So no one likes Pop Will Eat Itself, and they don't care. Not strictly true, of course - after all, they've enjoyed a good dozen Top 30 hits since their inception nearly 10 years ago. And now they're playing stadiums in America with their biggest/hippest fans, the extremely big and hip Nine Inch Nails. But still that underdog air surrounds PWEI.
Memories....
"Roight, " said Clint. "Oi've fookin' had it with the lot of yew." With that he stood up, gathered the large bag full of bottles he had been embracing for most of the evening and swung it up over his shoulder. He tottered briefly, bearing the baffled expression of a man whose centre of gravity has lost interest in life, before toppling backwards over a nearby table, spilling other peoples cocktails all over the floor and himself.
"F*** off to bed", said Graham. "You're embarrassing us."
"Fookin' fook bugger fook, " declared Clint, regaining his footing manfully, reaching for his room key, taking careful aim, and bouncing it neatly off Graham's forehead. Graham, not about to take this sort of behaviour from anyone, even his own band's singer, stood up and felled Clint with a single blow.
"Bollocks, fook, fookin' bugger fook", mumbled Clint to the carpet. "oi've fookin' had this. Oi fookin' quit. Oi'm taking my share of the fookin' money and oi'm fookin' off. It's all over. We're fookin' finished".
The finest of Britain's music business, filling the bar of the Reading Ramada hotel that summer evening in 1991 burst into sustained, relieved grateful applause.
We should have realised that Pop Will Eat Itself, of all people, weren't about to give up that easily.
Spurious Metaphor For PWEI No. 1 - Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda
He of the Imperial Japanese Army, the man who fought World War II until 1974. Holed up on the Filipino island of Lubang, his entire command dead or captured, he spent three decades ignoring journalists, officials, leaflet drops, even the pleas of his family and emperor, while waging a tireless guerrilla campaign against the long-suffering locals. Like Pop Will Eat Itself, when all the signs said, "Jack it in, you silly bastard, you're wasting everybody's time", Onoda would not be cowed or deterred.
There is a point at which such stubbornness becomes admirable.
How the F*** Has This Happened?
Tonight, Pop Will Eat Itself play the second of two nights at The Horizon, a Wembley sized barn in the outskirts of Chicago. They are opening for Nine Inch Nails, possibly the biggest band in America, certainly the hippest, whose singer, Trent Reznor, signed the poppies to his own label after they were dropped by RCA. Reznor's a big fan, even calls them an influence. Pop Will Eat Itself will play a fine show and go down a storm tonight as they did last night. It may eventually happen that they will translate their astonishing success in Britain (more than a dozen Top 30 hits) to America. They will also shortly be releasing an album of their songs remixed by some of the most painfully cool names in the business, most of whom asked to be involved: Alex Paterson, The Prodigy, Jah Wobble, Apollo 440 among others.
"I don't understand it either," shrugs Clint Mansell, stretching his peroxide mantis form across the couch in the rear lounge of the tour bus. "The only reason I can think for why we keep managing to transcend things is that somewhere, some way, we must be doing something that nobody else is giving them. Maybe it is that ability to be receptive to what's going on around us".
Or - as it is perhaps more commonly regarded - that shameless predilection for scrambling aboard any passing bandwagon.
"Well, possibly. But without meaning to go on about The Beatles or the Stones, in those days it was good, a band could change throughout its career, and that was how fashion changed. Whereas now what happens is that you get a new band, you see what they do, and that's all they do. It's just the way of the world now. You don't repair anything anymore, you just get a new one."
Talulah Gosh. Gaye Bykers on Acid. Zodiac Mindwarp. Age of Chance. Ned's Atomic Dustbin. The Wonder Stuff. Dozens more, all your contemporaries, at least fleetingly. You've seen them all off. You've been shamblers, greboes, rappers, jokers, agitpoppers, everything but a massed pipe marching band. Does none of it embarrass you?
"No, it's just something you did, isn't it? I mean, 10 years ago I was going out with such and such a girl. I'm not going out with her now, but I don't regret that I did it. It's just a phase of your life. Look at Ministry - go back and listen to some of their early records. I think they're a bit more embarrassed about those than we are about ours. You know, it's like getting out your old snapshots of when you were a New Romantic."
Jesus, you weren't, were you?
"I'm sure we must have had a go. No actually, I don't think we were. I think we were a bit late. The first band that we were in, which was me, Adam and Miles and Malc out of The Wonder Stuff and which Graham joined in its later stages (From Eden) was very sort of Bauhauish, all make-up and goth stuff. We wanted to be a mix between Bauhaus and The Psychedelic Furs."
Humbler beginnings are difficult, not to say downright disturbing, to imagine. Surely you must feel a least a little bit smug about the way things have worked out?
