Mark Stewart And The Maffia Learning To Cope With Cowardice

Learning To Cope With Cowardice – the ground-breaking debut solo album by visionary post-punk iconoclast Mark Stewart – is to be given a definitive reissue alongside The Lost Tapes, a newly discovered cache of unreleased material. After disbanding The Pop Group in the wake of a final performance at a momentous Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in 1980, Stewart had grown disillusioned with the UK’s music industry. Besides working for CND, Stewart had embarked on a prolonged visit to New York the same year, where he encountered a nascent hip-hop scene anchored by Kiss FM’s Kool DJ Red Alert. Together with the sounds of inner-city construction sites – in particular the heavyweight impact of pile drivers – his exposure to the pioneering cut-and-paste of early hip-hop represented an epiphany that catalyzed Stewart’s daring next project.   Alongside this faithful reissue of the original comes The Lost Tapes, a collection that represents the outcome of a painstaking search and arrangement of previously unheard material. Brought together into a sequence of embryonic prototypes, frenzied dub versions and new archive discoveries, The Lost Tapes chronicles the early ideas and unknown stories that defined the outset of Stewart and Sherwood’s vastly influential work together.