LA BAND CHE HA RIVOLUZIONATO IL POST
PUNK INGLESE DI FINE ANNI SETTANTA, CAPITANATA DAL CARISMATICO MARK STEWART,
GURU DELL’INDUSTRIAL, TORNA AD OTTOBRE CON DUE REISSUE, WE ARE TIME e CABINET OF
CURIOSITIES,
ED
UN NUOVO ATTESO TOUR
WE ARE TIME E’ LA
RIPUBBLICAZIONE DELLO STORICO DISCO DEL 1980 MENTRE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
RACCOGLIE I MIGLIORI SINGOLI, A CUI SI
AGGIUNGONO DUE INEDITI
Arrivati nella scena musicale sul finire
degli anni Settanta, Pop Group si sono da subito imposti come band innovativa e
d’avanguardia, un punto di rottura nell’era del post-punk.
A distanza di due anni dalla pubblicazione di
The Politics Of Envy, il progetto solista di Mark Stewart, l’industrial del Pop
Group è pronta a tornare con due reissue ed un nuovo tour
“It’s one of those
moments when the cogs of your mind shift and your life is going to irreversibly
change forever” – Nick
Cave on hearing The Pop Group for the first time.
“Without The Pop
Group I don’t know what The Minutemen would have sounded like” - Mike Watt
“The years have divested this band's music of
none of its urgent potency” - The
Guardian 2014
We Are Time è senza ombra di dubbio il disco
che meglio rappresenta gli esordi della band simbolo del post-punk inglese di
fine anni ‘70’. Dato alle stampe nel 1980, originariamente in formato vinile, We Are Time è un concentrato di
energia, spiazzante e d’impatto. Ti prende di petto con le sue influenze
sconnesse che spaziano da Patti Smith a Rimbaud, da James Brown a The Stooges,
passando per i Roxy Music e T. Rex. We
Are Time è il disco teenager del Pop
Group, come dichiara lo stesso Mark
Stewart: “The Pop Group was
mutating so fast right from the start that it was crucial to document those
first experiments with this compilation. We Are Time is really ‘the’ teenage
Pop Group album. It’s full of defiance and the material demonstrates the band's
staunch independence and our really early DIY ethic before the studio became
another instrument.”
Cabinet Of Curiosities raccoglie i
migliori brani del Pop Group, alcuni
rimasterizzati altri invece mai pubblicati. La raccolta inizia prepotentemente
con Where There’s A Will, il singolo
future-funk originariamente pubblicato nel 1980 in una doppia A-side con The
Slits. She Is Beyond Good And Evil è
invece qui pubblicata nella prima versione prodotta da Andy Mackay (Roxy
Music). Cabinet Of Curiosities
continua poi con alcuni brani tratti dalla John Peel BBC session live, per finire poi con due inediti, Abstract Heart e Karen’s Car. E a proposito dei brani mai precedentemente pubblicati,
Sager afferma “appropriately
our final stand with just Stewart, Sager, Smith and Waddington left. This is
the sound of paranoia, groove and noise at its height. There was nowhere left
to go”, mentre per Mark Stewart Cabinet Of Curiosities è il disco
perfetto mai realizzato dal Pop Group.
THE POP GROUP: BIOGRAPHY
The Pop Group’s arrival on the music scene in 1978 caused such a
savagely radical commotion, that it can now be seen as one of the most wildly
innovative, groundbreaking bands of the whole post-punk era.
With mystical fire, enraged by global injustices, the group delivered
scathing political and society-indicting messages aboard an apocalyptic roller
coaster, ferociously straddling their beloved influences such as free jazz,
conscious funk, heavyweight dub and audacious experimentalism. Theirs was the
most confrontational distillation of punk’s original ethos, running riot with
unfettered animal instinct in areas only being traversed by the likes of Public
Image Limited, This Heat and Throbbing Gristle. Their politically-charged
lyrics boasted intellectual influences including Wilhelm Reich, situationism,
French romanticism and the beat poets.