"No, not at all." says Clint, who could probably give lectures on blokeish modesty. "I mean, that all these people want to work with us, or remix our stuff, that's great, I'm all for it. But it's not like we're collecting all these people and going `Look, see, we're stood next to all these people, we are cool, honestly.` We're well past caring at this stage."
Spurious Metaphor For PWEI No.2 - Nigel Mansell
With whom they share a surname, an accent, a birthplace, a certain rumbustious swagger and the fact that even those that deride them in favour of their more glamorous and gifted peers would, when pressed, sullenly admit to missing them sorely were they not there, if only to mock. Like Nigel Mansell, Pop Will Eat Itself are a most English of success stories; no-one likes them, they don't care.
Or Do They?
Pop Will Eat Itself are Chaps. Geezers. Top Lads. Everyone says so. This is mostly because it's true. They are all, especially Clint, bright, funny, personable, practised masters of deadpan banter and excellent company. The music press in this country long ago seized upon the comic possibilities of PWEI's ungainly scramble up pop's greasy pole, their unflappable childish enthusiasm for everything to do with rock 'n' roll (I am told four times in two day, with due starstruck astonishment that - wait for it - Gene Simmons out of kiss came to see them in Los Angeles and liked them), the frequency with which farce has blighted their good intentions (their ill-fated tour in support of Public Enemy and Run DMC is still remembered with rueful laughter) and turned them into a cartoon strip, "Scooby Doo" with a sampler.
Surely though, somewhere in there must be lurking just a hint of an artist's ego. I put it to Clint that were we to run over Trent Reznor as we pulled into the backstage car park, he - king of pain, auteur of angst, etc - would be remembered as an artist. Whereas, if we drove off a bridge before we got there, PWEI would be recalled, at best, as entertainers. Clowns, not poets.
"Well, I don't know if I'm very entertaining," says Clint, sounding a bit bewildered by the question. "I suppose your ego would love to be remembered as an artist, but I don't think people view us as artists, Or if they do it's only as piss artists."
Thank you for that in character punchline.
"I'd rather not find out, actually."
But surely you think there's more to you. I mean, you wrote a single, "Ich Bin Ein Auslander", intended to communicate and stimulate anger at racism. Last night, in the grip of one assumes - some variety of existential torment - you assaulted a hotel lift, which is why your left hand now looks like an udder.
"Oh, I just get drunk," says Clint, looking vaguely embarrassed. "And then if something puts me off my stride I can't - as most people can't when they're drunk - rationalise it, and I just wind myself up and get more and more angry. I punched the lift because somebody annoyed me. And they annoyed me days ago, but I'm not a very confrontational person, so I wouldn't ever go and tell anyone they've annoyed me. I leave it, you know? Until I get drunk, and then I go completely nuts, and my treatment of people is way out of line. So then I was annoyed with myself. So I gave the lift a thump on the way back to bed."
Well, this is more like it. The demons in Clint out of Pop Will Eat itself.
Why don't you write about them?
"We have done songs where we bear or soul to a certain degree, like "Wise Up Sucker" or "I've Always Been a Coward, Baby", but generally when I'm writing I don't want to express that part of me, because I don't see it as a release, really. My thing is really the creation of sound. I mean, I like lyrics, and they need to have a point, I suppose, but to me the excitement really comes from the noise. I've always viewed the vocals as almost another instrument, really."
So you're not concerned at all with the idea of giving some of yourself away?
"No, I don't really worry about it, because otherwise I'd just write songs about cars and burgers."
Haven't you?
"Erm, well, probably. But that's my point."
Spurious Metaphor For PWEI No. 3 - Wimbledon FC
Ugly, graceless, charming mostly only at a loveable larrikin level, lacking in cultured niceties, bonded by an us-against-the-world "Crazy Gang" mindset, favourers of enthusiastic bluster over cool finesse, detested by everyone who likes to think themselves lover of life's finer things, apparently utterly unhampered by natural talent. And every year, they finish higher than Tottenham.
So Now What?
Given that you've been doing this for just about all of your adult life, can you imagine a future beyond Pop Will Eat Itself?
"Yeah. Yeah, I can. I'd like to do nothing. I would like to go back to doing nothing. That's always been my main thing, really. I don't like doing much. I can't see a point when I'd stop trying to write, because, even when it's not working, which is horrible, something happens and it just makes your day, and that feels brilliant. So until I lose that, or I lose the ability to come up with something that I like ... I mean, other people may have at times, but I've got no desire to stop,"
At that, the world's most consumptive aesthetes collapse sobbing into their lace handkerchiefs. The battered romantics exclaim three cheers. Those of us caught somewhere between the two applaud and hope no one sees us.