Hard to capture now the almost shocking impact of the NME's C81 compilation tape back there in 1981 (well, on one deeply reverential teenage NME reader, at least, & quite possibly a few more...). Simon Reynolds has called it "post-punk's swan song", apparently, but that doesn't quite get the shift to a more diverse &, crucially, poppier aesthetic that this little £1.50 (& two coupons) tape encapsulated.
Which would, in turn & in time, lead to the whole mutant disco/punk-funk genre - particularly once house & Ecstasy had allowed a critical mass of earnest British white boys to loosen up & even deign to get on to the occasional dancefloor. New Order's career is a neat summary of this arc, as many people have pointed out.
Anyway, the C81's best track - & one that exemplifies the shift to a new pop sensibility at the start of the 1980s - is its first, Scritti Politti's The "Sweetest Girl".
Readers born into the digital era's luxury will have no conception of how insanely difficult it was then to hear non-chart music, even with two hours of John Peel a night. Often you had to guess what it might sound like on the basis of NME reviews. But by reputation Scritti were deeply unlistenable - tunes not really being the point for crusty Marxist squat-punks (though in fact Green had his falsetto going even back at the time of Skank Bloc Bologna's one-riff guitars & thrashed cymbal...).
So dishing up one of the most perfect pop songs of all time was fairly unexpected. For a raincoated gloomster, it made moods other than anguished Joy Division-ish melancholia possible for music & opened the door to other C81 delights, such as D.A.F, Josef K & even James Blood Ulmer & Linx.
Girl's effortlessness & lightness owe a lot to its delicate little drum machine track, dubby echoes & piano vamp (by Robert Wyatt, allegedly). Note how it smuggles in semiotics & self-referential meta-criticism ("The sickest group in all the world - how could they do this to me?") under the cover of its gorgeous vocal.
AMG call it "peerless block of lovers rock-inspired synth pop". Certainly, nothing in Green's long & - after a bit of a mad hiatus - ongoing career was ever as good.
You can get it on the Early compilation or on Songs to Remember.
C81s aren't easily come by, but try eBay.
Bonus track: the harder but also pretty sublime Lions After Slumber.
Check out the Scritti obsessives site bibbly-o-tek.
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