99. Pop Will Eat Itself - Covers (EP) (Chapter 22)

Two weeks at number one from 13th June 1987

Pop Will Eat Itself are one of the few groups I can vividly remember entering and exiting my life. The first memory involves me joyfully taking my meagre paper round money to HMV, rushing to the “P” section in the racks and finding a copy of their album “Box Frenzy”. “This is the stuff!” I thought while looking at the cheaply designed sleeve (complete with unflattering photos of the group swigging from tins of lager).

I took it to the till, watched it being rung up, and took the hour’s bus journey home from Southend precinct to listen to it. The number 1 route towards the smaller South East Essex towns was always an indirect, circling, dawdling trip which nonetheless built up anticipation – sleeve notes would be devoured, labels inspected, and sometimes abuse would be yelled by other kids from my school sitting behind me, asking why I hadn’t bought a Public Enemy record instead (fair comment in retrospect, and one PWEI would probably get on board with). When I got home and my Dad asked to see what I bought (“I hope you’re broadening your tastes a bit”) his face fell.

The second memory is me almost exactly ten years later, looking at a box of records in my parent’s spare room, trying to rationalise my collection and lighten my life load before moving into yet another short-lived and chaotic houseshare (things would get worse before they got better). My hand fell on “Box Frenzy” and placed it into the “discard” pile with barely a second’s thought. “I’ll never play that again,” I thought to myself, and sure enough, I don’t think I’ve even so much as streamed it online since.

So what was it about the group which elicited excitement in a fourteen year old paperboy’s heart but only prompted thoughtless dismissal in the head of a broke, chaotic, twenty-four year old almost-man? Those are two very different reactions, occurring at distinct periods, and it strikes me that it’s not just about the naïveté of my youth. We’re not quite hearing it on this EP, but Pop Will Eat Itself jumped on to hip-hop and sampling culture just at the right moment, signposting their allegiances and habits with upfront glee (they even supported Public Enemy live, though it should be noted that they were bottled off). The group described themselves as “Robin Hoods”, taking from other people’s work to enhance their own. They enjoyed comparing their pilfering to serious law-breaking on their records - “Crime circles, waves, and passes by/ Uh, sorry no speech, we really must fly!” they declare on the album’s not entirely serious ‘statement of purpose’ finale “Hit The Hi-Tech Groove”.

There was one other group in the indie charts doing precisely the same thing at this point, namely The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, soon to become the KLF. The difference in media technique here is startling, however. The Poppies swigged beer, belched and sang football songs as they marched through life, coming across like unruly schoolboys stealing Trebor sweets from the newsagents. Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, were evasive and continually one step ahead of the journalists they spoke to. They never directly claimed to be sonic outlaws, jokingly or otherwise; they let the press draw that conclusion by themselves. Master criminals never openly brag about their daring heists – they let others report on them and speculate instead.

What’s interesting in retrospect is how underdeveloped the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu were at this point. Two tracks aside, “1987 What The Fuck Is Going On” is an unholy mess, reams of sticky-back plastic disintegrating against the weight of crudely edited samples which sound as if they’ve been cut with a dinner table knife. It’s like one of Chris Hill’s novelty cut-up records in places, failing to resist the temptation to floodlight how appropriately placed some of the copyright theft is, each sample lined up as a nudge-nudge wink-wink gag.

“Box Frenzy”, on the other hand, mixes genuinely quite witty couplets with piss-taking samples from recent hit singles (nothing too cool or knowing here) rapping that perhaps veers too close to shouting for comfort, and some porn film loops and casual misogyny (and even though most of that sexism stems from a cover version, nobody forced the group to record it at gunpoint). For all that chaos, however, there’s a strangely neat order to most of it, a sense of an album that was actually vaguely produced at FON, not just pulled together in a wild fury.

The central problem was that Pop Will Eat Itself had no mystery. They were loud. They were crude. They had creativity and wit, but it was unvarnished. The band journalists most frequently compared them to was the pre-Paul’s Boutique Beastie Boys. High praise in 1987, less so by the following year.

Prior to that album, the group released lo fidelity indie records with a trashy, punky vibe, getting on the C86 compilation almost by virtue of their DIY cheapness rather than anything else. At the point the “Covers EP” came out, PWEI were almost but not quite out of the chrysalis, moments away from the madness of “Box Frenzy” but still, to all intents and purposes, a guitar-based act with occasional raps on the side.

The first track on offer on this EP, a cover of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s recent hit “Love Missile F1-11”, is smart because it takes the digital twitter and stutter of the Moroder produced original and reminds us that basic, churning rock and roll was the blueprint beneath all that futurism after all. PWEI’s version is explosive and thrilling, turning the heat up on the best bits of an idea which was always trying too hard to second-guess where music was going next. “Who cares about your weird Clockwork Orange inspired pretensions, let’s rock” seems to be their thinking, and perhaps somebody could try that method with Campag Velocet next.

