40 Years Of Cupid & Psyche 85

Tiggerlion on Cupid & Psyche 85 by Scritti Politti

Green Gartside and his co-conspirators created this shimmering beauty of a pop album right in the middle of the dire eighties. It was the decade of Margaret Thatcher, economic recession, crippling unemployment, the miners’ strike, “the most bitter industrial dispute in British history”, UK military personnel dying and injured in an actual war, the dreaded Poll Tax and riots in most major cities. Sinn Féin began to stand in elections and The Troubles reached the most powerful in the country, the cabinet itself, at the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in October 1984. HIV/AIDS was recognised and soon became widespread across the world. Mad Cow Disease appeared in British cattle. Princess Di produced an heir and a spare. Mobile phones, home computers, CDs and the Nintendo Entertainment System went on sale to the public, Eastenders appeared on the BBC and Channel 4 came into being. Live Aid changed the relationship between pop stars and the public. Rapidly developing synthesisers dominated the charts, along with gated drums, reverb, and jangly guitars as typified by the Rickenbacker 330. MTV transformed pop music into images, songs into cultural touchstones, and artists into icons. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” were events rather than mere hits. In the midst of all this chaos and disorder, Cupid & Psyche 85 sits in an enchanted bell jar, a preserved piece of pop perfection, bright enough to bring cheer to the most miserable of existences.

Gartside is an unlikely pop star. At six foot six and with a shy demeanour, he is a literal gentle giant. He formed a branch of the Young Communist League with his friend and future bassist Nial Jinks while still at school in Cwmbran. At art college in Leeds, inspired by The Sex Pistols Anarchy Tour, they teamed up with Tom Morley to form Scritti Politti, a post-punk band expounding a Marxist agenda, before moving to squats in London in the hope of being noticed. The name Scritti Politti was chosen as a homage to the Italian Marxist writer and political theorist Antonio Gramsci. They shared a philosophy and sense of angry disappointment with Gang Of Four, released three singles independently before securing a contract with a cool, outsider label, Rough Trade. They lived true to their principles. Then, Gartside collapsed after a gig supporting Gang of Four in Brighton in early 1980. It was a panic attack brought on by his chronic stage fright and unhealthy lifestyle. A convalescence and recuperation back in Wales, involving some good home cooking and his sister’s soul records, resulted in a change of heart. Ironically, that episode of stage fright led to a more commercial pop approach. When the debut album, Songs To Remember, arrived in 1982, it shared nothing whatsoever with agitprop. It has all the worst qualities of shrill eighties production. Adam Kidron, son of Marxist economist Michael, was cutting his teeth as a producer. The keyboards sound as though they are made of tin. The thumb is heavy on the fretless bass. The gospel female backing vocals are overwhelming. There is some clumsy reggae and a half baked rap. Above all the clatter, Gartside’s delicate voice floats as if on a different plain. Nevertheless, it was a success reaching number twelve in the charts. The ‘Sweetest Girl’ points to the future. It is a deceptive song, note the parentheses, with a lovely melody, apparently about a boy and girl in love. But the real world intrudes by the third verse and she leaves in an act of defiance. Robert Wyatt, an expert in showcasing a delicate voice and sleights of hand involving politics, provides keyboard washes framing the song perfectly. Lyrically, Gartside had obviously heard Gang Of Four’s Anthrax, in which love is equated to a dose of a dreadful disease. He hadn’t abandoned his Marxist tendencies altogether but had moved away from the fierce indie ways of his bandmates. He aimed high as he sought subversive musical pastures elsewhere.

Geoff Travis, the founder and head of Rough Trade, is a remarkable man. He pissed off Morrissey enough to provoke him to write Frankly, Mr Shankly. Songs To Remember was the best selling album on his label up to that point, but he recognised that he didn’t have the resources to help Gartside make the records he wanted to. He did, however, introduce him to similar minded souls. Rough Trade employed a New York assistant engineer called David Gamson who could also play keyboards and programme synthesisers. The pair hit it off immediately. An early song they wrote together, L Is For Lover, was later produced and arranged by Nile Rogers as the title track for Al Jarreau’s 1986 LP. They travelled to New York and teamed up with Material drummer Fred Maher, tech-savvy enough to be Kraftwerk’s drum programmer. A new incarnation of Scritti Politti was born, this time signed to Virgin/Warner Brothers and with Bob Last as manager. Doors opened. Introductions were made. Before they knew it, they were working in the dazzling New York City Power Station studios with Arif Mardin, legendary producer of Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Average White Band and a host of others, who had recently triumphed with Chaka Khan.

Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) was the first release and a jaw-dropping transformation. Mardin brought his I Feel For You team, merging several different sounds at once from the moment the drums crash the track into a start. Maher plays a LinnDrum and AWB’s Steve Ferrone guests on a standard kit. The keyboard players are David Frank, described as “the founding father of electronic R&B” by Yamaha Music and Dusty Springfield pianist Paul Buchanon. Paul Jackson Jnr, who played on Thriller, provides the sparkling rhythm guitar threading the contrapunctal parts together. There is a lot of Fairlight programming, including by JJ Jeczalik of Art Of Noise, and a group of backing singers. Wood Beez makes a virtue of eighties production techniques: layered harmonies, reverb heavy, and careful attention to detail, yielding a rich, glittery sound. When Arethra said a little prayer, she brought with her decades of faith and singing in church. Her epiphany was sexual and secular. To Gartside, a lifelong atheist, listening to soul music had become almost a religious experience. You can hear it in his featherlight voice as it is propelled towards ecstasy by the rapturous music. A love song about love songs. Nevertheless, Gartside cannot resist getting up to some mischief in the final verse, alluding to drug abuse and severe mental illness. In March and April 1984, it sprang from the airways as exhilarating as a new romance, a fizzing celebration of falling in love.

Absolute repeated the trick with the same crew just a few months later. After a vulnerable, needy introductory vocal backed by a shimmering keyboard, hi-hats, drum pads, tambourines and bells flutter around a dislocated beat. It’s a complicated, layered sound with heavy drums that still manages to feel airy and light. Gartside is dreaming of the object of his desire he refers to as Absolute. The melody is beautifully resolved in a gleeful explosion of a bridge, placed bang in the middle of the track. The mention of vodka, the Swedish brand, questions if all the sweet talk is just a drunken reverie dedicated to alcohol but Brenda Joy (BJ) Nelson, Tawatha Agee and Fonzi Thornton are everywhere in the mix, cooing “love, love, you” to reassure us until the end.

Hypnotize, spelt the American way, was the next single, again released in 1984, and the first without Mardin and his musicians. Gamson had quite a number of new toys to play with: Roland Jupiter-8, PPG, Fender Rhodes, Minimoog, Yamaha DX7, Roland MSQ-700, Oberheim DMX, Oberheim OB-X, Fairlight CMI, Roland JX-8P. However, you wouldn’t have noticed the change at the time. These modern machines could be programmed slightly offset, increasing the sense of feel and groove, mimicking real musicians. Hypnotize still has the inside out beats, chords taken apart to be rebuilt in a different shape and fragments of melody stitched together into a bigger sounding whole. Effervescent keyboard riffs chirp away, augmented by the ORCH5 sample, better known as the “orchestra hit”, believed by many to be sampled from Stravinsky’s The Firebird. There is some smooth guitar from Ira Siegel. A pair of bored lovers squabble. Perhaps, this is an unrequited love, BJ Nelson adorable in the female role. Without Mardin’s plush touches and heavy bass, it has a harder, more assertive edge. Gartside, suitably bedazzled, confirms his inability to express his feelings in the coda, ruefully struggling to say I love you.

The Word Girl is Cupid & Psyche 85’s calling card, a fourth single but issued just six weeks before the album and its opening track. It is Gartside’s best construction/composition, with or without Gamson, and his biggest hit, a light, lover’s rock confection with a delightful tune and philosophical lyrics. Reggae guitar is courtesy of Nick Moroch. It is not just a song about a girl but also about the word ‘girl’ itself. Gartside muses on the religious experience he had listening to Aretha Franklin. Chain Of Fools gets a mention. Biblical references occur throughout: “In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh and walked among us.” A concept becomes reality. It doesn’t paint a picture of an ideal, but worries how the term ‘girl’ is manipulated and idealised, even abused for monetary purposes, and then worries more about girls in real life. The Word Girl is no ordinary love song, actually the last song written and recorded for the album, but a coalescence of all the ideas they’d been working on. It’s the first single to have a proper B side instead of an extended version. Ranking Ann is invited to share her thoughts on the subject, from a woman’s point of view, toasting over a dub retitled Flesh And Blood.

When the album finally hit the shelves, everything fell into place; Cupid & Psyche, passion and intellect, love and logic. There are just nine tracks, the four singles spread out across its length. Small Talk is the prototype for them all with Kate Bush guitarist Alan Murphy and the Fairlight set to Roman Trumpet. It was the first song written, mainly by Gamson, referencing World War II propaganda, “Careless talk costs lives.” A Little Knowledge is a pause for breath after the excitement of Absolute, a beautiful, breathy duet with BJ. It’s a mature, emotional reflection on their relationship that has just ended, handily answering the question “How do you mend a broken heart?”: learn from the experience and move on, bearing in mind that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A third Mardin production, Don’t Work That Hard, is placed right in the middle and his New York musicians are back. Marcus Miller is part of a thrusting, powerful rhythm section. Don’t be fooled by the title, suggesting a workers’ revolution. A cynical Gartside is soon besotted, fired up by a scorching Robert Quine guitar solo.

Perfect Way might have been the hidden gem if its more conventional structure and big chorus hadn’t got it the nod for the fifth single. It’s still full of surprises, such as an elegant twist into the main hook and a neat reverse of the beat in the break. There’s even a piano solo that quotes the Mario Bros theme. It was an unexpected hit in America reaching number five. Miles Davis was impressed enough to record a cover for Tutu. Lover To Fall is the most ebullient and most Marxist with a breathtaking chorus. “There’s gonna be a day when the rich get theirs,” Gartside sings. Again, he plays with words inspired by philosopher Jacques Derrida, who already had a song named after him on Songs To Remember. How many songs use the words “hermeneutic” and “paradigm” in an effort to win someone’s heart? According to Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, words only have meaning by contrasting with other words. Meaning becomes fluid or not present at all. To be effective, deconstruction needs to create something new, not to synthesise concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This attitude informed their whole way of working.

