I met Green Gartside once…at Green Man Festival in Wales…he posed for some pictures I took…I was gobsmacked and could not think of two words to say to him. For me it was a totally overwhelming experience just being face to face with him. I had just listened to him talk about his experiences with Scritti Politti and songwriting and lack of self confidence in his own later work and why he virtually stopped recording his songs after 2006.

So here in a field on the side of a mountain were two people confronted with lack of self believe and a camera in between us. In moments like that though, I go back to music in my head and maybe several albums from that era come to mind, Prefab Spout, The Waterboys might be contenders but for this National Album Day 2019 I have chosen Songs To Remember by Scritti Politti.

The album was a big change in direction for Gartside and the “group” who even at this stage were ever-changing. Gone was the “punk-esque skankings” of early recordings and in its place the most sublime set of songs with beautiful melodies and well thought out lyrics. When I first heard the double A side single of Asylums in Jerusalem & Jacques Derrida I thought it was Paul Simon gone in a new direction, the structure of the songs alone worthy of the comparison.

Songs To Remember is full of musical influences from around the planet from the New York Disco stomp of Sex to the ballad dream reggae pop of Sweetest Girl. I love all the tracks on the album but if I have to go for my favourite it would be Rock-A-Boy Blue and Green Gartside’s early take on himself and the music industry.

I learnt to live with the beats in the bar
Made me sick with repetition
I learnt to love that one note samba
No surprise or definition
I guess I can learn to love what I used to
If you can get used to just getting used by…

Green if I met you now I still would not know what to say to you.. but you have been a big influence on my life. But that is too cheesecake..isn’t it?

Songs To Remember by Scritti Politti, 1982, chosen by Simon Jay Price

Laurel perfectly encapsulates what it’s like to be a music maker in today’s landscape of artists with more control over their sound. Her 2018 debut album Dogviolet struck me with a deep level of confidence in both vocal delivery and performance that few artists are able to achieve, for that reason I’ve chosen it for National Album Day 2019.

Working out of her East London studio she handled all the songwriting, production, and mixing duties for the album, a mammoth task but one that allows the audience a greater sense of intimacy and shows the extent of her skill set.

 Sonically, the album navigates brash rhythmic guitar tones, hard hitting live drums and unique percussion sounds that all work to support the album’s narrative. Her work is able to perfectly capture the paradoxes of many romantic relationships; wanting attention but not wanting too much, wanting someone but not the toxicity a relationship could bring.

The album’s standout single, Adored, is the strongest to exemplify this, opening with the poignant line; “you’ve been wasting my time honey/ I’ve been wasting your life babe.” An artist like her with such a firm sense of self, so early in her career, should move through the world rejoicing just as we do when with her music.

At only nineteen years old, Greta Jaime (pronounced “jay-me”) is already a rising pop talent. After putting out her debut single ‘Lost in Mexico’ at sixteen, the north Londoner (of Mexican origin) has gained a firm foothold in the industry.

Within the opening bars of A Better Kind Greta Jaime’s sparse keyboard lines house a latent grandeur, which she develops through four minutes of some of the most confident pop writing to come from an emerging artist in a while.
Replete with huge and explosive vocal hooks and R&B tinged percussive grooves, A Better Kind channels the heady heartache that comes with acceptance over a failed relationship.

Penned and produced solely by Jaime, the song crescendos to a blistering climax: syncopated hip hop hi-hats underpin a skygazing solo reminiscent of St Vincent, making for a vital piece of contemporary pop perfection.

Dogviolet by Laurel chosen by musician and songwriter Greta Jaime

I was 12 and a half years old when Pearl Jam’s Ten album came out.
It had a huge effect on me and my life.
The thundering rawness of it.
It’s lyrics screamed right to me, pushing through into my young tormented world.
You might wonder why would a 12yr old need to hear a voice like that?

Eddie Vedder’s deep voice emulated the perfect amount of anger, frustration and desperation I was seeking. Paired with Stone Gossard and Mike McCready‘s beautifully heavy, melodic, sliding, wailing guitars, Jeff Ament‘s dynamic thundering bass and Dave Krusen‘s bashing drums, Pearl Jam’s debut LP Ten was the perfect soundtrack to the cells splitting within me. Puberty was smashing through my young body into my mind and it made me much more aware of the how messed up the adult world really was.

