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

Linton Kwesi Johnson's influence on Pop Group's Mark Stewart

Stewart had been hanging with Linton Kwesi Johnson and organisations like Race Today and the Radical Alliance of Black Poets and Players. Linton Kwesi Johnson didn't exactly mince words: his antifascist anthem "Fite Dem Back" vowed "We gonna smash their brains in/'Cos they ain't got nuffink in 'em". Johnson wasn't actually a Rasta (indeed he upset many Jamaicans when he mocked Rastafarianism as an ostrich religion), but his patois-thick voice and baleful cadences gave the words, which look simplistic on the printed page, a power and authority that Stewart aspired to.

Linton Kwesi Johnson - Fite Dem Back 1979

Evolution of The Pop Group

Like the Slits, the Pop Group pined for a lost wholeness that they imagined existed before civilization's debilitating effects. The song "Words Disobey Me" even hinted that language itself might be the enemy, that underneath all the layers of conditioning lay a pure, inarticulate speech of the heart. "Speak the unspoken/First words of a child...We don't need words/Throw them away", beseeched Stewart.

The Pop Group - Words Disobey Me 1979

The Pop Group's mounting revulsion for corporate capitalism and corresponding desire for "purity" in a corrupt world inspired the single "We Are All Prostitutes". Musically, it's their most powerful recording. The lyrics, though, abandoned Y's imagistic delirium for a histrionic rant against consumerism, "the most barbaric of all religions". Stewart warned, "our children shall rise up against us". The Pop Group seemed to be changing from lusty poet-warriors to puritanical doomsayers.

The Pop Group - We Are All Prostitutes 1979

The backlash came in March 1980, triggered by a split single that paired the Slits' "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm" with the Pop Group's "Where There's a Will". NME's Ian Penman mockingly dissed them as "Bristol Baezes", evoking sanctimonious sixties folkie Joan Baez.

The Pop Group - Where There's a Will 1980

The second Pop Group album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? got panned as self-righteous soapbox agitprop. The music was still fiery, and actually more focused than Y, but it was hard to stomach the crude finger-pointing of songs like "Blind Faith".

The Pop Group - Blind Faith 1980

The band seemed to proceed methodically through a checklist of issues - "Justice" dealt with police brutality, "How Much Longer" with Nixon and Kissinger's war crimes - and the self-flagellating guilt trip vibe was off-putting. "There Are No Spectators" chided the politically disengaged and passive, declaring, "There is no neutral/No one is innocent".

The Pop Group - Justice 1980


The Pop Group - How Much Longer 1980


The Pop Group - There Are No Spectators 1980

The album was relentlessly pinned to the specifics, from the sleeve with its collage of news clipping about outrages such as East Timor to songs such as "Feed The Hungry", all blurted statistics and denunciation. Hectoring and lecturing, For How Much Longer was as unpoetic as a fringe leftist pamphlet.

The Pop Group - Feed The Hungry 1980

A massive antinuclear rally held in Trafalgar Square in October 1980 was the last time the Pop Group performed together. After this high point - playing to 250.000 people - the Pop Group fell apart. "An organic disintegration", says Stewart. "There was no ill will".

The Pop Group - She Is Beyond Good and Evil and Y

Released by Radar Records in March 1979, the Pop Group's debut single, "She Is Beyond Good and Evil" was an exhilarating splurge of disco bass, slashing punk-funk rhythm guitar, and deranged dub effects, with singer Mark Stewart caterwauling lines like "our only defense is together as an army/I'll hold you like a gun".

Lyrically, says Stewart, the song was "a very young attempt to mix up poetic, existentialist stuff with political yearnings. The idea of unconditional love as a revolutionary force - the way it kind of switches on a light, makes you hope for a better world, gives you this idealism and energy".

The Pop Group - She Is Beyond Good and Evil 1979

To record "Beyong Good and Evil", the Pop Group hooked up with Dennis Bovell, who at that point was the only British reggae producer brilliant enough to bear any comparison with the Jamaican greats like Lee Perry and King Tubby. Bovell's musical scope stretched way beyond reggae, though. He'd played lead guitar in a Hendrix-influenced band called Stonehenge and believed that Jimi had created the first dub track ever in 1967 with "Third Stone from the Sun".

Jimi Hendrix - Third Stone from the Sun 1967

For "3:38", the B-side to "Beyond Good and Evil", he took the A-side's music and ran it backward, psychedelic-style, then built a new rhythm track for it with Bruce Smith (Pop Group's drummer). "We'd almost run out of studio time, that's why I reused the A-side", says Bovell.

The Pop Group - 3:38 1979

Working on their debut album Y, Bovell quickly grasped that the rhythm section held the whole band together. "Simon Underwood and Bruce Smith, they were the Sly and Robbie of the postpunk period, tight", says Bovell. "The thing that was not together about the Pop Group was Gareth Sager's and John Waddington's guitars and Mark's singing, which would be drifting all across the frame".

Pop Group songs like "We Are Time" blazed with a rage to live. "Not wanting to just be alive", says Stewart, "but to rid yourself of all constrictions. We had this romantic idea of going through nihilism, this intense deconditioning process, and emerging on the other side with something really positive".

The Pop Group - We Are Time 1979

Fire figured in the Pop Group's imagination as an ideal state of being, evoking inner-city riots, pagan rituals, the 1960s free jazz of Archie Shepp's Fire Music. One of the band's best songs, "Thief of Fire", used the Prometheus myth to talk about the quest for "prohibited knowledge, going into unknown areas".

The Pop Group -Thief of Fire 1979


Although the sheer funk force of Underwood and Smith makes the up-tempo songs like "We are Time" physically compelling, elsewhere Y veers into texture-saturated abstraction with sound paintings like "Savage Sea" and "Don't Sell Your Dreams".

The Pop Group - Savage Sea 1979


The Pop Group - Don't Sell Your Dreams 1979