Apopalypse Now!

NME Feature -29.04.89

Bugger off you ugly cow!', ... "Keep your 'orrible trap shut in future, you tart! Sod off back under your stone, you disgustin' little. . ."

It's two am, chucking out time in Birmingham's Powerhouse nightclub, and five epically pissed-up blokes are screaming abuse into the horror-filled face of one tiny girl. They are Pop Will Eat Itself (plus their - overtly -devoted manager. Craig) and she is the hapless Mags from Fuzzbox. Two weeks ago she described Clint Poppie in graphically unflattering terms and now she's had the misfortune to bump into the band while unarmed. Vocal vengeance is being taken with gusto.

Lankiest, loudest and lewdest among the frothing five is Clint himself. It is, after all, his porcelain-fragile sensibilities that have been so sorely assaulted. Leather-cased legs apart and groin gyrating, he offers the cowering Mags a flailing middle-finger salute. "Come on, you ratbag," he howls. "Come and get some of 'the least attractive man in the Universe'. . ."

At last! A genuine, full-force, art-of-the-state Pop Will Eat itself Incident! For a while there, I thought I was going to have to apologise for this piece's lack of them.

When I accepted this mission (two days - and worse, two nights! - being 'entertained' by the foursome with the scuzziest, scabbiest, scruffiest reputation of all the current Britpop crop) I'd fully expected such outrages. But on this first evening they've been a hellish long time coming:

At the Digbeth Irish Centre (where Front 242 strutted their laughably dated stuff between two enormous wallmounted shamrocks!) Graham, Clint, Adam and Richard had been models of attentive civility. And at the Powerhouse, prior to The Incident, the unacceptable behaviour had been restricted to gratuitous eyeball swivelling at every square centimetre of remotely exposed mammary, and a few disrespectful comments on the general direction of the divine REM!

And all the while an ever more lager-loosened Clint is blistering my ear about the need to avoid yet another lads-on-the-piss-and-the-pull PWEI story, about all the important things they've got to say. The full Serious Artist bit.

AS I collapse wearily into manager Craig's spare bed, therefore I'm saying a small relieved prayer of gratitude: Thank you, gods of journalism, for Mags from Fuzzbox...

Not many hours later I awake in a puddle of perspiration, the room a sauna. So rat-arsed was Craig the previous night that he'd left the oven- in the kitchen directly below me - full on all night. And his key in the front door. Through the hissing mist of steam and condensation I remember why I volunteered for this nonsense in the first place...

In the years since they arrived saying `grrrr`, Pop Will Eat Itself have transformed themselves from a belligerently amusing buzzability curiosity into the rock/rap monster that assailed the astonished ears of their new(ish) RCA paymasters at their recent Town & Country Club showcase.

That night they veered wildly between the shambolic and the seamless, the snarlingly aggressive and the oafishly endearing, the shitcart and the Lord Mayor's Show. But most of all, amidst the swirl of tapes, samples, backdrops, icons, slogans, smoke, ice, tantrums, lights and noise, they were just brilliant, a perfect fusion of boyish rock fantasies and techno-brutal hip-hop realities. And funny too.

Stripped to the waist, crotch-driven and sweat-basted, Clint onstage is a cartoon sex god. Jim Morrison escaped from an episode of Scooby Doo! The ludicrous encore, Sputnik's 'F1-11', Hawkwind's 'Orgone Accumulator' and Zodiac's `Prime Mover', three cock-rock anthems by bands even more despised by the hip style-tyrants than themselves! merely cemented my startled realisation that this is very possibly the best live band in Britain today...

And now I've heard their new LP!

Snappily titled 'This Is The Day, This Is The Hour, This Is This', it's a chromium plated gob-smacker. On it, every record, radio jingle. slang phrase, TV programme, flyposter, advert, cop film and dodgy comic you've ever read, seen or heard -the whole incessant fizz and clang of pop culture - has been sucked into a giant tumble dryer.

There they've been shaken, shaped, shuffled, shocked. shifted and shafted before being smashed, crashed, dashed, thrashed, mashed and lashed into this album's relentless brew of shiny Meccano rhythms, runaway rawk guitars and loopily effective samples and FX.

Alongside the familiar singles -'Def Con One, 'Can U Dig It? and the current chart-cracker 'Wise Up! Sucker - there are, amongst others. the cruelty irreverent JB-baiting of 'Not Now James, We're Busy', the apocalyptic heaviosity of 'The Fuses Have Been Lit' and the hangover hell of 'Wake Up, Time To Die. Together they coagulate into a chattering battering, clattering, pattering shattering beast of a thing, an ambitious quantum leap forward from the sixth-form yap'n'pap of 'Box Frenzy`.

