Look Know (Single) (1982) / Room To Live (Album) (1982)

Pete says:



Right - I don't have time for this right now.  Bored of the Internet and all its myriad opportunities for speedy and seamless communication, mobile phones and their oppressive mobility, and even face-to-face communication which requires me to wash and shit, I've decided the way forward - yes, I'm into C.B.  Inspired by my grandmothers worries about my Uncle 25 odd years ago I've decided that the real new way forward is hooking up with Container Drivers and adolescents with spotty exteriors, all code names and lingo, static over everything.  Who needs 'lola' and 'stalks'?  Who needs irritating use of punctuation to make faces which help the reader understand the tone and intent of a message (as the writer often cannot make full use of those handy tools - words - to do the job independently)?  Yes, I'm whacking a whopping ariel on my roof, and am going to spend the rest of my days gibbering and increasing my use of the word 'over'. Magic.

So clearly, I'm Into CB, B-Side to that dreadful song that I shan't even name, is my favourite thing this week.  Why?  Well, its funny, clever, and doesn't sound like it was recorded in a Mancunians arse - a healthy dose of unremitting repetition, and a MES lyric which pleases the ear and the mind:

This is Happy Harry Plank
from the land of waving palms
calling out to Cedar Plank
477 CC
There's no Code 13
In the home of chocolate city
I'm having trouble with the terminology
But I'm into CB

Triffic.  Will that do Ed?

No - ok then.  Room To Live is such a let down.  I've tried hard to get past this, but its proved to be impossible.  With hindsight, and you know my feelings about this approach but its the only way with this oddity, it's the Fall equivalent of a dose of salts - thankfully, its over reasonably quickly, and clears you out ready for the next thing.  To whit - post Hex its clear that the band were perilously close to making a name for themselves in something of a conventional manner by making wilfully unconventional music.  The songs, sounds and sense of Hex are all so off the scale that contemporaneously you could't have foreseen this band do anything else than get more and more off the piste - the Radiohead approach post OK Computer, if you will.  But The Fall, it has become clear, just refuse to pander to expectation, so if you're expecting weird from them they'll go elsewhere - Hard Life In Country could have come straight off Witch Trials, and Solicitor in Studio is poptastic.  In addition, this is the last we'll see of Mark Riley.  Now, aside from honking backing vocals, I think Riley has probably been a massive architect of The Fall thus far.  I say 'probably' because in all honesty I find it very hard to ascertain quite who brought what to the party.  Regardless, we'll see no more of him, and maybe we'll be better placed to work out what this means when we start to hear his replacement in the mix…

So anyway the most fundamental issue with Room To Live is that it is recorded so dreadfully that even for a seasoned Fall-listener the sonics of it prove to detract from the music, and even with the idiosyncratic production we've had thus far, this is the fist time is bothered me to such an extent that it spoils the songs.  But having said that, aside from two I'm not even sure the songs are up to much.  The aforementioned Hard Life In Country is dull, its portentous music failing to gel with its 'muss types hit rural England' lyric.  You're never sure where your sympathies or concern should lie, no words spark the ear, and '[getting] a terrible urge to drink isn't far wrong.  The title track just burbles along (though the sax is a nice addition to the Fall-sound) never really doing anything exciting, shifting up a key or two just to kill time, and by the time MES espouses that 'there's no hate to the point I give / I just want room to live' you start to wish there was some more aggression to alleviate the boredom.  And though I know Ed is keen, Solicitor in the Studio is flat, especially which you realise that it opens with the same chords of 'Slates, Slags, Etc.', and you can't help but recall how vibrant and thrilling that whole collection of tunes was.

On the up side, Detective Instinct has some nice moments, its bass-heavy flat-foot suspicious guitar creep backing some playful notions about a naff suburban dick:

Two thugs knocked down an old tree for an old lady's whim
Detective instinct
They were reasonable at first, it seemed…
The man at the bar had a v-neck vest on
No, it was a v-neck waistcoat
Accurate
Detective instinct

… but even this pales after a while.  The opening two tracks are by far the strongest things here - Joker Hysterical Face showcasing yet another 'best Fall riff ever' contenter, a lovely lollopy thing with a silly grin and the song manages to match up to it (though to my suporise, the line 'Ted Roger's brains burn in hell' which used to make me smile just irritates me know, especially as it's repeated), but the jewel in the real plastic gold crown is Marquis Cha Cha, a clear sign that even with the weakest production true class shines through.  It's a daft little spin on Lord Haw Haw, with MES never being able to go home.  In three chunky sections which plop in and around each other Room To Live saves itself.  Still could be better recorded though.

Oh - final track is Papal Visit.  Its shit.  Just noise and nonsense.  I suspect Ed likes it a bit.  He is wrong.

Gah - sorry.  Very negative I know, but necessary.  Room To Live, in my opinion marks the true end of The Fall's early period.  Which therefore means something new… exciting this, isn't it?

Ed says:


I have to admit, the last few reviews have been difficult to write. I’ve been tying myself in knots trying to convey the brilliance of the classic run of output from Dragnet through to Hex using the blunt tool that is my own vocabulary. This week has been a little easier because what we are dealing with is a little flawed, a little imperfect - although I must add not, without its substantial charms.

So - tortuous analogy time now - if Hex Enduction Hour is Thelma and Louise gunning that Thunderbird off the cliff, going out in one final blaze of glory in the expectation of being dashed to pieces on the rocks below, Room To Live is The Fall, er I mean Thelma and Louise, finding themselves bruised but miraculously alive at the bottom. And them the question is - where do you go from there after such a definitive total and final statement?

(Tune in for later installments for my Briget Jones’ Diary theory of Bend Sinister)

How do you follow up the head down single minded intensity of Hex? You don’t. You kick back, regroup, ease off, recharge. To paraphrase - get some fucking respite.

Room to Live - essentially the overspill from an extended weekend recording session for a single, we have a odd assortment of experiments collected together in a mini-album.

Don’t start improvising for god’s sake!

The line up is fracturing in unspoken anticipation of one of the more major shifts in Fall personnel since Dragnet. Marc Riley is on the way out and this will be his last appearance. This will also be the last appearance of secret weapon Kay Carroll, who is listed as the producer of most of the tracks on this album, with the exception of the two poorest ones. Credits on this record are confused - who plays what? It’s hard to know, musicians were encouraged to chop and change. There are a couple of guest players, one of whom is Arthur Cadman of Ludus, who plays for 16 seconds on a track, and gains the honour of being the shortest lived member of The Fall.

In terms of personnel, things are shifting and changing, we’ve had a solid few years and Room To Live could be viewed as snapshot of a band in flux. Possibly like the bit when Doctor Who regenerates and he’s half his predecessor and half his new incarnation and he’s going all mental and flailing around the TARDIS and gibbering and shit. See the record as half a capping off of the previous incarnation of The Fall and part a tentative searching for the new identity.

Well that’s some background and a few bits of half baked speculation. Now the music. Opener, Joker Hysterical Face is a cheeky lolloping, as oddly jaunty number. All swaggering bass, twanging guitar and swinging drums. Offsetting a depressing domestic scene of simmering resentment over the breakfast table. Notable for the marvellous line ‘Ted Rodgers’ brains burn in hell’:

A certain shortcut to a certain drab early 1980s mediocrity - crap food, rubbish TV, woodchip wallpaper, un-ironic moustaches and now defunct brands of lager. It’s a tasty little number, but it is lacking a certain something and never really takes off.

Marquis Cha-Cha is a highlight. A character study, an alter ego. The Lord Haw-Haw of the Argentines, of the Falklands War. Rumpled linen suit traitor trapped at the bar in some god forsaken South American dive. Broadcasting on behalf of his paymasters from the junta to his compatriots back home:

Hey you people over there
And those in sea and air
It has been theirs for years
It is a good life here
Football and beer much superior
Gringo gets cheap servant staff
Low tax and a dusky wife

A rumbling, awkward funk number with marvellous bellowed hook - ‘Marquis! Cha cha!”

He can never go home. This is again The Fall doing something brilliant with a well imagined character study, spotting weird tangents to jump off from, avoid the well trodden.

Hard Life In The Country. Musically it comes through like a Dragnet retread and so feels a little misplaced. Musically, I find it hard to get that excited about it. The lyrics however, are great, drawing perhaps on that vein of horror where the country can do you no good and is full of malice. What The League of Gentlemen did so well. The country is always years behind - the car parks are full of David Bowie clones. A malevolent pitchfork wielding mob of Aladdin Sanes?

The villagers
Are surrounding the house
The locals have come for their due
It's hard to live in the country

Title track Room to Live fails to hit the mark too. Evoking some of the more pastoral moments of Slates, it goes nowhere. Some words about wanting ‘Room to Live’. No can’t get into it. A misfire.

Detective Instinct, however, has real substance and real weirdness. Another character study - a character conducting character studies?

