A sense of purpose
MARK STEWART 1960 2023 The Pop Group’s Gareth Sager salutes the “relentless energy” of his inspirational bandmate
“MARK was pretty intense but always very amusing. He had a great sense of humour, a great sense of fun right from a young age. Because he was much taller than anybody else he could get into nightclubs and all that sort of stuff when nobody else could. But because of that he also used to get picked on. He had a few nasty little beatings that he was always pretty brave in facing up to. One particular one, these guys were hitting him with pool cues and he was just shouting at them: ‘You’re pathetic! Can’t you do better than that?’ So he was pretty resilient.
“He had a relentless energy and an incredible amount of information at his fingertips. He hoovered up anything from daytime TV to astrophysics and seemed to be able to talk about it at the drop of a hat and have a valid opinion on it. He was also an enormous fan of music. Whether it was David Bowie or Jah Shaka Soundsystem, he really loved it and he really loved to share it. He was so enthusiastic he would be able to get anybody interested in anything he was interested in.
“He could always make you laugh, even when things had gone really wrong. He may have fucked up massively but somehow he could always bring a smile to my face. However desperate the situation had got, somehow he’d be able to flip it on its head. There was a time when we were having all sorts of problems. When the police turned up, he was able to charm them completely and get them to go away and leave us alone.
“His conspiracy theory area was pretty good, without it being too pompous. He was able to put some things into lyrics and pull it off without it being too overtly party political – ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ was brilliant for that.
“The Pop Group introduced all these different colours into the period after punk where we thought that punk meant you’d be able to go out there and do anything you wanted and there should be no formula whatsoever. We totally ran with the idea that you should be able to mix up French chanson with dub and put a bit of free jazz in there; all these things can work together if they come from the right personalities. That ability to juxtapose different genres and types of music and sound is really important.
“One of his great talents was deconstructing the ordinary. I could put something together and then he would pull it apart and build it up from Z to A rather than from A to Z, as I put it down. I think he was trying to make people aware of the liveliness of life, the positive side of life.”
“One of his great talents was deconstructing the ordinary”
GARETH SAGER