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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 ten to the dozen in his rich Bristolese; this towering post-punk prophet, all six and a half foot of him, 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 know he’s 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”.
Mute boss Daniel Miller, who began working with Stewart in the early ’80s, suggests that Stewart wanted this album to be more appealing so that he might reach a wider audience – and once he’s snared them with the sweet stuff, they might come to appreciate Stewart’s gnarlier heavyweight gear. Either way, there’s a level of quality control on this project, overseen by Miller, that still allows Stewart to probe and provoke but this time the medium of his message is more palatable. The noirish electronic disco of opener “Memory Of You”, produced with regular foil Youth, is almost deceptively straight, with Stewart singing, “I could’ve wrote a love song” while he pours his heart out, craving a better world.
Stewart was known for his generosity. In Bristol, he opened doors for the Wild Bunch and Massive Attack, helped Tricky record his breakthrough “Aftermath”, and championed new outfits like Ishmael Ensemble and Young Echo. Similarly, here he brings together a bunch of disparate producers whose mongrel mix of styles complement each other. After the pulsing doom-step of the 23 Skidoo-produced “Crypto Religion” – “This is how I live now – some days are better than others,” he mooches – comes the atmospheric post-punk of Belgian act Mugwump’s “Blank Town” (“You’re not alone on this hill of bones”). On Youth’s “Neon Girl”, which features The Raincoats’ Gina Birch and descends into boozy schlager, he asks: “Is it too late, too late for me?” He sounds even more exposed on “This Is The Rain”, a bruised piano ballad produced with his Pop Group bandmate Gareth Sager, as he speaks stirringly of “a world upside down and backwards – this is the rain that washes and heals in glory.”
In some ways it’s fitting that Stewart comes full circle on The Fateful Symmetry with an endearing cumbia-style dub, mixed by Adrian Sherwood, of “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime”, originally a hit in 1980 for The Korgis, who would have been contemporaries of The Pop Group, although their approaches differed, to put it mildly. “Change your heart, it will astound you,” Stewart sings through distortion, but the message – and his enduring positivity – could not be clearer.
