The Pop Group

The Pop Group was born on April 7 1977 when Mark Stewart, Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith felt inspired to get out and shriek their primal angst. They then expanded their ranks with fellow freaks John Waddington and Simon Underwood. Collectively they showed an extreme diversity in the wild breadth of influences: Funkadelic, John Cage, Nico, John Coltrane, Lee Perry, Stockhausen, the Stooges and Subway Sect. Like naive musical savages they tried to put all these elements, and their unique take on life, into their songs, but this falls short of evoking what the listener heard; maybe Electronic Cavemen describes them best!

It took very little time to find them on the front of the NME, leading the charge to try to expand on the explosion punk had detonated in the staid rock scene...but no one was ready for the Pop Group. They did eight-minutes song with a funk beat, with improvisation rolling all over the place, busting all the rules of the day. On their debut album Y, with the help of British dub maestro Dennis Bovell, they put out one of the most challenging mixtures of genres, grooves and emotions ever cut into vinyl. No one knew how to deal with them, apart from those that could really hear the scream that said, "Words disobey me".

By 1979, .with the advent of Thatcher and the threat of nuclear world war, the band succumbed to the paranoia of the day and fought back with the classic single We Are All Prostitutes, followed by the LP For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder.

Then they blew themselves up and were gone…only to return 30 years later in 2009, showing what amazing potential was still burning there.