You can tell by his fashion
That boy's been in prison
Detective instinct

The Dragnet closing in. Hard boiled detective monologue? The bass is insistent, the guitar creepy sliding in from the periphery, and the percussion hap hazard. Case notes muttered into a tape recorder, in a back room, over a bottle of whisky? There is the touch of the noir. Paranoia hangs thick. Who knows what the case is, or if there is indeed a case? In short a study in uneasiness and stifling atmosphere. Which is a good thing. Alongside Marquis Cha-Cha, a highlight.

And one final highlight is Solicitor In Studio. There’s this enthusiastic exuberant bouncy bassline with the touch of the wideboy about it - there’s the feel of the more anarchic end of kids TV around the whole thing. Although the subject is a more grown up panel show, tedious point/counterpoint talking heads, the likes of Patrick Moore and Magnus Pike - ‘Scientists and their bloody childish reading habits’. I don’t think it would be too much of a leap to imagine this is MES on the sofa, observing and making notes. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Again, a great song derived from the mundane, and of course the same-as-it-ever-was observation that ‘Young and old dicks make TV’. Also, another one of those world collapsing in on itself anti-choruses. If I recall correctly, Pete can’t stand this song, so I’d be quite interesting in hearing why - to my mind there’s nothing not to like.

The set closes with Papal Visit, which is, to be frank, totally fucking ridiculous. How ridiculous? Mark E Smith plays the violin. I’m guessing he’s had no formal training, no decades ensconced in the conservatory. Essentially it is the sound of a man who can’t play the violin scraping the strings for five minutes under a bed of thumping toms. With a pretty good poem about the Pope’s 1982 UK visit over the top of it that’s probably best off read from the page.

That’s Room to Live. A mixed bag - more good than bad and certainly nothing awful - even Papal Visit, which by the nature of it being so very ridiculous makes it is hard not to have some sort of affection for. The catharsis of Hex has in a way wiped the slate clean.Things are moving on, and a new set up is beginning to evolve. Instead of sticking to a formula that has given them success, they are going somewhere new, changing up both the music and some of the personnel in search of the new thing.

Hex Enduction Hour (Album) (1982)

Ed Says:


It has been a few weeks since the last entry. This has been partly down to being incredibly busy and partly down to procrastination. Procrastination because the idea of writing about Hex Enduction Hour is pretty daunting. Its a work of epic proportions in a world where the currency of the word ‘epic’ is at an all time low. A particularly good sandwich, a mobile phone call plan or a video of a cat falling off a slippery work surface are not epic. Epic is big, expansive in idea, ambition and execution. It dwarves its contemporaries and proves them to be wanting. As a quality, it is rare - it has to be, because we are talking about scale.

That’s one thing then, the epic nature of Hex makes it a difficult subject to get started on because in some way you have to translate the scale and the way it hits you into some sort of sensible collection of words. Back to the old cliche of dancing about architecture.

I’ve made some notes. Looking back on them I find I’ve seemed to favour World War II military terminology, suggesting the impact and sound of the record might be analogous to blitzkrieg or the assault of a Panzer division, or full on total war conducted by the Wehrmacht. I’ve gone even further down this particular metaphorical cul-de-sac to suggest that there is very much a last days in the bunker, fight to the very last man, bombs falling, barbarians at the gate sort of scenario. However, that’s a bit one dimensional.

1982, but it may be at any time - there’s no frame of reference to mark it as contemporary to anything much. Nothing stylistic speaking, and where lyrics hit on known reference points, the framing is abstract. The music is an extreme final gasp - a dinosaur cackle, a pterodactyl cackle, before extinction. Back to the bunker. Presentation - angry, measured, sardonic. The Fall never sound this gloriously deranged again, but that’s OK, there’s many more avenues to explore in the future.

Some background - supposedly this was supposed to be the last Fall record. The one where they bowed out to mainly indifference with a final, totally uncompromising fuck you. They made the record they wanted to make, but luckily for us, the rest of the plan failed - unexpected success - 71 in the mainstream album charts. No mean feat.

After spending a large proportion of my life listening to music too loud in headphones, I’ve fallen foul to tinnitus. The high pitched whining in my ear is a tedious nisance, but I can live with it, the ear doctor advises that the best thing to do is not listen to music at an ear splitting volume and to take regular breaks from standing in front of amps etc. As I am a lot more sensible that I used to be, I follow this advice - with a couple of exceptions - listening to Hex Enduction Hour being one of them. If there is ever an album that should be listened to at a very loud volume it is this, it is almost feels disrespectful,  if that makes any sense whatsoever. The other exception is Raw Power - for the same reason.

Jesus. That’s some meandering preamble. I apologise. Summing up so far at this waypoint - intense, angry, extreme, sardonic (so therefore humorous, darkly) and should be played loud.

A word on personnel - this is the one where The Fall make like the glorious and unfairly maligned by association Glitter Band by utilising two drummers. Karl Burns is back and he’s beating the living crap out of those drums in tandem with Paul Hanley. What a team! Hold tight - I’ve been misleading you a little, Hex isn’t all full assault - there are also quieter, more trancier moments where the drummers get intricate and do some cool intertwining complex stuff.

The album, opens with the bombastic The Classical, which is one of the best openers to any album I’ve heard, on a par with the marching boots that announce Never Mind The Bollocks. Booom! We’re in - a funky, scathing tirade. An exasperation with the great British tolerance of mediocrity perhaps:

You won’t find anything more ridiculous than this new high profile razor unit - made with the best British attention to the wrong detail.

‘Hey there fuck face!’ - another Fall state of the union, pearls before swine. Anyway, it’s big, brash, poppy and it has a fucking bass solo in it.

Jawbone and the Air Rifle - which we’ve visited before, honed over a series of years, the version on here is great - still retaining the weird lysergic Chas and Davisms, but with increased confidence in the delivery and story telling.

Which brings us on to the classic Hip Priest. I don’t think it’s autobiographical, but its a tempting conclusion to come to - ‘He is not appreciated’. He hits motorway services. ‘All the young groups know they can imitate, but I teach’. Seething and shimmering, pulsing, ringing harmonics. All enveloping with a hint of menace, narration up front, right in the ears. Hip, hip, hip, hip, hip hip priest! ‘Clean as a packet of chocolate treats’

And in a series of high points, Deer Park is now prepended with Fortress, a tale about a humdrum BBC radio panel assignment in a the dreary warrens of one of the broadcasters buildings:

And here on the Vitamin B glandular show...
Much discussion in boiled beef and carrots
Room C-H-1-O-C-H-2-O-11

This almost throwaway, but like everything else on the record, it works - stateliness heralded with Casiotone preset.

A pause. I am growing dissatisfied with just running through the tracks like this, it seems that by breaking down the constituent parts we fail to do justice to the whole. I’ve attempted to outline a general feeling of what this record is about, but it is a complex, slippery beast, which is part of its appeal. It continues to yield treasures for over repeated listens and its a different album everytime. At the risk of pretension, how you see it depends on where the light is settling on that particular day. Oof- that’s tortuous.

A word on Iceland. This record was part recorded in Iceland, and I like to imagine that this is where the more hypnotic, inwardly contemplative part of this record stems from. You can definitely hear it in the song Iceland, written on the fly with the band running through a something delicate, repetitive, ancient, a plinky piano figure running through it. A general air of finding a spiritual home in the desolate edge of the arctic. Incantations:

What the goddamn fuck is it?
That played the pipes of aluminum
A Memorex for the Krakens
That induces this rough text
And casts the runes against the self-soul
And humbles in Iceland

Incidentally, the rest of this record was recorded in Hitchin, which having lived there for some of my teenage years, I can confirm is an absolute shithole. Perhaps this album wasn't going to be so angry until the group had spent a couple of days in this backward little market town. I digress...

Backing up to Just Step S’ways. More garage, but made super-huge and magnificent by the double drum attack. Most importantly:

Just step outside this futurist world today
Just step right round this...today
The Eastern Bloc rocks to Elton John.
So just step sideways from this place today
To be a celebrity you've gotta eat the past, nowadays

and then the killer:

But who wants to be in a Hovis advert, anyway?

I’m tying myself in knots here really, so going to wrap up, hopefully Pete has been a little more lucid. And This Day, the piece of music the record ends on is ridiculous and extraordinary. Excerpted from some point in the middle of a 26 minute recording, this is a slice of extreme strait-jacketed bonkers in an industrial unit business, where it’s all cranked up, pummelling onslaught with sick on the waltzer woozy fairground organ. Taking the repetition to the logical extreme, with ranting, hectoring vocals -

‘Everywhere no fucking respite!’

And just when you think there isn’t, it ends. And then you want to listen to it again.

In conclusion - Hex Enduction Hour. It is extremely good, but I’ll be damned if I can convey how good it is. So I suggest you listen to it.

