Their first attempt at going pop, with Songs To Remember Scritti Politti left behind their old, post-punk/DIY life – collectivism, scratchy songs, Marxist dialectic – and aimed for the charts. That they didn’t achieve that goal, just yet, was down to a number of things, though one of them surely is the tentativeness of some of the playing and writing here; leader Green Gartside’s songs are never less than lovely, but he hadn’t quite perfected the language of pop. That would come later, with Cupid & Psyche ’85. But what makes Songs To Remember still so ravishing is the voluptuousness of melody that Gartside is now revelling in, his desire to play pop, to be seduced by lover’s rock, to try and understand how funk works. It’s rare to hear someone ‘learning pop’ over the course of an album, but on Songs To Remember, you can hear the process, sometimes painful, often revelatory, always fascinating. It’s the blueprint for what was to come, and sketches are seductive in their own ways.