Sounds From The Junkshop #11 - Pop Will Eat Itself

 

"And when they come to ethnically cleanse me, will you speak out, will you defend me?" - Pop Will Eat Itself, Ich Bin Ein Auslander, 1994

I'll be honest, until my mid-teens, Pop Will Eat Itself were the one of those bands who I sort of knew that I should like as all of my favourite groups at the time (Carter, the Senseless Things, the Wonder Stuff) were constantly raving about them but just never quite did it for me (see also Atomic Dustbin, Ned's). I had a couple of their singles (X, Y And Zee and 92 Degrees Fahrenheit if anyone's keeping count) but for every slice of scuzzed-up indie techno anthemicness they seemed to then come out with something pretty anonymous.

Until the album we're going to deal with today, of course, namely 1994's seminal Dos Dedos Mi Amigos which well and truly won me over to their cause. And of course, as with every sodding band I seemed to get into circa 1993-94, it ended up being their final effort with the group splitting up a mere matter of months later. Sonofa...

PWEI were arguably one of the first "fraggle" bands to emerge blinking into the sunlight (indeed, they were around when the movement was in its precursor grebo form) having started as an endearingly shambolic C86 band before discovering dance/hip-hop rhythms and beefing up their sound for the excellent Def Con One single. However, by the early '90s they'd kind of become a bit of a joke band really who seemed like they were playing it for laughs a lot of the time and I think this might be why I never quite got into them the same way I did with the Stuffies or Carter.

Although the Poppies had achieved a run of respectable chart positions (usually breaching the Top 30 but not much higher), they never quite broke through into the big leagues and following 1992's admittedly underwhelming The Looks Or The Lifestyle? album, they were dropped by their label RCA even though the chart positions for the singles from it weren't really any worse than the ones that had come before. And here's where it gets interesting - they had a single already cued up when they were dropped, Get The Girl, Kill The Baddies! Like much of their stuff from this period, it was okay, it just didn't really leap out at you. However, it got released in the first week of January (when, let's be honest, no bugger releases anything, a tactic which a few groups down the years have used to gain a shock Top 20 hit including a fair few favourites of mine) and promptly stormed into the Top 10. That week, the band to become the highest charting band without a record deal to play Top of the Pops and no doubt RCA were left feeling slightly foolish..,

This was inevitably the cue for a record label feeding frenzy and the Poppies would sign to Mushroom, resurfacing towards the end of 1993 with the RSVP single. Another enjoyably daft indie-dance offering, I remember seeing the video on the ITV Chart Show and thinking it was brilliant just because of how out-there it was (perhaps unsurprising given that it was directed by the late great none-more-gonzo NME journalist Steven Wells who was a big influence on my early attempts at being a music writer)*. However, the next release, Ich Bin Ein Auslander, would be the one that really made me sit up and take notice.

* And obviously now I've said that I've just discovered it isn't on Youtube annoyingly!

It's easy to forget that in 1993-94, the UK was in a bit of a parlous state politically. The utter incompetence of a Tory government which had only just sneaked in by the skin of its teeth a couple of years earlier and had instantly been beset by one scandal after another combined with Labour's drift away from its socialist roots under first Kinnock then Blair had seen an unwelcome rise in support for far right parties like the BNP who were preying on the alienated. The effect was that British alternative music started to get a lot more political during this period - while groups like Carter had arguably always been a bit like this and the Manics had always been political (albeit with more of a small p for the most part), late '93 saw a whole raft of groups like Credit To The Nation and Blaggers ITA who were staunchly anti-fascist (CTTN's collaboration with veteran Yorkshire anarchist punks Chumbawamba Enough Is Enough with its chorus of "Give the fascist man a gunshot!" really did feel like a bit of an anthem for the times back then) as people started to rise up and say "actually, you know what, no this is not okay, we fought two world wars against the fascists and you can fuck right off if you think you're gonna try and start up the same ideology over here."