Pete says

In my experience, there are certain albums that, when you even simply go to pick them off the shelf, seem to spark and fizz under your fingertips.  They have an electrical, tactile quality even before that physical moment - they seem to loom large in the mind, to pulse expectantly next to their peers, seemingly knowing of their own power and weight.  It isn't just that they are exceptional - though for me such albums as 'Kid A' and 'Blood On The Tracks' undoubtedly are - and very occasionally they're just ('just' he says, with a wry smile) really good - for example 'Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space'.  No, its something more.  That sense of magic, that notion that this little sliver disk represents something greater than mere notes and words and rhythms.  Its a slippery sort of intangible kind of weird potency.  It can almost be overbearing.  Its clearly impossible to define.  It can be unpleasant, like riding on a roller-coaster in the dark again and again.  And for me at least, in the whole of The Fall's cannon, only one album truly encapsulates this illusive quality, and that album is Hex Enduction Hour.

If Dragnet were a grimy flat with angry dreamers inside, and Grotesque a run-down council house with the fantasist working class, then Hex is a skyscraper, all glass and steel, defying vision, defying light even.  You stare at it for ages trying to comprehend, and then realise your gaze has slipped to your own feet as you remain there, abashed and dumb.  Inside, myriad people, a city's worth of people, so many people that individuality has become meaningless, even meaning has almost become meaningless.  There's just recurring, vague, angry trends of thought that bubble through the legion.  They could be aliens for all I know, as the reality of Hex seems just so far removed from anything I perceive, and while you can try to latch onto a train of thought, but the time you have the train has left the solar system.  It feels paradoxically like 'essence of fall' while also feeling quite removed from anything else by the band ever, like the way that a tomato glances over at tomato puree and goes 'what the fuck?,,,'.

Let's illustrate this by looking at the two weakest things here (and let's get our terms of reference right - we're talking 'weakest' as in 'still can lift those huge round rocks, and almost made the finals of world's strongest man' weak).  When we thought about 'Jawbone and The Air-rifle' some time ago there was a latent sense that it was, for whatever reason, destined to end up on Hex.  It just seemed to condense the HP Lovecraftisms of MES with that pounding rhythm section, clanging guitars, meshing together words and song in a way that felt like the bastard son of 'J. Temperance', 'Spector vs. Rector' and all the great singles we've had  - it just seemed to be a call from the future, a sign-post to the heart of Fall-land.  But now its here, proudly sitting as track two, my god, doesn't it feel like a throwback?  I mean, surrounded by all this noise and sense, and nonsense, and everything in-between, strike me down but doesn't it feel... well, twee?  It's a cheeky tale of a curse with a proper old-fashioned narrative, the driving and grinding is comparatively one-dimensional, the vocal delivery is (in Hex terms at least) very straight.  What we thought sometime ago was the calling card of the future is merely the man at the gate.  And yes, I am overstating the facts to make a point - its a great tune, its a good choice at track two, and anywhere else in the Fall's early cannon it would standout - but there is something very functional about it.

Compare that with And This Day - fucking hell, if ever there was a 'song' that defied you actually hearing it its this one.  Its pretty clear that each instrument has a sense of where it is in the song, which bit it should be playing, but as to how everything fits together its a blimmin mystery.  It just whomps along, sustained primarily in its own obstinate belief in itself, with hooks falling as it goes, shot down in isolation - a bass one hits the ground, a drum one rises above the parapet, another Tommy with a inevitable look in its eye and a prayer on its lips.  Bang.  Gone.  And yet not gone, 'cos on and on it rolls, whipping the listener up into an emotional state best described as terrified bewilderment, "The whole Earth shudders / The surroundings are screaming on the roads" and don't we just know it, and yet another lurching riff on that insescent organ smacks you in the ear.  And yet, after everything that has gone before you can't help but feel this is an appropriate end to the listening experience that is Hex - I mean, what else could come here?  I don't resent And This Day for being hard, I'm not complaining about the way it makes me feel, as you can't finish something as powerful as Hex with anything less than a hammer.  If in this instance we're being pulled about by our expectations of how a song should feel then I'm a better listener because of it.  And Hex deserves a significant send off.

So we have two extremes - Jawbone (though top) feeling like a trad. Fall song (a concept that, in itself, is so ridiculous, and suggests perhaps just how indoctrinated I have become) and And This Day being the most extreme example so far of how hard The Fall can push you while still being artistically/musically valid (there will be gibber at some pointin the coming weeks, I am sure).  Everything else here doesn't feel like it can truly exist, like those elements at the end of the periodic table which fall apart before they actually formed.  All the other songs should never have been able to drag themselves out of the swamp because in so many aspects they stray so far from the norm, from convention, that conceptually I cannot even begin to imagine how they got from head, to guitar, to ear.  To even begin to picture a song like Hip Priest causes the brain to give in and die, and lets be honest, this does not bode well for whatever I am to write next...
Let's mop up a couple of bits before more strangled gushing.  Two drummers - Hanley, who in my head is just a solid, tuned in drummer, and Karl Burns, who I know was mental and I like to think drummed like it.  It's this unusual arrangement that creates the musical template for Hex - rhythm, rhythm, rhythm.  Beats and strums and sounds crashing in and over each other, fighting their way out of the murk.  Also, please don't ask me how, but while the production values here would cause an audiophile to weep the sound is perfect in every way, and whether through intent or accident the nature of the sound goes a long way to lending Hex the otherworldliness that befits the lyrics and songs.  Even before you get into the nitty gritty of what is being said and how its being presented, Hex just seems to be one of those records when everything got nailed all at once.

We've already looked at a number of songs here beforehand, so lets just recap - Deer Park, which impressive left me a little tiny bit nonplussed in its Peel Session outing is made here by a simplest of tricks - The Fall whack a whole other song at the start of it.  'Fortress' is far shorter than Deer Park, a little more expansive in its riffage, but when prefacing it provides the perfect scene setter.  Lyrically the two seem to rub up against each other without really making too much literal sense, which in microcosm is exactly like the rest of Hex.  Who Makes The Nazis allows itself to be a little more musically bonkers with tapes and goodness knows what else cluttering up the sound, but I still stand by my analysis of what its doing lyrically - using the power of nonsense to undermine our labelling of the world.  And Winter is just achingly wonderful - my only criticism of it is that due to the fact that we've moved from a musical medium which you actually have to get up and interact with to hear the second half of the record the splitting of the song into two parts (last track of side one and the first of side two) doesn't work quite as magically as it should do.  But that's hardly The Fall's fault - Hex lives and breathes in a world of its own creation, so who would think of future-proofing it?

There are five tracks remaining that I haven't mentioned, three of which are easily among the greatest songs that The Fall have ever done, while the remaining two are merely phenomenal.  Iceland is a companion piece to Winter, so much so in fact that the weird ennui that infects the latter tune in Salford almost moves lock stock over to Reykjavik.  A jammed meditation with the startling opening "A plate steel object was fired / And I did not feel for my compatriots" it almost, almost matches its chilly partner.  And with Jus Step S'Ways we have a strong contender for best Fall riff ever, with everything slaved to it and MES entertaining us with such weighty insights as "the eastern bloc rocks to Elton John" and "who wants to be in a Hovis advert anyway?"  Simply marvellous.

… I've three songs left to write about.  I have just reread their lyrics yet again, and thought really hard about the whole of Hex to try and start to pull this together, but this record defies any sort of analysis, pinning down.  I suppose the bottom line is this - for a lyricist that was already off piste Hex sees MES just going fucking off on one, and when combined with the focused, yet clattery music, it just leave this listener an awestruck mess.  The words here just sweep and judder,with as many odd phrases that catch the ear on one album as the Fall have had in total so far…

"Hey there fuckface"

"There's been no war for forty years / And getting drunk fills me with guilt"

"I got my last clean dirty shirt outta the wardrobe"

"Much discussion in boiled beef and carrots"

And, of course Mere Pseud Mag Editor's Father which is fucking fantastic.  You have to read it times to actually work out what it means, and then in the context of the song it seems utterly irrelevant anyway.  Anyway, basically, its a character study.  It's Fiery Jack turned up to nine hundred and eleven.  It's about a bloke who sounds a bit of a twat really.  But thats not the point.  The point is, for a pop song (and deep down, its a pop song), its a right fucking mess.  It's the same rhythm over and over again, with various instruments playing the same thing over and over again, occasionally on the 'right' notes though its actually anyones goes what those notes really ought to be.  It's a lurching monster of a tune that comes and goes without much fuss, apart from the fucking chaos, with MES just oodling away one the top, aside from when he gets a bit excited about watching Rowan Atkinson.  It's even got a middle eight that exists to reiterate how punishing the main body of it is, and - get this - a weird, strummed intro which he fucking croons over like some demented Dean Martin type.  It is brilliantly pointless, dazzlingly inconsequential.