They've overcome the 'Beaver Patrol' outcry, the Public Enemy debacle and the London Records signing farce. On both stage and record, Pop Will Eat Itself have defied the odds and dropped their trousers to the doubters. They have, quite simply. arrived...

"The House of Love?… The House of F****** Love!? It's enough to make you vomit…"

Maybe 'arrived' is too strong a word. For a week now PWEI have, according to their manager, been suffering from PMT. That's 'Pre-Midweek-Tension' a gut-sickness that afflicts those forced to wait for the (unofficial, record company supplied) midweek chart position for their new single.

To ensure that precious radio play and TV exposure - and with them Top Of The Pops, unimaginable wealth, wall-to-wall goddesses and undying fame - the record has to have a midweek position of 40 or above. Deep in the bowels of UB40's Abattoir studio where The Poppies are preparing backing tapes for their upcoming tours of Britain and America - the band have just heard from RCA's London command bunker. And I'm trying not to laugh.'. . . Sucker' has entered the chart at a midweek position of 41!

To add insult to perceived injury, the week's other notable new rock release, The House Of Love's 'Never' has gone in at a very healthy 27. Cue another storm of abuse...

Craig reassures his lads, in that way peculiar to all pop managers (it's called flannel) that all will be well, that No 41 will ensure an orgy of collective gutbusting by RCA's marketing zombies. Clint, for one, is unconvinced -"if that's the case, then logically we'd have been better off going in at number one hundred and soddin' seventy! ...

Whatever its fate, 'Wise Up! Sucker' will not of course be PWEI's first hit, and I start an interview that will, over the next 12 hours, tortuously unfold in a mess of studio booths, pool rooms, greasy spoons, public houses and moving taxis, by asking how they felt when their virgin (sort of) smash, 'Can U Dig It ?' slithered into the Top 40 earlier this year. A babble of excited recollection ensues; Pop Will Eat Itself are nothing if not enthusiasts:

"I was shaking!" howls Adam, the bearded one, " shaking like a shifting dog. .."

Clint's experience didn't feature pavement-fouling at all: "I sat there listening to the charts with my mum and dad and heard the guy say 'and at 38, new entry, Po Will Eat Itself'. Adam, who was over the road came across…. we were just totally chuffed, had a drink and all that… my mum and dad were chuffed too.

"Basically," chimes in Richard, the nearest thing PWEI has to the handsome one, "listening to the' radio that evening - not expecting the record to be in the charts, but hoping it was - was like Christmas morning; you hope you're gonna get Scalectrix but you open the present real carefully in case it isn't."

"You know how it is." Adam is no longer shaking like a pooping poodle, "as a kid you idolise, The Clash or The Banshees or whoever and you think it'd be great to be in a band. So then you get in a band and you hope for your first gig, then your first review and so on. Getting into the charts was part of that. . ."

" Yeah, " laughs Clint, "our first live review was of the very first band we were all in together, before Wild And Wandering even, called From Eden. We supported The Scientists and it was in the NME ... tore us apart.. ."

"The bit that referred to us was a total of seven words!" Richard gloats. "It said '. . . after the blundering glam of From Eden. . ."

"Shhh here comes the bit with Martin Balsam's speech... turn it up, you bastard...brilliant!! .."

'Regimented' is not a word that readily applies to Pop Will Eat Itself's work methods. The apparently vital backing tracks are pretty much left to the studio engineer while our heroes slurp canned lager and suck on Kentucky Fried chicken bones in the TV lounge.

The Poppies, it's fair to say, like television. Or, rather, they like bits of it a whole lot. On each and every one of the last 10 days they've watched a video of the courtroom classic Twelve Angry Men, of Mike Leigh's TV play Nuts in May, of East of Ipswich - " Michael Palin's gentle comedy" of selected episodes of Auf Weidersehen Pet and of the promisingly titled film Dutch Girls. Until you've seen four nominally sane blokes racing round a table to accurately recreate entire scenes from Twelve Angry Men (With Black Country accents) you just haven't lived.

In a tight schedule like this of course, boring old things like press interviews have to be slotted into the between-vid intermissions. So who, I wonder in such a break, are these people who have catapulted `Wise Up! Sucker` to the giddy heights of number 41 (midweek!) in the national charts? Who the hell listens to Pop Will Eat Itself?

"I dunno," Clint wades in, "but if I was 15, 16, 17, whatever, I wouldn't be listening to Pop Will Eat Itself. I'd be listening to bands like The House of Love. Even now I can't believe we've got what the biz calls a `fan base`. I really don't know who we speak to. I can see the appeal of The House Of Love, The Wedding Present and Morrissey; I can see what they're up to. And they're all old enough to know better. I don't know why they'd want to speak to the people that they reach. I don't. Why, when you're older, 30 or 34 or something, are you still singing about insecurity? What, he concludes sneerily, "has Morrissey got to be insecure about? I ask you, what?"

