‘TASTE IS A FORM OF PERSONAL CENSORSHIP’
– Mark Stewart
The groundbreaking, enduringly influential artist Mark Stewart presents his eighth solo album ‘The Fateful Symmetry’, a vital new masterwork completed shortly before his untimely passing in April 2023.
Across an illustrious career of pioneering music with The Pop Group, Mark Stewart & 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.
On first single and album opener ‘Memory of You’, co-produced with Youth (Killing Joke), and featuring backing vocals by Hollie Cook, Stewart unfurls a propulsive, post-disco torch song, a surging neo-noir of yearning vocals (“I could’ve wrote a love song”) and sleek, imposing synthesis, representing one of Stewart’s most dramatic and affecting performances. 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.”
For Youth, “Memory of You’ not only illustrates what a great singer Mark was but what a great writer he was too… the melody and lyrics could be from the Walker Brothers or a 50s crooner like [Frank] Sinatra; timeless yet still ahead of the pack.”
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.
Testifying to Stewart’s 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 normalised, always extraordinary.
The Fateful Symmetry is released on 11 July 2025 via Mute, Stewart’s long-standing label, helmed by old friend and kindred spirit Daniel Miller.
THE FATEFUL SYMMETRY TRACKLISTING
- Memory Of You
- Neon Girl
- This Is The Rain
- Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime (Bébe Durmiendo Cumbia Bootleg)
- Stable Song
- Twilight’s Child
- Crypto Religion
- Blank Town
- A Long Road