And then there's The Classical which as opener sets the tone perfectly.  Two drum kits whacking away, thudding Hanley bass (and even a solo of sorts) and those scabrous guitars that we've come to know and love, but a light year - a fucking light decade - on from anything before, even maybe New Puritan which in hindsight pointed the way much more accurately than Jawbone did.  Lord only knows what its all about - something to do with creativity possibly, highbrow verses low - but all viewed from a Fallian prism, all mashed up and spewed back at you, unrelenting, unforgiving:

Too much reliance on girl here
On girls here, behind every shell-actor
Snobbier Snobbier
Too much romantic here
I destroy romantics, actors,
Kill it!
Kill it!
KILL IT A !
KILL IT!
KILL IT A !

… and finally, goodness me.  How to describe the genius that is Hip Priest.

Y'know all those rappers that dedicate so much time and rhyme to self-aggrandisement?  Both Ed and I have a soft spot for such things, but really its a dirty, cheap little habit isn't it?  You know - "I've got a bigger vocabulary/gun/cock than you".  Childish.  Well, lets bow down to the master.  MES not only manages in one song to declare himself the greatest… whatever he is, but wraps it all up in a little fantasy that teases and delights, is equally as boastful as it is knowingly pathetic. This weird little character study is so perfectly put together that we can feel this hip priest, we know him, even though we can't really say why or how (though, of course, being so blatantly autobiographical helps)… and you know, I could quote any number of lines at you.  Lord knows, I've been quoting this song since the day I heard it, often straight in bemused people's faces, who have no idea who Dan is, nor why someone is not appreciated, nor why they can imitate, but I teach.  But what's the point.  This is a vocal tour de force, an insanely rare perfect combination of writer and singer, showman and artist.  This is someone demonstrating exactly what he's talking about by doing it amazingly - for those of us that get MES, that buy into it, this is like a fucking mantra.

But lets hold on one moment.  If there is any song that we need to redress the MES = The Fall balance, then maybe this is the one.  Yes, I and a many others like (and unlike) me believe MES to be a genius, a unique talent in music that should be celebrated (though that would ruin him), honoured (though he would hate it, probably), bought by every single red-blooded Britishman (… that'd go down OK I suspect).  But while he must take plenty of credit for shaping them, MES would be the bloke in the corner of the pub spouting rubbish were it not for his team - The Fall.  Hip Priest is such a strange musical experience, and he must pay homage to our aforementioned drummers, Riley and Scanlon playing guitars and maybe keyboards, and the might Hanley on bass.  The tangled mesh of music that these people weave, which builds for so long with plucked strings and taps, creating a sparse and lonely landscape with nowhere to hide, just the right environment for MES to unleash the full force of his talent.  The way the song builds for so, so long, the level of control and understanding required to keep things in check before the inevitable, yet still unnerving rush of the loud bits.  Go back to the Peel session and then listen to this - there's no doubt that MES has pushed and moulded, but that little guitar noodle, those bass drops, the way the keyboard can knowingly, perfectly just belt out whatever so long as the rhythm is right, the fact that so many little things have grown and been flooded into the melee must mean that there are skilful players here, and I utterly refute any fool who considers The Fall to be that Smith bloke and his backing band.  Hip Priest is both the best thing that The Fall have done up until this point, and it is a perfect demonstration of just what makes Hex sublime - everybody on the absolute top of their game, and everything else just falling into place as everyone must hope it does when they open the door to the recording studio.

And I write so much, and convey so little.  Hex astounds and delights and you get to the end flustered and sweaty and short of breath.  It says so much but doesn't allow you the dignity of comprehension.  It breaks you down as a music listener, and disdainfully walks away leaving you shattered but aching to learn.  Its astounding… and yet, I still prefer Grotesque!  For all the magic of it, the unyielding invention, there's something about its supreme confidence in itself that makes you think back to NWRA, to S Mithering, those snotty tunes that at least patted you on the back as they prepared to fuck you up.  It's splitting hairs, and really, truly, its nothing more than personal preference, but of these two astounding records the earlier one just manages to tick the boxes that I need filled.

… but having said that, Hex is there on my shelf right now, humming, buzzing to itself, dominating the space, jutting its elbows into its neighbours and waiting expectantly for the next time...

Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul (Single) & Peel Session #5 (1981)

Pete says:


This week – “The Good, The Bad, and The Before Its Time”, a.k.a.“Welcome Back Karl Burns (Do You Actually Play Anything)”, a.k.a. “There’s A Storm Coming”.

I just can’t shake it, though it breaks all my own rules, so I’m going to get it out of the way now – next week already feels massive.  Not necessarily good (though the chances are high), but sun-blockingly significant.  So as a result we’ve ended up this week with a cheeky single and an important Peel session.  We’ve also ended up – in my opinion – with something of a mixed bag, and to be frank this is the most inconsistent group of tunes we’ve had since Witch Trials, and to be perfectly honest, there’s even an element of dullness.  Oh, and I've decided to be hypercritical this week simply due to the fact that otherwise I'd be carping on about 'oh, how wonderful, how innovative', and that'd be super boring for you Mariah.

So, Peel session 5 – we’re rattling through them aren’t we?  That’s 5 in threeish years, and lets not forget the amount of progress that is evident in just this one example of The Fall’s output, especially when you compare it to today’s standards, when it seems to take years for a band to record yet another album that sounds like the last one (it’s just noise, you can’t heard the words, get off my lawn, etc etc).  We begin with Deer Park, which is a prime example of something The Fall do better than any other band I know – sustained, unreleased tension. As in, the same thing over and over again.  Now, this is fine, and in the context of Deer Park it works pretty well really, nice scabrous guitar, thudding along bass line, all well and good.  And that buzzing, incessant electric piano thing, all on two notes - nice, in a nasty sort of way.  But there's something about the performance that just leaves me a little cold.  I can appreciate it, and certainly enjoy it, but it doesn't quite hit the heights that one feels it ought to.  Perhaps this is due to my frustration at the lyrics, as while moments of it buzz me (I like "See the A&R civil servants / They get a sex thrill out of a sixteenth of Moroccan" and "Spare a thought for the sleeping promo dept. / They haven't had an idea in two years") as a whole I feel a little lost in meaning... and its worth saying that this has never fussed me generally about The Fall (or most other bands), and when it happens I often revel in the nonsense or view it as a challenge.  Maybe its the fact I've not read Mailer's 'The Deer Park' which would probably have helped, maybe its just not what I want from this song, or maybe even its been my mood over the last few days, but there's something not quite here for me to hear.  Humm...

And for me at least, things get a whole lot worse with 'Look, Know'. Okay, there should be nothing here for me not to like really, a typical Fall-funk bas line which has a bit of swagger and swing, a nice considered vocal, guitars, meh meh meh... lets be honest with each other, Look, Know is dull.  MES knew it was dull.  Steve Hanley forgets himself at one point and plays few bum notes, but bum notes that come not from the usual place of being so into it you loose yourself, but bum notes from surprise at how dull the not-bum notes are.  Its a dead-end of a track, a half-arsed exploration into a type of song that The Fall have no real reason to be playing, but what is most frustrating is the fact that that repeated, creepy little refrain 'Do you know what you look like / before you go out' could spin off into something really interesting, when in fact after a while you realise that its just an 'end of the affair' song, and even worse there's an element of self-pity that has no place on a song by The Fall (I am prepared to be corrected on this point at a later date). Things like:

But I say happy memories leave a bitter taste
I need a good brainwash agent to cut out this present shout of:
Do y'know what you look like before you go out?
That's why you eat crap food
That's why nobody talks to you
That's why you messed up everything you do

I'm sorry - 'messed up everything you do'?  Well, that's just lazy for any number of reasons, and the stuff that precedes it isn't much better, and I could be an arse and start to bang on about mess/do or
messed/did, but then we get "He was the first one to wear a flying jacket and go to a club / And she has the general policy of not being seen dead in a pub" which is just a nothing, nothing bit of lyrical nothingness.  By the time the lyrics start nudging toward Satre (which in turn starts to make the title a little more interesting) the song is a dead fish on the end of a dead fisherman's cock.  And what I find most frustrating about it all is that I know this song will be a single release, which if its not drastically better than this performance will be the slow bakers cheese flan which breaks a consistently ace run of singles since whatever came after It's The New Thing.  Just poor, and I'm honestly amazed that MES allowed this to bumble along.

