Mark Stewart, the musician best-known for main convulsive post-punkers the Pop Group, has died. Stewart’s Twitter experiences that he died earlier immediately; no explanation for dying has been reported. Stewart was 62.
Mark Stewart grew up in Bristol, and that’s the place he based the Pop Group in 1977, when he was nonetheless a youngster. Stewart and his bandmates, who have been mates from college, have been impressed by the preliminary burst of punk rock, however they have been additionally drawn to funk, dub, and free jazz, in addition to explicitly political artwork and rhetoric. They launched their debut single “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” in 1979.
The Pop Group have been loud and discordant and sarcastic, and their entire strategy was essential to the event of post-punk. The Pop Group solely launched two albums earlier than breaking apart in 1981; their final efficiency was at an enormous nuclear-disarmament protest in Trafalgar Square.
After the Pop Group’s breakup, Mark Stewart moved to London and labored with Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label and have become a member of the dub collective New Age Steppers. Stewart launched plenty of solo albums through the years, the newest of which was 2022’s VS. In 2010, the Pop Group additionally reunited to play an All Tomorrow’s Parties pageant in help of a collection of reissues, and so they remained energetic and launched two extra albums.