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It's Friday! It's about three o'clock! It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!

Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap some Fridays this year.

I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.

Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.

If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.

Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:

Pop Will Eat Itself - Def Con One

A couple of weeks ago, I was placing an order from Amazon. I discovered that I would be paying around three quid postage, but was only slightly more than three quid away from the total required to qualify for free shipping. Naturally, I added an album costing around twelve quid to my order. This is called economising.

Said album arrived on Monday, and I've been wallowing in it all week. In fact, working on the lines of the t-shirts sold by the oh-so-cool-but-ferociously-pricey magMA at Seven Dials, I want a t-shirt which reads:

Clint &
Graham &
Adam &
Richard.

After years of hearing occasional tracks in clubs, being mailed mp3s by

kneeshooter and finding the odd mention in the music press, a compilation made for me by

metame and featuring the fantastic Hit The Hi-Tech Groove finally spurred me into getting PWEI Product, the Pop Will Eat Itself anthology.

PWEI arrived on the scene in the mid-80s, way ahead of their time, and proceded to mix bits of hip-hop and rap with straight indie, whilst pogoing like bastards. And being white. And from the Midlands. They sampled it, looped it[*], and cheerfully thieved their way across the whole of popular culture; the results were awe-inspiring, paving the way for everyone from Limp Bizkit to Goldie Lookin' Chain.

There's plenty of songs on PWEI Product to remind you that they shared their earliest antecedents with The Wonderstuff; just cheerful, noisy indie. I'm not 100% sure if the songs are arranged chronologically but they certainly get more and more experimental (and political) until the climactic track of the album, the mighty anti-right-wing Ich Bin Ein Auslander.

I'd have claimed not to know many PWEI songs, but recognised a surprising number, including finding all the lyrics to Can U Dig It? buried somewhere in my mid-90s hindbrain ("Alan Moore knows the score!"). Wikipedia repeats the "possibly apocryphal" story that in the 90s PWEI had sold more t-shirts than records. I suspect that was originally said as a joke, but I do indeed remember the days when you couldn't move a foot without seeing the little robot dude or the fake-Pepsi logo somewhere - yet their records were rarely on the radio.

They were bigger than themselves, and they were ubiquitous while still being underground and cool. And, it turns out, they made some extremely fine music while they were there.

[*] and, according to certain seditious sources, fucked it and ate it.