Photo of Mark Stewart by Chiara Meattelli and Dominic Lee

Mark Stewart on Mark Fisher:
“HE CAME FROM THE PRESENT TO SAVE THE FUTURE AND CHANGE THE PAST.”

The question Mark, is this: Where to begin the discussion of the great free-thinker and theorist that was Mark Fisher – when the object was somebody who dealt with the ambiguity of time itself?

Can I outdo the last intellectual missive on the matter? I very much doubt it. Should I want to? If I learnt anything about Mark, I can wholeheartedly say no, I shouldn’t.  He would much rather I invest my time reaching the audiences, who as yet, are entirely unaware of both him and his work.  Or, better still, devising methods of my own, capable of derailing the deluge of despair, that dictates your cyclical resignation to “whatever will be, will be”, as Doris once sang.  Mark’s switching of the baton to me, is not a position of privilege that I, and I alone hold, you understand? Mark made the case for all to seize it – and in turn pass it on – if we are to achieve what is required to tack through the ill-wind that blows. And that is poignant. For it was Raymond Briggs, who, with his graphic novel When The Wind Blows (pub. 1982), made his much needed anti-nuclear narrative, accessible to children.  Briggs, like Fisher and other great writers, recognised that in order to avert what is seen by some as the inevitable future – one must reach the youngest of audiences.  Far too many of those – now in their 40s and 50s – are fully accepting of all that their political ‘leaders’ feed them. 

Mark’s work, as well as being a call to arms, is an open invitation to be challenged in order to instil agency, and ignite – with a ferociousness like I have never seen before – an anarchical phenomenon that has reached even the eye of Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric. Therefore, proving itself capable of playing an entirely different game, and winning. Which, in itself, brings me to my penning this and contributing to Niall McCann’s forthcoming film about Mark Fisher’s life & work – Lost Futures.  Niall is committed to making Mark accessible to as many and varied an audience as possible. Let’s assist. For every person who’s aware of Mark Fisher’s work, there are infinite others who aren’t.  If his unparalleled discourse is to hold the status of his ‘lasting legacy’, which we, his devotees rightly bestow upon him, then it is us – those already well-versed in his vision – who carry the honour of the arduous task of spreading his word. And yes, it will be arduous, but that’s the least we, who claim to admire Fisher, should be prepared to shoulder, if we are worthy of declaring ourselves to be forever changed and inspired by his work. It’s worth remembering the integral role that the blessing and a curse – that is the internet – has to play, in facilitating these necessary connections.  When Fisher cast his critique of the net, so ably identifying all its holes, he did so in the hope that it would all be stitched up with better solutions. After all, there is no catch to be had, without the means to captivate what lies beneath. He plunged us to the depths in helping us to understand the effects of social media, so as to provide us with the determination to surface, with all manner of attached material coming up for air with us.

Mark wanted everyone to be in on the act.  He was more than capable of disproving his most ardent ‘academic’ critics, but he’d sooner awaken the opposition than rebuke them. He never favoured wallowing in one-upmanship over the wonderment of a new inductee to the cause.  Mark knew full well that the most vital respondents to his cries, were not those with enviable résumés they’d had the privilege of designing themselves, but instead those that had theirs dictated to them. The people who’ve spent a life being underestimated for all manner of reasons beyond their control, but most of all, their lack of access to a formal licence to question EVERYTHING. We need them. 

Mark talked much about his belief of the links between mental health and circumstance, so if little blue pills that help get it up, or surgeries that leave patients feeling fuller, less flat, are made readily available on the NHS prescriptions list, then shouldn’t Fisher’s back catalogue be on it too? He stabs right at the heart of the mental health plague. No amount of therapy slugs or anti-depressants can better arm the depressed with the tools they need to understand their plight, than Mark Fisher, surely?  And where better to reach the afflicted, than the environments that see very little material that speaks to our contemporary natural condition.

I spoke to Niall McCann (director of ‘Lost Futures’) about my writing this piece and he made reference to a quote that Fisher had once said of prisons: “Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.” No greater truth. And right there, lies one of our biggest opportunities, staring us in the face.  For as well as the need to reach the youngest of audiences with thought provoking material to avoid the continuation of the status quo, is it not equally important to reach all – who, by definition of their circumstances – are a ‘captive audience’? Prisoners; long-term hospital patients, mental health ward patients; ATU admissions; care home residents? After all, it is they, who tend to have unrivalled lived experience of the effects of privatisation. None of the settings in which these potential audiences reside are considered hip so get overlooked – and so too does the opportunity to learn from those within. 

Surely this has to change?  How to achieve that? Answers on a postcard to the usual address please, or perhaps better still, a deleted one. See it as a random act of kindness. Remember those? It’s time for retiring ‘radicals’ everywhere, to cast aside the copies of Keep Calm And Colour In Unicorns and instead inundate the mail boxes of anybody and everybody you would ordinarily deem to ‘have nothing in common with’. What’s the alternative? That you continue with a life of blinkered, onanistic self-assurance, immune to the truth of the surrounding landscape? Is this who you want to be? Only satisfied when you’ve fulfilled your own needs, regardless of who or what it denies in the process? It’s time to diversify and digress from the barely tolerated diet, and instead force yourself to swallow your most unpalatable hypocrisies. Break them down with a good glug of acid and permit your imagination to transform them into first class fertile matter, to enable new life to flourish in pastures new. 

