After three decades The Pop Group is recording and touring again. Was there a sudden urge to wake people the fuck up again?

For sure, with an insane clown president, the world seems to be spinning off its axis, it’s the end of certainty.  It seems to me to be a honeymoon on mars, none more alien.

A lot of contemporary rock bands are described as post-punk revival. Is The Pop Group now one of them?

No way! The only way they are ever going to put us in a box is in our coffins.  The whole point of doing the Pop Group again was to treat it as a completely new project, not to repeat the sins of the past.  I see heritage acts as a kind of necrophilia.

Or is the authentic post-punk spirit still very alive as of today?

It is with us, for me punk blew down the walls and opened up an ocean of possibilities and today we’re picking on brand new sounds and tropes to experiment with in our secret laboratory. These are different times, strange days indeed.

In an interview Nick Cave once described The Pop Group as violent, paranoid music for a violent, paranoid time. Ironically this was even before we had to deal with Brexit, Trump and Russian cyberwarfare. Seems like we didn’t make any progression at all. Or aren’t times that bad?

Nick’s case holds even more true now and my younger self could not possibly imagine what SUCKERS people have become.

Het Bos means ‘the forest’. A place where you can easily get lost, but maybe see some new and exciting things along the way. What are you hoping to run into at Het Bos? In other words, what can we expect of The Pop Group?

I once did a chaos magic ritual in a bizarre forest outside Bristol, and out concerts are often as Kenneth Anger would say, invocations and a gathering of freaks of every sort.  For me the audience is in a true punk-rock sense more important perhaps than the spectacle and for me going to concerts is a way of meeting new like minded freeeeaks, a temporary autonomous zone.  Please leave your preconceptions at the door and dance like no one is watching, naked in the forest.  Expect pure primal NRG.

interview door Mich Segers (medewerker, Het Bos)

The Pop Group speelt op 3 Februari in Het Bos.
http://hetbos.be/agenda/2017/2/3/#1156