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''Songs to Remember'' is the debut album by the British post-punk/new wave pop group Scritti Politti. The album's recording had to be delayed for nine months due to frontman Green Gartside's collapse and illness, and then after completion its release was delayed for a further year at the band's request. It was eventually released on Rough Trade Records on 3 September 1982, reaching number 12 on the UK albums chart. The album's lead single and best known track, "The Sweetest Girl", was recorded and released as a single by British pop group Madness, reaching number 35 on the UK singles chart in 1986. The album was heavily influenced by 1960s and 1970s funk, disco and soul music, and marked the start of Scritti Politti's move from their underground DIY ethic towards making commercial pop music and their mainstream and international breakthrough with the follow-up album ''Cupid & Psyche 85'' three years later. Although ''Songs to Remember'' and the three singles taken from it were not the big hits that Green had hoped for, the album was acclaimed by the critics and featured on many lists of the best albums of 1982. It remains a highly regarded record: in 1989 the British music magazine ''Record Mirror'' placed it at number 14 in their critics' list of the best albums of the 1980s, and it was included in journalist Garry Mulholland's book ''Fear of Music: The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco'' where he described the record as "a unique and modestly epic fusion of pop, reggae, funk, soul, jazz and lyrics submerged in the deep end of political philosophy". The Scottish pop group Wet Wet Wet took their name from a line in the track "Gettin' Havin' & Holdin'" – "it's tired of joking... wet, wet with tears". ==Background== Having released a couple of early singles, Scritti Politti began planning their debut album in 1979, but the recording had to be delayed when Green collapsed after a gig supporting Gang of Four in Brighton in early 1980. Originally believed to be a heart attack, the cause of his collapse was eventually diagnosed as a panic attack, brought on by his chronic stage fright and his unhealthy lifestyle. Returning home to south Wales at his parents' insistence for a nine-month convalescence period, Green had plenty of time to think about the direction the band and their music were going in. During 1979 he had already become less interested in the independent music and punk scene and had started listening to and buying American funk and disco like Chic and the Jacksons, Stax soul like Aretha Franklin, and 1960s British beat music such as the Beatles' early records. Green came to the conclusion that "you don't have to be lobotomised in order to make pop music. It's a real passion to make it" and that making pop music didn't mean selling out punk's principles or dumbing down: "I think the politics of punk does survive. There are a whole lot () people who aren't happy to make pap but want to make pop. They understand that what sells means something. It finds a way into people's hearts in a way that independent music never did."〔 He explained his reasons for abandoning the band's original "do-it-yourself" philosophy to ''Smash Hits'' in November 1981: sections of the music papers became more and more closeted with more and more people sitting in their bedrooms making cassettes and swopping them with other people making cassettes. There were more and more silly names and it began to smack more and more of 'hippy-ness'. It had become an ageing alternative that was never going to present a route for people who wanted to make their music on a wide scale. We never particularly wanted to become a cult group, but the music was very marginal and we were—perhaps rightly—stereotyped as intellectuals."〔}} As well as his musical change of heart, Green had also abandoned the strict Marxist philosophy of the early Scritti Politti ideas and recordings, saying that "a lot of the very oppositional politics that we'd been involved in lost their appeal and credibility for me. I rejected the principles of that, what was monolithical Marxism. I no longer supported the mechanism which held that up, and carried over to the music. Plus I was bored shitless with the noise we were making."〔 Before his collapse Green had already broached the concept of taking the group in a more commercial pop direction with his band mates. His ideas did not go down well with them, as he recounted in an interview for ''Jamming!'' fanzine in June 1982: Although both initially stayed with the group to play on the album, Jinks left Scritti Politti shortly after the record's completion in 1981.〔 Morley decided to stay with the group even though his drumming was becoming replaced more frequently by programmed drum machines, but he was eventually sidelined and left the group in November 1982. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Songs to Remember」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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