This past Friday, Mark Stewart died at the age of 62. Stewart was best-known as the leader of the Pop Group, the UK post-punk insurrectionists who never sold too many records but whose aggressive avant-funk sound influenced a ton of other artists. One of those artists was Nick Cave, who’s always been vocal about how the Pop Group “changed everything” for him as a young man in Australia. Today, Cave has written a heartfelt eulogy for Stewart in his Red Hand Files newsletter, elaborating on all the ways that the Pop Group impacted his own band the Birthday Party.

In The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave writes that the Birthday Party moved to UK “partly because of The Pop Group”:

We truly loved them, were mystified by them, playing their strange, utterly unique music non-stop, barely able to comprehend what it was we were actually listening to. For us, cut off from the world in Australia, The Pop Group embodied the wild and creative promise of the UK. If we could only get there, we thought, everything would be all right, because that’s where The Pop Group came from.

Cave writes that the Birthday Party found the UK to be “crushingly disappointing” but that the band was newly inspired after witnessing a Pop Group show:

I remember waiting in the darkened venue for them to come on, bummed out about England, listening to some ambient music wafting out of the speakers, when suddenly and without warning The Pop Group strode onto stage and ploughed into the opening song with such indomitable force and such sudden visceral rage that I could barely breathe. It was the most exciting and ferocious concert of my young life – everything changed at that moment and we, as a fledgling band, knew then what we needed to do. I think The Birthday Party truly became The Birthday Party that night – more musically adventurous, more anarchic, more confronting, more dangerous.

Cave goes on to write about his friendship with Mark Stewart and claims that the Pop Group’s “We Are All Prostitutes” has “the greatest opening twenty seconds of any song ever recorded.” Read his piece here.