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Pop Will Eat Itself: ‘Def Con One’

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The summer of 1988, I was working as a researcher on a live lunchtime magazine show, shown on the BBC. Its audience was mainly moms, grannies, students and the unemployed. I’d just spent three-and-a-half years unemployed, so was now having a royal blast. Part of the joy was bringing a little anarchy to the show. Each week, when I suggested the show’s guest music acts, I’d slip in a few bands (Die Krupps, Cowboy Junkies, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) that would be lucky to get a mention on Yoof programming, let alone this anodyne day time chat show.

Two things stick from that summer - Joan Jett judging an air guitar competition; and the day I booked Pop Will Eat Itself to play in front of an audience of the over-sixties.

Each week I had to find one band for a studio performance, the acts ranged from the guff the record companies forced on us, to the mavericks, who mainly came form indie labels.  One week a VHS arrived on my desk, “Def Con One” by Pop Will Eat Itself. Along with Cave’s “Mercy Seat”, it was one of the best things I heard that summer. It was a beaut, with its samples of The Stooges, Lipps Inc., The Osmonds and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. And the icing was the accompanying video - directed by artist and film-maker Richard Heslop, who had worked Derek Jarman on The Last of England.

PWEI came out of Stourbridge, England, in the mid-eighties, and after a few different line-ups settled on Clint Mansell, Adam Mole, Graham Crabb and Richard March. The name came form an article in the NME by David Quantick. In July 1988, PWEI pulled up in a van at our temporary studio in the heart of a Garden Festival. They arrived with only backing tapes, loud hailer, guitars and drum-riser - to jump around on - went straight into the studio and let rip with “Def Con One” to a stunned silver-haired audience. It was a moment of sheer anarchic delight. Unable to find a video of that performance, this will give you an idea of what PWEI were like in front of an audience, but just imagine it being coffin dodgers in search of a seat on a hot summer’s day.

Pop Will Eat Itself was well-ahead of its time, and its members more talented than we thought them to be - Clint Mansell now writes brilliant soundtracks for movies like Requiem for a Dream, Moon, The Wrestler and Black Swan

Without much ado, here then is Richard Heslop’s original promo for “Def Con One”. Enjoy.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.13.2011
08:43 pm
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