"Absolutely nothing..." Richard pipes up authoritatively, "apart from the fact that he can't get laid 'cos he's put it about that he's celibate..."

'This Is The Day. This Is The Hour. This Is This' is, like I said, pop-crazed, a huge distorting mirror, scrambling and redirecting all the trash that gets beamed into the Poppies' collective noodle, the sound of a world waist-deep in video arcade games. First hearing is like standing beneath a 45-minute shower of sparks. With its overlapping, intertwined gapless tracks, it owes something at least to Public Enemy's 'Nation Of Millions'.

PWEI agree. And disagree:

"Yeah," hmmms Adam `the way it's structured, the way the tracks are interlinked, that does come from the Public Enemy LP 'cos that's what's happening now, but basically we got the idea from old Hawkwind albums. Their LPs- like 'Quark Strangeness And Charm'- run from end to end with no gaps."

Clint has a more contemporary fellow-traveller for his LP: "I saw Birdland recently and they just ploughed through everything. That was f***ing great, that was. I found that really exciting."

"What we wanted." Graham adds, "was for it to sound like this massive barrage of stuff. The ideal first reaction would be 'what the f*** is this? The flip side of that is that a lot of people will probably dismiss it on the first listen, will say 'oh it's a mess'. That's just the way it goes though."

And who will be parting with coin of the realm to own it?

"People who're as f***ed up as us."

"Ordinary people basically... bods."

'People who bought our early records probably won't buy it. They more than likely hate our guts by now. '

I know that this will sound like so much wank, but I really don't care I f it gets slagged, in some quarters. Like for instance Smash Hits…"

Pop Will Eat Itself could hardly be more upfront about their new record. They know how good it is. Press reviews are only one channel from which they'll be gaining feedback about it. Clint warms to his theme:

"Other things are important. Like there's this guy called who works with The Wonder Stuff and who used to work with The Clash. He was out the other night with Mick Jones who was saying that Pop Will Eat Itself are a good band, that he likes what we do. But what he just couldn't accept was that the likes of us or The Wonder Stuff could have used The Clash as an influence."

Maybe he needs to look a little closer to home. BAD, however lame of late, are one of the few species relatives that the Poppies have in these islands.

"Sure. I can see that comparison." concedes Adam, "but Mick Jones liking what we do just makes me feel strange. Good, but strange. It's brilliant that one of my heroes has even head of us. ."

"Adam and me went to see The Clash at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall in 1978. We got right down the front and just stood there in awe..."

"Me and Clint were the sort of kids who queued up for hours then ran to prime spot in front of the stage, then refused to move from that exact spot. We didn't realise that if you was tough you stuck at the bar all night, and then, when The Clash came on, you barged down the front and told someone 'hey mate, your mum's on the phone'.

The only other Brit who's so far made a totally convincing fist of the harder edge of the rock/rap/sampling camp is Adrian Sherwood when he's got his Tackhead hat on. Yet the poor blighter struggles to even get his universally acclaimed records released. You must feel for someone like him, surely?

"To be perfectly truthful," Clint shrugs, "I don't give a toss about Tackhead. It's like us moaning about not getting any radio exposure. You do what you do and you accept the limitations. You've got to be realistic."

"Anyway," Graham concurs, "Tackhead deliberately set out to be extreme. If he was that bothered, he'd change his songs to make them more commercial".

Only Richard sounds a less than stern note: "Well, I must admit that I'd be pretty pissed off at people doing watered down versions of things that I was doing two years ago and making more money at it than me..."

"But that's always the way!" Clint's in full cry now: "It's like Elvis Presley making money out of black man rock'n'roll. That's always the way it's gonna be - you'll never sell extremist things to the mass populace 'til it gets watered down and people can accept and deal with it."

"What you're up against is this: My sister lives at home with us, and Leanne, her six-year-old has got the Kylie Minogue album and plays It to death. That's the reality - if they heard our LP, they'd like it but ."

"The first record I ever owned when I was 10, was an album . ." Richard is about to say something memorable you can tell, "…by The Wombles..."

"0i, you lot what the f*** do you think you're up to?..."

In the playground of a downtown Stourbridge school, Clint, Adam and I are being yelled at by the

caretaker. This, on reflection, is hardly a surprise; it's three o'clock in the morning!

We've ended up here after a night at the local rock club which is called The Rock Club! In that hell-hole, a musical menu Of Motorhead, Maiden, Metallica and more Motorhead is ravenously devoured by a clientele whose hairy, muscled, tattooed bodies bulge through Guns 'n' Roses singlets. Quite a few boys go there too!

