The Pop Group’s lead singer, who has died at 62, whipped political confrontation into a thrilling mix of avant-funk and crashing soundscapes
In September 1978, the NME put a band made up of teenagers who had yet to release a record on its cover. It was the kind of dramatic, impulsive move to which the music press was occasionally prone, the sort of thing that invariably led to accusations of overheated hype or reckless desperation. By the autumn of 1978, punk was clearly winding down, or at least being co-opted by less artful practitioners than those in its first wave – the big new noise in that area was the terrace-chant choruses and political populism of Sham 69 – so the hunt was clearly on among journalists for something different, a situation that often led them to make rash choices. But The Pop Group, whose frontman Mark Stewart glowered on the NME’s cover, were anything but a desperate hype or a rash choice. Barely out of school, they were in the process of helping to define what became known as post-punk: jagged guitars, funk-inspired rhythms, a bold spirit of experimentation, dub-influenced soundscapes, anything but traditional rock. It’s tempting to say you could tell they were barely out of school. For all the apparent anguish in Stewart’s vocals, their music seemed powered by a youthful enthusiasm that was wild to the point of seeming deranged: it sounded like it was throwing everything they were interested in at you at once. Some people found it overwhelming, an off-putting, chaotic racket. Others were completely entranced. The Pop Group, Nick Cave later claimed, “changed everything” for him: “it was so direct, so musically inventive, so improvised”.
What The Pop Group threw at you was largely the result of Mark Stewart’s eclectic, autodidactic musical education, an education that seemed founded on an insatiable curiosity, but which he always claimed was mostly facilitated by his towering height. Already 6ft 6ins by the time he was 12, Stewart not only absorbed what he saw on the TV or heard on the radio (he was a huge fan of glam rock) but also was able to get into places usually off-limits for anyone his age, including reggae-fuelled blues parties in Bristol’s St Paul’s district, and soul clubs where he encountered tough dancefloor funk and jazz and the curious moment in 1975 when some soul fans began dressing in a style that presaged punk – mohair jumpers, spiked hair and the pegged trousers and 1950s suits that became The Pop Group’s initial onstage uniform. There was also a local underground bookshop, where he took in radical political tracts, situationist texts and cultural theory, all of which coursed through The Pop Group’s lyrics and notoriously argumentative interviews: the writer Simon Reynolds subsequently compared reading a feature about The Pop Group to having “your brain set on fire”.
