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Mark Stewart, Pop Group frontman and revered countercultural musician, dies aged 62

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Mark Stewart, who was celebrated for his dizzying and politicised blend of post-punk, dub and funk as frontman of the Pop Group and in a solo career, has died aged 62.

News of his death was confirmed by his label Mute, who wrote: “In honour of this original, fearless, sensitive, artistic and funny man, think for yourself and question everything. The world was changed because of Mark Stewart, it will never be the same without him.” No cause of death has been given.

Stewart was born in 1960 and raised in Bristol, where he formed the Pop Group in 1977 with youth club friends John Waddington and Simon Underwood, soon adding Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith to complete the lineup.

With their somewhat ironic band name – though with a hint of bright pop music nonetheless – they embraced the iconoclasm of the punk movement of the time, and had been inspired by seeing the Clash. Stewart later explained: “There is the arrogance of power and what we got from punk was the power of arrogance.”

But the band deviated from punk’s music, using jazzy, improvisatory arrangements, funk basslines and noisy abstraction. Stewart’s beautifully, starkly expressive vocals, like a highly musical form of ranted speech, helped them stand out all the more, and their 1979 debut album Y – made with dub producer Dennis Bovell – is regarded as a high point in the post-punk movement.

Their divisive 1980 follow-up For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? was more commercial, with tighter funk rhythms and a presaging of the industrial music of the rest of the decade. It also featured a collaboration with US group the Last Poets, regarded as the forefathers of hip-hop.

After playing a vast CND rally in Trafalgar Square, the Pop Group split up later that year, and Stewart, along with Smith and Waddington, joined New Age Steppers, a dub music collective headed up by Adrian Sherwood that also included other post-punk luminaries such as the Slits’ Ari Up and Viv Albertine and Public Image Ltd’s Keith Levene.

Stewart continued to collaborate with Sherwood on solo releases as Mark Stewart & the Maffia, which advanced his interest in dub. Beginning with the 1985 album As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade, he also continued the connection with US hip-hop by using a backing band with guitarist Skip McDonald, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Keith LeBlanc, who had played on Sugar Hill Records releases such as White Lines and The Message.

Backed again by McDonald, Wimbish and LeBlanc and with Sherwood as producer, his self-titled solo album in 1987 also featured contributions from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto and riffed on the music of Erik Satie. He released two more albums with this lineup – Metatron (1990) and Control Data (1996) – and also collaborated with the likes of Daddy G from fellow Bristolians Massive Attack.

The 2005 compilation Kiss the Future chimed with a then-resurgent punk-funk sound and earned him a new audience, ahead of another solo release in 2008, Edit.

The Pop Group reformed in 2010 for live shows, released the compilation We Are Time in 2014 and then a brand new studio album in 2015, Citizen Zombie, helmed by Oscar-winning Adele producer Paul Epworth. A final album came the following year, Honeymoon on Mars.

Stewart also collaborated with artists such as Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and experimental film-maker Kenneth Anger on his final solo album, 2012’s The Politics of Envy.

He explained his highly cosmopolitan style in an interview that year: “I think I just make sparks and try to push things together that don’t necessarily fit. I’m happy to put a booty bass bassline on top of a Slayer guitar – for me it comes back to cut and paste and doing a punk collage, putting Ronald Reagan’s head on top of a gay cowboy model or something.

“I’ve been messing about doing things like that since I was about six. To a certain extent, people are contained, but for me I can listen to some footwork stuff, some mad Japanese noise or a bubblegum pop song all in the same 10 minutes.”

His music was also avowedly political, castigating injustice, capitalism and authoritarian cruelty while celebrating art as an escape – sometimes within the space of a single song, as with the Pop Group classic We Are All Prostitutes.

“Arguments are good,” he said in 2008. “People are brainwashed to think that these things are out of your control; in the shops round here people say ‘I don’t want to think about politics’ – they are taught, it’s kept behind the curtains.”

Daniel Miller, the head of Mute, paid tribute, saying: “His musical influence has been much greater than is often acknowledged … I can’t imagine you being anything other than restless but I hope you find your very special peace.”

