If you wanted a quick introduction to Pop Will Eat Itself, I think the Very Metal Noise Pollution EP would be a perfect place to start. It may only contain four songs, but they sum up everything the band was doing at their peak and each one is brilliant in it's own way. PWEI-zation might as well be an introduction to the band, 92'F was one of their greatest singles and the backing vocals on this version are incredible, Def.Con.One was the Poppies doing hip-hop in a way only they could and Preaching to the Perverted was the token rock song. Four sides of an interesting band and not a dull moment.
This feels like an appropriate time to tell the story of how I got into PWEI. Readers of a certain age will remember the ill-fated and short-lived Sega Saturn, a strange console that started the decline of Sega. (As a side note, it had the curious feature that when used as a cd player you could mute the vocals of any song. I still don't know how it did that.) Anyway, a friend at school sold me his and a bunch of games for very little. I mostly wanted it so I could play Alien Trilogy and because I heard you could play the games in a cd player and listen to the soundtrack; he had Quake and I was keen to hear the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack (long before Trent became an award winning film-score composer). Also in the bundle of games was the impossibly-difficult game Loaded which featured two songs by a band I'd never heard of called Pop Will Eat Itself. The two songs were great (Kick to Kill and RSVP from their final album) and I was happy because I'd discovered a band that I may never have heard of until much later (and I doubt an older-me would have given them so much time). It would be ages before I read anything about who the band were or found out anything more about them. Such were the days before the internet.
I eventually sought out a cheap best-of (Wise Up Suckers) and then found more and more of their records in second hand stores over the next couple of years. I even travelled all the way to London from Lancaster to see them on their 2005 reformation tour, which was an excellent show. Most of my friends thought PWEI were terrible and I guess they had their reasons. In the early 2000's, PWEI weren't a cool band and it seems I'd missed the boat on their music by a good ten years, but I still dug their music. They were a fun band to get into.
Format: 12"
Tracks: 4
Cost: £8 new
Bought: Record Fair, Southampton
When: 26/10/02
Colour: Black
Etching: Side A: "Audie Murphy's Saddlebags" Side B: "Size of an elephant"
mp3s: no
