Learning To Cope With Cowardice, the 1983 debut solo album by Mark Stewart, is to be reissued this January by Mute.
The album will be made available again alongside a release called The Lost Tapes, a 10-track collection of recently discovered, previously unreleased material. From that, you can hear ‘Paranoia’ above.
The package will be made available on double vinyl, double CD and as a limited edition double clear vinyl – a percentage of the profits from that will go to the Mercy Ships charity – with the release set for January 25.
"It was a real adventure discovering this forbidden history, a twisted tale of Muswell hillbillies, French pirates and a Dutch schizophrenic doctor doing psychic archaeology," Stewart says of the material that makes up The Lost Tapes. Adrian Sherwood, whose On-U Sound label released Learning To Cope With Cowardice says those tracks represent "the early childhood of the songs before Mark and me conducted frenzied, scorched earth, slash-and-burn, twenty hour mental, manic editing sessions at Crass’ studios that led to birthing the finished album."
The tracks that made up his debut solo album followed a period spent in New York discovering the burgeoning hip hop scene in the city after he disbanded The Pop Group in 1980.
You can pre-order the reissue here.