Sherwood called Stewart “the biggest musical influence in my life and our extended family will miss you so so much,” while the Pop Group’s Gareth Sager said: “Mark was the most amazing mind of my generation.”

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thedimpause
40 days ago
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Aberdare, UK
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Athens museum unveils design for major renovation

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Work at National Archaeological Museum will be overseen by UK architect David Chipperfield

It is slated to be the “western world’s museum of museums,” a showcase of Greece’s greatest repository of ancient art.

Once completed, the revamped National Archaeological Museum in Athens will, say officials, not only have been expanded but “reborn” at a time of record tourism to the country.

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thedimpause
105 days ago
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Aberdare, UK
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Terry Hall: lead singer of the Specials dies aged 63

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Terry Hall, the lead singer of the Specials and a former member of Fun Boy Three and the Colourfield, has died aged 63, his bandmates in the Specials have confirmed.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing, following a brief illness, of Terry, our beautiful friend, brother and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced,” the band tweeted.

“Terry was a wonderful husband and father and one of the kindest, funniest, and most genuine of souls. His music and his performances encapsulated the very essence of life… the joy, the pain, the humour, the fight for justice, but mostly the love.”

The band asked for respect for Hall’s family’s privacy.

Neville Staple, Hall’s bandmate in the Specials and Fun Boy Three, said he was “deeply saddened” by the news.

“We knew Terry had been unwell but didn’t realise how serious until recently,” he wrote. “We had only just confirmed some 2023 joint music agreements together. This has hit me hard and must be extremely difficult for Terry’s wife and family.”

Hall joined the first incarnation of the Specials – then called the Automatics – shortly after the Coventry band formed in 1977, replacing vocalist Tim Strickland. After a stint as the Coventry Automatics, they became Special AKA, known as the Specials. The pioneering 2 Tone band rose thanks to the support of Joe Strummer, who invited them to support the Clash live, and of BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

They released their debut single, Gangsters (a reworking of Prince Buster’s Al Capone) in 1979, which reached No 6 in the UK singles chart. They would dominate the Top 10 over the next two years, peaking with their second No 1 single, and calling card, Ghost Town, in 1981. The lyrics, written by the band’s main songwriter, Jerry Dammers, dealt with Britain’s urban decay, unemployment and disfranchised youth.

Its popularity peaked in early summer 1981 as riots between young Black people and police were erupting across the UK in response to racist discrimination and the use of stop-and-search tactics. It remained at No 1 for three weeks, spending 10 weeks in the Top 40, and is widely considered one of the greatest pop records of all time. “It sits in the past, brooding and glowering at us, its remarkable, dark power undimmed,” Guardian critic Alexis Petridis wrote in 2020.

Among those to pay tribute on Tuesday was musician Billy Bragg. “The Specials were a celebration of how British culture was envigorated by Caribbean immigration but the onstage demenour of their lead singer was a reminder that they were in the serious business of challenging our perception of who we were in the late 1970s,” he tweeted.

Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s and Hall’s former partner wrote that she was “gutted”. “He was a lovely, sensitive, talented and unique person. Our extremely brief romance resulted in the song Our Lips Are Sealed, which will forever tie us together in music history. Terrible news to hear this,” she tweeted.

Squeeze’s Chris Difford called Hall “a man of few words verbally but so many great words in song. I always admired and envied his sweep of the pen”, while Rowetta remembered him as “one of the greatest frontmen from one of the greatest bands. And a gorgeous, kind, down to earth man.” Badly Drawn Boy called him “a musical hero”, while Sleaford Mods said Hall was “King of the Suedeheads. A big man. Hope you find peace now mate.” Boy George tweeted that he was “very sad”, adding: “Absolutely loved him as an artist. Sad day!”

Hall was born in Coventry on 19 March 1959 to a family who predominantly worked in the car industry. He was an academically gifted child and also a noted footballer who was invited to try out for West Bromwich Albion – an opportunity his parents declined based on the inconvenience of travelling across the Midlands. After he sailed through the 11-plus exam, his parents also declined his place at a nearby grammar school.

