Forty Minutes Of Pop Will Eat Itself

This goose lives at Portland basin in Ashton- under-  Lyne, East Manchester. When we were there a couple of weeks ago they warned us that the geese were nesting and could be aggressive if disturbed. They didn't mention this one though, who has necked two cans of Stella and now wants a fight. 

Pop Will Eat Itself are touring this autumn. I'm quite tempted. Back in autumn 1988 I saw them at Liverpool University. In my head they were one of the first gigs I attended in Liverpool, close to the start of the academic year, maybe just after Fresher's Week- but false memory syndrome has had me here because according to PWEI's own On Patrol gig history at their website they didn't play the Mountford Hall until 2nd December 1988. There is a live recording of the gig on Mixcloud, probably one I bought at some point on cassette from the bootleg tape sellers in the student's union. 

The gig was great, PWEI hitting the stage and giving us an hour of their mash up of rock, rap, dance music and samples. The room was a real gathering of the late 80s tribes, grebos, indie kids, and goths all standing around waiting. I was wearing Levi's, Converse, a black t- shirt and dark green waistcoat (with Watchmen smiley face badge) combo with, for some reason, a bandanna tied round my head. This sticks in the memory for reasons I cannot fully ascertain- as does my conversation with Tracey, a hippy girl who was on my course. We had a chat, all going well, but at some point I referred to Poppie Clint as Clive and Tracey was withering in her look and response. 'Clint, Adam, he's called Clint'. They came on stage to rescue me from my embarrassment (Tracey later came with us to see The House Of Love in Widnes though that could have been because Al had a car). 

Stourbridge's finest were huge fun, a riot of sounds, samples, buzzsaw guitars and shouting. B.A.D. may have got their before them but they were fairly ground-breaking in their approach and records. The mix below reflects that I hope, forty minutes of late 80s and early 90s collisions of styles, pop culture references all over the place, focussing mainly on singles and finishing with a song released for Italia 90, an unlikely music- football- politics crossover.

Forty Minutes Of Pop Will Eat Itself

• The Incredible PWEI v Dirty Harry
• Can U Dig It (7" Mix)
• Dance Of The Mad
• Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me, Kill Me
• Karmadrome
• Wise Up Sucker
• Def. Con. One.
• Orgone Accumulator
• Inject Me
• Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina

The Incredible PWEI v Dirty Harry is from the 92 Degrees single from 1991, a superb acid house/ film sample fest. 

Can U Dig It was a single in 1989, from their second album, This Is The Day.. This Is The Hour... This Is This!, a list of influences and references from TV, film, comics, records and that sounds like what life felt like in 87/ 88 from The Twilight Zone to Alan Moore (knows the score), V For Vendetta and Into The Groovy, Run DMC and Renegade Soundwave, Marvel and DC. Wise Up Sucker is from the same album, a single too as is Def. Con. One., the lead single from 1988's This Is This!, the archetypal grebo rock song, a collision of punk, hip hop, rock, indie and samples. Inject Me was on the album too. 

Dance Of The Mad is from 1990, a single that lost the word Bastards from the end of the title to make it more acceptable for TV and radio play. Produced by Flood and taken from the third PWEI album, Cure For Sanity, and recorded at Paul Weller's Black Barn studio in Surrey. It's Weller's studio now, I'm not sure if he owned it then. I can't imagine much common ground in 1990 between Weller and the Poppies but who knows.

Eat, Me, Drink Me, Love Me, Kill Me and Karmadrome are from 1992, a double A- side single. You need both sides. 

Orgone Accumulator is a cover of the Hawkwind song from a 1987 covers EP along with Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Love Missile F1- 11.

Touched by The Hand Of Cicciolina is from Cure For Sanity and a summer 1990 single, one of the songs of the summer (a summer that wasn't short of memorable songs). It features/ pays tribute to Hungarian- Italian porn star Ilona Staller who was elected into the Italian parliament in 1987. A couple of years later she offered to have sex with Saddam Hussein in exchange for peace. The piano riff, Gary Linekar sample and chant of 'Cicicolina/ Ciciolina/ This time for I- tal- ya', are all PWEI gold. 

Quarterfinals

It's Friday and it's July. There are Euro 20 quarterfinals on over the weekend, including England Marxists taking on Ukraine tomorrow night, and the Tour de France is well under way. The sun has been shining and the summer holidays are within touching distance. 

Here's some music for tonight's Italy versus Belgium clash, a real heavyweight quarterfinal between a Belgium side packed with talent and well placed to win their first international trophy against a young, revitalised Italian team. In the Belgian end there's Rheinzand, Ghent's top of the table Balearic/ house/ disco outfit and a slice from their recently released remix album which features versions from the likes of Superpitcher, Skylab, In Flagranti and Chris Coco and this funky delight, a remix of Queen Of Dawn by Pete Herbert.

In the the curva sud for Italy we have Pop Will Eat Itself, the Black Country's grebo sampling kings who made the still fantastic sounding piano house tribute to Italia 90 and porn star turned politician Cicciolina. New Order get all the plaudits for making a credible/ good football record in the summer of 1990 and there's no doubt that World In Motion was a sign that things were changing, but Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina is that summer's secret weapon, the supersub who scores the winner in injury time. 

Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina (Extra Time Mix)

And for further extra time/ Friday fun Lorde's new single, Solar Power, has been spliced together with Loaded to make Lorded. It's the from Joe Muggs and it works. You can find it here . The original's no slouch either. 