I asked Bobby Gillespie and Obsolete Capitalism to summarise what they believe to be the essence of Mark Fisher’s work for inclusion in this piece.

Bobby Gillespie:

“The beauty of Mark Fisher’s laser sharp critique of the destructive effects of life under Neoliberalism, was that it spoke to ordinary people in plain language that went beyond the often-hermetic intellectual world of academia.  He is greatly missed. We need more voices like Mark’s, more than ever.”

So, let’s assist in courting the audience Mark craved to reach the most. In another conversation with a friend I’ve recently introduced to Mark’s work, they said: “It feels to me like there is a feast of fawning over Mark’s theories and a famine of practice out there.” A valid point.  There are people pushing themselves to continue his praxis – one such example that comes to mind is Oneohtrix Point Never. There are numerous others, but why stop there?  What can be gained by knowing much of what is wrong and how it occurred, if we just hoard the horrors in the hope that somebody else will pick up the slack in remedying them? It ain’t gonna happen. Meanwhile, the tendency to promote oneself as one of Fisher’s dedicated disciples to the already switched on, on social media, prevails.  Perhaps a sin we are all guilty of to a greater or lesser degree I expect, but as the expression goes: about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.  If you’re already familiar with Mark Fisher’s work, by now, you might be vexed that I’ve made little or no reference to Capitalist Realism, or Hauntology…etc. Maybe that’s because primarily Mark was my mate. I miss him. And for me, promoting the generosity of Mark Fisher the person, will always come first before his works. Mark gave you those. They are all available to be devoured and shared. Please do. The last word goes to Obsolete Capitalism, proving that although Mark wanted to appeal to everyone, he had a habit of impressing upon some of us an acuity that felt special, and unique to our innermost thoughts and experiences.

Obsolete Capitalism, June 2022:

“Like other great thinkers of the past – Nietzsche and Deleuze among others – Mark Fisher is a writer with “no mediation”. What is left when he tears away with a simple and definitive gesture, the enveloping screen on which the great epic fable of ‘capitalist realism’ is projected?  Only emptiness.  Instead of living in an age ‘saturated with history’ as Nietzsche wrote, Fisher has clearly and capably described our age as ‘saturated with emptiness’.  While this “emptiness” expands into every corner of capitalism, it also discharges the supposed systemic alternatives opposing it.  Helping us in liberation from ‘horror vacui’ and recognising the emptiness in the false fullness of the Real, is his most generous and enduring intellectual legacy.”

A statement about film-in-progress Lost Futures from director Niall McCann:

The video we have produced for “Storm Crow” is an attempt to visualise Mark Fisher’s ideas and combine them with music which comes from a similar place. An experiment in matching his ideas to Mark Stewart’s music in a playful way, recontextualizing old TV advertisements—which both Marks would have grown up watching—zombie movies, along with pivotal social and political moments which helped bring us to what Fisher called “Capitalist Realism” which is the idea that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism.

The vast body of work Fisher left behind explores capitalism’s unassailable role in our lives, the closing off of any sense of a future different from the present, and the effects of this on us as individuals. His writings lifted up the veil and showed the world afresh to his readers, and that’s the core idea in the music video.

The film itself revolves around something which is central to Mark Fisher’s work: the future. When I was young the future was everywhere. It could be anything, it seemed rife with possibilities, for something better. Now, it’s only talked about as a more terrifying version of the present. This is a film about the futures we have lost and how we might start imagining new ones again.

We will use Mark Fisher’s life and his brilliant ideas as a guide through some of the most urgent questions of our time.

 
‘Storm Crow’ by Mark Stewart also features on On-U Sound’s Pay It All Back Vol 8 compilation. Listen / Order Pay It All Back Vol 8.
For more information about Lost Futures, a film about Mark Fisher currently in development, head here.
Niall McCann (Redemption Films)
Mark Stewart Official Website
Repeater Books
Obsolete Capitalism

Words by Mark Stewart, June 2022 ©

INT.  LACK-LUSTRE RECORDING STUDIO SUITE, IN LOCAL STATION ‘RADIO ZIDER’. BUILT IN ‘80s, STAINED BEYOND REPAIR IN SHADES OF ‘COFFEE & CREAM’.  SOMEWHERE IN THE WILD, WILD, WEST, OF SOMERSET, 2022. DISSECTED SPLIT SCREEN SHOT. STUDIO GLASS BETWEEN RECORDING BOOTH AND CONTROL ROOM RUNS VERTICALLY DOWN THE MIDDLE. IN THE CONTROL ROOM IS A TV SCREEN THAT CLINGS TO THE WALL BRACKET WITH ½ ROLL OF DUCT TAPE AND A WING AND A PRAYER. IT ROLLS 24/7 WITH PRE-RECORDED MUSIC VIDEOS/SHOWBIZ & CELEBRITY GOSSIP. MARK STEWART’S MIC IS PERMANENTLY ON.  SA 1 & SA 2’S ARE OFF, ALTERNATING TO ON, WHEN STATED.  NIGHT.

