{"id":393087,"date":"2026-04-11T10:16:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T10:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/393087\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T10:16:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T10:16:44","slug":"scritti-politti-songs-to-remember-2026-remaster-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/393087\/","title":{"rendered":"Scritti Politti: Songs to Remember (2026 Remaster) Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Songs to Remember were a book, it would look like T.S. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land, with the poet\u2019s (in)famous notes<\/a> attached after publication. The songs get origin stories. About \u201cThe \u2018Sweetest Girl,\u2019\u201d singer-songwriter-guitarist-theorist Green Gartside<\/a> has said, \u201cThe song wasn’t about a person or the person but about the mythical notion of the \u2018sweetest girl,\u2019\u201d hence the inverted commas in its single form. \u201cLions After Slumber\u201d? See Percy Bysshe Shelley\u2019s The Mask of Anarchy<\/a>, his 1819 eulogy for the dead in the Peterloo Massacre<\/a>. The name \u201cJacques Derrida\u201d would strike terror in those with a grad school syllabus; Gartside does not yield an inch. \u201cIt\u2019s about how powerful and contradictory the politics of desire are,\u201d he once remarked<\/a>, no fingers crossed behind his back. \u201cAbout being torn between all things glamorous and reactionary and all things glamorous and leftist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because Gartside is a smart fella and music journalists swoon when artists flatter their intelligence, he has always come across as a marvelous interview subject bewitched by the diaphanous verbal webs he spins. But listeners don\u2019t need his commentary to enjoy Scritti Politti<\/a>\u2019s 1982 Songs to Remember any more than early readers of Eliot needed him sticking his tongue out at them in those notes. Recently reissued by original label Rough Trade Records, Songs to Remember epitomizes the group\u2019s attempt to reconcile an art-school background, 1977-era punk ethics, and an obsession with chart pop into a musical statement as stately and cohesive as a book of sonnets.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

The results did not go over with the band, such as it was. Gartside told<\/a> Simon Reynolds that he \u201cwrote screeds of justification,\u201d wanting the songs to be \u201cunderstood and approved and thought-through by the group.\u201d (When you\u2019re explaining\u2026) Fans familiar with 1985\u2019s beat-tastic, falsetto-fluttery, Technicolor masterpiece Cupid & Psyche 85<\/a> may blanch at Songs to Remember\u2019s wispy skeletal attempts at dub and acoustic pop (especially since the album has, until now, been out of print and unavailable on streaming). Did Gartside turn to megapop because he sucked as a punk? Did he understand how his brand of DIY constricted his melodic talents? Hard to say. To contextualize Songs to Remember changes how we might enjoy it, and, after all, thinking about how to enjoy art is an approach that flatters Gartside\u2019s post-structuralist hermeneutics. Let us say that he needed to make Songs to Remember to write Cupid & Psyche 85 like a doctoral student needs to write a first draft of a dissertation; from a distance of 40 years, it\u2019s fun to identify elements of their debut that Gartside would go on to develop or scrap.<\/p>\n

This edition of Songs to Remember just pops: Gartside would savor the irony of a post-punk artifact polished as shinily as a new Porsche. Tracks like \u201cSex,\u201d with its syncopated guitar and bass, might\u2019ve worked on Cupid & Psyche 85 with a plushier bottom. The prominent backup singers, Jamie Talbot\u2019s wandering sax lines, and Gartside\u2019s Vocoderized croon on \u201cFaithless\u201d nod towards his affinities for trad and modern R&B. Those singers\u2014Jackie Challenor, Lorenza Johnson, and Mae McKenna\u2014show up again on \u201cJacques Derrida,\u201d the album\u2019s triumph. Their enthusiasm (\u201cI want it, I want it, I WANT it!\u201d) coax Gartside into grinning through the kind of acoustic groove on which even the most mid of lyricists can triumph. Mixing his messages like a pop wunderkind instead of a theorist, he claims to \u201cstill support the revolution\u201d while wondering why no one\u2019s told him who he\u2019s working for, only don\u2019t tell the girl whose heart he\u2019s taking apart like the French philosopher deconstructed literary texts.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Songs to Remember were a book, it would look like T.S. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land, with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[692,93,61,60,278,514],"class_list":{"0":"post-393087","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}