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.