Pop Group - Confessions of a Firestarter

Bristol, county seat of Avon, England. We're around the mid-1970s. With the ships docking in the harbour come not just goods of every kind, but also a good number of outlandish records, especially by "funk" artists. In 1975, Mark Stewart is just 14 years old, but he doesn't mind hanging around the city's many venues, in search of novelty and distraction. As he would recall years later in an interview with the New Musical Express: "We used to go to clubs to dance to records by T-Connection, BT Express, Fatback Band... basically, all those monstrous bass lines. Shortly afterwards I discovered that pretty much in every city in the UK there were kids like me who loved funk and dressed in the style of the Fifties. Like me, moreover, theirs was a kind of reaction against so-called "prog-rock", and, like me, when punk arrived, they immediately followed in its wake."

Outside the clubs, however, things were far from rosy. An unprecedented economic recession was raging like an unstoppable storm. England was in disarray, and people were searching for the most suitable political solutions to tackle the crisis.

Despite his very young age, Stewart was developing a strong political conscience, and, little by little, he came into contact with the older kids in the area. But the idea rattling around in his "gulliver" (to borrow a phrase from good old Alex in Arancia Meccanica) was to put together a band, and thus give vent to the most hidden folds of his own soul.

Meanwhile, in London, punk had already launched its offensive, and, as if that weren't enough, the political situation kept sinking deeper. The National Front had grown stronger, becoming a genuine threat. The clashes on Lewisham High Street only boosted its credibility, so much so that - as Jon Savage recalls in his "England's Dreaming" - it was elevated to the rank of "defender of free speech and unity" (!). In any case, it was right after the events of Lewisham that punk's definitive process of "politicisation" began, thanks above all to the work of the Clash.

But let's get back to Bristol. Mark had finally managed to put a band together: the trigger was a Sex Pistols gig. Like him, struck by that event, were Gareth Sager (guitar, saxophone and piano), John Waddington (guitar), Bruce Smith (drums) and Simon Underwood (bass). They decided to call themselves "The Pop Group", but they had no intention whatsoever of playing "pop music" - none at all. That was stuff for pimply teenagers, for people who have no desire to get the most out of themselves. Just listen to what Sager told an NME journalist: "I think people only use a tiny fraction of their potential." And again: "People think rock has something to do with youthful rebellion. It's pathetic! Rock means becoming aware of reality. We want to open people up to new experiences. Rock, in fact, is a celebration of awareness."

We're light years away from punk's original premises here. The lesson of Strummer & co. is clearly evident, but the Pop Group had a far more defined, and undoubtedly more radical, political ideology. Certainly closer to Stewart and his crew were the Slits, one of the first all-female punk bands. The destinies of the two bands ran so closely in parallel that together they founded the "Y" label, while Bruce Smith, at one point, became a drummer in "joint custody" between the two.

In their musical and ideological approach there was a certain stance taken against the whole of Western civilisation (recall the lines "Western values means nothing to her", from the band's first single, "She Is Beyond Good And Evil"), and, as a reflection of that, a reappraisal of "primitive" elements. Hence the foregrounding of "natural rhythm" ("In The Beginning There Was Rhythm" was the title of the split single released by the Slits and the Pop Group) and the so-called "tribal consciousness" (the belief that in Africa's tribal societies there was no alienation or repression).

This "primitivist ideology" regards "dance" as the key element through which man frees himself from his frustrations and anxieties. Hence the importance of "funk"-derived rhythmic structures and the agit-prop emphasis through which those structures are diluted and almost annihilated, to the point of becoming something unrecognisable, inscrutable. In the case of the Bristol outfit, the music turns magmatic, jagged, Dionysian, all-consuming. Artaud's "theatre of cruelty" seems to come to life through a sonic assemblage that is about as disturbing as anything imaginable in England at the time. But also fundamental to the musical and ideological development of the Pop Group were, and perhaps above all, Wilhelm Reich's theory of libido (according to which orgasm is the primordial cosmic energy, capable of bringing about man's liberation, his emancipation from social constraints), the Situationist revolt, Beat poetry, the avant-garde of the "Art And Language" movement, and the Zen spirituality of John Cage. And in their attempt to turn live performances into genuine happenings, there is undoubtedly an echo of a certain strand of 20th-century theatre, from Appia to Kantor, by way of Kaprow and Grotowski. In this sense, calling the Pop Group a mere "rock band" is something of an understatement.