Now - please bear in mind my hypercritical stance this week.  Deer Park is at the very least alright, and Look, Know is at the very best poor. Winter is undoubtably amazing. In fact, potentially the
most beautiful thing I've heard by The Fall thus far.  In fact, in the continual yet slightly engineered debate that I'm having in my brain about The Fall/lyrics/poetry it represents the finest example of how
exceptional poetry and music can coexist, and through doing so create a whole new form of meaning, and eschew any concrete sense of 'real' without delving into the likely blind alley of 'surreal' (thought having said that, see below...).  Let's break this down - effectively (after a clugging introduction at least) we have drums, bass, guitar, electric piano all playing pretty much the same thing all the way through (key note - 'pretty much'... there's so much room to manoeuvre within 'pretty much' isn't there?  Classy musicians, really good musical peeps who play without self-consciousness, who drive forward without watching out for the trappings of fame, those types can find whole albums in 'pretty much'.  Elgar wrote the Enigma Variations out of 'pretty much'.)  And musically that's it - but then again, oh! that syncopated arpeggio on the electric piano and oh!  the thuddy riff on the bass that ends each phrase and oh!  all of the sodding thing basically.  Like a runty, dirty four-year old singing something that just causes you to weep uncontrollably, musically Winter inexplicably whacks you right in the heart and will not let you ignore it.  There's no rhyme or reason to this, you can't really explain it, it's just a base fist of a piece. Bang - listen.

But over and above all this, its the most sublime, exceptional piece of poetry this side of Bob Dylan.  The poetry I like the best is usually one of two things, and the stuff I like most is often both - something that says something about something in a smart way that perhaps changes what you thought you felt, and/or something beautiful that uses English in a way that is perhaps unexpected, perhaps rhythmic, perhaps shocking, but always, always beautiful.  Winter scores well on the first and supremely well on the second, though in all honesty to say what its about would be over-reaching myself.  But clearly the mad kid is at the heart of it, and the fact that he demands three times 'gimmie the lead' of the black dog suggests that his tangible unruliness and yet the air of sadness seems to define the emotional timbre of the song.  And that's a fairly potent mix, especially when the refrain seems so perfectly constructed, so well considered, so that its literal ambiguity ('what the fuck does it mean?') is mirrored by its emotional nullness, where positive words immediately get balanced out by darker ones.

Entrances uncovered
Street-signs you never saw
All entrances delivered
Courtesy Winter.

It feels very very Alan Bennet, it feels very very Dennis Potter. It's bliss.  'Two white doves cross the sky' sounds like it should lift you up, but the gentle weariness of it all makes the line doubly sad, Manny in the library who appears only briefly is forever crystallised in time at the moment just before your stomach unravels and a hangover gets slightly better and I know better than most that feeling in that place, and the mad kid's "black cardboard Archbishop's hat / With a green-fuzz skull and crossbones" is so ridiculous but so pathetic... everything that is wrong with Look, Know is flipped on its head here, but most pertinently the general sense of pointlessness that infects Look, Know is harnessed by Winter, is thrown right back at the listener, is turned into something beautiful and sad. It's almost too much to bear to be honest.

... okay, so I don't think its up to my to decode it.  But I really want to.  But using words to do so seems to miss the point - I mean, if the mad kid has 4 lights, and genius only three, yet the rest of us have 2.5 (bar the mediocre) then am I illuminated enough to even try? And the mad kid has more lights than genius, what does that make him? Too insightful to even realise, to bear knowing?  Here's where music and words together can strike even more pointedly into the brain, into the 'heart'.  I can feel Winter, even though I don't know why.  And as if by magic, as if I actually plan this gibberish ineffectual garbage which I write, now is the moment to point out a lovely little coincidence that occurred today.

I have, for some time now, been taking photos of my daughter with CDs that we've listened to, and this is the one I took today.

Winnie very much enjoyed Abbey Road, and I don't blame her as its class, but let us for a moment consider its opening track 'Come Together'.  I don't have my copy of the seminal 'Revolution In The
Head' to hand, but I seem to recall that Ian MacDonald talks about 'Come Together' as being a song that (excuse my paraphrasing and potential misinterpretation) uses words and specifically nonsensicality as a tactic in the counter cultural revolution, crystallising something begun with 'I Am The Walrus' and others. Actually breaking down meaning and yet saying something regardless about how pointlessness and artificiality.  'Come Together' is powerful beyond words precisely due to its lyrical content being beyond sense, to the point where that is the point.  Now, consider who makes the Nazis...

... I mean, who does make the NAZIs?  It seems a daft question, but really, think about it, and don't answer Hitler.  It's who 'makes', not 'made'.

... and who decided that 'fuck' upsets people?

... and why are you reading this?  It's just words.  It's just words about words and music, written by someone who's opinion is only as relevant as you make it.  I'm nobody.  Seriously - I'm a 34 year old
librarian.  I take pictures of my daughter with the CDs of other people's bands.  I write songs that virtually nobody hears.  But those that do think they are pretty good.  But what do they know?  I could
write my achievements and make myself sound like a superman or a waster.  You might think I've striven hard against adversity to achieve something noble, or squandered my talents when I could have changed the world.  If indeed you consider my talents to be anything like worth speaking of.  I could spin words back and forth and make anybody reading this believe anything.  Or nothing.  Or everything.

So, who makes the nazis?

Over a scatty couple of riffs MES essentially takes apart the horror and the artifice of 'nazis'.  It's like that Lenny Bruce bit of standup where he goes through the audience naming them by the most offensive racial stereotypes there are, and keeps saying this words over and over again, but here its almost gibberish that smacks the power of words to bits:

Who makes the Nazis?
Motels like three split-level mirages
Who makes the Nazis?
Buffalo lips on toast, smiling
Who makes the Nazis?
I put a finger on the weird.
This was real Irish know.
Joe was then good as gold
And told of the rapists in the Spa Motel.
The real mould.
Who makes the Nazis?

Here we are 35ish years after the end of the second world war, and MES is illustrating to us that these archetypes are nothing more that empty vessels that we fill with meaning.  This is not to say that he's
undermining evil and terror - far from it - but the evil men do need not be labeled and indexed.  I am sure that there are many interpretations of this song that take images and eek out meanings, that demonstrate connections between The Fall and history, but that's not what I hear.  I hear a remarkable deconstruction of sense, which takes as its subject nazis, but it could be anything really.  Who makes the Beatles?  Who makes The Fall?

Phew.  Heavy.  Anyway, lets just touch upon probably the last great Fall single in a remarkable run Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul all thump and chippy and joyous, with a proper bridge thing and pop greatness
spilling over - we salute you Rowche-Lie Dream, good times.  And before finishing up, Fantastic Life... humm... well, it's alright isn't it, but already I'm starting to hear spaces that need to be filled by something a bit more clear and clean, to cut against the mess and noise.  I mean, its well played, interesting enough, but it needs a bit more spark, a bit more glamour maybe, a something to add to the brix and mortar. Wonder what that's going to be?  But before that... what's this I see before me, blocking out the light, uncompromisable, scary, big...

Ed says:


Once upon a time there was Northen - an odd, semi-secretive regional subculture with esoteric rituals, serious fanatics and distinctive uniform. Seven inch singles as sacred relics that had somehow become weirdly divorced from their original Motor City context and transplanted to the North. Specifically Lancashire and more Specifically still, Wigan. Of course, these days where every single sub-sub genre has been mined for the reissues market, a lot of the mystique has been removed. On the plus side, anyone can now hear Frank Wilson’s incredibly rare (two known copies), and incredibly beautiful ‘Do I Love You’, but on the down side it is now forever in my head indelibly associated with a popular brand of fried chicken. Families thrust their gaping maws in bargain buckets while the soul man expounds. So it seems you can have familiarity and chicken ads or you can have obscurity and an opaque mystique.

Lie Dream of a Casino Soul does nothing to dent the mystique but it leaves us with more questions. An insight into the deranged sleep deprived Sunday mind of the 48 hour chemically assisted dancefloor athlete.

I'm a bit jagged right now
In a tongue-tired, wired state
Cause Sunday morning dancing
I had an awake dream
I was in the supervision dept.
Of a big town store
Security floors one to four
They had cameras in the clothes dummies.

‘And that just goes to show, the lie dream of the casino scene’. Ambivalent, but ready to do it again next week no doubt. Musically, we’ve immediately picked up where Slates left off. Leaning to the abrasive side of that release, we have bopping drums, and wonky, creepy keys/kazoo. From the intro we could almost be dealing with some sort of northern soul pastiche, but this is neatly side stepped by the song becoming totally fucking willfully awkward - a good thing in case you were in doubt. Yet it is still poppy in a nagging way - repetition. MES is in strong form, commanding, although a bit more serious in tone, which is at odds with the surrealism of the lyrics. Oh yes, and the thing I love most about this is the pronunciation of ‘dept’ - exactly as it is written.

The B Side, Fantastic Life is even better, at least I think it is - I’m flip flopping on this one - at the moment I am all in favour. Again following in the vein of Slates, but this time the poppy Leave the Capital side of things. Driving, repetitive, shiny, with some shimmering keys and a nice bit of understated but cooly melodic guitar, where Fantastic Life really stands out for me is lyrically, in as much as I’ve got very little idea what Mark is actually banging on about, but there’s some great snippets:

The Siberian mushroom Santa
Was in fact Rasputin's brother
And he didst walk round Whitechapel
To further the religion of forgiven sin murder

which feels like the beginning of some insane shamanic conspiracy theory that takes in the Romanovs and Jack the Ripper. Anyway, a hard one to get a handle on but I do like it, despite, or maybe because of its intangibility. Sometimes it is good to resist the urge to know something inside out and to struggle for some sort of definitive interpretation, sometimes none is available - don’t let the untidiness jar, accept it. Join us.

