Go Mental With The Pop Group (Interview)

Hailing from Bristol, The Pop Group had a brief, but important musical career, forming in 1977, at the height of the punk movement and splitting up just three years later. During that time the band released two albums and became one of the pioneering post-punk band by incorporating dub, reggae, funk and Krautrock into their raw punk attitute. All these with a sharp, political eye. Now the band is back and fully in tact with a new album, Citizen Zombie and a tour that brings them to Auckland on March 4th. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to The Pop Group’s front man, Mark Stewart and found that he is as passionate and dedicated to pushing musical and social boundaries as he was almost 40 years ago.

Click her to listen to the interview with The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart:

Or read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: I understand you guys are in rehearsal at the moment. How is that going?

MS: It’s starting tomorrow. The bass player has just arrived in Bristol and we’re reminiscing. It’s starting tomorrow and the drummers flying into New York tomorrow morning it’s starting. It’s going to be really interesting cause it’s the first time that we’re actually getting to play some of these new songs which is, it’s like a rebirth really for the band.

MD: Right. When you say you were reminiscing, what kind of reminiscing have you been going through so far?

MS: Just talking about teenage years in Bristol and who’s this and who’s that and bands just reformed. Another band he was in called The Glaxo Babies they were like my favourite ever Bristol band more than The Pop Group, they have a song called Shake The Foundations and we were just talking about who wanted to be in and who wasn’t going to be in it and just reminiscing about some mates of ours and lotharios and it’s just funny just talking about back in the day. Bristol has gone a bit frozen in aspic.

MD: Right.

MS: It’s a small enough town that nothing much changes there, do you know what I mean?

MD: Yeah. So how much was Bristol an influence on the way The Pop Group ended up sounding back in the day?

MS: Well this is the crucial thing.  I mean from a distance because I’ve lived all over the world from a distance I’m just beginning to talk about it in the last few weeks. I think that town is crucial to the sound of the band. People kind of analyse the Bristol sound a bit later on with our mates Massive Attack  and Portishead and Tricky and stuff but I think when just trying to understand it for myself I mean what happened was that Punk happened right. We were kind of…my next door neighbour formed a very kind of Bristol Punk band and we were kind of coming up to London and watching them and we kind of we were just mates of our mates band and we decided to form our own band and the band coming up to a gig in the Rock scene then, but Punk was already happening. So we thought it wouldn’t have been Punk to be a Punk band. So we just got to try and bring in all these things that we were interested in and listening to and kind of just analysing it from a distance. It’s like, in Bristol bass and bass music is completely part of kind of the skeleton of the city. My mum lived in a really kind of what became the kind of key West Indian neighbourhood and from an early age, I was going to Blues dances and listening to loads of Reggae. So if it has to be explained, I mean it was, I was into Funk and Reggae before I was into Punk, that sort of thing. Although one second you could be listening to like The Velvet Underground and Pearls Before Swine and the next minute you’re like listening to King Tubby and the next minute you’re listening to Neu. But I can’t really find, I don’t really know why me or Gareth got into such a wide spectrum of music but it seems like you must have been quite precocious like 14 or 15 year olds and the weird stuff we were listening to, but there wass books and films, I still got a vivacious attitude for all sorts of weird culture from like weird sound system culture to…it’s mad.  I don’t know what it is but I have to feed off stuff all the time.

MD: Do you think if Punk hadn’t have happened, would you have formed a band or did Punk kind of enable you to do it?

MS: Yeah no way. I would have either been working in a factory or if I bothered to stay in school, I was knocking? off school. I don’t know, if music hadn’t have happened, constantly I was knocking off school, just hanging around record shops while I should have been at school and listening to Reggae records and kind of going out clubbing with my mates before Punk but that was just as a consumer, the kind of social side. There is no way that people of my kind of class had any intentions of being in a band. I mean bands were kind of it was all kind of prog  rock and far away stuff or kind of what we call Pub Rock which was a kind of muso thing which I couldn’t really connect to either.

MD: Right.