The rest of the EP consists of an equally scrappy but less successful Hawkwind cover (“Orgone Accumulator”), a deeply unexpected but shimmering Shriekback cover (“Everything That Rises”) and finally a stab at a recent indie smash, Mighty Lemon Drops’ “Like An Angel”, which also incorporates bits of Teardrop Explodes "When I Dream". It’s hard to draw many conclusions from the buffet on offer, apart from the fact PWEI appear to have picked up on these tracks because they enjoyed them, and wanted to put their own stamp on them, and all that usual soundcheck jazz; but none seem like radical reinterpretations by comparison, and it’s clear why the cover of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s only significant hit was prioritised for the radio DJs.

It’s also hard to find anything more to say about the project as a whole, beyond reflecting on how much press goodwill surrounded the group at this point. By the tail end of the year, “Box Frenzy” would be listed as the 49th best album of the year in the NME end-of-year critic’s poll, which seems absurdly generous in hindsight. Leading up to that, “Love Missile F1-11” is probably the first single of theirs which hints they were more than just a noisy grebo outfit and had keen pairs of ears and a sense of where music was heading in the late eighties – and if it sounds like little more than an effervescent racket by 2026 standards, it’s worth harking back to that brief pre-Shoom, post-synth pop era where it felt as if anything could and should happen, but no one idea had really completely captured the national imagination yet. At that point, four greasers sleeping in the back of a van with a sampler (probably) bought from Tandys felt as if they might conceivably be the future. Their music tastes were so vast that they potentially had broad appeal.

Greater reflection than that seems unnecessary. PWEI are probably the most “straightforward” band we’ve covered since the Anti-Nowhere League; their output is stronger, and they’re operating to different principles, but nonetheless there’s a reason their racket enticed the fourteen year old me into a record shop yet repelled my older self. Suburban kids love loud brashness. So, briefly, did the music press, if it had hi-tech knobs on.

We were all a bit less sophisticated back then. Perhaps what we were loudly yelling and chanting was for someone to show us the way. If you play the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s “1987” again, you’ll hear an unlisted track which offers fragments of a Top of the Pops episode consisting mostly of re-releases and cover versions, after which Bill Drummond screeches “Fuck that, that’s not the Jams!” A gap was wide open for something fresh to enter. In June 1987, we didn’t necessarily have a clear idea about what that would be, but the answer was a matter of months away.

New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts

14. The Fall – The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit)

Peak position: 6


25. Billy Bragg – The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit)​

Peak position: 5

26. The Passmore Sisters – Every Child In Heaven (Sharp)

Peak position: 15


The Passmore Sisters formed in 1983 and steadily built their profile in the years that followed, attracting late night radio play (especially from John Peel) and enthusiastic press, but surprisingly few signs of bigger action despite that. "Every Child In Heaven" has a peculiar Americana feel to it, totally out of sorts with the group's Bradford origins, and almost sounds as if it could have been a bargaining chip towards a major label deal, but to no avail.

The group disintegrated later in the year, with bass player Howard Taylor and guitarist Brian Roberts joining The Hollow Men, who signed to Arista and achieved a greater deal of cult success in the process.

30. Redskins – The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit)​

Peak position: 21


Week Two


20. Guana Batz - Rock This Town (ID)

Peak position: 20


And what might this be – a revival of a revival of a revival? Perhaps pop was eating itself after all. Psychobilly legends Guana Batz pick up The Straycats 1981 rock and roll hit single “Rock This Town” and give it a spirited live rendition at the Klub Foot, ridding it of the eighties sheen and making it sound as if it always was recorded by some terrifying greased-up farmhands in leather in 1958. It works – but of course it does. 

29. Hotline - Rock This House (Rhythm King)

Peak position: 24

And by pure serendipity, the future being rocked meets the past being rocked. Hotline were a duo consisting of producers Tony Powell and Trevor Russell whose activities in 1987 were ahead of the game, understanding that House music wasn’t just an underground fad but held broader potential. “Rock This House” was the first of four singles on Rhythm King, and while they never realised their obvious crossover potential, their records are actually beautiful neon-lit explorations where smooth funk meets the early kicks of House rhythms.

While later House records were hyperactive and vaguely anonymous, Hotline added distinctive bedroom seduction vocals and slick synth washes, creating records which were perfect for the car trip to the nightclub as well as actually being heard on the dancefloor later. If anything, the complexity and orderliness of this record acts against them getting any real credit in the House Hall Of Fame; it’s hard to imagine any club DJ touching this as a retro spin, as it lacks the ecstatic pull of the genre’s later, more established singles. That doesn’t mean to say its coolness and grace isn’t appealing in its own right, though.

 

For the complete charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number Ones In The National Charts

Whitney Houston: "I Wanna Dance With Somebody Who Loves Me" (Arista)

The Firm: "Star Trekkin'" (Bark)