Thunder Underbelly

Some epic leftfield music from Renegade Soundwave back in 1990 for a Saturday in early June. This is Thunder, techno/ electro built around a pounding breakbeat, a throbbing dubby bassline and a distorted guitar sample or two, intense dance music made for hot nights in dark nightclubs. There's a Perry Como sample buried in there too. Superb sounding stuff, over three decades since it was released. 

Thunder

From a few years later, 1994, this is Renegade Soundwave remixing Pop Will Eat Itself, a dark, dubbed out, claustrophobic, industrial piece of music, with samples this time from Tom Waits and Jeru The Damaja. 

Underbelly (Renegade Soundwave Blackout Mix)

Songs For Mothers

Today is Mother's Day. Mothering Sunday, to give it its full Anglophone title, is traditionally observe don the fourth Sunday in Lent, three weeks before Easter Day. Originally on this day people would visit their 'mother' church but it has become an occasion for honouring and celebrating the roles of mothers- and celebrating Mums is something that I think we can all agree on. I'd like to think that next Sunday, in Julian Cope's world or Samuel L. Jackson's, is Motherfucker Sunday but I can't find any evidence for that as yet.

Two songs with mother in the title by way of celebration. First up Pop Will Eat Itself and a 1992 song that opens with some acid house bleeps, then a furious barrage of guitars and the line ''I gave you grief, you gave me milk'. Clint goes on to apologise to his Mum by saying 'I never planned to disappoint you or annoy you to desert you or destroy you'. A familiar tale.

Mother

Can released Mothersky in 1970, a song on their Soundtracks album, with a full cream groove from Liebezeit and Czukay. This re-edit by Pilooski tweaks it for the modern age. Damo Suzuki sings of mothers and madness.

Mothersky (Pilooski Re-edit)

My Favourite Way Of Getting Kicks

A last 1987 song for this week and I'm not even sure it's a very good one. Pop Will Eat Itself's Box Frenzy album was awash with drum machine and samples and on songs like There Is No Love Between Us Anymore they came up with something relatively original, a Midlands take on hip-hop/sampling with indie guitars. The song the album was equally well known for was Beaver Patrol, which opened with a sample 'Attention young ladies!', some crunchy guitar, crashing drum machine beat and then the line 'My favourite way of getting kicks, I go down town and I hustle chicks- beaver patrol'. From there on in it's a question of trying to work out if this is tongue in cheek, humorous, serious, a wind up or what.

Beaver Patrol

It seems like most people were totally unaware this was a cover- I know I was for many years (until a friend bought me the Pebbles garage compilation in the early 90s). The Wilde Knights wrote the original, a 60s organ and guitar garage song. Somehow I'm pretty sure The Wilde Knights were totally serious.

Beaver Patrol

Touched By The Hand Of...

...Cicciolina, Cicciolina.

In May 1990 Pop Will Eat Itself released a single just ahead of the Italia 90 World Cup. PWEI intended it as an alternative World Cup theme and let's face it, given how corrupt FIFA is/was, no one would really have batted an eyelid at a dance single by a West Midlands grebo band fronted by an Italian porn star turned politician. Plus, as a song, it's massively good fun. House pianos. Dub bassline. Horns. Fans chanting. Commentary.

Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina (Extra Time Mix)

Rich Lane has recently done a Cotton Dub re-edit of it, updating it for 2017 in fine style. No download unfortunately but again, massively good fun.

Home Sweet Home

Following in a line from yesterday's post, a wobbly line maybe but a line nonetheless, comes this long, blissful, dubbed out remix of Pop Will Eat Itself by The Orb themselves. This remix takes Pop Will Eat Itself into all sorts of places they might not have got to on their own- a proper excursion on the version. The Orb's remixes from the early-to-mid 90s are compiled on a pair of double cd albums called Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty which I can't recommend highly enough if you don't have them. They can be picked up pretty cheaply second hand too.

Home (Home Sweet Home Remix)

All You Gotta Do Is Hustle

Tom Courtenay has just said to Pattie Boyd, while walking Thameside in the rain in 1966, 'Yeah, so actually my favourite way of getting kicks is to go down town and hustle chicks', and Pattie has replied 'You what pal?' Leaving Tom to dig his way out of the whole Beaver Patrol problem.

The original of yesterday's Poppies cover.

Beaver Patrol

My Favourite Way Of Getting Kicks

There's a grebo reunion package tour about to do the rounds- Jesus Jones, The Wonderstuff and Pop Will Eat Itself. Steady, don't rush off to Ticketmaster all at once. If Jesus Jones were playing in our back garden I'd pull the blinds down and turn up the TV, and The Wonderstuff would probably turn the bar into a giant magnet but I'd quite enjoy PWEI. I saw them in my first term as a student at Liverpool University and they were dead good fun. I'm sure I'm not the only one who didn't know Beaver Patrol was a cover until much later as well (Shadows Of Knight, 60s nugget band). Beaver Patrol is of course infantile, purile and sexist. At the gig, autumn '88, I was talking to a grebo girl I quite fancied. I was wearing a bandanna (around my head) and a white shirt with a waistcoat. Thought I was cutting quite a dash. I only realised later that several times I'd referred to PWEI's Clint as Clive. Although maybe it was the bandanna that damaged my chances more.

Beaver Patrol