Artist · chart history · #322 in alternative artist polls
Pop Will Eat Itself
Band Stourbridge United Kingdom Active 1986–1986
Pop Will Eat Itself formed in 1986 in Stourbridge, United Kingdom and was active until 1986. Pop Will Eat Itself has 24 chart appearances on 18 radio countdowns from 8 stations on RockLists, spanning 1988–2003. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Def.Con.One”, which appears on 8 lists with a best position of #25. The station that charted Pop Will Eat Itself most often is Live 105 (San Francisco, CA), with 6 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1988.
Pop Will Eat Itself formed in 1986 in Stourbridge, in England's West Midlands, with members drawn from Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country, and they started out tagged as a scruffy grebo act. Box Frenzy, in 1987, carried "There is No Love Between Us Anymore", a ramshackle, sweetly sour pop song, but they would not stay scruffy for long.
By This Is the Day... This Is the Hour... This Is This! in 1989 they had become something else entirely: a sample-driven, cut-and-paste riot of hip-hop beats, borrowed noise and punk yelling, with tracks like "Def.Con.One" and "Wise Up! Sucker!". Clint Mansell and Graham Crabb are at the heart of it. Cure for Sanity followed in 1990 with "X, Y And Zee", and the sound kept getting harder and more industrial on Dos Dedos Mis Amigos and the Amalgamation EP, both in 1994, home of "Everything's Cool" and "Ich Bin Ein Auslander". Their highest-charting single, "Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies!", went top ten in the UK in 1993.
Richard March, Adam Mole and Fuzz Townshend are also part of the story, and Kerry Hammond played guitar and sang backing vocals in 1995 and 1996. The band broke up in 1996, reformed briefly in 2005, and in 2010 put out their first new release in more than five years.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Pop Will Eat Itself on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Def.Con.One | 8 | #25 | – | 1988 | |
| 2 | Wise Up! Sucker! | 4 | #41 | – | – | |
| 3 | There is No Love Between Us Anymore | 5 | #29 | – | 1988 | |
| 4 | Ich Bin Ein Auslander | 3 | #10 | – | 1995 | |
| 5 | Can You Dig It | 1 | #49 | – | 1989 | |
| 6 | Everything's Cool | 1 | #58 | – | 1994 | |
| 7 | X, Y And Zee | 1 | #85 | – | 1991 |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
Comments
Log in or create a free account to join the conversation about Pop Will Eat Itself.
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts.