After digging out my Desperate Bicycles records I decided to hunt out my copy of the first single by Scritti Politti. If that name seem familiar it may be from the hits they had in the mid 80s with singles such as Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) or The Word Girl, or you may even know the blissfull The “Sweetest Girl”, which got to the giddy heights of number 64 in the UK charts back in 1981 (the song was also the opening track on the NME’s C81 cassette which citizen Bay has been digging big time of late). However, before the band became an intellectual pop band much beloved by certain factions of the UK music press, they made a series of independently make scratchy DIY punk records. Scritti founder and current Dalston resident Green Gartside saw the Sex Pistols on the opening night of the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy’ tour at Leeds University, and decided to form a band.

The band came to London in 1977, moving into a legendary squat in Regent’s Park Road in Camden Town. Scritti Politti were galvanised into actiom the Desperate Bicycles and released their first DIY single, titled ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ on their own St. Pancras label in 1978. The inside of the sleeve included information on the cost to make the single - recording (£98), mastering (£40), pressing (2,500 7 inch singles for £369.36) , Rubber Stamp and labels (£8), plus information on their distributor Rough Trade Records, then still a record shop in Notting Hill. And just in case you didn’t get the idea he first time around, they printed the costs of producing the John Peel sessions EP on that cover as well.

Green notoriously hates the bands early records, which he claimed “sounds like some anti-produced labour of negativity”, but he finally relented and let his label Rough Trade reissue “Skank Bloc Bologna” on the compilation Early, which brings together the bands first four singles and EPs. The album is available for download at emusic, or you can buy the album from the Rough Trade shop here, for the bargain price of only £6.99!