“All of a sudden they were expected to buy books and a school uniform,” he told Fantastic Man. “I’d just been walking to school dressed in my football kit. So there’s always been a bit of that kicking around in the back of my mind. Not being educated. Wondering what would have happened if I’d gone.”

In 2019, Hall told the comedian Richard Herring that aged 12 he was abducted by a paedophile ring in France, an incident he had previously touched on in the 1983 Fun Boy Three single Well Fancy That!, which blamed a teacher for the ordeal: “You took me to France on the promise of teaching me French,” he sang.

Hall “kept it hidden” and didn’t tell his parents. “They both worked in factories. They got paid in cash. Me dad was a heavy drinker. They had their own lives, you know?”

It resulted in Hall being medicated throughout his teenage years and living with depression and manic depression. “I was on Valium when I was 13 and it took me out of life for six months,” he told the Big Issue.

He dropped out of education at the age of 14 and felt pushed towards non-conformism. “I can laugh about it now but it sort of switched something in my head, and it’s like I don’t have to do that, and that’s when I started not listening to anyone.”

His political awakening came in his teenage years “when I discovered that working men’s clubs had a colour bar on their doors. You could only get in if you were white. That really shook me. I couldn’t work it out.”

After working as a bricklayer, among other jobs, he joined his first band, the punk outfit Squad, inspired by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. His older sister, and guiding influence, Teresa introduced him to Trojan Records, while it was David Bowie’s 1975 album Young Americans that pushed Hall towards becoming a singer, he told the Guardian in 2009. “I come from a gypsy-spirited family, and everyone used to sing in pubs whether you liked it or not. I didn’t want to be that sort of singer. Then when I was 16 this album gave me a look, a sound, and a way of holding yourself. Apparently all his clothes were from WalMart at this time. He put a blond streak in his hair and we would do the same.”

Then came the Specials. The band released their self-titled debut album in October 1979 and received mass acclaim for blending a punk sensibility – and sharp lyrics about the degradation of modern Britain – with the traditional Jamaican ska sound, even explicitly updating hits by the likes of Toots and the Maytals, Prince Buster and Dandy Livingstone.

Today the album is widely considered a landmark recording: it ranked at No 42 in Pitchfork’s list of the best albums of the 1970s, and No 260 on the NME’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, published in 2013. The band released a second, even darker album, More Specials, in 1980.

The multiracial group were active in the Rock Against Racism movement, played benefit concerts for anti-racist and anti-nuclear organisations, and also supported the 1978 Right to Work march protesting unemployment. “Our government leaders aren’t interested in knowing the way people feel,” Hall told the New York Times. “If they were, they’d just resign, because they aren’t helping anybody. The kids can’t go to the prime minister and say, look, ‘We are unemployed, what are you going to do to help us?’ There’s no way they can approach people like that. So they express themselves by smashing things up.’’

After the success of Ghost Town in 1981, the band split bitterly that July. “It felt like the perfect moment to stop the Specials part one,” Hall said. “We’d gone from seven kids in the back of a van to being presented with gold discs and I never felt massively comfortable with that.

Hall formed Fun Boy Three with his Specials bandmates Staple and Lynval Golding. They also enjoyed chart success for several years, collaborating twice with girl band Bananarama, on It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It) and Really Saying Something. Hall would also land a Top 10 single with Our Lips Are Sealed, a song he co-wrote with US indie star – and then romantic partner – Jane Wiedlin for her band the Go-Go’s.

Hall would form another band, the Colourfield, in 1984, which had a hit with Thinking of You. He became a frequent collaborator over subsequent decades, working with the likes of the Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie, US actress Blair Booth, Toots and the Maytals, Lily Allen, Blur’s Damon Albarn – and later with his band Gorillaz – and Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart with whom he formed a duo known as Vegas in 1992.

Hall wasn’t part of a Specials reunion, the Specials Mk 2, which lasted from 1993 to 1998. He released his debut solo album in 1994, Home, produced by Broudie; a follow-up, Laugh, came in 1997.

In 2008, inspired by the Pixies’ reunion in 2004, Hall announced that he would be reforming the Specials for a tour and new music, albeit without founding member Jerry Dammers, who claimed he had been forced out. “The Specials was this big hole which took up four years of my life,” Hall told the Telegraph. “More than anything, I really wanted to see these people again.”