MARK STEWART (Peter Pan of THE POP GROUP), casually dressed in one of his band’s T-shirts emblazoned with the title of their track “She’s Beyond Good and Evil’ and a ‘man/cash/bum’ bag round his waist. He stands,  one side of the glass in the recording booth.  He grapples to familiarise himself with his new, temporary studio surroundings (courtesy of his insurance company), after having been forced to evacuate during a flood, from his usual state-of-the-art studio of choice – in the Hamlet of EVANELPUS. Excited, in anticipation of hosting a transatlantic call with (Filmmakers RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON & NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS), he is committed to creating a convivial atmosphere for his 2 guests and collaborators.  Radio Zider’s Producer is on extended leave (again).  In his absence, his 2 frazzled Sound Assistants (SA 1 & SA 2), deputise, behind the desk in the control room. SA 2 (Millennial) irascible, dressed in ‘street gear’, stands twiddling his knobs. SA 1 (Gen Z) lacks confidence by comparison to his slightly senior colleague, dressed in ‘smart casual’, he sits perched on edge of seat, neck craned, firmly focused on TV screen. With their once high-hopes of high-earnings now jaded and putrid pallors further faded, they no longer consider sharing personal details such as their names with their Manager’s clientele, necessary. 

MARK STEWART: Russ, Nik, OK, we’re ready to roll and in control again now.  Sorry about that, few technical issues there.  I blame the scrumpy.  The locals can’t get enough of it. “Let’s start at the very beginning…” So, joking aside, I’m stoked to be catching up with you. Having now had the pleasure of working with you both twice – firstly on your film Rip It Up And Start Again and secondly on the making of the video with myself and my collaborators – Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire, Wrangler) and Eric Random (Nico and The Faction) – which accompanies my new single Cast No Shadow (taken from the forthcoming album VS).  For context, I should add that Cast No Shadow was made in response to Rip It Up + Start Again, which in turn, you both made in response to Simon Reynold’s 2005 book of the same name.  The film boasts a wealth of material previously unearthed, which is a credit to yourselves and your contributors – of which there are too numerous to mention here – so will instead just urge people to go and explore, follow the links.  It’s a real treat to turn the tables – as a Clairvoyant might say – and conduct a Directors’ Q&A with you both.  You’re busy, I know, so I’ll try to butt out and stay on-piste.  Here’s a starter for 10, to both of you: What was your personal mission statement prior to embarking on this journey, in your joint creation of the rarified gem that is your Post-Punk documentary film –  Rip It Up + Start Again?

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: The era was pointedly anti-star, and if there is ever going to be a comprehensive view of this era as a whole, then that should be the approach.  The central character of this film is the Zeitgeist itself.  There seemed to be one, across the world, and we are letting the artists of that time show us its source and shape, its sound and flavour.  Also, many of the best acts put out a record or two and it was over… It was an ocean of artists, not an Olympic pantheon… a constellation of daring sorties rather than a field of careerists. Once “stars” inevitably did emerge, you then have New Wave.

MARK STEWART: Truth. Russell?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: We wanted to do a film where the protagonists themselves are given time to tell it from their perspective – and to follow their leads on what and who was important from inside the scene(s).  Though there was no formal ‘movement’, it’s surprisingly and hearteningly clear that there most definitely was this Zeitgeist, stretching from the rust belt in America, through the grey 70s of the UK, and on to culturally reconstructed Germany.  It ended up being an incredibly fertile and diverse field.

MARK STEWART: What was Post-Punk for you at the time ‘78 onwards?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: I came to London in early 1979 and immediately fell in with a disparate bunch of filmmakers and musicians.  At that time we’d all been shaken up / inspired by the energy of punk, though not necessarily fully convinced of its longevity, or its ability in purely musical terms to go the distance.  Nobody called it post-punk at that time, obviously, in fact I don’t think I even heard the term until Simon’s book came out in the mid 2000s.  But there was new music coming out week after week – as singles – no albums yet – all by new artists, basically people you’d never heard of.  It was very pure in some cases and I think that’s what grew into the post-punk envelope, but there were a lot of chancers, hopping on the punk bandwagon, and many musicians who were pretty decent, but not really coming up with anything radically new – just embellishing their previous style with a bit of spikiness.  I’d put some people I really liked in that group, like Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Graham Parker or bands like Dexys and the Specials (though I think these latter did break out into something fantastic, later on, with ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘In The Studio’).  I even had a few singles by The Police!

But I was much more interested in the very spare and odd sounds that were coming out from Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, The Pop Group, Rip, Rig & Panic, The Cure (yes – they were a key band at the start.  ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ was a real landmark work). The Fall would require a whole interview of their own, as I am a fanatic, so for now will just say ‘Hex Enduction Hour’.  There was a gap between the first Public Image single (stunning) and the first major label album by one of the ‘new bands’ (which might have been Go4’s ‘Entertainment!’?) when everything was just 7” singles.  There was no real hierarchy, and you didn’t know who anyone was, or where they came from anyway.  Just lightning blasts from every direction:  Skank Bloc Bologna, Health & Efficiency, She Is Beyond Good & Evil, At Home He’s A Tourist, Transmission, Map Reference. It’s really an embarrassment of riches crammed into a two year period.  When bands did get their albums out, there were some stunning things like ‘Y’, ‘Deceit’, ‘Odyshape’, ‘154’, ‘Dub Housing’ or ‘The Modern Dance’, and ‘Kangaroo?’ by Red Crayola.  And, The Slits’ ‘Cut’.  Then ‘Metal Box’ was another huge poke in the eye from PiL, who didn’t do much, but what they did do, was impeccable.

