Provision: Scritti Politti's gold record, seams and all

Provision reached No. 8 in the UK, shipped 100,000 copies for a BPI gold certificate and picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. It is also the sound of a band coming apart in a very well equipped room. Rough Trade put it back on vinyl and CD on 11 December, with sleeve notes by Green Gartside and David Gamson, and the cracks are the reason to play it again.

Scritti Politti began in Leeds in 1977: Gartside, Nial Jinks, Tom Morley, punk aligned and Marxist, named after Gramsci and misspelled because the correct Italian sounded less rock and roll. They squatted in Camden, released "Skank Bloc Bologna" on their own St Pancras label, printed the pressing costs on the sleeve, and signed to Rough Trade in 1979. Then Gartside turned the band toward pop. Cupid & Psyche 85 gave him three UK Top 20 hits in 1985 and a US Top 20 with "Perfect Way". Provision followed three years later on Virgin, the third album, with a great deal to live up to.

It was recorded a piece at a time, before computer-assisted recording was available, and assembled afterwards. David Gamson arranged and programmed drums, Fred Maher played and programmed, Marcus Miller played bass, Dan Huff played guitar, six backing vocalists stacked the harmonies, and Roger Troutman of Zapp brought his talkbox to two tracks. Gamson says the album pushed the limits of what analogue recording could do. He has also said the sessions went on an incredibly long time and that they lost the forest for the trees. The new sleeve notes tell that story.

Miles Davis had covered "Perfect Way" on Tutu in 1986, and he came to "Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry For Loverboy)". Gartside expected an entourage and got none: Davis arrived alone, spent hours at the piano working out the changes and trying ideas, and Gartside found him enigmatically charming, more diffident than taciturn. Around those sessions Gartside's health was going. He has described cocaine as briefly a problem, and he filmed the video for the album's opening single in one attempt, from a hospital bed, because he could not manage a second.

The sound is funk played by men who could play anything, run through a Synclavier and lit like a showroom. The parts lock: Miller's bass forward and exact, Maher's drums half live and half sequenced, that six deep vocal stack behind Gartside's lead, Troutman's talkbox arriving like a voice from another record. Nothing is left to chance. That is the album's best quality and its worst. When the calculation holds you hear a pop group with a budget and no fear. When it does not you hear kick and snare being entered by SMPTE number.

The opening single put Troutman's talkbox up front and reached No. 55 in the UK, No. 12 on the US dance chart and No. 53 on the Hot 100, which tells you where this band's future was. "First Boy in This Town (Lovesick)" was the second single and stopped at No. 63. "Best Thing Ever" had already been out the year before, on the Who's That Girl soundtrack, and it sits in the running order like a borrowed suit. "Oh Patti" is the one: No. 13, Davis's trumpet over the changes he had spent hours finding, and the CD's extended mix gives you more of that solo. "Sugar and Spice" brings Troutman back on side two. "Philosophy Now" closes the record, and by then the method has become the subject.

It is for people who like the machinery audible: Zapp's talkbox funk, the glossiest end of 1985 to 1988 pop, records where the credits are part of the pleasure. Put it next to Cupid & Psyche 85 and the budget has doubled while the certainty has halved. The vinyl keeps the original nine tracks; the CD adds the dub of the opening single and the extended "Oh Patti", which is this album's two ideas in miniature, one stretched and one given room.

What fails is the method. Provision is a record of excellent parts that never settle into a whole, and "First Boy in This Town" is where you hear it plainly: a single with everything on it and no grip. "Overnite" and "Bam Salute" go by without leaving a mark, and the album took so long that assembly became the point. Pop cannot survive that across nine tracks without sagging somewhere. Four or five cuts here are as good as British pop got in 1988, and the rest is a very good band paying for them. That is a 3.5, argued at volume. The seams are the record, and Rough Trade was right to leave them in.

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