MS: Although I like some of it Dr. Feelgood and stuff. But for us we were just kind of into fashion and into music and just hanging out and clubbing and stuff and suddenly in an English music paper I saw a tiny little photo of The Sex Pistols and they were wearing the same clothes, mohair jumpers and mad clothes, that we were wearing to go out to these funk clubs. I was coming up to London shopping and stuff in Malcolm McLaren’s early shops. So suddenly it felt like there was somebody who was part of our generation and so really it was a tribal thing, Punk and you go to a different town and there’d be one or two people looking a bit similar or there’ll be one other person in the schools. But it’s really, really funny. I mean soon as The Pop Group started we started going and playing in places like Manchester and Scotland or whatever. I’d meet other kids who were forming bands like Ian from Joy Division or the kids from The Mary Chain or Primal Scream whatever but it seems a bit of isolation, there’d be like one or two kids in each school or in each part of the town that are kind of getting into these things, somehow their own kind of record and when Punk happened there was already a kind of grass roots that people that were into like Iggy Pop and The New York Dollls.

MD: Right, I was wondering if you were aware of the American Punk scene as well because there’s a band that I remember hearing back in the day that when I was listening to your new album it kind of, Pere Ubu. Are you familiar with them at all?

MS: Yes. We went on tour with them while we were at school.

MD: Oh right.

MS: I was in school. We went on tour supporting Pere Ubu in Europe and Patti Smith right. The funny thing is we loved Pere Ubu. When I heard Final Solution and Datapanik In The Year Zero we really, really loved them. We were on tour with them. The funny thing is recently we played Brighton and I got a message from David Thomas who when we toured with them I didn’t talk to him a lot but he must have really liked our music because all these years later he made a point of coming here and saying hello to us, really, really nice guy.

MD: Yeah.

MS: It’s nice to get respect from people like that.

MD: Absolutely. Your track St. Outrageous on your new album kind of made me think of Pere Ubu and what they were doing back in the day.

MS: Oh thanks mate, that’s great, that’s really cool. I was just looking up this guy Peter Laughner or something, the bass player of Pere Ubu.

MD: Oh right.

MS: Was also in Rockets From The Tombs.

MD: Exactly.

MS: There’s a really good compilation that friends Soul Jazz has just put out about the Akron…early proto-punk Akron years.

MD: Right, cool. There’s some good stuff that came out of there and Dead Boys and all those guys as well.

MS: Yeah.

MD: Now I don’t know if you’re aware of this but I assume you know who Lorde is, she’s kind of the New Zealand pop queen at the moment and she recently sent out a tweet I think in response to something of Paul Epworth saying that she was a fan of The Pop Group. Were you aware of that?

MS: I heard probably about it, yes. She bought all of our stuff, yeah.

MD: I think it says oh my god have fun blasting them.

MS: The funny thing is when I first heard her stuff, right, very, very early on.

MD: Yeah.

MS: Of course she broke out,  I thought this girl’s got a bit of balls, it’s quite cool. But it sounds like she, where ever people come from if people have got control of their own destiny and they’re kind of stomping their feet and not listening to other people and not being manipulated or anything. I’ve got uttermost respect for people in the pop scene and the underground scene and whatever and she has been recently working with Paul and it sounds like she, I mean she’s as strong as Bjork or anybody like that. She’s completely in control of who she is and what she wants to do and all power to the girl.

MD: Yeah. I don’t think there’s much media manipulation going on there unless she’s doing It so, which is kinda cool.

MS: Fantastic.

MD: Now I’m curious, when The Pop Group originally showed up in the late 70s, you had a lot to say about the condition of things in England and the world and now you’re back again 30 some years later, how would you say things have changed as far as your approach to dealing with that kind of stuff? Has the world changed much and has your approach changed to it much?

MS: Let’s see, how long have we got?

MD: In 10 words or less.

