It seems like everyone wants a piece of dub-come-punk pioneer Mark Stewart at the moment, with enigmatic duo Hype Williams the latest to jump in and remix his track, "Stereotype". So, I caught up with the man to find out what he makes of it all, but ended up talking about Mitt Romney and worshipping shopping centres intead. I'm not sure how we got there, but I'm pretty sure the riots and Goldie had something to with it.Noisey: Hello, Mark. Tell me – what’s the deal with your new single, then?
Mark Stewart: It’s called "Stereotype", from the most recent album The Politics of Envy, which featured a load of different collaborations with a myriad of people, from Daddy G, Kenneth Anger, Richard Hell, Primal Scream to Lee Perry. The cool thing about this single is that I’ve got loads of really cool people I know around the world to do remixes. Every time I get tickled by a new kind of music, I just want to start doubling-up and producing it myself.That's a lot of people. Did you catch any of Channel 4’s House Party?
I saw the bit when they were talking to DJ Pierre and Goldie, when they found a 303 Bass Machine and just twiddled the knobs until it exploded.What did you think of it?
It reminded me of when we were just punks; non-musicians that got in the studio and started pressing all the wrong knobs, turning something completely up and getting that kind of washing machine noise, then that all became acid house. Like, Goldie, he was a graffiti artist, he used to come down to Bristol and hang out with us lot. Then he got in the studio, went up to some rack, turned everything up to full and suddenly he’s the first person to do that time stretching thing on drum 'n' bass. I love the naivety of coming at things from different angles.Cool. Did the London riots influence your album last year? You were recording near where it all kicked off, right?
Yeah, just up the road. It’s quite strange, because I did this album a few years back called As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade, which had a rioter on the front with his mask. It was talking about hyper consumerism and the state of my mates back in Bristol that I grew up with. People had just gone mad on crack, or whatever, and it was one of those places that just blew up during the riots back in the 80s. Why did you ask?Well, I saw that your album has a bunch of political and cultural influences. Consumer apathy, for example.
I think that was all the opposite of apathy, more like hyper-consumerism – bloodlust – know what I mean? There’s this concept called cargo cults – some anthropologist went to this remote Papua New Guinea island, and he saw people dressing up to worship these weird helicopter things. Anyway, he worked out that, in the 1940s, the first white man they saw was a US Marine from a helicopter. That's where the idea of a cargo cult came from, because they thought he was a God. I mean, they’d never seen anyone come down from the sky. So, this whole idea of consumerism worshipping when there's a lack of religion rings true. Department stores are the new cathedrals, because when we’re kids, we’re taught to worship and aspire to things that aren’t really obtainable for 90-odd percent of us.True. How do you feel about the Republican party, then?
The strange thing is, the title of this album is The Politics Of Envy, after me and a couple of my mates set up this weird art group called the Newman Artists. We had a little manifesto about "hate" being a form of personal censorship, "need" a refuge of the insecure, "the trivial" a dangerous company and "deny" as the politics of envy. Suddenly, when my record came out, Mitt Romney used the term “the politics of envy” as an attack on Obama. He accused him of having this politics of envy, of socialists just being envious of rich people. Somehow, my record title kept on getting tagged in these speeches on Twitter.So you’re the one to blame!
[Laughs] I am! We’ve come back in different incarnations for thousands of years. We were the Bastille.We were. Are you still raving as hard these days?
I rave to a lot of reggae. Constantly, in fact. And I DJ quite a bit.What’s changed since the glory days of rave?
