattered was, the press aside, inconsequential, especially given the near perfection of Faithless, Jacques Derrida and Asylums In Jerusalem. Other experiments were a matter of taste, but in at least landing the album high up the charts the singer had half proved his original point.
A contrarian’s experiment, fittingly this remastered issue of Songs To Remember comes without additional clutter, remixes, live work, or the deathly boredom of iterative demo versions. Three years on, its successor Cupid & Psyche ’85 was a more fully realized picture and found a world ready to embrace it. With that, Gartside had completed his resurrection.
You can read a full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 