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

The Desperate Bicycles

DIY's most fervent evangelists, the Desps chanted "it was easy, it was cheap - go and do it" at the end of their early 1977 debut "Smokescreen". That slogan then became the chorus of "The Medium Was Tedium", the follow-up released later that same year. "No more time for spectating", they declared on "Don't Back the Front", an antifascist anthem on the flip side of "Medium", adding the listener-inciting battle cry "cut it, press it, distribute it/Xerox music's here at last". A sleeve note revealed that "Smokescreen had cost only £ 153 and said the band "would really like to know why you haven't made your single yet".
As for the Desps' actual music, it was almost puritan in its unadorned simplicity, its guitar sound frugal to the point of emaciation. For the Desperate Bicycles, it was as though sloppiness and scrawniness became signs of membership in the true punk elect. The very deficiency of traditional rock virtues (tightness, feel) stood as tokens of the group's authenticity and purity of intent.

The Desperate Bicycles - Smokescreen - 1977


The Desperate Bicycles - The Medium Was Tedium - 1977


The Desperate Bicycles - Don't Back the Front - 1977

Factory Records

The label's first release, A Factory Sample, was a double EP packaged in glistening silver. "It just seemed so special", says Paul Morley, who was NME's Manchester correspondent at the time. "The fact that it was so beautiful looking showed the possibilities of what could be done, and it showed up the London record industry for being so boring".

Soon Factory was outdoing Fast Product's collectible Earcom samplers and bizarre packages like Quality of Life by bringing a Marcel Duchamp-like absurdism to their catalog. Numbers were assigned to anything and everything: pipe dreams, whims, unrealized projects, movies that were never finished or never started.
Fac 8 was a menstrual egg timer proposed by Linder but never actually constructed. Fac 99 was a dental bill for Factory codirector Rob Gretton, who'd had his molars reconstructed. Fac 61 was a lawsuit from the label's former house producer Martin Hannett.

The Secret Public - 1977

Released at the very end of 1977, almost a full year after Spiral Scratch, ORG-2 wasn't even a record, but a booklet of collages by Linder (singer in the band Ludus) and Jon Savage (journalist for Sounds magazine). "It didn't have a cover price, so it didn't sell very well. Nobody knew what to sell it for!" laughs Boon. "But it did its job. The title The Secret Public was all about that other side of the DIY thing - trying to locate kindred spirits who would 'get it' and respond".

(Scans taken from: www.goldminetrash.blog.co.uk)