Well, the thing is, I kind of spaz out. When we were in Leeds, from the age of three or four, me and my brother would just lie on the floor and spaz, foaming at the mouth. We used to call it “scrooging”. My son used to do it too. His mum’s Spanish and she used to phone me up and say she she thought he was a bit special. I’d ask why, and she said he’d come home from school, run up and down the stairs making explosion noises. I said that he was just fighting aliens and that we’re still doing it now as adults. We call it “scrooging”, like hyperventilating, but if you do it to music you can get further out. It’s the full rave. The rave to the grave.I’ll be sure to try it.Watch the video for "Stereotype" below exclusively on Noisey and catch Mark at Village Underground September 27th.Follow Alex on Twitter @alexdonovan
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Mark Stewart: It’s called "Stereotype", from the most recent album The Politics of Envy, which featured a load of different collaborations with a myriad of people, from Daddy G, Kenneth Anger, Richard Hell, Primal Scream to Lee Perry. The cool thing about this single is that I’ve got loads of really cool people I know around the world to do remixes. Every time I get tickled by a new kind of music, I just want to start doubling-up and producing it myself.That's a lot of people. Did you catch any of Channel 4’s House Party?
I saw the bit when they were talking to DJ Pierre and Goldie, when they found a 303 Bass Machine and just twiddled the knobs until it exploded.What did you think of it?
It reminded me of when we were just punks; non-musicians that got in the studio and started pressing all the wrong knobs, turning something completely up and getting that kind of washing machine noise, then that all became acid house. Like, Goldie, he was a graffiti artist, he used to come down to Bristol and hang out with us lot. Then he got in the studio, went up to some rack, turned everything up to full and suddenly he’s the first person to do that time stretching thing on drum 'n' bass. I love the naivety of coming at things from different angles.Cool. Did the London riots influence your album last year? You were recording near where it all kicked off, right?
Yeah, just up the road. It’s quite strange, because I did this album a few years back called As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade, which had a rioter on the front with his mask. It was talking about hyper consumerism and the state of my mates back in Bristol that I grew up with. People had just gone mad on crack, or whatever, and it was one of those places that just blew up during the riots back in the 80s. Why did you ask?
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I think that was all the opposite of apathy, more like hyper-consumerism – bloodlust – know what I mean? There’s this concept called cargo cults – some anthropologist went to this remote Papua New Guinea island, and he saw people dressing up to worship these weird helicopter things. Anyway, he worked out that, in the 1940s, the first white man they saw was a US Marine from a helicopter. That's where the idea of a cargo cult came from, because they thought he was a God. I mean, they’d never seen anyone come down from the sky. So, this whole idea of consumerism worshipping when there's a lack of religion rings true. Department stores are the new cathedrals, because when we’re kids, we’re taught to worship and aspire to things that aren’t really obtainable for 90-odd percent of us.True. How do you feel about the Republican party, then?
The strange thing is, the title of this album is The Politics Of Envy, after me and a couple of my mates set up this weird art group called the Newman Artists. We had a little manifesto about "hate" being a form of personal censorship, "need" a refuge of the insecure, "the trivial" a dangerous company and "deny" as the politics of envy. Suddenly, when my record came out, Mitt Romney used the term “the politics of envy” as an attack on Obama. He accused him of having this politics of envy, of socialists just being envious of rich people. Somehow, my record title kept on getting tagged in these speeches on Twitter.
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[Laughs] I am! We’ve come back in different incarnations for thousands of years. We were the Bastille.We were. Are you still raving as hard these days?
I rave to a lot of reggae. Constantly, in fact. And I DJ quite a bit.What’s changed since the glory days of rave?
Well, the thing is, I kind of spaz out. When we were in Leeds, from the age of three or four, me and my brother would just lie on the floor and spaz, foaming at the mouth. We used to call it “scrooging”. My son used to do it too. His mum’s Spanish and she used to phone me up and say she she thought he was a bit special. I’d ask why, and she said he’d come home from school, run up and down the stairs making explosion noises. I said that he was just fighting aliens and that we’re still doing it now as adults. We call it “scrooging”, like hyperventilating, but if you do it to music you can get further out. It’s the full rave. The rave to the grave.I’ll be sure to try it.Watch the video for "Stereotype" below exclusively on Noisey and catch Mark at Village Underground September 27th.Follow Alex on Twitter @alexdonovan