PWEI, ALAN MOORE, AND MORE

Big snake, fries to go.

IT WAS 1985 and I was reading comics again. One of my favourites in the new modern style was SWAMP THING as written by Alan Moore. It was smart, scary and full of ideas and myths – and in one issue Swamp Thing encounters the Orouborous, the legendary infinite self-consuming snake that is eternally engaged in swallowing itself. I loved the idea, I loved Swamp Thing and I loved Alan Moore.

At the time I was a music journalist looking for new bands to write about. One band I liked was an indie group on a small label called Pink. They were called Jamie Wednesday. They had a trumpeter and did a cover of Jackie’s White Horses and had great songs of their own, like their debut single Vote For Love. I interviewed them in Croydon and, to add a bit more to the piece, wrote an intro about sampling and recycling in popular music.

I was a bit obsessed with sampling and the way it used bits of old songs to make new songs: I imagined that eventually you could build entire songs out of samples, and then use those songs to make more new songs, and so on. I thought of the self-consuming Ouroborous and I ended my intro by writing, “One day, on some far distant Top Of The Pops, before the horrified eyes of a nation, pop will eat itself.”

Time passed, as it does. I got a record from a band in the Midlands. It was an EP of indie pop, it was called The Poppies Say GRRrrr! and it came with a typed letter on very thin paper. The band were called Pop Will Eat Itself but I didn’t connect the name with my article until later, when PWEI were all over the music press.

They moved quickly from their original indie guitar stance to becoming an band who occupied the hitherto empty no-man’s-land between The Beastie Boys and Viz Comic. Their semi-tongue-in-cheek sexist comedy didn’t endear them to everyone but some of their records did, most notably Can U Dig it, which is fantastic, and contains the great hook “Alan Moore knows the score.” [1]

And so pop, and everything else, ate itself.

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[1] Alan Moore returned the compliment in a US interview, saying, “There was a band over here in the ’80s called Pop Will Eat Itself. That name was a great name, a prophetic name.”