After the Pop Group: Pigbag and Mark Stewart's Jerusalem

The Pop Group splintered into multiple bands. Maximum Joy and Pigbag pursued slightly different versions of funk. Pigbag, helmed by Simon Underwood and still associated with Dick O'Dell's Y label, became a real pop group, scoring a massive U.K. hit with "Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag".

Pigbag - Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag - 1985

Stewart, meanwhile, sang on the first New Age Steppers album, then made his solo debut in October 1982 with a fully realized version of "Jerusalem", the English hymn the Pop Group massacred at their last show in Trafalgar Square. Produced by Sherwood and marrying church organ swells to dub's thunderquake bass, "Jerusalem" unites Blake's vision of Albion as promised land with the Zion of Rasta's dreaming. Its declaration "I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/'Til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land", served as a mission statement for Stewart's ongoing career as culture warrior. 

Amazingly, almost thirty years later he's still shouting down Babylon.

Mark Stewart & The Maffia - Jerusalem 1982

Evolution of the Slits

Proposing a kind of cosmology of rhythm, "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm" hymned all the pulsating patterns that structure reality: "...God is riddim...Riddim is roots and roots is riddim...SILENCE! Silence is a riddim too!". Ari Up and Neneh Cherry had encountered the early underground hip-hop scene on a trip to New York, and hearing rap for the first time inspired her percussive, chanted delivery on "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm".

The Slits - In the Beginning There Was Rhythm 1980

As a sideline to the Slits, Ari Up formed New Age Steppers, a collaboration with dub producer Adrian Sherwood and his session musicians Creation Rebel. Released in the first week of 1981, the group's debut single, "Fade Away", features one of Ari Up's finest vocal performances, but its trust-in-Jah fatalism (the power-hungry and money-minded will all "fade away", leaving the righteous meek to inherit the earth) seemed disconcertingly passive, suggesting a retreat into hippielike serenity.

New Age Steppers - Fade Away 1981

One more Slits album, Return of the Giant Slits, saw the group abandon the independent scene for a major label, CBS, even bigger than their previous home Island Records. Influenced by African music, Sun Ra and Don Cherry (Neneh's father and a pioneer of ethnodelic jazz), the record's diffuse, low-key experimentalism fell into a hostile marketplace.

In songs like "Animal Space", Ari Up's pantheism took an ecomystical turn. "Earthbeat", for instance, was a lament for a sorely mistreated Mother Earth ("Even the leaves are wheezing/Even the clouds are coughing").

The Slits - Animal Space 1981


The Slits - Earthbeat 1981

After the band finally fell apart, the singer fled Babylon (aka the industrial First World) in search of any remaining havens of unspoiled Nature. Flitting from rural Jamaica to the jungles of Belize and Borneo (where she lived with tribal indians), she became a real earth mother with a family.