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The Fateful Symmetry MUTE 7/10

The late Pop Group singer’s final report.

By Piers Martin

A touch of Tommy Cooper: Mark Stewart at the controls

CHIARRA MEATTELLI AND DOMINIC LEE

MARK STEWART tended to confound expectations wherever he went. Not because he wanted to – he just couldn’t help it. His innate curiosity, sense of humour and gently provocative nature, coupled with his enormous charisma and sharp mind, meant that while he dedicated his life to making intensely powerful music, he didn’t take himself too seriously. Spend even a couple of minutes in his company and he’d be ribbing you left, right and centre, barking 10 to the dozen in his rich Bristolese; this towering, six-and-a-half-foot post-punk prophet had a touch of Tommy Cooper about him.

Stewart died unexpectedly in April 2023 at the age of 62, a force of nature suddenly silent, but he’d completed what would become The Fateful Symmetry, his eighth solo album, before his death. Looking back at what he worked on during the last decade or so of his life – two new albums with the reformed Pop Group, and versions of their classic 1979 debut Y reissued through Mute, plus a couple of industrial dub solo releases that brought together the likes of Bobby Gillespie, Richard Hell, Kenneth Anger, Penny Rimbaud and Keith Levene – it’s tempting to assume that this new record would continue in the vein of his collaborative solo material: jagged, whacked-out dubstep and menacing funk fusion united by Stewart’s theatrical pronouncements on an array of conspiracy theories and political topics. In that mode, it was often too easy to dismiss Stewart as the strange man with the megaphone on the street corner who’d been ranting about the same thing for 40 years, even though, deep down, you knew he’d cottoned on to some essential truth.

Not that The Fateful Symmetry, despite its eerily prescient title, is some kind of warning from beyond the grave – far from it. In fact, knowing that Stewart has gone, it comes across more like a love letter to life, full of arrestingly beautiful songs in which Stewart revels in the glorious absurdity of humanity. In a final twist he’d no doubt relish, Stewart has produced the most accessible album of his career, one that mashes together swooning chanson and smouldering ballads, new-wave grooves and candy-striped dub, while he offers a relatively restrained performance, crooning through the likes of “Neon Girl” and “This Is The Rain” in the manner of modern-day Nick Cave, a singer who once claimed that Stewart in his unhinged Pop Group prime “changed everything”.