3. The Pop GroupWe Are Time
Again it comes back to the punk ethos: that idea that you can do whatever you fucking want to. D. Boon said punk was whatever you wanted it to be. Here you had The Pop Group putting Beefheart with Funkadelic… and why the fuck not! Why not put Beefheart with Funkadelic?! It’s like that Jam song ‘Art School’: "Do what you want/ This is the new art school". D. Boon was a painter, remember, and so he loved that line. Also, The Jam and The Pop Group were singing in their own accents, rather than trying to sound like the US bands That was important for Minutemen, ’cause then we thought, "hey, we can sound like we’re from Pedro!" Another idea we got from The Pop Group was a lyrics thing – something D. Boon called "talking out loud". It was about, like, saying whatever came into your head, no matter what.
But, man, that band got D Boon and I fired up like motherfuckers. Mark Stewart… incredible man… fuckin’ almost seven-foot tall or something. I couldn’t believe I got to meet him. I wanted to ask him like a million questions. I got to play his town, y’know: Bristol. It’s a water town, a port town, like Pedro.