Onto Peel Session #5, which is a cracker. Now, in past posts I’ve been inclined not to go too mad with songs that reappear in the studio form in the following week, but here we have some new songs that will do just that, but in interesting and different enough forms to give the session versions a bit of attention in their own right.

Right then - Peel Session. You know the drill. The Fall come in, record four songs of quality and distinction which we then get to enjoy for perpetuity. Thank you The Fall and thank you John Peel, even if your love of gabba was a bit trying sometimes. They never play any gabba when the BBC wheel out Zane Lowe or Lamacq to eulogise him once a year, and what we hear is the standard indie disco Love Will Tear Us Apart/This Charming Man/Blue Monday revisionism with maybe a sprinkling of The Wedding Present and maybe our heroes’ recording of Mr Pharmacist to spice things up a little. Never any gabba, Scouse house, King Sunny Ade, Bogshed, dusty old 78s and the like. We just get a Factory/Rough Trade oriented indie theme park that bears very little relation to the late Mr Peel’s incredibly varied, often delightful  and on occasion slightly irritating radio show.

Major digression - back on track - it must have been great hearing these on the radio for the first time in March of 1981. This is, in my opionion, a really special Peel Session. Let’s dive in.

Deer Park. Sometimes listening to The Fall is like being given a massive reading list. Does the hook allude to Mailer's 'Deer Park'? I've read it and am none the wiser. Keeping up with Mark’s literary references can be a full time job. In previous weeks we’ve had H P Lovecraft, M R James, William Blake. Add to the list this week Colin Wilson’s ‘Ritual In The Dark’, which I’m yet to get round to. A full on drone, head down thumper. A sketch of some sort of London squat scene. ‘The English Deer Park - a large type artist ranch’, patrolled by ‘Captain Beefheart imitators with zits’ where ‘young rastas...get a sex thrill out of a sixteenth of Morrocan’.  Grubby, improverished post-punk (chronologically, that it) scene. A keyboard all the way through - all on one crash victim’s head mashed against horn honking note.

It’s hard being unique and it’s very difficult creating original work that sounds unlike anything that’s gone before it. Look Know makes it look easy. Its greatness is in its insouciance. Repetitive circling bass, snare with vocal mantra breaking out into exquisite longing jangling that is perhaps reminiscent of The Cure’s more poppy moments before returning to the mantra, leading out into a more lovely jangle that harks back to Dragnet, which seems like ancient history now, but was in fact less released only around 18 months previously. Ridiculous. Lyrically weak and concerned with, I don’t know, the ritual of how you display yourself on a night out. Not amongst the best, but in a way irrelevant, as what makes this great is the delivery. A triumph of style over substance, which needn't always be a bad thing.

Winter. How to approach about writing about this? Its beautiful, shimmering, throbbing, brittle, hypnotic and again, true to the mission built on repetition. Peaks and troughs, build ups and slow downs, shifts in gear. Over the weeks we’ve had these many moments where there’s a musical bed with poetry over the top, ‘CnC Stop Mithering’, ‘Spectre Vs Rector’, ‘The NWRA’ - this is the moment where they nail it, where the words, mood, music work together in such a way as to create something really rather special.

The mad kid walked left-side south-side towards me
He was about 7
His mother was a cleaning lady
She had a large black dog
And the mad kid said:
"Gimme the lead
Gimme the lead
Gimme the lead"
I'd just walked past the alcoholics' dry-out house
The lawn was littered with cans of Barbican
There was a feminist's Austin Maxi parked outside
With anti-nicotine anti-nuclear stickers on the side
Anyway two weeks before the mad kid had said to me
"I'll take both of you on,
I'll take both of you on"

A snapshot of a scene, a neighbourhood, characters rubbing against each other. Again - signifiers, what the Austin Maxi tells you, a very specific early to mid eighties form of radicalism, like my mum’s friends from the the Poly who used to give the seven year old me Greenpeace T Shirts with pictures of whales on and read New Internationalist. We also have a bit of weird pulp science stuff which also harks back to the ongoing thematic obsession with there being something else behind the curtain that the more attuned mind can latch onto:

The mad kid had 4 lights, the average is 2.5 lights
The mediocre has 2 lights, the sign of genius is three lights

Again, marvellous.

With its heavy quotation, you could say that Totally Wired was The Fall’s big old Hunter S Thompson influenced song, but to me Who Makes The Nazis really evokes the late Doctor’s style. Short, clipped, hallucinatory, buzzing away, paranoid journalistic phrases barked into a dictaphone. Over some extreme anti-music - out of tune uke, thumping non-swinging toms, glorious dictaphonic tape hiss, serious twangs, sparseness. If you don’t make music you might say that it is completely without skill or planning, but you’d be wrong. This is a piece of music full of images - conjured up by the words and by the gaps in the music as the listener’s mind attempts, by default, to pin down some meaning or reference point. A heat haze song for dried out, brains frazzled by sun and acid.

Mark: Here’s a word from Bobby 

Unidentified Fall Member: When you're out of rocks, just give them real soul (salt?)
Hate’s not your enemy, love's your enemy
Murder all bush monkeys 

Yes. Me neither, but what I love about this exchange is the complicit deadpan delivery of Unidentified Fall Member. There’s a surrealist cabaret vibe to the whole thing. Or an aside in the script for a some sort of weird play. Unsettling. Who makes the Nazis? We all are all complicit...

So - no straight answers, no easy narratives, no simple tunes, but many interesting facets and a high hit rate when it comes to hairs on the back of the neck moments. The single’s great, but the Peel Session is stunning - consolidating but innovating, perhaps more than they’ve ever done at this point.

Slates (Album) (1981) / Peel Session #4 (1981)

Ed says:

“Evil’s not in extremes, its in the aftermath - the middlemass."

Back once again, scourge of the mediocre and the poorly though out, The Fall resurface with Slates, a six track mini album, but by no means inconsequential. A condensed capsule of Fall intensity - experimental, whatever that means, with an unexpected pop angle. The line up solidified into a potent attack division. Unrelenting. Righteous bile.

Slates opens with Middlemass, which is a big crashing collapsing insistent rant, where the ‘Wehrmact never got in here’, but where banality exists, but not so much the banality of evil, more that of lack of imagination, learning, artfulness:

This boy is like a tape loop
And he has soft mitts
But he's the last domain
Of a very black, back room brain
He learned a word today
The word's ‘misanthropy’

Its is rumoured that this song is a sly dig at Marc Riley. Whatever, cracks are potentially appearing in The Fall structure and we may well be approaching a time of renewal, but for the time being hammer away, even if the very music you help create is the cudgel with which you are battered.

Anyway. Middlemass manages to combine the two main musical tropes that run through Slates in one opening song. There is the full on seesawing keyboard atonal guitar big crashing beat, anchored by Steve H’s out there but steady as a rock bass. Nagging, insistent, pushing the boundaries of comfort, imagine the cavity walls of your house are full of bluebottles - itchy skin, panic attack music. Contrast this with an almost genteel, pastoral, poppy tunefulness, underpinned with acoustics. ‘Pastoral’ is a word that comes up surprisingly often for me with The Fall, throughout their career there are these random gentle moments. Middlemass is a masterpiece of delivery - every line building up to a rhythmic payoff - all the instrumentation plus Mark’s singing/non-singing. Brutal and effective.

An Older Lover Etc follows. This has both feet firmly planted in the buzzing insects big dread mental collapse side of the coin. A creeping, spidery guitar, clattering drums, claustrophobic bass. Multiple vocal tracks from MES, phased in and out, with ‘Take an older lover you’ll soon get tired of her’ repeated mantra like, but the highlight of this if the climactic screamed/barked: “Dear girls! Dr Annabel lies!”. Who Dr Annabel is/was I don’t know, an agony aunt possibly. A scary piece of music.

Prole Art Threat - more narrative, this time a fucked up Play For Today, thrown through the scrambler, rendered incomprehensible. A tale of spy intrigue, dealing with a ‘pink press threat’ and MI9. ‘It's recluse, safehouse time’. Martial, lumbering, glorious, urgent. Uneasy listening - music to blast at the surrounded compounds of 1980s drug lords from helicopters until they relent, begging for mercy, throwing down their weaponry. Well, a lot more fun than that sounds, but opaque and providing no sop to the listener.

Fit and Working Again. The poppy side of things - an acoustic guitar and the lovely walking melodic bass line. Fisher Price piano melody. MES relaxed and conversational - fit and working again - clarity, crispness, an eagerness to face the world, joyfullness. Fresh faced even. A feeling of personal observation as opposed to a character study, pages from a diary:

Sat opposite a freak on a train
Warts on his head and chin
Boy, was I getting so vain
I saw the recession around Victoria Station

Which the longer you stare at, the more you see.

