Mark Stewart - from The Pop Group to the Maffia & solo career

BombArt is a Dadaist radio show, a collaboration between artists Mark Stewart and Peter Harris.

Mark Stewart is an artist, vocalist, producer, and songwriter from Bristol. As a founding member of The Pop Group, Mark Stewart & The Maffia, and as a soloist, Stewart has remained an anarchic and pioneering figure since the punk era, a constant source of discordance amongst the frontiers of post-punk, dub, industrial, and electronic music. His work is driven by an explosive form of lyricism and inspired by radical politics, protest movements, theory, philosophy, technology, art, and poetry. Stewart has cultivated a collision of ideas, ideals, and influences throughout his indisputably groundbreaking career.

Stewart has recently worked on archival material for The Pop Group and Mark Stewart & The Maffia as part of an extensive program of reissues and new releases.

The influential cultural theorist and writer Mark Fisher ('Capitalist Realism') has appraised Stewart's work as representing a connection 'between dub's dismantling of the song, William Burroughs's cut-up techniques, and Situationist detournement', while the author and environmentalist Rob Hopkins ('From What is to What If': Unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want') has described Stewart as 'one of the great artists of my time, challenging, not for the faint-hearted, ahead of his time' whose 'larger-than-life prophetic voice changed me, and my sense of what's possible, forever'.

Peter Harris is an artist, filmmaker, and musician. His work often involves experimenting with new ways of making self-portraits, many of which become collaborations. In 1998 he began working 'by proxy', inviting family and cultural icons who influenced his life to give him ideas for paintings, searching for his identity through those who played a part in constructing it. This current project with Mark Stewart continues this idea, exploring a more in-depth collaboration through an ongoing series. His longest-running and well-known association is with Jamaican music legend Lee 'Scratch' Perry. They have been working on a series of drawings, paintings, films, and music projects, since 2003.

Their show, BOMBART, first played on Radio Alhara in January 2021, has reached its seventh episode. We had a chat with Mark about the impact radio has had on his life and his future plans with BOMBART.