August 31st, 1994

This interview originally appeared in the pages of Cake magazine

Clint Poppie - vocals/guitars
Graham Poppie - vocals
Adam Poppie - guitars/keyboards
Richard Poppie - bass
Fuzz Poppie - drums

"You know what major labels are like - somebody's got a job this week and they find a better job with another label and they're off next week and that's what it was like for us - we signed to RCA and there was no-one left except for Korda [Marshall, the A&R man who got them signed, was subsequently fired from RCA
with them and now manages them]. Eventually the label got a new manager and he decided to clear the decks, get rid of the old bands, you know, like the Wedding Present and us, and get new bands in, and I suppose to a certain extent rejuvenate the label, you know, which to a certain degree, you know, I suppose is fair but the reason they do this is that major companies generally lose interest in their bands and stop promoting them". This is Clint Poppie (nee Mansell) at his most vociferous. I've never met a nicer, more self-effacing person. It's took him the huge sentence above, chock-full of qualifications, to say that major labels generally suck. As an interviewer of English bands, I'm used to qualifications like "you know" and "I suppose" and "rather", but Clint takes top honors in this department. Later on, he was a bit more forthright in describing the last two years in Pop Will Eat Itself's turbulent history.

PWEI was born in 1986 and signed to RCA in 1988 after two successful years on the indie label Chapter 22. Many subsequent disputes were rumored (denied, incidentally, by Clint, who observes, "Britain's too small to have two regular music weeklies, there's nothing to talk about except gossip") over the band's lack of commerciality and thus (in the eyes of RCA) their lack of commercial success. Eventually they were dropped by RCA in 1993, but the last single released on RCA made it to number 9 in the UK charts, ironically enough their highest chart position ever, after they had been dropped. "At the time the music papers were having this big indie-versus- major label debate and here we were just dropped by a major label and the single went in the top ten and everybody thought "yeah, fuck the major labels". With RCA it was a bad relationship, you know, and like a lot of bad relationships it's only when you're out of it you realize - you know, you think how the fuck did you put up with it and stay there for so long, you know." Other major labels started to line up with interest in PWEI but the band signed instead to the indie label Infectious Records in the UK, and on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records in the US. "We were all sorted out with Infectious and Nothing, so the idea of going from the frying pan to the fire, from RCA to Sony, whose offer was just... shit really...". In Britain a typical major deal is 13- 14% to the band, the rest to the label, whereas on an independent you can get a 50/50 deal. "I mean, the only reason we signed to RCA in the first place was that Rough Trade weren't interested in financing the things we wanted to, do whereas now they do. And now if we want to do something we just get on the phone to Korda and it's sorted. Or it isn't. Or, you know, we compromise. But in a major label you have to explain it to someone who explains it to someone else and so on and it takes forever. And Infectious can put the record out four weeks after getting the tapes and the artwork, but RCA wanted ten. If they put it out at all."

The new album is called "Dos Dedos Mi Amigos", which the Spanish speakers among you will immediately recognize as "Two Fingers My Friends". The raising of two fingers in the UK has two very distinct meanings - palm outwards it means the usual "okay, peace and love man" bullshit that it does here, palm inwards it means the same as flipping the middle finger does in the US (so be careful). "Actually "Dos Dedos" is a brand of tequila, but I've always been fascinated by the gesture and a friend who knows about these things told me that when the English and French used to have wars, the French would cut these two fingers off any
English soldiers they captured so they couldn't fire arrows using a bow. So the English used to lob the two fingers at the French to show they'd still got them. We like it 'cos we can go (gestures one way) to the people who've supported us all this time and (gestures the other way) to our detractors".

"Dos Dedos Mi Amigos" has a distinctly different, harder edged sound than the Poppies of old, which makes one wonder whether Clint was being entirely forthcoming when he denies that RCA ever influenced them to try and be commercial. "You become aware of things you've done and you decide what you like and what you don't like, you know, and when we've done "instant" types of songs I suppose we've got bored of them very quickly and people want us to play them but you think "I'm sick of this". I'm 31 now, it's inevitable that you get into different situations than you did, say, six years ago, a couple of members of the band have got kids now, and you just may not want to write "Can U Dig It?" any more. So I suppose it is slightly downbeat compared to what it was".

The most public attention in England has been to the single "Ich Bin Ein Auslander", a powerful anti-racism screed, which garnered much praise. "There's an undercurrent of fascists picking up support all over Europe and what actually got me going was after some racist incident happened in Germany and everyone was
saying how terrible it was over there and one of the papers pointed out that there were more reported racist crimes in England than anywhere else and I just thought, we're all foreigners, we're all outsiders." On the "Amalgamation" CD EP there is a version by rapmeisters Fun Da Mental; "It was Korda who suggested
we get Aki in to do a mix, but we thought he should actually do his own vocals, put his own slant on it. You know, the trouble with rappers in general is that at gigs most of them sound like they're just playing their records, unlike with Fun Da Mental. We did that tour with Run-D.M.C. and at some gigs Professor Griff wasn't there but his vocal parts were still coming out of the PA."

"Ich Bin Ein Auslander" and the album which followed it surprised some as to the band's sudden seeming seriousness. "In England especially, the band's music has I think been seriously overshadowed by the band's antics, like for instance there was an anti-KKK song on our album "Cure For Sanity" but they were overshadowed by us having a good time. I mean we don't want to be all po-faced and seriously studied about our art all of a sudden but you probably want to try and avoid getting into those situations again." Not always possible; five hours of drinking later, as we all started falling off our chairs in the Lower East Side's Bob
bar, I forgot to ask him whether he still wanted to avoid these situations. Live shows in November (highly recommended) if you want to find out.

---John Speakman