Clint Mansell

English musician Clint Mansell, long recognized as the frontman for the alternative outfit Pop Will Eat Itself between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, pivoted soon afterward toward scoring films and television. He launched this new chapter by supplying an eccentric, frequently unsettling fusion of orchestral and electronic textures for director Darren Aronofsky on the latter’s initial two features, the paranoia-driven Pi from 1998 and the addiction-fueled Requiem for a Dream in 2000. Their partnership persisted across subsequent decades, yielding a Golden Globe nomination for Mansell’s work on The Fountain in 2006. During the same span he broadened his palette across projects helmed by Barbet Schroeder on 2002’s Murder by Numbers, Duncan Jones on 2009’s Moon, and action director Rupert Sanders on 2017’s Ghost in the Shell.

Born Clinton Darryl Mansell in Coventry, England, in 1963, he assembled Pop Will Eat Itself in Stourbridge alongside keyboardist Adam Mole, bassist Richard March, and drummer Graham Crabb, handling lead vocals and guitar himself. The Buzzcocks-inspired indie act issued its self-produced debut EP, The Poppies Say Grrr, in 1986. While cutting the follow-up Poppiecock, the band embraced sampling drawn from sources that ranged from James Brown to Iggy Pop. Crabb eventually stepped forward from the drum kit to share frontman duties with Mansell as the group leaned more heavily on drum machines and programming. Refining a hybrid of punk, hip-hop, and electronic dance music they called grebo, Pop Will Eat Itself ignited a minor upheaval; grebo dominated British music journalism by the time their 1987 debut album Box Frenzy and its hit “There Is No Love Between Us Anymore” appeared. Hip-hop’s imprint grew still stronger on tracks such as “Def. Con. One.” and “Can U Dig It?,” both featured on the 1989 RCA release This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This!, the band’s sole Billboard 200 entry. Another single, “Touched by the Hand of Cicciolina,” an homage to the Italian porn performer turned politician, also charted, while 1991’s Cure for Sanity reflected a deepening engagement with dance music. By 1992’s The Looks or the Lifestyle the lineup had incorporated live drummer Fuzz (Robert Townshend) to enlarge its continually shifting sound. Early 1993 brought the group’s biggest U.K. success, the Top Ten single “Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies,” yet RCA dropped them regardless. After signing with Infectious in Britain they were picked up stateside by Nothing, the imprint run by longtime admirer Trent Reznor. Pop Will Eat Itself resurfaced in 1994 with the more industrial Dos Dedos Mis Amigos, which reached number 11 in the U.K. Ahead of the 1995 remix collection Two Fingers, My Friends, Crabb departed to concentrate on family and his side project Golden Claw Musics. Mansell assumed sole lead responsibilities until the band dissolved in mid-1996. That year he relocated to New York and, several months later, met filmmaker Darren Aronofsky via a mutual acquaintance.

Mansell’s industrial-tinged original instrumentals, paired with preexisting pieces by Aphex Twin, Orbital, and Massive Attack, formed the soundtrack to 1998’s Pi, marking a breakthrough that coincided with growing festival acclaim for Aronofsky. Their next joint effort, 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, merged electronic and chamber elements and included performances by the Kronos Quartet. Mansell’s third theatrical score arrived with Nick Hamm’s 2001 mystery The Hole. A rapid succession of films followed, among them Knockaround Guys (2001), Murder by Numbers (2002), Nicolas Cage’s Sonny (2002), and the adventure Sahara (2004), as Mansell devoted himself entirely to film composition. Pop Will Eat Itself briefly reunited for a few English shows in 2005 that yielded several Instant Live double albums; when Mansell and March declined further commitments, the remaining members continued as Vileevils.

Reuniting with Aronofsky on the 2006 science-fiction drama The Fountain earned Mansell his first Golden Globe nomination plus awards from the Chicago Film Critics Association and the International Film Music Critics Association. Another Aronofsky collaboration, the 2008 biopic The Wrestler, spotlighted atmospheric electric guitar by Slash. Returning to science-fiction and fantasy fare, Mansell scored both Moon and Blood: The Last Vampire in 2009, along with the multilingual espionage romance L’Affaire Farewell and the romantic comedy The Rebound. He and Aronofsky opened the 2010s with the Best Picture Oscar nominee Black Swan, which brought Mansell a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.

Pop Will Eat Itself reconvened in the studio in 2011, though without Mansell. He instead made his video-game scoring debut on 2012’s Mass Effect 3, then supplied music for Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (2015). Mansell co-composed the 2017 live-action Ghost in the Shell with Lorne Balfe and took sole credit for that year’s animated Loving Vincent, centered on Vincent van Gogh. He rejoined director Duncan Jones for 2018’s Mute and contributed to the television series Titans and DC Comics’ Doom Patrol, which debuted in 2018 and 2019, respectively.