The Pop Group was born in Bristol in 1977 out of a disenchantment with punk failing to bust out of
its rock origins. Gareth Sager [guitar] recalls, “Having witnessed The Ramones at the
Roundhouse in 1976 and then having heard The Sex Pistols, the 16 year-old
Stewart [vocals], Sager and Smith [drums] were disappointed with Anarchy In The
UK. The energy was great and the attitude all too relatable but the music was
still plain old rock, so we formed The Pop Group with the addition of John
Waddington [guitar] and Simon Underwood [bass].”
While loudly supporting campaigns such as CND, The Pop Group wrenched
back punk’s original mission away from the rock ’n’ roll traditionalism which
now seemed to be swamping it, rekindling a militant fire which had more in
common with the Black Panthers and the liberated energy of free jazz. “It’s proper end-of-the-world music,”
declared singer Mark Stewart.
Finding early gigs supporting kindred spirits Pere Ubu, Patti Smith and
This Heat, they progressed very quickly to headlining events such as 1978s
Electric Ballroom line up of Nico, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Cabaret Voltaire.
The Pop Group’s anarchic live shows alienated many audiences in the grand
tradition of early Sex Pistols but was the foremost example of post-punk’s
liberating ability to tap into other forms of music to convey a vital message.
Later, in 1979, reviewing a Cambodia benefit gig at London University for which
the band were supported by Scritti Politti, Nick Kent writing in the NME
observed, “They project a very real sense of danger of the sort I've not
experienced since the Pistols' 100 Club days. But whereas the Pistols were more
into conventional hard rock, The Pop Group are working in territory that is far
from orthodox.”
“We wanted to use the energy that we drew from punk
and make it more political,” explained Stewart
in 1998. "After all the sloganeering
of punk, we actually wanted to get actively involved in campaigns; Scrap SUS,
the Blair Peach, CND. And the attitude was that if you’re being ‘radical’ with
the lyrics, we should challenge the structure of the music, too. Punk was still
rock ’n’ roll based, no one was doing what we were doing. I was really into The
Last Poets and the Watts Prophets, and the others were getting into free jazz.
We were creating a wall of noise for the lyrics to fight against. It was all
part of challenging the production process, disrespecting the studio machines.
It may look naïve now, but we were hopeful as much as anything else.” The
Pop Group donated the proceeds of their first major tour to Amnesty
International.
On first recordings such as ‘Genius Or Lunatic’, ‘Trap’, ‘Colour Blind’,
‘Sense Of Purpose’ and ‘Kiss The Book’, which would later surface on their 1980
We
Are Time album, Sager explains that the band was “trying in an inexplicably naive manner to combine Patti Smith’s
Rimbaud ramblings, James Brown, The Stooges, Roxy Music, T.Rex and classical
aleatoric music”.
The Pop Group went on to record a BBC session in July of 1978 for John
Peel. Later, ambivalent to Patti Smith, Peel praised her choice of tour opening
act, saying “Ah well, I certainly give
Patti Smith credit for one thing, she knows a good band when she hears
one.” Soon after the broadcast
in August, The Pop Group managed to score the first positive review of any Peel
Session from Melody Maker and the band graced the cover of New Musical Express.
In March of 1979 they debuted on Radar Records with ‘She Is Beyond Good
And Evil’ (declaring love as a revolutionary force) and instrumental flipside
3’38 (both in title and duration), and graced the cover of Melody Maker and
Sounds in the same month, following with the release of their first album, Y,
in April. They toyed with the idea of John Cale as producer but, as Sager
explains, “a meeting with the Velvet
Underground maverick ended up with him asleep face down in his spaghetti, which
put an end to that.”
With reggae titan Dennis Bovell fulfilling the production role, the
album was rightly hailed as one of the great debut albums, an abrasive squall
bristling with scorchers such as ‘Don’t Call Me Pain’, ‘Blood Money’, ‘Boys
From Brazil’ and ‘We Are Time’. “By now the band was bringing in other
influences,” recalls Sager,
“including Ornette Coleman, King Tubby, Funkadelic, Debussy, Jacques Brel, Fela
Kuti and Steve Reich.”
