Mark Stewart on The Pop Group reunion

Mark’s a giant of a man. He’s one of those guys who has to stoop to get in rooms. He looks - to borrow his favourite word - like a clash of a 50s matinee idol, Reg Presley of The Troggs and an Easter Island Statue come angrily to life. His head’s velocity is too fast for anyone currently trapped in his orbit. I see Jim Sclavunous (Bad Seeds/Grinderman/occasional Quietus writer) afterwards and say that ideally I’d like to interview Stewart again because even though I liked him, maybe I'd caught him on a particularly manic day. Spending two hours with him was a bit like spending 20 hours trapped on a passenger jet that's full of children and constantly threatening to fall out of the sky. Jim smiles indulgently and says that he's always out there: "I've known Mark for years and he's always been far out on some distant cosmic plain that makes him hard to reach sometimes."

During the interview in The Griffin on Leonard Street, I feel like his brain is skimming on far ahead like a stone across a pond surface. I ask one thing and he answers some other question that I’ve not even dreamed up yet. He's like a chess grandmaster who has malfunctioned and found himself suddenly only able to play the moves that are the furthest ahead - ten steps into the future. These moves may make sense to him but don't always to those round him. There is much bright and probably brilliant talk occluded into partial uselessness by this. He reacts to everything around him. His face darts about changing expression constantly. He isn’t pulling focus and he’s omni-intent on the interview, my beard, the barwoman, his friends Andy Fraser of Some Friendly and Paul Smith of Blast First sat at the bar, the cold wave compilation being played on the stereo, his notes that he has written onto a sheet of paper in front of him, something else that he can see over my shoulder. He sneers loudly at nearly everything I say in about an hour and a half which can, and does, get slightly grating. Even if I had turned up totally unprepared, which I haven't, I still would have hit the mark with at least a third of the questions. He’s a nice guy though and an energizing presence. It’s sad he comes into this naturally presuming I’m on the opposite side to him. Part of him still acts as if it’s 1980 and the guy from the NME is here to stitch him up. In fact he constantly refers to me as being from the weekly (which I do write for) but he doesn’t hear when I tell him that the piece is for a more humble institution.

He admits himself that he's frozen in time in some ways: "I haven't changed since I was 14."...

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John Doran @'The Quietus'