So, a few weeks back I made some sort of comment re: garage bands, specifically holding up Totally Wired as some sort of exemplar ultimate distillation of a primitive RnR thumper? Well, they’ve only gone further, reducing everything to two glorious chords. Slates, Slags Etc is The Fall’s take on Sister Ray, except better.

Here's the definitive rant - slates drive me bats. Therefore I say ‘hey slates give us a break’

Which just about sums it up, for six odd minutes - in fact the only thing I think could improve this would be another ten minutes. A music scene rant, a music scene populated by the mediocre middlemass, where:

Male slags, knock over your drink, pay for correct amount spilt

And where you must not break the cardinal rule:

Don't start improvising for Christ's sake

Which is the point, have the nerve, have the conviction to stick to those two chords, if you have enough to say, you need no more.

And finally, the piece-de-fucking-resistance, as they say in France - Leave The Capitol. When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life? Samuel Johnson may have been correct then, but when you experience:

The tables covered in beer
Showbiz whines, minute detail
Its a hand on the shoulder in Leicester Square
Its vaudeville pub back room dusty pictures of
White frocked girls and music teachers
The beds too clean
The waters poison for the system

Then:

you know in your brain, you know in your brain
LEAVE THE CAPITOL!
EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!

Its a jaunty, poppy number, but deep, hypnotic. MES relating the details calmly before the exhortations of the chorus. The delivery is perfect, the dynamics of the band, followed by the ridiculous final third of the song, with the cod Scottish:

I laughed at the great God Pan - I didnae, I didnae!

This, the Roman shell and the ancient environs of London are oppressive and one must get out, is this perhaps the accumulated burden of history troubling or crowding out the psychically attuned mind? Possibly. What I do know is this is a fantastic piece of multi-layered pop music that makes me extremely happy to listen to. You know, grinning and dancing and shit.

So that’s Slates. Its odd, but its also immediate and holds up some of the best traits in The Fall - the mood of experimentation, fascinating lyrics, their ability to find pop hooks in the strangest places. There is an air of misanthropy (learned a new word today) but not bitterness. Strident and righteous. Bottom line - the streak of excellence that began with Dragnet is as yet unbroken.

I’m not going to go into Peel Session #4 in too much detail. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it, its just that we’ve already dealt with Middlemass, and this version therein doesn’t really offer anything new. We’ll be dealing with the single Lie Dream of A Casino Soul next week, and that’s the superior version. Hip Priest ushering in something new, but again, I want to save that for a later week, because its big stuff.

This leaves CnC-Hassle Schmuck, which is a reworking of CnC Stop Mithering, from Grotesque. This time we get some additional lyrics, which serve as an excellent addendum to the original. DVD Extras. So what do we have here? Well the following rings particularly ominously close to the mark, and I love it for that:

I can see, I have dreams
I was by the fireplace at home
The date was 2010
All England was a university town
All you could get was wine

Then! Breaking news!

Oh dear friends
I can't continue this
Arthur Askey's just been shot (Oh my God!)

Before launching into a preposterous reworking of Do The Hucklebuck (Do The Hassle-Schmuck). A hilariously entertaining rockabilly gibberish nightmare, which seems to entertain an interest in tartan:

Get some pics off your old dad (old pics)
Pick up some old tartan (big spot)
And remember friends
The highland parents

and oddly enough ‘shimmering buttocks’. We're on to absurd Vic and Bob sort of territory here. Marvellous.

So to conclude this week - The Fall, sometimes the intention is crystal clear, sometimes more opaque, and often they confuse the hell out of you, but they always entertain and they always get under your skin.

Pete says:

The experimental in now conventional.  The conventional is now experimental…

… d'you know, this exercise is actually somewhat harder when a band is in a rich run of form.  Because one tries to make each little instalment interesting and different, but after a while, when a band keeps churning out class after class, what more can you say?  Slates is fabulous, and while showing some element of development, really and honestly The Fall are coasting here, albeit coasting on the very top of a very high and very impressive wave.  Its definitely worth noting though that we've a six track release, and in my personal Pisco experience thats a difficult format to nail, especially for a band as freewheeling as The Fall - any band with a well defined sound can bang out six tracks, and the quality of that release will depend on the relative quality of the tracks.  But The Fall don't just have a sound - their sound is a whole world to explore, and so six manifestations of it can be so radically different that the combined effect is muddy and odd (whereas on an 10 or 11 track album those inconstancies are balanced out and actually provide character and flow).

Slates circumvents this risk to my ears by splitting itself right down the middle, with the first three songs - or 'side one' you hipsters you - leaning toward the more experimental, and side two showcasing three more conventional numbers.  Being The Fall though these definitions may require a little finessing - 'experimental' in Fall world means tunes ostensibly from the rock/pop tradition but with a twist, a push further than you would expect leading elsewhere, a license to roam.  Whereas 'conventional' in Fall-land means odd, bonkers poems/raps/lyrics delivered over playful, wonky music, yet recognisably styles, songs, verses and choruses as you might expect… and having reread that, I suppose they pretty much amount to the same thing.  This is in no way noble.

Anyway, Slates, yes!  Opening with Middlemass, in its own way its as peculiar a little song as the Fall have ever done, almost uncatagorisable owing a debt to indie, show tune… god knows what else really.  Seriously - all I can say with any certainty is that its a song in two parts, the first a lollopy beast that keeps raising its head above the murky waters before crashing backdown again, and then a sort of chippy little cheeky thing that in another band's hands would cause you to want to put your head through a wall.

Lyrically there are nods to a number of MES preconceptions - class (which is what I've always the taken to refer to, or maybe if not class then just 'averageness'), drugs, music and the mechanics of the industry, some casual WWII iconography (although I was so gutted to find out that what I thought was 'the weather never got in here' - which I felt was a great great line especially as its repeated a number of times - is actually 'Werhmacht'.  Ah well, life goes on), but it feels a little like, even for a lyricist as scattergun, as oblique as MES, well - utterly bonkers.  It really feels like any linking narrative, any exposition, any turns of phrase which are unnecessary have been discarded, and even possibly that the frame has substantially widened.  So here we are folks - a 6 track release that has the confidence to open with a tune as unconventional as this… why are you not listening to it yet?

Ok - next up is'An Older Lover etc..  So, why the 'etc'?  I mean, if one is to read the lyrics off the page it's a simple little meditation on… well, taking an older lover.  Or a younger one.  No, an older one.  But it's moments like when another MES piles in on top of the sing-song one that began the tune insisting "Doctor Annabel Lies!" that we start to think we're not quite in the territory we thought we were (as well as the icky reference to the older lover's 'love [being] like your mothers / with added attractions'.  Uuuugggghhhhhhhh….).  And all those added bits of music that seem to get slapped over… I assume via a little tape recorder or something, but when a different rhythm ploughs in over the skeletal guitars and tribally drums any sense of simplicity in the lyrics gets swept away.  This love affair is rather more complicated than words alone suggest.

What makes Prole Art Threat a work of genius is this - it is essentially the same, rolling aggressive chug with a highly counterintuitive lollop, which then is punctuated in seemly unstructured places by the same four guitar chimes.  Musically that's it.  But over this is MES' take on a Play For Today, with characters and a script and everything.  Some songs defy explanation - go, gentle reader, and Spotify.

So flip that mp3 over friend!  And while we do, lets appreciate how odd that was. It's easy to take for granted when you've listened to this bizarre music since its conception as we have, but we have a six track record of which the first three are wilfully bonkers.  They're hooky undoubtably, they're pop songs of a kind, but they don't follow any solid kind of conventions that we take for granted in pop/rock music, or at least they disobey enough of them to make any pigeonholing pointless.  And most impressively, The Fall make this sound so easy that you get suckered into not noticing.

The three remaining tunes by contrast are pop, punk, then funk but allay any disappointment you may feel - in place of any desired musical groundbreaking we get some choice Smithisms, and besides, if all pop, punk and funk were as fine as this you wouldn't need much else.  Fit and Working Again is as fresh a tune that The Fall have committed to tape as yet, all acoustic guitars and real piano and falsetto backing.  Lovely.  And this brightness is wonderfully offset with such breezy observations as 'I used to hang like a chandelier / My lungs encrusted in blood / But the flex is now cut clear'.  A song you could take home to your granny… unlike our three chord-a-punk-a-definitive-rant Slags, Slates, Etc which thugs along with whining feedback and elucidates on a subject clearly dear to MES' heart, slaved to a rolling rhyme and offering such observations as 'Male slags, knock over your drink / Pay for correct amount split', 'With greedy bastard scrubbed hands / Kill jokes join gangs', 'Dog bits the dicks that feed it', 'Ream off names of books and bands / Kill cultural interest in our land'. Charming.  And very, very funny.  And rounding things off, possibly the jewel in the crown here, Leave the Capitol - funky as sin, and with a hook to die for - 'LEAVE THE CAPITOL / EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL / Then you know you must leave the capitol'.  Too good me to describe, so I hope Ed has.