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: In retrospect, I can see that my affinity for what came to be known as “post-punk” began – as a kid growing up in Detroit – as a fascination with the Sixties outsiders, such as Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Zappa/Captain Beefheart, as well as the glam futurism of Bowie, Roxy Music and Eno. This same set of artists (name-checked repeatedly in these interviews) set me up quickly to absorb the fast changing worlds of Wire, Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, and Talking Heads/Eno, the dark romance of Joy Division and the Virgin Prunes, the dub-noir of A Certain Ratio and “Metal Box”, the scabrous No Wave New Yorkers, and the Teutonic electronica of D.A.F. and… and here I think you have to include Kraftwerk and Suicide, pre-post-punkers in full stride with the rest of the kids…

MARK STEWART: Breathe fellas breathe. What do you see as major acts carrying on the post-punk tradition these days? Russell?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: I’m too out of touch these days to do more than sound like a diligent Guardian reader. Nowadays – in the middle of another fashion wave, there’s a few bands I rather enjoy, like Yard Act or Dry Cleaning.  (Wet Leg were amusing – mainly for their name, actually, and some decent songs, but they seem too curated already.) And I’m sure Fontaines D.C. will go somewhere, not least because for every bit I love, there’s a bit I find too close to U2.  But still. Interestingly (or not) there was a conscious or subconscious influence on dub in almost every ‘original’ post punk band, but as far as I can tell, none at all in any of the new ones.  That stream of influence seems to be absent. Curious.  But you hear its lack immediately.  I don’t have much of a background in dub, and what I do know was brought to me via post-punk bands in the early Scrits, the Slits, the Pop Group, or A Certain Ratio. Once the initial scenes had matured, I kept noticing that the best and most fascinating bands of all seemed to secretly source Post-Punk: Sonic Youth, Pixies, PJ Harvey, through to late 80s and 90s, and acts like Portishead, Massive Attack and Bjork.

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: My Bloody Valentine ‘Isn’t Anything and Loveless’, Tricky ‘Maxinquay’ and ‘Pre-Millennium Tension’, the Pixies ‘Doolittle’, Stereolab ‘Dots and Loops’, Broadcast/Focus Group ‘Broadcast and the Focus Group Examine Witch Cults of the Radio Age’, Aphex Twin ‘Selected Ambient works Vols 1 and 2’, Boards of Canada ‘Geogaddi’ and ‘A Beautiful Place Out in the Country’,  the Focus Group ‘Hey Let Loose Your Love’, Laurel Halo ‘Quarantine’, P J Harvey ‘To Bring you My Love’ and ‘Uh Huh Her’, Burial ‘Burial’ and ‘Untrue’, Demdike Stare ‘Elemental Parts 1-4’, Meat Beat Manifesto ‘Satyricon’. Record labels: Ghost Box Hyperdub, 4AD.

MARK STEWART: Choice stuff cool. What do you think of / how do you define a D.I.Y ethos?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: There’s something about young people and music being separated by heavy fire doors in the mid-seventies.  Punk, and then Post-Punk, was the movement from watching to playing, but in 1975 there wasn’t much of a path forward for beginners and all their inventiveness and enthusiasm.  I think you (Mark) said to us: ‘it was easier to imagine becoming a footballer than a musician’. Well, Punk dropkicked that one out of touch. 

MARK STEWART: Ha, I’m hardly George Best.

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: I’d say that D.I.Y starts with whatever you find lying around – not just in terms of the actual instruments: guitar, bass, drums, voice – but also musical form: pop singles, bits of funk, school hymns, doggerel, your parents’ jazz records, what you heard coming out of shops on the high streets in the cities, etc. etc. and under all of that, the fact that you didn’t need to be a musician to be mad about music. The next step being, ultimately, some idiots had to make a record and get it distributed, without being millionaires. Was it Desperate Bicycles? Or Buzzcocks? Or Swell Maps? Or Factory Records sampler? Scritti Politti’s ‘How to…’ liner notes? I don’t think you can separate out all those strands – everyone did it on a shoestring, crappy jobs, a few quid stuck away, living on the dole, or in a squat.

I remember there was an awful lot of talking. A lot of reading and a lot of debate.  Not only about politics, but film, photography, art, personal identity, sexuality, as well as music. Cheap housing.  One thing that emerged naturally from that lo-life is that bands tended not to have leaders – there were certainly some very strong personalities – but it’s hard to think of any solo ‘stars’.  And a lot more women formed or joined bands.  Certainly not a 50/50 parity, but way more than say pub rock or glam prog bands of just a couple of years before.  Punk was somewhere between.  Not just as ‘sexy singers of Top Of The Pops’ either: I’ve noticed a weird propensity for female bass players: Tina Weymouth, Gayle Advert; Gina Birch; Tessa Pollitt, Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, Sara Lee…

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: Forget Mark Perry’s “Here’s three chords, start a band”- Wire showed me “Here’s ONE chord, build a new world!” Apply that idea to everything!

MARK STEWART: Yeeeeeeesssss!  What is ‘messthetics’?

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: As a kid in Detroit, somehow that term didn’t trickle down to me, until the whole era was over… I will defer to Russell’s able verbal skills.