It wasn't just the new bands either - quite a few established bands started to grow their teeth politically during this time and, much like the Senseless Things did with Homophobic Asshole and Primary Instinct, Ich Bin Ein Auslander saw a new more politically charged and much heavier PWEI emerge. As someone who was at a mixed race secondary school in Bradford, it definitely resonated with me and quickly became a regular fixture on my walkman at the time. Maybe I just have a perspective on this but as someone who was used to being at school with Asian kids right through primary school and secondary school, I honestly never saw them as different from me - we were all in the same boat learning the same stuff and trying to muddle our way through the hellishness of our teenage years and the first time I learnt about the BNP winning council seats in Bradford as a 14-15 year old my response was pretty much "Really? Why the fuck has that happened?" I've always seen any sort of politics that tries to put one part of the working class against another part as politics for idiots who haven't identified who their real enemies (ie the politicians, press barons and corporate fat cats) are. And don’t even get me started on the sort of vomit-inducing nostalgia for an age that never existed that papers like the Mail peddle and drive people into the arms of these odious fuckwits. But anyway, back to the music, get me started on politics and we'll be here all day...

PWEI would follow up Auslander with another brilliant single Everything's Cool which seemed to be a damning indictment of those who choose to blithely ignore the world burning around them and pretend that it's all okay rather than getting up and doing something about it. After two brilliant singles, obviously I was gonna buy the album when it came out and I still regard Dos Dedos Mi Amigos (named after a line from Everything's Cool) as PWEI's finest hour. Much heavier than anything they'd done previously, it really did feel like a damning state of the nation address and it was on my stereo for pretty much the whole of the last few months of 1994.

The saddest thing is that as I listen to it again in 2020 where the political climate makes 1993-4 look like a walk in the park with an actively malicious quasi-fascist Tory party in control and driving the country into an economic oblivion that'll benefit nobody other than the spivs and speculators who are mates with them, an ineffectual Labour opposition that seems more interested in alienating its own supporters than actively challenging the ruling government, the rise of nationalism in a much more organised and dangerous form than we ever had to deal with back then, Dos Dedos still sounds scarily prescient. While at least there are bands like the Idles and Bob Vylan and artists like Stormzy coming up who are taking up the baton from this album and trying to get the kids of today to rise up and challenge injustice, unlike back then it increasingly feels like a losing battle - when you browse Facebook and see teenagers actually sticking up for the repellent Boris Johnson, you really do feel like the whole thing's fucked.

Although Dos Dedos would give PWEI their highest charting album, only just missing the Top 10, relations in the band were starting to strain and after sessions for a follow-up were aborted the group called it a day in 1996. Guitarist Richard March and drummer Fuzz Townshend would go on to form enjoyably daft indie-dance types Bentley Rhythm Ace whose one album was the soundtrack to many very drunken house parties during my student days in Stoke-on-Trent while frontmen Clint Mansell and Graham Crabb would go on to produce film soundtracks and ambient music respectively.

However, 2010 would see Crabb put a new PWEI line-up together with the blessing of his former bandmates (all of whom have made live appearances with the group from time to time) featuring new recruits including former Gaye Bykers On Acid/Apollo 440 man Mary Byker joining as co-vocalist and Jason Bowld from under-rated Nottingham noiseniks Pitchshifter on drums. They've put out two albums since, 2012's New Noise Designed By A Sadist and 2019's Anti-Nasty League, both of which are good continuations of the Dos Dedos sound and having finally seen them live a few times since they reformed, I can confirm they still pack as much of a punch as ever.

So where does this leave Dos Dedos Mi Amigos in 2020 then? Still depressingly relevant I'd say. But until that day comes when we finally get a society that works for everyone, not just the privileged few at the top, this sort of music will always be needed to get people angry and help them to rise up and fight injustice, prejudice and privilege. To dream the impossible dream as Carter (and before them Don Quixote) once said. Anyway, I thoroughly recommend Dos Dedos - political indie-industrial music really doesn't get much better than this. Seek out, get pissed, destroy...