They embarked on a 30th anniversary tour in 2009 and performed at the 2012 London Olympics closing concert, but faced the death of drummer John Bradbury, and the departure of vocalist Staple and guitarist Roddy Radiation over the next few years.

The band would find themselves in the news again in 2017, when 18-year-old Birmingham woman Saffiyah Khan was photographed facing off with protesters at an EDL march while wearing a Specials T-shirt. “It felt like a vindication of everything the band had set out to do,” Hall said.

In 2019, they released a new album, Encore, which featured Khan performing on a new song, 10 Commandments. It charted at No 1 in the UK albums chart – their highest-ever album placing. “Achieving a first No 1 album in our 60s restored our faith in humanity,” Hall told the Quietus.

Hall was still struggling with his mental health, he admitted around this time. In 2003, he had begun self-medicating with alcohol. In the last decade of his life, he sought medication, having been wary of it since being put on Valium as a teenager, as well as taking up art therapy.

“It got to a point where I didn’t have a choice – and it’s done me so much good,” he said. “Talking about mental health problems is a conscious decision. It’s something I want to share with people.”

Hall is survived by his wife, director Lindy Heymann. They had one son; Hall has two older sons with his ex-wife, Jeanette Hall.

In 2019, Hall told Uncut magazine that he had been enjoying his 60s, an age he had aspired to since being a 27-year-old fan of musical lifers Andy Williams, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. “I feel blessed to have reached that stage,” he said. “A lot of people think that 60 is part of the downward spiral, which it is if you allow it to be, but you can fight it and say, no it isn’t – it’s just part of this story.”

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thedimpause
164 days ago
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Aberdare, UK
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The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis review – a classic laid bare

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This behind-the-scenes look at an epic poem depicts details of TS Eliot’s life and his reliance on Ezra Pound’s editorial input

A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised and dissected poems in English literature. TS Eliot spent six days a week at the offices of Lloyds bank and crammed the business of poetry and literary criticism into the evenings and Sundays. This allowed him to write The Waste Land, a densely allusive work that drew on Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy, tarot and the Upanishads to create a dazzling portrait of both the ruins of postwar Europe and the inner alienation of modernity. But it was not, as Matthew Hollis’s captivatingly exhaustive “biography of a poem” demonstrates, a work conceived or executed in isolation; and chief among Eliot’s enablers were his wife, Vivien, and his fellow poet and indefatigable literary fixer, Ezra Pound, who looms almost as large in the book as does Eliot himself.

One of the numerous illuminating anecdotes of their entwined lives sees TS Eliot deliver a parcel to James Joyce in Paris at their first ever meeting. Entrusted with the gift by Pound but forbidden from knowing its contents, Eliot, alongside his fellow traveller Wyndham Lewis, ceremoniously presented the package as the trio assembled at a Left Bank hotel and waited as Joyce struggled with its strings until, for want of a knife, a pair of nail scissors was found. Within, a clearly second-hand pair of brown shoes, prompted by Pound’s anxiety that Joyce, whom he liked and admired, was short of funds and in need of sturdy footwear. “‘Oh!’ said Joyce faintly, and sat down.” That night the Château Latour flowed, and subsequently a humiliated Joyce settled every bill.

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thedimpause
170 days ago
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Aberdare, UK
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The country’s going to the dogs, but at least the police have cleared the M25

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Sometimes, a report of bad news makes me realise that the world circumstances I’d been living in weren’t as bleak as I’d been assuming. The death of Ella Fitzgerald did this for me. I’d thought she was long dead. It made me realise that I’d missed years of enjoying the fact of her still being alive. Perhaps, along with the “in memoriam” segment at the Baftas, there should also be a “surprisingly still alive” video to encourage us to appreciate some elderly stars while they’re still faintly twinkling.

I used to get the same sensation of retrospective positivity from reported job losses in the British car industry. I was always pleasantly surprised that there were still that many jobs left to lose. That’ll be it now though, I always thought, but then, a year or so later, another gargantuan layoff was announced and I was once again impressed by how many people in the UK had apparently still been making cars all this time.

