Front man with the Pop Group, post-punk political provocateurs
MARK STEWART, who has died aged 62, was a singer, songwriter and activist whose musical vision and verbal broadsides put his band, the
Pop Group, in the vanguard of the post-punk movement’s political wing.
He helped to bring subgenres like avant-funk and trip-hop into existence and he inspired such notable figures as Nick Cave, who said that he and his band the Birthday Party moved to Britain from Australia precisely because of Stewart and his collaborators.
When he finally got to see the Pop Group, Cave recalled, “It was the most exciting and ferocious concert of my young life – everything changed at that moment, and we, as a fledgling band, knew then what we needed to do.”
Mark Stewart was born in Bristol on August 10 1960, and though he attended Bristol Grammar School, where he ran the school dances (for which he claimed to have earned more than he ever did with the Pop Group), he said he received a more useful education from hanging out in an underground bookshop in the city.
He co-founded the Pop Group in 1977 with his schoolmates John Waddington, Simon Underwood, Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith. They had the idea, he said, in the back of a van on their way to a Sex Pistols gig.
“Growing up in Bristol, I was going out dancing to really heavy funk and going to reggae dances, and we just thought we’d bring in some of the stuff we were really into, like Sun Ra and whatever,” he recalled. “For us, punk was freedom, and we just started mixing things up and making the kind of music that we wanted to hear.”
They set the template with their first single, She is Beyond Good and Evil, released in March 1979 and produced by dub legend Dennis Bovell – sharp, angular funk from the rhythm section, choppy lead guitar, and Stewart’s part-declaimed, part-howled vocal: “Like a dancing flame on a bed of nails/ She is one thing you cannot buy.”
Their debut album Y was released the following month, and they were soon sharing bills with the likes of the Swans, with their intimidating sheets of noise, and Gang of Four, with their slashing chords and Frankfurt-school lyrics.
The Pop Group’s second single, We Are All Prostitutes
– “Hey! Loud fast music/ Hey! Sweat and dirt/ Hey! Sounds from man’s soul/ Hey! Noise of battle/ Hey! Black clouds of smoke/ Hey! It’s time to lose control” – was described by Nick Cave as “violent, paranoid music for a violent, paranoid time” and was backed with the snappily titled Amnesty International Report on British Army Torture of Irish Prisoners.
The band’s second album, For How Much Longer do We Tolerate Mass Murder?
(1980), was a glorious if challenging collision of funk, free jazz, atonality and found sounds overlaid with Stewart’s anarchic rants. But riven with disagreements, the band split later that year with a performance in Trafalgar Square at a rally for the CND, a cause which would remain close to Stewart’s heart.
He moved to London and began working with Adrian Sherwood’s ON-U Sound label, and went on to form Mark Stewart and the Maffia (their best-known album was
As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade, released in 1985) as well as working with the New Age Steppers, a post-punk supergroup that also included the likes of Ari Up and Viv Albertine of the Slits. He later moved to Berlin, to tap in to what he later described as a “real bleeding-edge arts scene”.
The Pop Group reformed in 2010, releasing Citizen Zombie five years later, followed by Honeymoon on Mars in 2016. Stewart’s last appearance with the band was at the behest of Terry Hall, in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral to celebrate its stint as City of Culture 2021.