The Pop Group’s return represents post punk provocation for a contemporary era, a resistant continuation of dissentious intent that refutes the nostalgic comfort of the old for a bracing, contrarian engagement with the new.
Since reforming for a specially curated ATP festival in 2010 - at the behest of Simpsons creator Matt Groening - the band have been industrious in their reactivation. Laying the groundwork for the Citizen Zombie recording sessions the band toured key international festivals and played numerous gigs across the UK, Europe and the rest of the world throughout 2010 and into 2014, a period in which the potency of earlier years was refined and reignited.
Alongside these ongoing live appearances 2014 saw the first in a long line of reissues, beginning with We Are Time, a collection of early experiments classified by Stewart as ‘the teenage Pop Group album’ and Cabinet of Curiosities, a compilation of session tracks, unreleased songs and alternative versions recovered from obscurity and equated to a ‘lost Pop Group album’. In support of these reissues the band completed a 7 date UK tour. On witnessing their final performance at the Islington Assembly Hall, veteran music journalist Richard Williams remarked that the gig: ‘provided evidence of their continuing relevance…they’re actually better at it than they used to be back in the day.’
On Citizen Zombie the band tapped into this propensity for emulation, enlisting the hand of multi Grammy and Academy award winning producer Paul Epworth. Their first studio recording in 35 years, the album’s release in February 2015 reaffirmed the band’s assaultive power with a record fuelled by unfettered studio experimentation. Taking aim with incisive social critique and expansive pop radicalism, it confirmed the band’s undiminished relevance. A necessary, targeted affront to modern apathy; the dystopic pop such volatile times deserve.
As part of a conversation with Thurston Moore for The Quietus, Mark Stewart elucidated on what the record represents in the context of the band’s history: ‘We wanted to actually be a pop group and to go on the television shows and to engage with the normal channels as an antidote to the kind of zombification of society…For me, it's really important to engage - and to engage fiercely’. This is a reformation that realizes a long standing resolve to infiltrate and destabilize the MOR consensus of an unengaged mainstream, by venturing into terrain no one would expect The Pop Group to go to: ‘I think it's quite important to use the channels at your disposal. To be an explosion at the heart of the commodity.’
In the video for Mad Truth – the first single to be taken from the album - this compulsion found an anarchic counterpart in Asia Argento, who visualised fluoro-strobe rituals, symbolic of ‘a spiritual warfare against a world populated by the living dead’. A seven inch split single which brought together one of Citizen Zombie’s most searing moments (Nations) with a turn from ‘suburban sink estate saviours’ the Sleaford Mods, signalled further proof of the band’s abiding commitment to confrontation and collusion.
Such ambition was matched in the wake of Citizen Zombie’s release as an extensive period of touring ensued, a stretch which included dates in Japan, Australia and America. After appearances in Tokyo, Los Angeles, an acclaimed two night stint in New York and a trip to SXSW, the band then played a seven night run across the UK culminating in a penultimate gig at The Dome in Tufnell Park, London. The event was duly hailed in The Guardian as one which bristled with a defiant edge at odds with ‘a formulaic and depoliticised age’ and one which served as ‘a timely reminder of how rock used to revolt’. By the tail end of Summer a guerrilla gig at Glastonbury’s Crow’s Nest saw Louder Than War’s John Robb declare the band’s second billing at the festival – after an afternoon slot on the John Peel Stage - as ‘one of the most astonishing gigs I’ve ever seen.’ These displays continued as the band took to Europe in the Autumn, with memorably charged performances at Iceland Airwaves, Le Guess Who in Utrecht and Belgium’s Sonic City festival, as part of a line up curated by Preoccupations née Viet Cong.
The momentum has barely relented since. As part of the closing concerts of Banksy’s Dismaland Bemusement Park, [Mark] Stewart and Gareth Sager performed a special ‘Noise Set’ with Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak>, Invada Records) at the controls, repurposing material new and old for a maximalist offensive riven by distortion and dub FX. An expanded ‘Noise Set’ line up was subsequently requested to appear at the latest edition of the BBC6 Music Festival, an event which hailed the art and music of the Bristol scene as well as The Pop Group’s influential place within it. An alternative slant on their live set, these performances have sustained the longevity of their new material, opening it up to different dimensions and maintaining the band’s reputation as an unpredictable, subversionary live force.
In February of 2016 the band resumed a comprehensive reissue programme with the rerelease of their second studio album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? As part of a special event at Rough Trade East, the writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, along with the writer, theorist and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun co-chaired a discussion with Mark Stewart and Gareth Sager on the impact and legacy of the album. Fisher prefaced the event with an article in Fact Magazine appraising its status as a ‘samizdat publication in its own right’ citing it’s ‘contiguity of enjoyment and political consciousness…less like a dreary sermon than a strange dream, in which accounts of unconscionable misery and exploitation co-exist with the fugitive compulsions of a febrile dance music.’ The conversation conducted between them and the article penned by Fisher explored and appraised the album’s lasting significance, not only in relation to the time of its release amidst ‘the ruins of Thatcher’s slash and burn agenda’ but amongst a new and equally troubling contemporary era of ‘proxy wars and false flag attacks’.
Accompanying its release came the reissue of anti-anthem and fabled second single We Are All Prostitutes acknowledged by Fisher – alongside For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? – as equally enduring and exhilarating, a single that discharged a form of ‘scouring, seesawing, seasick funk’ and represented ‘a pied piper’s exit from dominant reality, fired by a fissile compound of millenarian terror and militant jubilation.’ The video, shot at the Electric Ballroom in November of 1979 when the single was originally released, was rediscovered by video maker Chris Reynolds. Initially thought lost and previously unseen, its remarkable restoration heralded a turbulent colour rush CCTV collage, providing a fitting representation of the band’s artful ferocity.
Only a few months later, in May of 2016, the band continued their prolific activity with another renowned addition to their series of reissues. The Boys Whose Head Exploded, an archival compilation lifting the lid on live tapes from 1979/80, brought together brawling versions of songs from the live frontline of a UK appearance and a European tour. Intensely raw and situated within an instable cauldron of crowd melees and full tilt stage disorder, the collection also brought to light a short feature filmed by Don Letts at Alexandra Palace on June 15th 1980. Retrieved from Letts’ Punk Rock Archives, the rare footage served as another reminder of what the Pop Group have always specialised in, encapsulating the band’s molotov cocktail of punk, funk, free jazz and radical politics at its most artistically concussive.
With Honeymoon On Mars The Pop Group open another chapter at a time when their iconoclastic contention is needed now more than ever. It’s a record that finds the band unwaveringly incensed and resolute in their mutative sense of innovation, as Stewart elaborates: ‘it’s a stand against manufactured hate, a hypersonic journey into a dystopian future full of alien encounters and sci-fi lullabies’
The band have recruited dub titan and producer of their seminal Y album Dennis Bovell as well as founding member of Public Enemy and legendary Bomb Squad producer Hank Shocklee, realising a dream twofold collaboration, as Stewart concludes: “We’ve at last fulfilled a double fantasy to work with our two favourite sonic assassins, Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell and Hank Shocklee. We’re in awe as Dennis, the Captain Kirk of dub is taking us on a hyper sound voyage into the future, and Hank, as always tears up the rules totally upholding our faith in the absolute value of noise. We’ve gone completely off the map.”
Honeymoon On Mars will be released on October 28th.
Stay tuned.