MS:  I mean the world’s a big place. Well I mean, I don’t know how to explain this and obviously when people..the funny thing is for me, time is a kind of circle, I can’t really…I remember Steve Albini described The Pop Group as kind of non-linear right. My mind’s a bit kind of non-linear right. All I know is that about the age of 14 or 15 something happened to me when I became kind of aware somehow, my antenna’s grew or something, but I kind of realized the illusion of all the stuff that they’ve been teaching us at school was a load of complete rubbish.

MD: Right.

MS: And I just kind of started to see the world and make a jigsaw of how I thought economics worked or how I started to see how the kind of matrix functioned right.

MD: Right.

MS: Basically my quest is to try and see behind the mirror and try and…again right, the appetite for like good music and new things and interesting literature and cool films. I’m also interested in like trying to find out as much as possible about economics and how some of these systems are really working, who is really behind some of these stories.  Not in a bad way or a good way just because I need to know for myself because I’m on this planet as well.

MD: Right.

MS: And it just seems that people say because of the Pop Group, but I’ve been continuously making music through that whole period. I’ve been doing my solo stuff, but every year I’m doing something or collaborating with somebody or seeing things. The point is to me, when I open the window, when I open the curtains, I see the world and I think it’s important for people to reflect or to comment or somehow to not ignore what’s going on in the world.  I don’t understand how anybody can write about bloody I love you baby in my pink Cadillac.

MD: Right.

MS: There’s good things and there’s bad things. The world is an interconnected place.

MD: Yeah.

MS: Back in the day there was a quote that ten thousand men, women and children die of starvation every day and I thought that is happening, it as important for me to say that as ‘I love you baby’. It’s as poetic as anything else. And now on this new album, Citizen Zombie, there’s a quote saying that something like the nine richest people in the world earn more than the 3.5 billion poorest.

MD: Right.

MS: I know it’s kind of statistic but those facts are just, it’s a fact.

MD: Yup.

MS: For me that’s not political, that’s just a fact. You know, that car is red, this fact is a fact.

MD: Yeah.

MS: So it’s as interesting to me as some of that weird science, do you know what I’m saying. It’s not, this is the world we live in and I think it’s important to be aware of it. Not in a dark kind of depressing way because I find at the moment because this whole Pop Group kind of theme and the live concerts and the music and the kind of interactions we’re getting with people across the world, it’s very kind of joyous and hopeful and I’m really enjoying it because I’m learning again really fast kind of cool, kind of alternative interconnected people right across the world. There’s this kind of conscious parallel world of good, cool people who some of them are in pretty strong positions of power.

MD: Right.

MS: And they’re aware of what’s going on. I’m finding it very, very encouraging.

MD: Oh sorry go ahead.

MS: Back in the day it was when we were really young, when we were 16, 17, there’s that whole kind of teenage adolescent thing of like ‘them and us’ and we were like the only Punks in the village and it was really completely and utterly oppositional and I think we are still kind of very, very independent and in kind of opposition to the kind of X Factor zombification of society.

MD: Yeah.

MS: But you kind of realise that even the guy that does The Simpsons or somebody way up…

MD: Yeah.

MS: The cool people who are kind of ghosts with machines,  you know what I mean?

MD: Yup, absolutely. I notice in the track Mad Truth, it’s a very funky, upbeat kind of almost danceable number, but yet at the same time you’re calling for people to, it’s time to take a stand.

Click here to listen to Mad Truth:

MS: Yeah.

MD: So what are you trying to accomplish with this album, do you think? Is it just trying to get people aware that they’re part of the world and they should do something about it, or what?

MS: It’s a personal thing. I mean the interesting thing about this The Pop Group thing is that we’re four strong characters and we’re kind of representing our own kind of personal things and kind of wrestling with each other and for us it’s a kind of, we’re creating an energy from us as individuals, as human beings and we’re trying to, like in Star Trek when they kind of beam each other up to another planet,  we’re trying to like throw that energy out into people in the world. It either acts as a kind of solice and encouragement. Often what The Pop Group seem to be representing at the moment is a kind of a visible face of an alternative. We’ve been playing some quite small towns in England, a lot of people been coming out, not because they’re completely fans of The Pop Group or whatever but just because they want to see other freaks  in the town or whatever, do you know what I mean?

