Friday 27 May 2016

The Pop Group - The Boys Whose Head Exploded


The Pop Group 'exploded' in 1981 but I don't recall us all crying - you see, you don't miss your water 'til the well runs dry and it's been a long dry spell since Bristol's finest made records...35 years of what? Yeah, a lot's happened, but nothing like The Pop Group. Bemoaning this with an FB friend felt like so much 'old' men moaning about the good ol' days and how nothing better has come along, the way the baby boomers do about Hendrix, The Beatles or whoever...

...but we were smarter than them in our youth, weren't we? Probably not. Every generation claims it's own youthful one as 'the best', or at least something special. Naturally. So hang out the streamers, we're having a Punky Reggae street party to celebrate that old thing! Nostalgia...

...The Pop Group don't ask for or warrant nostalgia...too fiery, too brilliant in their blazing glory to justify middle-aged dismay through the increasing fog of age, surely. To do so is almost like admitting defeat. The idiots aren't winning, they won years ago...

...yet listening to The Boys Whose Head Exploded kickstarts the heart again, as if those of us who were there are like so many patients in an old folks home being given a shot of something to pep us up and the privilege of playing our music on the sound system...christ...

...the politics aside, if such a thing is possible, the spirit of The Pop Group is what should be carried in our hearts, the power to resist the pacification programme whilst control units are laid our geometrically, not in the streets, but throughout the media...

...we are all prostitutes, selling our ideals for security which, it turns out, is a myth, but one we strive for because the alternative in this society is the dole-drums...or perhaps, should you be so inclined, a commune in Wales...

...it's some feat to retain your power three decades on. If we struggle to do so personally, in musical form at least, The Pop Group have lost none of theirs. How come? By not fitting any one genre easily to start with. We love a genre; it's easily-recognised rules and boundaries, just as we love our homes, if we're lucky. None matched The Pop Group in terms of fusing Funk, Punk, Dub and skronky noise. Mark Stewart's vocals and the players backing him created that thing that only comes along once in your lifetime...

...screaming off the dancefloor, burning holes in the mixing desk, trashing even Punk ideals with shredded guitar strings and primal Funk screaming that rendered old three-chord wonders insignificant, the politics of rhythm, Molotov music from behind their private barricade...The Pop Group...alive and definitely kicking in '79, '80 and now...



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