The Pop Group – Influences

Oh my God! I queued through the night as a 14 year old to get a front row ticket for this. Lou’s Rock’n’Roll Animal Tour. The guy should be beatified. Lou is truly ‘St. Outrageous’.

George Clinton is the bomb. May be getting the chance to work with him soon…
I saw the Mothership land once at an amazing live gig at the Finsbury Park Rainbow where they tore the roof off the mother. Slamming, celebratory, mutant fuuuunk! Can’t go wrong with early Funkadelic.

Ladbroke Grove back in the day was my haunt, squatting on the square where they filmed ‘Performance’. The Clash Christmas parties at Acklam Hall under the Westway and shows on the Anarchy Tour were mindblowing and made you want to be a band.
Love you Joe, miss you mate.

Saw David Thomas the other day at one of our shows. He is still completely out ‘there’, reporting back from the frontline of magical realism. Both the Ubu and Patti Smith really helped us early on, taking us out on tour when we were still at school.

A friend of Jean Genet and Louis Aragon, Leo’s ‘sordide sentimentale’ soaked into The Pop Group’s most poetic, political side. Me and Gareth Sager (guitarist) swapped his albums constantly while making ‘Y’. Leo Ferre is by far the biggest influence on the band.

Suburban sink estate saviours, smell the piss in the lifts in the secret Britain ‘they’ don’t want you to see. This is our reality. Mobility scooters outside Poundland, James Joyce with a pramface. This is what my family look like. Knowle, Hartcliffe, Horfield. KSBB, RAM and the lodgers from Paddy the Butcher to Forklift. Legends one and all. Attack dogs, no escape.

Whatever you do, don’t push me. Punk was a chance to escape the terrace turf wars of Britain’s glory(ification) of ultraviolence and these 60s garage punks, through Lenny Kaye’s (Patti Smith’s guitarist) Nuggets, really shook us up.

Jo’s startling, transgressive, insectoid androgyny together with reading books like ‘Maldoror’ by Lautréamont and Huysmans ‘Là-bas’ blew our teenage minds and the band have never been the same since.

Later covered on the CLASSIC Mick Ronson album, Annette together with Carla Bley and Judy Nylon were real female role models for this pubescent boy, and Annette was doing experiments way back at the beginning of the 70s that have not yet been caught up with. A true pioneeress.

This mechanical, motorik beat was the first track I know of to use spoken word. Please buy anything by Judy Nylon, Sound or Art. The girl’s a beacon of light in the fog of war.