After an early phase spent playing covers of Modern Lovers and T-Rex, the band began experimenting with new and more complex harmonic architectures. They often spent their afternoons listening to records by Sun Ra, Funkadelic, Captain Beefheart, Last Poets, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis (especially his post-"Bitches Brew" period), Can and numerous "reggae" artists. They made their debut at the "Tiffany", in their native Bristol. It was 1978. And it was a genuine revelation, at least for those who managed to grasp its revolutionary charge.

Radarscope Records sensed their potential and signed them. The first fruit of this union (far from a happy one, to be honest) was the single "She Is Beyond Good And Evil / 3.38", released in 1979. Side A is an overwhelming tribal dance, almost a primitivist twist steeped in noise and dub. Side B, meanwhile, makes room for an instrumental that evokes Can and winks at This Heat.

That same year, the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher, won the general election, ushering in one of the most difficult periods in English history. The curbing of trade union power and cuts to the welfare state were only the first warning signs.

The Pop Group responded by releasing their debut album, Y, one of the most radical, politicized and innovative records of all time. Imagine Ornette Coleman and James Brown deciding to play together after falling head over heels for "dub" and certain tribal rhythms. That, more or less, is Y! Just listen to the opening track, "Thief Of Fire", to understand it: "avant-funk", if that term has ever meant anything. But there's more. Here and there, dub flourishes, tribal percussion, grainy free-jazz, radio frequencies, flights of saxophone fancy, and a vocal style that swings between agit-prop declamations and cannibalistic screams. "Snowgirl" is a nursery rhyme worthy of the most iconoclastic Zappa, a bizarre musical sludge smeared with free-jazz (there's a lot of Cecil Taylor in Sager's percussive use of the piano) and minimal funk. Dub and funk are then dissected and rendered subliminal on "Blood Money", lit up by dissonant flashes à la Pere Ubu and mercilessly battered by every kind of cacophony, while the ghost of Damo Suzuki seems to roam freely through Stewart's vocal cords (think of "Peking O" on Tago Mago).

The album's masterpiece is undoubtedly "We Are Time", perhaps the most deconstructed funk track ever recorded. The basslines are full-bodied and powerful, as tradition dictates; the guitar screeches, roars, howls; Smith grinds out a relentless rhythm, yet anything but linear, always ready instead to follow Stewart's vocal twists and turns. The sound editing is terrifying, obsessive, lysergic, to the point that the track ends up collapsing on itself, torn apart by a monstrous sonic deflagration (this is the tangible proof of how the Pop Group treated the recording studio as a genuine instrument in its own right).

After so much devastation, the timid glimmer of a piano rises on the horizon, which, amid horn calls and a voice that melancholically projects itself into the empty space, brushes against the thinnest, most vibrating strings of the soul. The landscape is desolate, dark, yet at the same time intimately divine, so much so that "Savage Sea" almost feels like a pagan prayer.

The band goes back to grinding out savage funk rhythms on "Words Disobey Me", while the funk-jazz of "Don't Call Me Pain" raises yet another pointed invective against Western society. A distant horn call opens "The Boys From Brazil", where tribalism turns into neurosis, fear, existential anguish. The sax's piercing excursions merge with the hallucinated atmosphere and jagged rhythm, giving rise to an abysmal, densely woven spiral, yet held together by a remarkably lucid overall vision.

The guitar's oscillations, its glacial, introspective chords — still echoing the masters of Cleveland — sketch out the desolate crevices of "Don't Sell Your Dreams", pierced by Stewart's screams and left to drift into the void, together with the assonances and dissonances that make up its most cryptic, most arcane undercurrent. The drums' imperious explosions, the flashes of musique concrète, the instrumental breakdowns: everything contributes to triggering an emotional short circuit, a traumatic ecstasy, before silence sets in, resolved into an everyday life made of noise and alienating actions.

An absolute masterpiece of English new wave, Y still carries an impressive explosive force and Dionysian charge. The sense of paranoia pervading its labyrinths certainly brings it close to other great records of the era, such as P.I.L.'s "Metal Box", Pere Ubu's "The Modern Dance" and "Dub Housing", Chrome's "Half Machine Lip Moves" and Tuxedomoon's "Half Mute". The utopia of man's regeneration, of his definitive liberation from the rigid schematism of social life, is nonetheless the Pop Group's distinguishing trait, and, in a sense, its historical justification.