With Underwood replaced by Dan Catsis of Glaxo Babies, The Pop Group
made its first incendiary statement for the Rough Trade label that autumn with
the dissonant primal roar of ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ c/w ‘Amnesty
International Report’. The A-side featured a guest appearance from free jazz
cellist Tristan Honsinger, who had played with the likes of Cecil Taylor and
Derek Bailey.
The single was followed by March 1980’s For How Much Longer Do We
Tolerate Mass Murder?, the band’s first release on their own Y label in
partnership with Rough Trade. The album saw the funk element upped to red
alert, displaying the influence of On The
Corner period Miles Davis. The urge to skin and sacrifice their sizzling
skeleton grooves with free jazz skronk on tracks like ‘Communicate’ and ‘Blind
Faith’, put the band in a similar orbit to James White & The Contortions,
while other highlights included the anthemic ‘Forces Of Oppression’ and the
reggae infusion of ‘There Are No Spectators’.
That same month, The Pop Group shared a 45 with The Slits, contributing
the fractured future-funk of ‘Where There’s A Will’, described by Sager as “The group’s best attempt to mix a message
with a groove plus some real free playing. If you are really unhinged you may
be able to dance to this.”
The aforementioned
We
Are Time, named after one of their most infamous onslaughts, followed
later that year. The limited set rounded up unreleased early gems like ‘Trap’,
‘Genius Or Lunatic’ and ‘Colour Blind’. Stewart reflects on these seminal early
recordings, “The Pop Group was mutating
so fast right from the start that it was crucial to document those first
experiments with this compilation. We
Are Time is really ‘the’ teenage Pop Group album. It’s full of defiance and
the material demonstrates the band's staunch independence and our really early
DIY ethic before the studio became another instrument.”
After the blinding supernova that was The Pop Group imploded, its
members went on their respective creative paths. Mark Stewart’s solo career saw
him pioneering further new genres, initially on Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound
label with The Maffia (The Sugarhill house band). Further solo releases
followed on Mute through the eighties and nineties and more recently on Future
Noise Music. Stewart and Bruce Smith also participated in the New Age Steppers
collective, while other TPG spin-off bands included Pigbag (Simon Underwood),
Rip Rig And Panic (Gareth Sager, Bruce Smith), Float Up CP (Sager, Smith), Head
(Sager), Maximum Joy (Catsis, Waddington) and Public Image Ltd (Smith).
The group reformed in 2010 and have been playing key international
festivals and gigs (including All Tomorrow’s Parties events, a New Year’s Eve
show in London with Sonic Youth, Off Festival, Primavera, Summer Sonic and
Celtic Connections), declaring “There was
a lot left undone...We were so young and volatile. Let’s face it, things are
probably even more fucked up now than they were in the early ‘80s...and we are even
more fucked off.”
The Pop Group’s influence is far-reaching. They were admired by their
contemporaries and have been acknowledged as influential by successive
generations of artists such as Massive Attack and St Vincent. Their original
material still explodes with an incandescent spirit and energy, to which many
current bands aspire. The reformation has rekindled embers which had never gone
out, flaming up in a new world which is even more deserving of their assault
than back in the day.
THE POP GROUP: ORIGINAL U.K. DISCOGRAPHY
SINGLES
She Is Beyond Good
And Evil / 3’38 [Radar ADA 29, ADA 29(T), 1979]
We Are All
Prostitutes / Amnesty International Report [Rough Trade RT 023, 1979]
Where There’s A
Will (c/w In The Beginning There Was Rhythm by The Slits) [Rough Trade/Y RT
039A/Y1, 1980]
ALBUMS
Y (Radar RAD 20,
1979)
For How Much
Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? [Rough Trade/Y Rough 9/Y2, 1980]
We Are Time [Rough
Trade/Y Rough 12/Y5, 1980]
THE POP GROUP: PERSONNEL
Mark Stewart
(vocals, lyrics)
Gareth Sager
(guitar, saxophone, clarinet, piano, organ)
Bruce Smith
(drums, percussion)
John Waddington
(guitar, bass guitar)
Simon Underwood
(bass guitar)
Dan Catsis (bass
guitar)
Promozione Discografica:
Ja.La Media Activities
laura@jalamediaactivities.com +39.3397154021
jarno@jalamediaactivities.com +39.3394355906
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