The Girl Of Our Dreams

One of the wheels set in motion by The Sex Pistols and the birth of punk in the UK in 1976 was the appearance of regional scenes where creative people suddenly saw a route to making music in a different way and didn't feel the need to go to London to do it. Don't ask for permission, don't wait for someone to offer you a contract, just get up and do it. In Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol bands began to act. Another of the wheels was the realisation by some that you didn't need to sound like The Sex Pistols, you could funnel all sorts of other influences into your DIY sound. 

This was as true in Bristol as anywhere else. The Pop Group gave themselves the most generic name they could think of (only A Pop Group could have been a little more generic), a name dripping in irony. They took their influences- punk but also jazz and free, dub, funk- and fused them with radical politics to come up with some of the most uncompromising, intense and intuitive post- punk records. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil was their debut single, released in March 1979. Mark Stewart was a didactic and intense frontman and lyricist. The song is about love as an unconditional force, a force where according to Mark, 'idealism and energy mix poetic, existential, and political yearnings with the romantic idea of passing through nihilism and emerging on the other side with something positive, something beyond'. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil

The Pop Group were not making pop music, certainly not the chart bothering stuff. The guitars are vicious and trebly, similar to the scratchy sound ACR were brewing up in Manchester. The bass is from dub. The drums too. There is dub space and FX and Mark delivering with lines like, 'Western values mean nothing to her', and, 'She is the one thing you can't buy/ With zero reasons for living'. 

On We Are All Prostitutes, their second single, also released in 1979, the band sound angry, disturbed, raging, alienated and violent, the band hewing around, the sound veering from left to right, never settling for a moment with a skronking sax solo interrupting the middle of the song. 

We Are All Prostitutes

The B-side was titled Amnesty International Report On British Army Torture Of Irish Prisoners. 

The Pop Group released two albums, Y and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? and then split in 1981. The members went on to influence pop music further in all sorts of ways- between them they were instrumental in Rip Rig And Panic (and beyond that in Neneh Cherry's solo career), Pigbag, Maximum Joy, The Slits and with Adrian Sherwood and On U Sound. They reformed in 2010 at the instigation of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. Mark died in 2023 bringing the reunion to an end. Guitarist John Waddington died in the same year. 

The Collapse Of Everything

Adrian Sherwood's The Grand Designer EP that lit up June and continues to get regular plays round here. The lead and title track is a beautifully rich and textured piece of dub, all manner of instruments and FX flying in and out of the mix over a bobbing rhythm and occasional bursts of siren. It's followed by Let's Stay Together, a track in the old style dub tradition of using the same rhythm and some of the sounds but with a vocal drizzled over the top, in this case one b the late Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the Upsetter jutting in and out in typical fashion. I suspect Mr Sherwood has files and tapes filled with Lee Perry vocals just waiting to find a track. 

Let's Stay Together is followed by Russian Oscillator which may (or may not) be based on the same building blocks but distorted and bent out of shape, rough industrial abstract dub. The fourth track, Cold War Skank, is a joy, guitars and rumbling bass, echoes of the desert and Saharan blues. 

The Grand Designer can be heard and bought here. It turns out that the EP is a spearhead, leading the charge for a Sherwood solo album to follow in August, a record called The Collapse Of Everything. The title track and album opener dropped onto the internet earlier this week, old school dub from the On U studio- languorous dub groove, bubbling bass, sounds ricocheting left and right, FX and flow, piano and fuzz guitar. 

The Collapse Of Everything was partly inspired by the losses of Mark Stewart and Keith LeBlanc- the title comes from a Stewart song- and features Doug Wimbish, Gaudi and Brian Eno all making appearances among a cast of sixteen players. You can pre- order the album on vinyl and digitally at Bandcamp. 

Mark Stewart R.I.P.

 
Mark Stewart's death at the age of 62 was announced on Friday. Mark was a towering presence in post- punk and in music thereafter, a man who saw music as an art form that should be provocative and challenging. The Pop Group, the Bristol group he led, brought together punk's guitars and confrontation, dub's space, free jazz's noise and funk's basslines with Stewart's politicised, expressive and sometimes ranting vocals, with Dennis Bovell at the controls. They were hugely important in influencing the wave of 80s and 90s industrial bands. When the group fractured in 1980 Stewart went on to New Age Steppers and then to work with a like- minded soul in Adrian Sherwood and the On U Sound collective. His Mark Stewart and The Maffia records were made firstly with On U musicians from Creation Rebel and later on the Tackhead trio of Doug Wimbish, Skip McDonald and Keith LeBlanc. 

This song was from 1983, the title track from his debut album although the edited version here is from a flexi- disc given away with a Dutch magazine. The album, all cut up electro beats, dub bass, distorted, sample- like vocals and Mark's politics, isn't an easy listen and it's not supposed to be. 

Learning To Cope With Cowardice ((Flexi Version)

In 2019 Mark's voice and denunciation of Brexit and all those who pushed it were at the centre of a single recorded by Jah Wobble and a post- punk supergroup containing Youth, Richard Dudanski, Keith Levene and drum tracks and loops courtesy of Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh. Mark Stewart- one of those people who you feel we shall not see the likes of again. R.I.P.

A Very British Coup

A Very British Coup

This week Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested that if The House Of Commons continues to make every effort to avoid a no-deal Brexit the Queen should suspend parliament. There you have it, if there was every any doubt, the actual face and voice of a right wing coup, not by thugs in jackboots but by Old Etonians with upper class accents. Suspend democracy to get what you want. 'If Adolf Hitler, flew in today, they'd send a limousine anyway...', as Strummer put it in 1978. 

So this is very well timed indeed, a new song from a very post-punk line up of Jah Wobble, Keith Levene, Richard Dudanski, Youth and Mark Stewart and this fantastic musical melting pot, a comment on the madness of Brexit, a piece of 2019 brilliance. Even more excitingly, there's a Weatherall remix to follow. Levene and Wobble's former PiL colleague, Brexit and Trump cheerleader Lydon, is nowhere to be seen.