In the 9 pieces that make up this legendary record, the most disparate musical sources are fused and reworked in pursuit of a permanent revolution, where the regenerative magic of the "Living Theatre" meets the dissolute energy of punk, the brazen sexual frenzy of funk and the metropolitan intellectualism of free-jazz. The Pop Group's primitivist synthesis is without doubt one of the most sublime, irreverent and far-sighted legacies of the entire new wave movement.

Having instantly become a sensation (perhaps more for their political ideas than for the worth of their music), the band, after a falling-out with Radarscope Records, decided to move to Rough Trade, the historic label founded by Geoff Travis. With the contractual issues resolved, in 1980 they released their second single, "We Are All Prostitutes", a bizarre disco-funk record cast into a chaos of violins and frenzied saxophones. On side B we find "Amnesty International Report On British Army Torture Of Irish Prisoners", a crackling, noise-driven jazz piece over which Stewart reads out the Amnesty report.

Their second album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Muss Murder?, released that same year, would turn out to be their swan song (worth noting is the magnificent cover art, surely one of the most beautiful and meaningful of all time). The political impact here is more direct (certainly the title leaves no room for doubt), and the music, consequently, becomes less experimental, though it remains harsh and anything but easy listening. The funk component takes over, while the free-jazz and tribal elements are, so to speak, dispersed within the harmonic fabric, becoming almost entirely unrecognizable.

This is evident from the very first two tracks, "Forces Of Oppression" and "Feed The Hungry": these are dense, obsessive rhythmic fabrics, in which Sager's sax can trace its unpredictable trajectories and Waddington's usual noisy guitar can scatter dissonances like seeds carried by the wind across boundless clearings. Stewart's vocals, meanwhile, have become less "schizoid": he no longer tells stories through metaphor, he declaims, and does so with a dissolute, excessive passion. There's also room for a bizarre reworking of the Last Poets' "One Out Of Many (E Pluribus Unum)"; for the stretched-out dub of "There Are No Spectators"; for the abrasive free-jazz of "Communicate". Then there's the agit-punk of "Rob A Bank", the bacchanal of "Blind Faith" and the disco-music fragrances of "Justice". Here and there, voice and saxophone are, as usual, electronically treated, in a manner reminiscent of how Chrome and Throbbing Gristle used to operate.

The Pop Group's adventure had by now reached its end. But there was still time to put out We Are Time, a collection of live material, radio sessions and outtakes. Another compilation, We Are All Prostitutes, would see the light of day in 1998.

When one pope dies, another is made... actually, four! And so, with the historic band name laid to rest, the old lesson was carried on, with due innovations and cross-contaminations, by bassist Underwood's Pig Bag, by Smith and Sager's Rip Rig & Panic, by fellow guitarist Waddington's Maximum Joy, and by Mark Stewart as a solo artist, backed by Mafia (formerly Tackhead).

After a thirty-five-year hiatus, the band returned to the scene in 2015 with the thoroughly dignified Citizen Zombie. Aside from John Waddington, the lineup is the same as in 1980.

Produced by Paul Epworth (whose résumé includes collaborations with U2, Coldplay, Paul McCartney and so on — a choice justified by the desire to keep pace with more modern production techniques), the record tunes back into the sturdiest moments of "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" and the dance-meets-dub experiments of Mark Stewart's early solo work. The result is music that's dark and mutant just the right amount, full of carefully dosed manipulations and feedback, the odd background chant or electric blast.

With the disco-funk weave of "Mad Truth" (punctuated by a cheeky guitar refrain) we're squarely in danceable territory, revisited with schizophrenic energy by the more predictable "Shadow Child" and "Box 9" and charged with pop fibrillation by the carefree "S.O.P.H.I.A.", with Stewart's subconscious playing nasty tricks on him: ⟦Q1⟧…

A ballad like "Echelon" could probably have been skipped, but the longer the record spins, the more it cements the feeling that, despite all the years gone by, the Pop Group are still having fun making music — and that's more than enough to justify everything. A few striking moments ("Nations", where they sound like Suicide played at double speed; "St. Outrageous", which tinkers with oscillations from outer space, dancing along Gary Numan-esque precipices; and "Age Of Miracles", a take on ecstatic dub house) help make the reunion anything but pointless.

The following year Stewart & co already had the follow-up ready, Honeymoon On Mars, which retreads the sound of its predecessor and doesn't add much to the legend of the Bristol band.

⟦Q2⟧

(Gareth Sager)

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