I still remember seeing the album cover for Ten and thinking, ‘Woahhh who are these long haired guys? Where are they with all their arms up reaching to a point in his red room of bricks?’ They looked so cool as if they were reaching upwards, banding together, trying to make something matter.

To me, the whole album sounded like it was made to release an ever building angst towards adults like our parents and even teachers (Baby Boomers) that left us to grow up in their wake of abuse, divorce, alcoholism and neglect.

The song Why Go, along with Alive and Jeremy are perfect examples of the angst that needed to burst out after the 80s glitz and pomp was over. Here is a sample of the blistering lyrics from Why Go about a daughter being locked up in  a psychiatric institution:

She scratches a letter
Into a wall, made of stone
Maybe someday
Another child
Won’t feel as alone as she does
It’s been two years
And counting
Since they put her in this place
She’s been diagnosed
By some stupid fuck
And mommy agrees

Why go home?

Teenagers of the 90s were not happy with the cards they’d been dealt and Pearl Jam came along at the right time to encapsulate that frustration with their brilliant music. Amazing lyrics matched with the heavy melodic rock rhythms made perfect anthems for crowds of thousands at their concerts. I believe Pearl Jam truly helped join millions of youth all around the world and let them share  in the commiserations at how shit things were, while at the same time allowing them to release that pain by having fun moshing and stage diving the madness out.

Ten by Pearl Jam, 1991, chosen by web designer, DJ and photographer Belle Piec

When I was a young lad starting to try and get serious about music, I had discovered Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, but could not get into Pink Floyd. I knew I should, but having listened to my friends copy of Dark Side Of The Moon, i just did not get it. Then at the end of 1979, watching Top of the Pops as you did, I saw an animated video, with sadistic teachers, marching hammers and kids like me decrying that education was overrated. Of course It was Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, it was a Christmas Number 1 and was at the top of the charts around the world. Now I got it!

I had to go out and buy The Wall, after all I had heard that Margaret Thatcher hated the single, and that was enough PR I needed. The gatefold artwork by British illustrator Gerald Scarfe, was brilliant behind the stark white cover, with nightmarish caricatures  visible in the breaches in the wall. What I was not prepared for was the story of smothering parenthood and growing isolation. It turned out that Rock N Roll was not as glamorous as Smash Hits made it seem. Each track follows the previous one as childhood, progresses to unhappy adulthood. Before The Wall albums could be dipped in and out off. The Wall cannot be skipped though, it would be like buying a novel and ripping out random chapters. In fact I do not think I have ever, randomly listened to the album.

The intro, is quiet and then the opening bars of In The Flesh? kick in with glorious guitar and dark oppressive percussion, The Thin Ice is almost a menacing lullaby, dominated by piano, and this is how the album continues. Each short piece of music is well crafted and has its place in the track listing and there are ever decreasing circles. There are three parts to Another Brick In The Wall, the sheer desperation of Part 3 being my favourite. Side four, for those of you that still love vinyl has In The Flesh, sans question mark, where Pink, hallucinates that his gig is a Nazi rally. You get the feeling you have heard it before and of course you have, its intro is pretty much the same as track 1. This was released at a time when the National Front were prevalent in society, so it was topical. At the end of the album when you hear the wall crumble and the oppression ends, the last words are the truncated phrase “Isn’t this where we came in?” and you realise that the melody is that gentle one at the beginning of track 1. So this is an album that should be played in order, and the cyclical nature suggests it should be on loop. So you plunge back into the murky depths of this semi biographical masterpiece.

The Wall is the album that made me appreciate that, good albums have structure and is still one of my favourites. What about Dark Side Of The Moon, well I now got it, and it is also one of my favourite albums, I even understood Wish You Were Here. The Wall made me appreciate Pink Floyd, and hence opened my eyes to a whole raft of music and artists. So much so that when i went to the flicks to see the longest music video I had seen, or rather the feature film of the album starring Bob Geldof I was visually and aurally engulfed in it. It led to my first experience of my musical snobbery, as a lot of film goers had gone because of the leading man, who was famous for being the frontman of The Boomtown Rats. As there was very little dialogue, the ‘philistines’ did not get the film. I did though, I had forgotten my confusion at Dark Side Of The Moon just a few years previously.

As I have been writing this, The Album has been playing throughout, and it is just as magical as the first time. With digital music it is so easy to skip a track, there is none of that cueing the tonearm shenanigans, but I would never skip a track of The Wall, no matter how easy they make it.

The Wall by Pink Floyd, 1979, chosen by writer and reviewer Tony Creek