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 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 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 album was relentlessly pinned to the specifics, from the sleeve with its collage of news clippings 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.
For the Pop Group, and above all Mark Stewart—always the intellectual engine of the band, its autodidact bookworm—the shift to plainspeaking and speaking out was simply the righteous response to the urgencies of the era. Thatcher had surged to power in May 1979, carried by a massive political swing to the right. “It was a fiery time, you felt something was about to kick off,” says Stewart of 1980’s apocalyptic atmosphere. “See, I never felt that politics was this dreary thing. When we were ranting, it was all from the heart. It came out in a mad rush.” Stewart had absorbed the music of the Last Poets, black Muslim radicals sometimes credited with inventing rap, who’d lashed “white devils” and Negro counterrevolutionaries alike on early seventies albums like This Is Madness and Chastisement . He’d also been hanging with Linton Kwesi Johnson and organizations 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.
For many white British bohemians, though, it was precisely roots reggae’s mystical millenarianism—Rasta’s imagery of “armagideon,” “crisus time,” retribution and redemption—that resonated with their own sense of internal exile. “We did feel like we were on the front line of Babylon,” recalls Vivien Goldman. “Rasta provided this mesh of the political, the spiritual, and the apocalyptic, and it helped you define your enemies.” There was friction, naturally, between trendy liberalism and Rasta’s Old Testament morals and sexual chauvinism, but the sheer inspirational force of the music swept reservations aside. “With the roots worldview, the logic was often questionable, but the feeling of spiritual uplift was undeniable,” says Stewart. “Going to sound systems with black mates, they were like huge evangelical meetings, and you didn’t get that kind of energy with rock gigs. That kind of yearning for a better world, that questioning of the system—it just made my hairs stand up on end.”
As Stewart felt the pull of reggae, admiring the way it could shout down Babylon without lapsing into sloganeering, the other members of the Pop Group were being tugged in the opposite direction. They wanted to explore their free-jazz side more deeply. “It wasn’t that I disagreed with the things Mark said,” recalls Bruce Smith. “I was just concerned about it getting so dogmatic. It was like Mark
For the Pop Group, and above all Mark Stewart—always the intellectual engine of the band, its autodidact bookworm—the shift to plainspeaking and speaking out was simply the righteous response to the urgencies of the era. Thatcher had surged to power in May 1979, carried by a massive political swing to the right. “It was a fiery time, you felt something was about to kick off,” says Stewart of 1980’s apocalyptic atmosphere. “See, I never felt that politics was this dreary thing. When we were ranting, it was all from the heart. It came out in a mad rush.” Stewart had absorbed the music of the Last Poets, black Muslim radicals sometimes credited with inventing rap, who’d lashed “white devils” and Negro counterrevolutionaries alike on early seventies albums like This Is Madness and Chastisement . He’d also been hanging with Linton Kwesi Johnson and organizations 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.
For many white British bohemians, though, it was precisely roots reggae’s mystical millenarianism—Rasta’s imagery of “armagideon,” “crisus time,” retribution and redemption—that resonated with their own sense of internal exile. “We did feel like we were on the front line of Babylon,” recalls Vivien Goldman. “Rasta provided this mesh of the political, the spiritual, and the apocalyptic, and it helped you define your enemies.” There was friction, naturally, between trendy liberalism and Rasta’s Old Testament morals and sexual chauvinism, but the sheer inspirational force of the music swept reservations aside. “With the roots worldview, the logic was often questionable, but the feeling of spiritual uplift was undeniable,” says Stewart. “Going to sound systems with black mates, they were like huge evangelical meetings, and you didn’t get that kind of energy with rock gigs. That kind of yearning for a better world, that questioning of the system—it just made my hairs stand up on end.”
As Stewart felt the pull of reggae, admiring the way it could shout down Babylon without lapsing into sloganeering, the other members of the Pop Group were being tugged in the opposite direction. They wanted to explore their free-jazz side more deeply. “It wasn’t that I disagreed with the things Mark said,” recalls Bruce Smith. “I was just concerned about it getting so dogmatic. It was like Mark
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