An enduring figure on the edgy frontiers of the British music scene,
Mark Stewart first came to prominence during the late '70s as a member of the punk/dub noisemaking squad
the Pop Group, and has been storming musical boundaries and making powerful, confrontational music ever since. After he began working with producer
Adrian Sherwood,
Stewart began releasing caustic, chaotic solo albums such as 1983's Learning to Cope with Cowardice, which incorporated radical political messages into a dense, explosive mix inspired by dub and funk.
Stewart's fearless genre experimentation and distinctly neurotic vocal style later proved to be a major influence on industrial, trip-hop, digital hardcore, and countless other styles throughout the coming decades.
Stewart continued to subvert techno, industrial, and dub on further solo efforts like 1990's
Metatron and 2012's The Politics of Envy, and participated in a
Pop Group reunion during the 2010s.
Stewart was born and raised in Bristol, England and attended Bristol Grammar School; one of his school friends was
Nick Sheppard, who later went on to join
the Cortinas and the
Cut the Crap-era
Clash. Emboldened by punk but not impressed with its stylistic hegemony,
Stewart and his friends were eager to start a funk band, and in 1978 he teamed up with guitarists
John Waddington and
Gareth Sager, bassist
Simon Underwood, and drummer Bruce Smith to form
the Pop Group. Between their limited musical experience and
Stewart's strident vocal style and accusatory political lyrics,
the Pop Group's music took a considerable left turn from their original blueprint, bolting slashing guitar noise and fractured melodies to primitive funk and dub rhythms, and though their commercial success was limited, the band's influence would prove to be massive over time.
In 1980,
the Pop Group split up, and
Stewart, Bruce Smith, and
Waddington appeared on the first album by
the New Age Steppers, whose music was a prescient fusion of dub and post-punk experimentalism. It was
Stewart's first work with producer
Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound who would prove to be a valuable ally and frequent collaborator.
Stewart released his first solo effort in 1983, Learning to Cope with Cowardice; credited to
Mark Stewart + Maffia, the album was produced by
Sherwood and featured many of the same revolving team of musicians who had appeared on the
New Age Steppers recordings. For the next album by
Stewart + Maffia,
As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade,
Stewart and
Sherwood joined forces with guitarist
Skip McDonald, bassist
Doug Wimbish, and drummer
Keith LeBlanc, who had been the core of the Sugar Hill Records house band before teaming up with
Sherwood to form
Tackhead. This line-up of Maffia recorded
Stewart's next two efforts,
Mark Stewart and
Metatron, and reunited for
Stewart's 1996 album
Control Data.
Through much of the '90s and 2000s,
Stewart devoted much of his energy to producing and collaborating with other artists, including
Tricky,
Massive Attack,
Trent Reznor, and
ADULT, and he immersed himself in the electronic music community, where his fondness for tossing different musical ideas at one another found a home. In 2005,
Stewart released Kiss the Future, a career-spanning anthology of his many musical projects, and he completed a long-awaited new album in 2008,
Edit. A documentary about
Stewart and his career, On/Off:, played at a number of international film festivals in 2009. In 2010,
Stewart announced that he was re-forming
the Pop Group with original members
Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith for a series of reunion shows, and that the band would begin work on a new album.
Stewart found time to release new solo projects in 2012: The Politics of Envy (featuring guest appearances from
Lee "Scratch" Perry,
Richard Hell,
Keith Levene, and members of
Primal Scream and
the Raincoats) and Exorcism of Envy (featuring much of the same supporting cast, along with
Factory Floor and Kenneth Anger).
The Pop Group's third album,
Citizen Zombie, was released in 2015, followed by
Honeymoon on Mars in 2016. In 2017,
Stewart wrote lyrics for several tracks on
Little Axe's album London Blues, and he appeared on
De Lux's
More Disco Songs About Love the following year.
Stewart's debut album was reissued with a disc of previously unreleased material as Learning to Cope with Cowardice/The Lost Tapes in 2019. ~ Mark Deming