JOCUND DIN: CAUGHT BY THE RIVER x THE POP GROUP
‘Buying Honeymoon on Mars has sent me back to those three albums. The first, Y, is especially good for sounds, the second and third for words and world woe. All of them feel sculptural to me, both mineral and metal, hacked from the planet and beaten out of it, whilst the accompanying shouting – a work party of one, hitting the jackhammers and hollering – adds great momentum. To listen to such musical lean and heave is still oxygenating down all the years…
At its best, you hear on Honeymoon on Mars what was there before and what therefore is the Pop Group: the sound of something being ripped from the flow of time, a great questioning machine kicking into life, a calving glacier, a scream running over the top of everything. Aged eighteen, when he stood across the bank of school lockers from me, Mark Stewart was somehow already primed for his late middle aged honeymoon, was already embarked on adulthood even though that adulthood would keep him forever, it seems, in the raw first light of angry consciousness…’
Terrific personal reflection on the power of The Pop Group down the years in Caught by the River. By author & BBC Radio producer Tim Dee.