MD: Yeah.

MS: It’s like the whole idea being independent, having no censorship, trying to control your own destiny, which we got in the early DIY days of Rough Trade and stuff and I’ll fight for the rest of my life, people kind of respect that.

MD: Yeah.

MS: I think you can kind of set a template which other bands can use and whatever. At the moment we’re really trying to make some kind of strong opposition, do you know what I mean?

MD: Yeah. It’s one thing for a band to get back together again after 30 years and do some gigs, but quite another to actually go in to studio and make some new music together. Was that a big step for you guys?

MS: Well as soon as, I was living in Berlin at the time, and as soon as we all started talking about doing reissues and playing again, the first thing anybody said was let’s try and do something different and something new. It would have been completely un- Pop Group just to kind of tour around some kind of heritage circuit. We’ve all got much better things to do then to do something like that and we all really respect what that band means to people and what it means to us and we’re fans because we’re making the kind of music that we can’t hear anywhere else. When we were kids, we were hearing in our heads the kind of mix of dub reggae and noisy guitars and trash metal and punk and whatever.

MD: Right.

MS: Until we had to make it ourselves cause we couldn’t hear it anywhere. We were making our own kind of mental mixtapes and now we’re just like, we’re completely and utterly biting at the…, forgotten what it was dogs bite right.

MD: Chomping at the bit!

MS: To get into the studio and soon as we were formed, so much material was pouring out of us. I mean we had like 40 songs on the go that we whittled down to the ones for this album. Me and Gareth are completely and utterly shocked by what’s going on and sometimes you just got to stand back and let the muse just run off like some mad tiger into the jungle and you got to find some burning torches and go into the jungle and see where the hell this muse is gone, do you know what I mean?

MD: Yeah.

MS: For me, I’m just holding on to this tiger and letting it ride, it’s mad. All the way through my solo career I’m kind of in control of what I’m doing and I’m kind of doing things in a deliberate manner for this purpose or for that purpose. The sense of experimentation and the sense of kind of risk and flipping the script which I think comes from the antagonism between our different characters somebody pulls from it. Somebody will suddenly pull a track in a completely different direction, they turn off all the guitars or go down to a little ? from it, but it’s four of us. All I’m learning is to stand back and see what happens.

MD: Yeah.

MS: I’m not just saying this, but it’s really kind of, it’s given me a real bolt of electricity at my spine. It’s interesting even tomorrow, I’m like a little kid. It’s more exciting for me now personally as a human being that it was when we were kids, it’s weird.

MD: And so…

MS: I’d never thought I’d think like that.

MD: So you’re going to be here in New Zealand playing in a couple of weeks or so. How do you think that’s going to translate to the stage what’s been going on, on the album and in the rehearsals?

MS: Well this is what we were just discussing. I think the album, I mean again we want to kind of we want to rip the songs into some other kind of form and kind of dub them out and make them into another kind of emotional kind of space. I mean this is what we’re trying to work out, how to, but again it’s very kind of ritualistic. I mean the funny thing is, even when we’re kind of rehearsing in the day time, it turns into like some kind of weird kind of Balinese monkey chant thing.

MD: Right.

MS: And the shocking thing is that live and especially this New Zealand show there’s so much excitement of all different people from right across all the different islands, saying this is amazing and it was kind of organised a bit kind of on the spur, but there’s like so much kind of grass roots support and so many cool people are getting excited about it. I think it’s going to be like when we first went to Japan like 2 years ago.

MD: Right.

MS: What’s interesting for me is that the people arrive quite cool and we start going mental on stage and you see like one guy suddenly like losing it and going into spasms and then the person next to him, the girl next to him thinks oh if he can lose it, I can lose it. He’s given me permission.

MD: Yeah.

MS: Then the whole place starts. Going to a Pop Group gig is an excuse to go completely mental with other human beings, like often people do it in their house in the privacy of their own home.