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: The main difference between D.I.Y and ‘messthetics’ is that the first in an inventiveness born from necessity.  Whereas the latter is an applied philosophy, whatever your means.  This Heat, for example, could make a piece from bashing bits of sheet metal and pipes (Metal) or use a 24 Track console, but play the desk with faders (24 track loop), or they could equally use a home-made cassette sampler (6 cassette machines tied together, playing pre-recorded loops, and put through a small mixer) to introduce a random tapemix as a random instrument.  Allow the faults and the unpredictability to shine through.  Have resolute non-musicians on stage.  That would be ‘messthetics’.  Keeping the rough edges and not drowning under heavy production gloss.  [There’s a close parallel in filmmaking, too: those years spent trying to do things for zero money meant everyone had to be able to do everything with at least a minimum degree of competence – people just became ‘filmmakers’.  Video promised to level all that even more, but in the end, it didn’t: you can now spend millions of a video production with a massive crew.  The Danish ‘Dogme 95’ movement were very post-punk, and a lot might be learned from adapting their commandments to music.  There’s probably a book to be written somewhere in there about manifestos too.]

MARK STEWART: Sorry I can’t provide you with any of the luxuries that the BBC provide their Desert Island Discs guests – and I will deviate from their format, by stating no explanations or apologies please, when now, finally, I ask you both: What’s your post-punk playlist?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON:
Gang of Four: At Home He’s A Tourist
Scritti Politti: Skank Bloc Bologna
The Pop Group: She Is Beyond Good and Evil
This Heat: Health & Efficiency
Public Image Ltd.: Poptones
The Fall: New Puritan
Wire: Map Reference
Joy Division (sorry, I’m from Manchester): Love Will Tear Us Apart
Pere Ubu (off Modern Romance): The Real World
Instant Hit – The Slits
The Void – The Raincoats
Shack Up – A Certain Ratio
10.15 Saturday Night – The Cure
Eugene – Essential Logic
The Milkmaid – Red Crayola (off Kangaroo?)
Private Armies – Viv Goldman
Alphaville – The Monochrome Set
You – Delta 5
It’s Obvious – Au Pairs
Leave the Capitol – The Fall

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS:
Definitely 2 lists, here – UK and US perspectives.
This Heat – 24-Track Loop
Cabaret Voltaire – Eddie’s Put, Loosen the Clamp
Wire – Our Swimmer
Young Marble Giants – Eating Noddemix, Choci Loni
The Contortions – Dish It Out, Almost Black
DNA – Egomaniac’s Kiss
Rosa Yemen – Rosa Vertov
Swell Maps – Let’s Build A Car, Midget Submarines
Ike Yard – Night After Night
Suicide – Radiation, Cheree
D.A.F.: – Ein Bisschen Krieg, Osten Währt am Längsten.
Byrne & Eno – America is Waiting, Mountain of Needles
The Fall – Impression of J Temperance, New Face in Hell
Ultravox – My Sex
Talking Heads – Warning Signs, Cities, Not Seen
Public Image Ltd. – Poptones, Public Image
Pere Ubu – I Will Wait, The Book Is On The Table.

MARK STEWART: Thanks fellas, respect. it’s been a gas.  Over and out.
&nbsp:

‘Pay It All Back Vol. 7’ on On-U Sound
 

In a secret world of forbidden knowledge,
power comes at a terrible price.

A tour of every department of our media saturated society,
the most explosive conspiracy ever conceived,
the people shapers at every turn
we see ourselves as they want us to be.

Immersed in their options,
surrounded by their representations,
reality melts.

                            —Mark Stewart, “Favour”

The latest installment in On-U Sound’s Pay It All Back series of compilations, named after William S. Burroughs’ demand in Nova Express, gathers new music by Gary Lucas, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Roots Manuva & Doug Wimbish, Nisennenmondai, African Head Charge, Coldcut, Ghetto Priest, Sherwood & Pinch, Little Axe and Horace Andy, among others. Best of all, side three of the double LP kicks off with “Favour,” the first new solo material from Mark Stewart since 2012’s The Politics of Envy and its ghostly dub twin Exorcism of Envy.
 

Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart, London, 1985 (photo by Beezer, courtesy of Mute)

The video for “Favour,” directed by Stewart and Ruth Perry, sets the song’s opening lines, about emerging from a coma, deep in the sidereal void. Parched after his long sleep, the singer asks for a soda and receives dynamite—a better deal than Howlin’ Wolf got.

Everything in “Favour,” from the symbols of circular time suspended onscreen to the drum the size of New Jersey reverberating on the soundtrack, suggests a vast mental space where all that is solid has melted into air. The only landmarks are memories that vanish as soon as they surface, represented here by footage from Tøni Schifer’s documentary On/Off: Mark Stewart (Pop Group to Maffia). Perry and Stewart have processed these images from the singer’s life to resemble the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sequence of 2001.

Mark Stewart told DM in January that he’s got “like two or three albums worth of new stuff” in the can, so keep your eyes on the stars.

Pay It All Back Vol. 7 is available from On-U Sound and Amazon.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Mark Stewart talks with Dangerous Minds about ‘Learning to Cope with Cowardice’
A short film on the making of Mark Stewart’s ‘Learning to Cope with Cowardice’ (a DM premiere!)

Mark Stewart and the Maffia live in Kentish Town, 1986 (Photo by Beezer)

Last month, when Mute brought out a double-LP reissue of Mark Stewart’s solo debut from 1983, Learning to Cope with Cowardice, we interviewed the man about the record and its historical, political, and musical context. Now we have a new short film by Charlie Marbles about the making of the album to show you.

