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The Pop Group were born on a ray of sound and challenged preconceptions with the volatile avante-garde caterwaul of their genre-crashing free jazz noise rock.  They formed in Bristol, England in 1978 with  Mark Stewart on vocals, Jon Waddington and Gareth Sager on guitar, Simon Underwood on bass, and Bruce Smith on drums and percussion. The Pop Group was rife with irony as their challenging din was anything but.  Their debut album 'Y' was produced by the band with dub mastermind Dennis Bovell for Radar Records.  It never charted; but it was well-received by critics for its uncompromisingly aleatoric synthesis of such divergent styles as free jazz, reggae, funk, and punk into an artful mélange of sound.  

Stewart says:    "Basically we had a kind of arrogance that we got from club culture. There was the arrogance of power but we had the power of arrogance... you see? Because we were from that punk generation if we wanted to do something we just did it. It was more a sense of we were like a football gang. If someone was standing there [points to me] then you’d tell them that they were going to be the drummer. Somebody was there [points at Paul Smith] and you’d tell him that he was going to be guitarist. It didn’t matter if he was a guitarist or not. You just decided to do it. I knew a kid [Simon Underwood] who worked on a lathe in a factory and he was my best mate so he played bass. It’s like a group of people stood at the bar in a pub saying, 'What shall we do?' But instead of getting drunk we formed The Pop Group. And it started like that. Seeing the Subway Sect and going to the Roxy with this early punk band called the Cortinas gave us the arrogance. We were arrogant to begin with but this gave us even more arrogance. The arrogance not to go and fight on the Bristol Rovers terraces and to wait for Millwall at the train station. But the arrogance to say we’re going to do this and we’re going to represent. We’re going to say what we’re going to say and we’re going to do what we’re going to do and if we want to crash Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton with dub reggae we will. We were pulling things from all different cultures and all different classes. It was weird and it wasn’t a logical thing...I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with crashing genres...If I want to take a bassline from Jamaica and a rhythm from New York and I’ll crash them together. It’s like a radiowave in my head, pulling all these things together...We’re going to go off wherever we go off! The whole point is destabilizing and questioning things. It’s sacrilege and heresy not orthodoxy!"








http://thepopgroup.net/





"She Is Beyond Good And Evil"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL0tYowbIxE




'Y'
full album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viqOIqGLLgI


1. "She Is Beyond Good And Evil" 0:00
2. "Thief Of Fire" 3:22
3. "Snowgirl" 7:57
4. "Blood Money" 11:18
5. "We Are Time" 14:15
6. "Savage Sea" 20:44
7. "Words Disobey Me" 23:45
8. "Don't Call Me Pain" 27:12
9. "The Boys From Brazil" 32:47
10. "Don't Sell Your Dreams" 37:01