Mark Stewart

Born in Bristol on August 10, 1960, Mark Stewart was a singer, songwriter and major figure on the British post-punk scene. He began his career as a founding member of The Pop Group, formed in 1977, which mixed punk, dub, funk and free jazz in a radical approach both musically and politically. With albums such as Y (1979) and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? (1980), the group made its mark on the British underground scene with its social critique and sonic experimentation. After The Pop Group split up in 1981, Stewart briefly joined the New Age Steppers collective, an experimental dub project led by Adrian Sherwood via his On-U Sound label, which fused post-punk and experimental dub alongside musicians from The Slits (Ari Up), The Raincoats and various British reggae groups. In 1983, he embarked on a solo career under the name Mark Stewart + The Maffia, a band associated with On-U Sound and featuring members of the Sugar Hill Records house band (Doug Wimbish, Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald) and produced by Sherwood. He further explores industrial dub, blending spoken word, electronic beats and political engagement. His first solo album, Learning to Cope with Cowardice (1983), is considered a classic of the political avant-garde. This period gave rise to several important albums: Learning to Cope with Cowardice (1983), As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade (1985), Mark Stewart (1987), and Metatron (1990), where Stewart fuses dub, hip-hop, electronic noise and spoken word in a politically incendiary vein. After Control Data (1996), a long period of silence followed until Edit (2008), where he collaborated with Richard H. Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire), Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot) and other figures of radical electronica. At the same time, he reformed The Pop Group in 2010, releasing the albums Citizen Zombie (2015) and Honeymoon on Mars (2016). He continues his own career with the diptych The Politics of Envy and Exorcism of Envy, both released in 2012. The former features covers of Primal Scream, Living Colour and David Bowie, and original compositions with or without Martin Glover (Youth), also co-producing. In 2019, the mix album Secret Thirteen Mix 290 precedes the solo opus VS (2022), all tracks on which are mashups with Front 242, Stephen Mallinder, Consolidated, Nun Gun, Ye Gods, Mike Watt, KK Null or Lee "Scratch" Perry. On April 21, 2023, Mark Stewart died at the age of 62. In 2025, the posthumous album The Fateful Symmetry was released, featuring a remixed version of "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime (Bébe Durmiendo Cumbia Bootleg)" between industrial dub tracks.

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