“Not a simple or easy album… it’s almost as if they want you to run away screaming. Regardless, it’s a towering avant-garde work”: The prog power of The Pop Group’s Y

The Pop Group - Y.

Any band calling themselves The Pop Group are either stating the bleedin’ obvious or have a perverse sense of irony. In the instance of the Bristol five-piece it was a case of the latter.

They started in 1977, when the world was safety-pinned to the supposed anarchy of punk. But what vocalist Mark Stewart et al were doing was truly anarchic because they refused to bend to any conformity.