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Pop Will Eat Itself were never a huge band. Their biggest hit, Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies!, reached number nine, but in the 10 years of their existence from 1986 to '96, they were darlings of the NME. Tickets for their reunion tour, which opens tonight in Nottingham, have sold well. With 2000 Light Ales From Home, their first EP, they unequivocally set out their stall. Songs such as Beaver Patrol and Touched by the Hand of Cicciolina (the Italian porn star) established the band as a hard-drinking, laddish pop act who had emerged, Midlands accents intact, from the dole queues of Stourbridge and inspired the very concept of laddism.
After they split up in 1996, the band got on with their lives - one is now a driving instructor, another a teacher. But the way that singer Clint Mansell's career has panned out is one of the most intriguing re-inventions in modern music. This Saturday sees the respected Kronos Quartet playing some of his compositions at the Barbican, an astonishing turnaround for the former frontman of a frankly loutish pop group.
Although he can't read music, Mansell's dark, innovative scores for Darren Aronofsky's independent films Pi and Requiem for a Dream have been widely acclaimed by serious music critics (the Kronos will be performing some of the music for Requiem for a Dream) and he's about to become a Hollywood figure with his inventive score for Sahara, a film starring Penelope Cruz and Matthew McConaughey which is released here in March.
When I...