That’s assuming this isn’t some accountants’ trick whereby it is possible to have negative employees. I’m not talking about GPs’ receptionists – I mean mathematically. Perhaps it’s been discovered that making British workers redundant is such a reliably successful business strategy that some financial instrument has been invented whereby you can continue to do that even when there are no literal British workers left to lay off. Like a futures market in UK redundancies – or a “no futures” market if you happen to be British.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly the sort of thing that could cause the next global economic crisis – though we’d perhaps better let the current one finish first – when it is discovered that notional trillions of British workers must now somehow be made redundant in order to square the circle of global finance. A whole rainforest of P45 forms may need to be filled in on a daily basis.

I got that old familiar “I think the glass that just smashed might actually have been half full!” feeling again last week with reports of “M25 brought to standstill”. So it’s actually been moving then, has it, all this time? That’s nice! I’d been assuming it was now basically a car park. The M25 was a byword for interminable delays when I first moved to London around the time Ella Fitzgerald died. Decades of worsening traffic later, I reckoned it must have become unusable long ago, so the thought that something could noticeably slow it down was rather cheering.

I don’t suppose that was the reaction the Just Stop Oil protesters who caused the standstill were expecting. I think the response of the authorities is more what they had in mind: a great big high court injunction specifically prohibiting the thing they were specifically planning to do. That’s got to be gratifying if you’re doing a protest: to have the desperate gesture you’re about to make officially designated as aberrant behaviour. It’s like the high court was the protesters’ MC: “Ladies and gentlemen, this next protest is absolutely not allowed, so make sure you pay attention to that!”

It’s impressive that, in maximising the illegality of the protesters’ actions, the government is throwing itself squarely behind raising awareness of the climate emergency. It’s a deft move. Ministers know that, as discredited rightwing politicians, their words have little power to convince, but in these actions, they’re showing a real commitment to putting climate change high up the political agenda. It’s a far more powerful gesture than Rishi Sunak’s grudging attendance at Cop27.

So it’s all good really, unless of course the high court injunction was intended to stop the protesters. Anyone who thought that is a moron. I have a niggling fear that the transport secretary, Mark Harper, at least, may have held out some hope. “I instructed National Highways to apply for this further injunction… [to] make it easier to take action against this reckless minority of protesters,” he said, adding: “They could face imprisonment or an unlimited fine.”

Lots to unpack here. I’m not sure his assertion that the protesters constitute a minority is quite the zinger he hopes. When are protesters not? I don’t think there’s ever been a time, in all human history, when a majority of people have been protesting. Even during the French Revolution, I expect most people were keeping their heads down.

But the main idiocy is his implication that this small group of people who are consumed by the, I’m sorry to say, far from irrational terror that the planet is soon to become uninhabitable, is going to back down in fear of prison or a fine. Maybe it would disperse a crowd of thousands, but the hardcore few dozen dangling from motorway bridges have long since made their peace with it.

When Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Matt Twist said: “This action is grossly disproportionate to any legitimate aim that this group may have”, it made me wonder where he’s getting his news. An Opec-sponsored message board?

Disproportionate? They’re stopping traffic because they think the world is ending. And unlike various religious groups down the centuries, there’s a decent chance they may be right.

But the authorities are not merely showing stupidity in the face of these protests, there’s malevolence in the mix too. The new offence, under this year’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, of “conspiracy to intentionally or recklessly cause public nuisance” seems open to wildly illiberal interpretation. It was on suspicion of this crime that several potential protesters were arrested on Monday morning before they’d done any protesting.

What is the justification for new laws restricting protest? The mere fact that protests are on the rise? To address assistant commissioner Twist’s pet subject of proportionality, are they rising out of proportion to legitimate grievance? It doesn’t feel like it. It’s not that the people are getting more bolshie, it’s that the country’s getting worse. And the government’s response is to restrict the legal means by which we can say so.

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thedimpause
199 days ago
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Aberdare, UK
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Oldest known written sentence discovered – on a head-lice comb

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Timeless fret over hygiene picked out on engraved Bronze age comb from ancient kingdom of Judah

It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear.

Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

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thedimpause
205 days ago
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