After his standard lager-frenzy (and stopping only to lay down a couple of times in the main street! Clint has decided to relive a chunk of his youth for me, to return to his (and Adam's) old school. And a genuinely fine establishment it looks too. Architecturally impressive and reeking of grammar-type tradition. It counts among its former pupils both Samuel Johnson and Robert Plant. It's called King Edward's and Clint naturally has a chip on his shoulder about it.

"They humiliated me here." - He hisses through near to tears clenched teeth, "They f****** humiliated me."

Then he's off to the yard's dark corners on some kind of nightmare trip down memory lane. Adam reckons he might be laying all this on a bit thick:

"All I can really remember him doing was spending every breaktime holding hands with this girl, leant up against that wall over there. Then the break would end and they'd walk back to the class, still hand in hand.

'I had a rougher time. My older brothers had been head boy and sports captain, those sort of things. I remember one teacher getting hold of me and telling me 'your brothers were a credit to this school, a credit; but you you're like something scraped up off Brighton beach after a Bank Holiday Monday.'

Clint hoves back into view, still tearfully muttering about how they "made me feel small, really small." I rather helpfully suggest when he becomes a global superstar he'll be able to buy this place. This notion cheers him up a bit.

"Yeah, buy the f***ing place, then kick' em all out on their arses."

From his bedroom window across the square, the caretaker very generously informs us that he's called the Police. We scarper. As we slip back into the silent stillness of the Stourbridge night, my mind is trying (it's probably the drink) to picture the scene a few years hence when this pair of by then mega-successful Old Boys are back at King Edwards giving out the swimming certificates or the swatting prizes. I soon pack that in; it's easier to imagine Salman Rushdie succeeding The Ayatollah...

This night will not end! Some 90 minutes and one taxi-ride later, and I 'm in another advanced state of panic. Clint has taken me back to his parents' home where he still lives, has treated me to a supper of badly sliced bread and dodgy home-brew, and is now leading me along an upstairs corridor towards his bedroom! This is dedication beyond the call of duty - am I to make the ultimate sacrifice for journalism?

Thankfully the answer is no. Even Clint Poppie isn't that drunk. He collects a duvet, inform me that he'll sleep downstairs and leaves me alone in his lair. The room is small, barely big enough for the double bed, stereo TV set and VTR that it houses. The remaining space is taken up with old copies of Viz and Watchmen comics. On a notice board is pinned a letter from the creator of the latter, Alan Moore (the guy who 'knows the score' in 'Can U Dig It?). The text ends with the words: `about nine-nil down with a few minutes to play, since you ask. Love. Peace and Fuck the Tories, Alan.'

There are numerous posters adorning Clint's walls. A large majority of these are advertising the various projects of Pop Will Eat Itself, but there are others too. Madonna, Fiona Richmond, The Sex Pistols and most revealing and startling of all, in the space directly above Clint's pillow, a classic '60's shot of (check this, psycho fans) Tom Jones!

In what remains of my head, bells ring and lightbulbs blaze into life. Next time I see the Poppies' singer in full pelvis propulsion mode at the front of some stage, dozens of hands clawing at his hide-armoured crotch, I'll know that it's not unusual...

In the morning, as I'm getting ready to (phew!) leave, Clint presents a pitiful sight. A decaying salad of still-worn trousers, crumpled shirt and snake riot hair, he remains sprawled in his parents' chintzy couch, losing against the onset of a monster headache.

Meanwhile his sister is busy getting her kids ready for school. As they make their way past the prostrate figure of the sometime rock deity, she whispers to the Kylie fan "go quietly now so as not to wake Uncle Clinton . ."

Aaaahhh... this must be the 'family life' that Mrs Thatch is always wittering on about . .

With their studied obnoxiousness, their colossal mouths, their juvenile stunts and their provocative scams, Pop Will Eat Itself have played into the hand of their legions of enemies and detractors, always allowing their personalities and antics to overshadow their music. And maybe that music has, in the past, been piss-weak enough to make that a sensible policy, a diversionary tactic, a smokescreen. 'This Is The Day, This Is The Hour, This Is This', however, instantly, dramatically and utterly alters all that. It no longer matters that PWEI make f***ed up, falling down fools of themselves; their music stands up. Even if its creators don't!

So if your carefully-tended prejudice continues to prevent YOU from getting to grips with Pop Will Eat Itself, then the loss is now yours. If it closes your ears and eyes to the tornado of fun and ferocity they currently whip up then you're in dire danger of becoming the sucker spotlit in their latest single ...

Wise Up! Wise Up! Wise Up!