If you’ve never heard Learning to Cope with Cowardice, it is a collection of sounds that wraps your nervous system around the spools of a cassette deck, then uses your brain to degauss the tape head and your cerebrospinal fluid to lubricate the capstan: a variegated cut-up of genres, styles, media, times, places, and identities. In the film below, Stewart and producer Adrian Sherwood describe the mixing and editing techniques they used to make this mental work of art, some imported from New York hip-hop and other audio collage forms—Stewart, in particular, credits Teo Macero’s work on On the Corner and William S. Burroughs’ tape experiments as inspiration—and some invented on the spot and probably never yet repeated, such as “scratching” multitrack tapes.

The singer and producer describe Stewart’s desires for unconventional sounds (Sherwood remembers a snare so trebly “it was actually cutting your eyeball off”) and his struggles to get them through the technocracy of the mastering process onto the finished record. Stewart:

I was constantly fighting with engineers about buzzes and hisses and noises, and trying to make helicopter sounds, and then they’d try and change it, they’d try and normalize you. I’m not gonna be fuckin’ normalized!

Learning to Cope with Cowardice plus The Lost Tapes is available on double vinyl (benefiting Mercy Ships) and double CD. Check out Mark Stewart’s new political resistance playlist, too.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Mark Stewart talks with Dangerous Minds about ‘Learning to Cope with Cowardice’
Dub visionary Adrian Sherwood talks about his legendary career in music

Illustration from the cover of the ‘Jerusalem’ 12-inch and the ‘Mark Stewart + Maffia’ compilation

Head above the heavens, feet below the hells, the singer Mark Stewart has embodied the international rebel spirit since he fronted the Pop Group as a teenager, giving voice to activist and imaginal concerns shared by punks, Rastas and b-boys. Mark Stewart and the Maffia’s moving, mind-mangling, amazing debut album, 1983’s Learning to Cope with Cowardice, whose sounds still beckon from an unrealized future, will be reissued on CD, vinyl and digital formats tomorrow, supplemented by an extra disc of recently discovered outtakes that differ radically from anything on the finished album. Sales of the double LP edition benefit Mercy Ships, an organization that provides lifesaving surgeries to people in poor and war-torn countries around the world.

I spoke with Mark Stewart last week by transatlantic telephone line. After he expressed his respect for Dangerous Minds, affably breaking my balls about the post in which I outed him as the owner of the face in Discharge’s logo, we talked underground media and mutual aid briefly before settling in for a discussion of his solo debut and the current historical moment. A lightly edited transcript follows.

Mark Stewart: I’m so pleased to be working with Mute again, and Daniel Miller has kind of rejuvenated Mute, and the independents—it’s a pleasure, you know, to work with cool people where something flows, you know? It’s really important for us that there’s those kind of columns in the underground.

Dangerous Minds: Holding it up.

Holding it up.

I wouldn’t have asked you about this, but I interviewed Adrian Sherwood the day after the Brexit vote, so it strikes me as funny that I’m talking to you now, right after the deal failed. Do you have anything to say about the situation?

I think it’s a total distraction. [laughs] I think it’s a complete smokescreen, and I’m very scared what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s like, I was watching something about Goebbels’ control of the media on some history channel, right, and how he learned from Madison Avenue. I’m not taking a position right or left on it, but I think it’s the most bizarre distraction in the last few years, and God knows what’s going on. But, you know, behind the scenes, our health [services]—there’s all sorts of things, all these laws are being passed behind the scenes, but that is the only thing journalists are looking at. Not the only thing, but do you understand what I’m saying? That isn’t a comment against whoever and whatever.

The problem is, in England, and I’m not being rude, is it is so class-ridden, it’s a problem for both sides of the spectrum. I was living in Berlin for a while, and I was talking to a very cool Japanese guy yesterday, who’s translating this friend of mine, Mark Fisher’s, this theorist’s book on capitalist realism. And in Germany, and I think until fairly recently in Japan, skilled laborers were treated with ultimate respect. The unions worked with the entrepreneurs, or the bosses, or whatever, and there was a kind of “synergy,” to use a wanky name, and so the economy was quite strong, and there was a social service system. . . you know, Germany’s quite an interesting model. But here—the craziest thing is, people are speculating, people are making big money out of these sudden changes, they’re spread-betting against these sudden changes of polarity, you know? I was reading, ‘cause I always read all sides of the spectrum, I was reading in a financial thing, suddenly sterling has got very, very strong. You know? And these politicians are being played. Do you know what I mean? They’re being played.

I can sit and talk to a Tory boy, I can sit and talk to whoever. And I’ll listen to people and try and talk to them in their language, and try and understand their point of view, right? ‘Cause being opposed to people, you don’t really get anywhere. But they think they’re doing something for whatever bizarre, medieval idea of nationalism or identity politics or whatever you call it, and there are some—there used to be this thing in England which was called “caring conservatism,” which was quite feudal, it was like how the king of the manor would give the employees some bread. [laughs] Scraps from the table or whatever. But here, the problem is, the working class are envious of the rich, and the rich want to squeeze the working class until it explodes to get every drop of blood out of them. It’s quite a strange system. And the middle ground that you’ve got in Germany, with the, whatever they’re called, Christian Democrats or something; back in the day, when people like Chomsky and everybody used to attack these middle-left kind of parties—you know, I read a lot of theory, but now, that is heaven compared to what’s happening these days! “The center cannot hold.” Everything is just. . . it’s bizarre, you know?
 

Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart, London, 1985 (photo by Beezer, courtesy of Mute)
 
But the problem is, again, my personal Facebook is full of loads of cool people who I really respect, so I get utterly impressed when, like, these Italian theorists start talking to me about how this album or our early work inspired people to get into different ideas about the planet. But I’m sick to death of people moaning about these non-events, which could be like—it’s like an orchestrated ballet of distraction. You know, it’s bollocks! “Never mind the bollocks” is never mind the fuckin’—it’s bollocks! And people are constantly talking about it.

And what I would be doing—so many of my American friends are just constantly posting this stuff about Trump, right? And I’m like—sorry, I’ll probably lose a lot of respect for saying this, I’m sorry, but as soon as the polls were looking like that, the guy’s been democratically elected, we’d roll up our sleeves and try and organize for 10 years down the line, if not five years down the line, and try and grow some sense of hope! Spread seeds of hope, culturally, in these small towns. That’s what things like punk are about. You know, with punk, a youth center opened, or a squat opened, and little places changed a bit, you know? Now people are just tutting. Saying “Oh, he’s bad”—so what? You’re bad for not fuckin’ doing anything! Sorry to rant, but there’s this culture, this narcissistic culture of wallowing in defeat. Which is basically another way of saying “I’m not going to do anything, but I’m gonna pretend to have a conscience by tutting.”

Yeah, people are glued to their TV sets and the news constantly, and it makes them feel powerless, and they don’t do anything. I don’t know if it’s a similar thing with Brexit.

I don’t know. I think people make a choice not to care from an early age. I’m not being rude. You can blame this, you can blame something outside of yourself, but as I grow a little bit older and I get more pulled into weird, sort of Taoist sort of things, it’s to do with putting a foot forward and breaking outside of the mold, and if you get hit, you get hit. Or if somebody says you’re a nutter, like they said about us back in the day, you know, or they say you’re wrong, or whatever, at least you stepped forward, outside of the embryonic—do you understand what I’m saying? You have to do provocations. In my sense, it’s kind of art provocations. What I do is, even if I’m not sure about something, I think It’s enough of a curveball to go in that direction, or to spin against my own stupid sense of conditioning: sparks will fly. Let’s go! Let’s do it. Do you know what I mean?

It’s this sitting back—and now you’re getting people kind of reminiscing about the Cold War! Which again was a distraction. It’s just nonsense, you know? People want to live in this nostalgic bubble. And now they’re saying that the fuckin’—a journalist in an English paper was saying that the Cowardice times were more paranoid than now? What the fuck? [laughter] With Cambridge Analytica, we got fuckin’ algorithms—if there was a Night of the Long Knives overnight and somebody got control of the algorithms, thousands of people could just be rounded up for reading Dangerous Minds. Do you understand what I’m saying? And it’s all sold to the highest bidder; there isn’t even any politics involved. It’s naked capitalistic control. But, you know, now I’m moaning like I shouldn’t have done. Daniel Miller had this idea of enabling technologies, and in America, there was always like Mondo 2000 and Electronic Frontier Foundation. So I’m positive as well as being. . . it’s very interesting times. And when there’s change, there’s possibility.

One of the main reasons I wanted to interview you about this record is that “Jerusalem” is one of my favorite recordings.

This one, or another one? My one, or somebody else’s?

No, your “Jerusalem” is one of my favorite records. Part of it is, there’s the Blake poem, which has all this revolutionary, visionary significance, but then there’s so much layered on top of it—all this patriotic meaning, and it’s in the hymnal, and I don’t know if you know that story about Throbbing Gristle playing at the boys’ school and the boys singing them offstage with “And did those feet in ancient time”—

No.

—so I wonder if you could tell me about what that song means to you, and whether you were trying to recover some of the William Blake in that song.

Well, it’s a long, long, long story, and a lot of it’s got to do with an ancient tradition of kind of English, kind of Celtic mysticism, which is—I’m gonna sound like David Tibet now or something—but I’m a Stewart, right? And our family history is linked to this other family called the Sinclairs. My father died a couple of weeks ago, and he was a real, to use the word nicely, occultist. He was a Templar, and he taught remote viewing. But for me, I feel, growing up near Glastonbury—this might sound very, very hippie, this, but it’s the kind of mysticism of Blake that I really liked, right? There was a review in the Wire, when the record first came out, back in the day, and they said me and Adrian, it was a perfect alchemical marriage, or something. If you can be kinda hopefully mystical at the same time as being hopefully an activist, there’s an uplifting sense of that tune in specific.
 

Mark Stewart and the Maffia’s first performance, CND rally in Trafalgar Square, 1980 (courtesy of Freaks R Us)
 
What happened was that the last ever Pop Group concert and the first ever Maffia concert were on the same day. Basically, I’d got sick to death of music, I’d kinda packed it all in, I thought we weren’t ever gonna get anywhere with it, and I was just bored of it, right? And I became a volunteer in the office of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in London, in Poland Street, right? And one day in the office, Monsignor Bruce Kent, who was in charge of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the time, we were organizing what turned out to be the biggest postwar demonstration against nuclear weapons, and the center of London was brought to a standstill by 500,000 people. People came from far and wide, from Scotland, from everywhere. And he turned round and said, “It might be good to have some music,” ‘cause, you know, Tony Benn and all these amazing people were speaking, and I said, “Oh, I’ve got a band!” And I said, “I can ask some of my mates.” So I asked the Specials and Killing Joke; Specials couldn’t do it, but Killing Joke did it, and we ended up playing between the lions in Trafalgar Square. My brother and loads of my weird artist mates did this huge kind of amazing mural of this baby coming out of this atom bomb.

