Gone too soon... Mark was the most helpful character when I wrote my Bristol story.
New unreleased song:
The groundbreaking, enduringly influential artist Mark Stewart left an eighth solo album ‘The Fateful Symmetry’, completed shortly before his untimely passing in April 2023. ‘The Fateful Symmetry’ will come out 11th July 2025 on Mute: https://mute.ffm.to/mark-stewart-tfs First single and album opener ‘Memory of You’, has been co-produced with Youth (Killing Joke), and features backing vocals by Hollie Cook. As with much of Stewart’s work, conventions and expectations are only here to be subverted: “There’s a way of using a love song as a Trojan Horse, putting sugar on the poison to invade people’s minds. On the surface, it’s about if I’d only loved [but] it’s about longing and dreaming of a better world. For me love is a political act.” - Mark Stewart The short film for ‘Memory of You’ has been created by film makers Peter Harris and Hugo Glendinning. Harris began collaborating with Mark Stewart in 2020 when they started their BOMBART show together on Radio Alhara, and they went on to create a series of collaborative artworks and music. Peter Harris is most known for his art collaborations with Lee “Scratch” Perry. Across an illustrious career of pioneering music with The Pop Group, Mark Stewart & The Maffia and as a solo artist, Stewart has produced a seminal body of work, galvanised by the DIY ideals of punk, radical politics, protest movements, theory, philosophy, technology, art and poetry. With ‘The Fateful Symmetry’, Stewart’s abiding legacy as a ‘revered countercultural musician’ (The Guardian) is sustained, with an album as fearless and visionary as his best work. Testifying to his prolific, unrelenting ingenuity, and signifying one of his most intimate, empowering statements, ‘The Fateful Symmetry’ is an astonishingly expressive and innovative record; a fierce and beautiful manifesto for a better world. The inimitable, titanic Mark Stewart, never normalized, always extraordinary. Filming and editing: Hugo Glendinning Paintings: Peter Harris