The first half of the eighties saw dramatic, rapid improvements in electronic musical equipment. Kraftwerk first used sequencers on Trans Europe Express in 1977, but 1981’s Computer World seem to beat with a human heart. The Human League’s Dare and Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret revel in the cheaper, more accessible synthesisers to achieve unexpected chart success. Japan used sequencers and synthesisers to shape their conventional instruments into the Far East atmospherics of Tin Drum. The Associates conjured up dazzling art rock on Sulk, deploying a range of kit in highly experimental ways. Peter Gabriel was the first in the UK to obtain a Fairlight CMI, using it extensively on Peter Gabriel 4. JJ Jeczalik crops up programming one for Trevor Horn’s blend of pop and Hollywood glamour for ABC’s Lexicon Of Love. Simple Minds adapted their dance electronica into a dreamy stadium rock for New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84). New Order went in the other direction, using electronic instruments to create a dance rock hybrid on Low Life. All of these albums sound fantastic, really lovely in the ear, including Sulk’s deliberate dissonance. However, Cupid & Psyche 85 set a whole new paradigm.

Gamson was born to make this album. His father was both an early adopter of synths and an assistant to Leonard Bernstein, but his real inspirator was Leon Sylvers, producer of Shalamar, The Whispers and Tavares. Sylvers described his process by saying, “My ideal is to have the whole record sing, to work on the music tracks so they take on the same character as the vocals.” On Cupid & Psyche 85, Gamson got closer to that ideal than anyone, meshing the hooks, beats, synth riffs, programmed asides and guitar figures together like cogs inside “a Swiss watch,” as he put it. He also had studied Bach’s mastery of counterpoint, which could be seen as the musical equivalent to Derrida’s deconstruction of language. No wonder he and Gartside found they had so much in common, their ideas, philosophy and approach to creativity complementing each other. Scritti Politti is often seen as a vehicle for Green Gartside but Cupid & Psyche 85 is a genuine team effort.

Deconstruction, counterpoint, exemplary musicians, state of the art technology, sharp songwriting and composition, ethereal singing and sumptuous production all combine to yield a one off event, a rare opening up of new horizons. It is an album that is so definitively eighties yet totally transcends its time, completely dominated by machines but sounds so human. They tried to repeat its success on Provision but couldn’t recapture its magic; Gartside’s fragile voice, the only remaining touch of humanity, oppressed by the power of the machines. Maher befriended Robert Quine and ended up touring with Lou Reed and producing New York for him. He also produced Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend and Lloyd Cole’s solo debut. Gamson produced and wrote songs for a host of artists, including Chaka Khan, George Benson, Luther Vandross, Kesha, Charli XCX, but his most significant work was with Meshell Ndegeocello on her first three albums, Peace Beyond Passion remaining her best seller. Gartside retired from the music business for most of the nineties, returning to release artistically valuable but commercially unsuccessful material at his own pace and on his own terms. He can look back on a career involving collaborations with Miles Davis, Chaka Khan, Eurythmics, Elvis Costello, Shabba Ranks, Mos Def, Meshell Ndegeocello, Kylie Minogue, Robyn Hitchcock, Manic Street Preachers, Tracey Thorn, and Robert Wyatt.

In the remake of Gang Of Four’s Anthrax for the LP Entertainment, Andy Gill deadpans a monologue in the right hand channel: “Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about ’cause most groups make most of their songs about falling in love, or how happy they are to be in love; and you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time.” Gartside could claim that his songs are based on a philosophical theory but there is no escaping the emotions expressed in his singing and the music. Of course these are love songs, glorious love songs, posing the question what else is there to sing about?

Gartside’s writing partnership with Gamson is as ironic and as subversive-within a duo as Becker/Fagen, Sparks, and, later, Pet Shop Boys: superficially, catchy, attractive pop music but, underneath, a multitude of complexities. In a decade with no Steely Dan and Sparks absent from the charts, Cupid & Psyche 85’s twisted harmonics and jagged melodies, offsetting clever-clogs lyrics with handsome tunes, helped fill the void. However, it is as far from a dry, academic exercise as it is possible to be. Instead, it is a delightful, sunshine album that befits a summer release, and remains thoroughly infectious, readily danceable and a real pleasure to listen to. Wherever the starting point, and whatever the equipment used, Scritti Politti built a joyous, sparkling pop classic. Forty minutes fly by in a flush of euphoria. Tracey Thorn, once asked Gartside how he managed to sound so upbeat and was told the secret is to smile when you are singing. Released at a turning point in the eighties, shortly after the year long miners’ strike came to end and just as the economy began to pick up, Cupid & Psyche 85 is a pivotal album, a triumph of programmed synth-pop, setting a standard that still resonates today. These days, almost all pop music is made like this. More importantly, it is guaranteed to raise a smile and, Lord knows, we could all do with some joy right now.

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