Basically, I was thinking to myself, What would be a classic rallying song, that people young and old—you know, ‘cause very few people would have known about the Pop Group in this demonstration—young and old, like Woody Guthrie, or Pete Seeger, or something like “We Shall Overcome,” what would be good for England? And immediately I thought of “Jerusalem.” And the Pop Group was going all sort of free-jazzy and out there and stuff, where I couldn’t get it together with the Pop Group. I was already hanging out with Adrian and starting to make some sort of reggaeish stuff, so the first version of the Maffia got up and played “Jerusalem” and a few other songs a few hours later in the day, ‘cause people sing it on marches and stuff in England.

So that was the reason for the “Jerusalem” thing. And that moment, that moment in the middle of London, you know, it was the proudest day of my life, to actually be involved in—I’m just trying to organize something just now, just before you phoned, to try and kick off a big sort of demo this year, because that’s what gets me going! It’s like when we used to do Rock Against Racism; we did stuff for Scrap SUS, when they used to just stop black kids on sight and search them, the police; Anti-Fascist League, you know, and now we’re doing this stuff for these Mercy Ships people, who build these boats—they do up these old kind of trawlers and park them out in international waters, outside war zones, and make them into little floating hospitals and operate on kids and stuff. That’s what the money from the limited vinyl’s going towards. But it’s just like—when it’s a benefit, you can get other cool bands. There’s a band here called Fat White Family and all these offshoots of them, Black MIDI or something, there’s these conscious young bands who are mates of mates, and I know in a couple of phone calls I can get an amazing bill together, and the people around me aren’t gonna ask for so much money, they’re more likely to answer the call, you know? And people remember those events for years to come.

Well, I remember you said something in an interview years ago, “The political and the mystical go hand in hand.”

[laughs] I always say the same bollocks! You’ve caught me out!

Much, much more after the jump…

 
One item you might have missed in the neverending news tsunami of the past couple years: the quadrisected, photocopied face in the Discharge logo belongs to the great singer Mark Stewart.

That’s him staring back at you (or so it seems; I always assumed Discharge guy’s eyes were open but hidden by shadows, not closed as Stewart’s are) on the reverse of Discharge’s first seven-inches, “Realities of War,” “Fight Back” and “Decontrol,” not to mention all those T-shirts, back patches and leather jackets. The image comes from the print ad for the Pop Group’s debut single, “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” b/w “3’38,” released in 1979, when Stewart was still a teenager.

The ad for the Pop Group’s first single in the March 31, 1979 issue of NME (via Beat Chapter)

The back cover of Discharge’s first release, ‘Realities of War’ (‘thanks to no fucker’)

The Pop Group posted one Randulf Stiglitz’s astonished discovery of the Discharge logo’s identity on Facebook last year. I assumed it would pass immediately therefrom into the common fund of human wisdom, so I did not write about it at the time. As it happened, everyone was distracted by alarming signs of the human species’ descent into barbarism, with the result that news algorithms—today’s cigar-chomping J. Jonah Jamesons—buried this fun fact on the last page of the internet. So enjoy it again, for the first time!
 

 
After the jump, video clips of Discharge and the Pop Group…

 
Legendary post-punk/funk art terrorist Mark Stewart is back with an urgent, apocalyptic new track, “Nothing is Sacred” which you can download for free at his website.

The track is a damning indictment of greed in a year riddled by riots, revolutions, occupations and increasing collapse of the global financial system. A collaboration with Crass vocalist Eve Libertine, German electro monsters Slope and Dan Catsis from the Pop Group on bass “Nothing Is Sacred”’s howling funk-rock and unyielding political attack evolved from the sessions for Mark’s forthcoming album.

Stewart’s re-emergence seems particularly well-timed considering current events. 2012 will see the release of the new album from the Pop Group/New Age Steppers/Maffia frontman featuring collaborators like Richard Hell, Primal Scream, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Gina Birch from The Raincoaits and original PiL guitarist Keith Levene.
 

 
If not tomorrow night in Los Angeles, here’s a documentary I still very much plan on catching.  From Cinefamily:

This one’s a must for all post-punk junkies!  The name of singer/industrial hip-hop pioneer Mark Stewart may not be instantly familiar, but his influence is felt the world over.  From his early days with confrontational post-punk pioneers The Pop Group to his myriad collaborations with acts like Trent Reznor, Massive Attack and Primal Scream, Stewart has provided ghostly beats and haunting vocals for over thirty years, and shows no signs of stopping.  German filmmaker T?ɬ?ni Schifer, who followed Stewart with a camera for three years, has crafted a detailed, intimate portrait of the artist, supplemented by interviews with Stewart himself, his Pop Group co-horts Dan Catsis, Gareth Sager and John Waddington, Keith Levine (P.I.L.), Janine Rainforth (Maximum Joy), Douglas Hart (The Jesus & Mary Chain), Fritz Catlin (23 Skidoo), Daniel Miller (Mute Records), Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Massive Attack and many others, plus some terrific never-before-seen vintage performance footage.

Well, as post-punk authority Simon Reynolds says, reading an interview with The Pop Group was like “having your brain set on fire.”  And If that’s not enough enticement, here’s the trailer for ON/OFF:

 
More On Mark Stewart/On-U Sound

Director T?ɬ?ni Schifer on MySpace