So anyway, Slates represents a steady progression…

(BRRRPTZZAP!  Ok- confession. I know what's coming. I know what's on the horizon for this band, and if my musical memory serves me well then Slates, even as fine as it is, is merely a progression to… something.  And this isn't to undermine its brilliance as all six tracks are seriously good, but even so… I'm not sure this 'something' is as good as, say, Grotesque, but having progressed so far chronologically I'm hearing Slates as a semi-consolidation, a sort of taking stock a bit before going absolutely mental, and this is ever so unfair because mercy me, I'd quite happily stick it on repeat for hours at a time and not get bored.  In fact I have. A number of times.  So if I, in any way, have not sold this to you then fine - I'm a lucky bastard who's massively, massively into The Fall and if you don't want these six tracks to push your ears and mind that's your concern.  BRRRPTZZAP!)

… so before I round up a quick note on Peel Session 4.  Middlemass, as stated, is great and played well here.  Lie Dream of a Casino Soul sounds like it has something missing (this is due to the fact it has something missing), and I'm not even typing the name of the third one.  Seriously, the third one is just too much right now for me to even think about.  In fact, I just thought about it for, like, half-a-second and went a bit mental, and had to have a lie down for a bit, and asked the wife to take my temperature, and by the time I realised it I found it was next week and I was still in my underwear, the baby was going through my wallet, the cat had written a novel, and I was late for my tea.  I'm not going there right now and you can't make me…

… so just to say that C'n'C - Hassle Schmuck is my tune of the week.  It's not as good as anything on Slates really, but its the best bit of the best song on Grotesque with new lyrics which are as worthy to be there as anything on the original (the spookily prescient "The date was 2010 / All England was a university town / All you could get was wine", and "you wouldn't even know the sun was up / unless there was a press release on it" for example), which when falls apart with the sad news that "Arthur Askey's just been shot" (while in the background an audibly shaken band member laments 'oh my god!') into a piercingly sharp and funny parody of a Chubby Checker dance tune.  Screw the experimental!

Live In London 1980: The Legendary Chaos Tape (Album)

Pete says:


You would have thought that this week the Fall Retrospective would have been a breeze, what with a few days annual leave and such excitement spilling over from last time.  However, its been far from that - after such an outpouring of guff about Grotesque, general life bits and bats, and a Pisco Sour Hour recording session on Friday, I find myself on a Monday night feebly tapping away.  And I enjoyed this weeks offering too, so maybe its a shame to not do it justice..

… but on the other hand - ah screw it.  Let's get this bit out of the way - Legendary Chaos Tape is a fine document of this version of The Fall playing a high quality set to a increasingly empty room of people (at least that's how it felt) who go from being enthusiastic to bewildered to elsewhere.  But none the less our heroes plough on, carrying their unique torch as they blaze a trail through something or other, turning music on its head and washing it down with a pint of bitter.  Is MES a lager or bitter man?  I sort of feel he's a lager man, but I wish it were the other way round.

Anyway, here's my key thought from this week, before I sign off, send this to Ed, and expect a stern tut due to lateness - as I said, my band were recording on Friday night - it went rather well, cheers for asking.  Our errant quarter Mary will be returning to the fold soon, and so our attentions to the live set what with gigs coming up, and we've already drawn up a list of greatest hits to get back up to speed.  Its not a very long list, but that's not important right now.  What is important right now is - when does a band bring a new song through to the live set?  When do you unleash that sprog on the world?  When it's half formed?  Quarter formed?  When you think its finished?  And how do you approach that live performance?  A gift to the fans?  A litmus test?

PSH generally get a song totally written, then try it out live, then tinker with it to really hone it for live performance (or ditch it - that has happened before now).  Based on the Legendary Chaos Tape The Fall do something rather different.  They lull their fans in with the odd single or album track, then having metaphorically tethered them to a chair proceed to continue the writing process, but on stage.  Maybe a couple of the band don't really know the song - fine, they'll work it out.  The audience certainly don't know it, but given that it hasn't really been written you can't really blame them.  Maybe the lyrics aren't finished - fine, use some old ones that you like and see what new direction you can take.

Essentially, the observation I'm trying to make here is that certain tunes here are less live performances and more small parts or a laborious birthing process, with an audience unwitting contributors.  With other bands I'd get cross at, lets say, An Older Lover being such a prototype feet-finding process here, but I can hear something growing and changing, and I know that by the time we get to next week this kind of thing will have paid off.  And anyway, soon afterwards we have a stunning, tight Container Drivers just to prove that we're in a controlled environment.  In fact, much as I did enjoy this live offering, and though I am pushed for time this week, I do reckon that this white-hot on-stage growth ties in with the Repetition and with the changing faces and with some of the other things that we're noticing, and that's perhaps the most interesting thing to take forward from this. Onwards.



Ed says:

The approach we've been taking to this whole project is to take things chronologically, release by release, with the conceit that each week we're listening to the music anew, or at least with fresh ears. We're barred from listening to Fall output beyond our current temporal threshold, so to all intents and purposes we don't know what's coming up. Of course, being more than a little interested in the music, to date I'd heard all of these records. This is not the case of The Legendary Chaos Tape, which I've been listening to for the first time this week.

So some points. A live album. 1980. It's a nice little (long) set, although not up to the intensity of Totale's Turns. The sound is grubby and lo-fi - which is not a problem. The band are verging on the edge of shambolic at times, but they are admirably nailed to the floor by the younger Hanley brother, Paul, on drums. There is energy, enthusiasm, attack. Most of the songs on here are essential, although perhaps not present here in their essential versions. Notable highlight is the bonkers shamanic trance of Spector vs Rector, where every version I hear seems to be a further exercise in distilling more and more fear and loathing from the source material, radiating bad vibes out in all directions. Newies, An Older Lover, in particular showcase a kind of claustrophobic spidery sound with creeping dynamic shifts forming an uncomfortable bed for some uncomfortable poetry, which is very potent. We'll be dealing with this more next week.

The band, and MES, sound uncharacteristically relaxed. MES is joking, having fun, doesn't appear to be too nonplussed with band cock ups. None of this - 'Will you stop mucking about and get it fucking together' business. Perhaps he's breaking in the new drummer gently after the teddy boy's ejection.

Live albums, however, are curious beasts, particularly ones with little crowd noise that appear to be mainly taken from on stage sounds (a guess). There is a disconnect between the performance and the context. You get this on the Chaos Tape and I think it kind of suffers because of it, or perhaps this is just me. Are they playing in the upstairs room of a pub? A large hall? Someone's front room? Who knows? What's the room look like? Are the crowd excited, antagonistic, bored, confused? Perhaps I'm some sort of sap who wants everything spelled out.

Its a good snapshot of The Fall at this moment in time, or at least I assume it is. MES is a frontman very much in control - well mostly in control. There is a level of shabbiness, but it is appealing. I don't know. I think I have to spend some more time with the recording. I'm flip-flopping.

In short, its not bad, but its no Totale's Turns, one of the great live albums. Other great live albums I've known and loved would be The Commodores Live 1977, Suicide's '23 Minutes Over Brussels' and Bob Marley and the Wailers Live at the Rainbow. And its strikes me that all of these in their certain ways capture the crowd and the ambience perfectly and therefore the event as a moment in time and with a context, even if it is the sound of a load of enraged Belgians trying to bludgeon someone to death with their own drum machine.

That's it this week. Seriously rambling and confused this week, let's see where the next one takes us...

Grotesque (After The Gramme) (Album) (1980)

Ed says:

In the intro to this project, Pete mentions being proud that he got me into The Fall, and he should be as it is true. He also says that it was the repeated playing of the greatest hits compilation ‘Fifty Thousand Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong’ while on a road trip that did the job . This is partly true, but it was actually the other Fall album he brought along that had the most profound impact. The album happened to be Grotesque (After The Gramme), which we’ve got to this week.

The three of us on this trip, Pete, our friend Adam and myself took it in turns to drive as we escaped the November snow of Sheffield headed for Spain. As is only right and proper, the person driving got to select the music for their shift. By the time we were halfway through France it was Pete’s turn to drive and he put Grotesque on. I’d like to say that I was caught up in it straightaway, but this would be incorrect - Pete likes to sing along and he knew all the words. I find this distracting. However, I heard enough to be intrigued and he kindly shut the fuck up when it came to further listens. By about the third listen I knew that I loved The Fall and I knew that this was a very special album.

A weird one to write this week - this is the Fall album I love the most and it’s quite hard to write this post without just enthusing and gushing and the like. I’ve also had little sleep this weekend so who knows if my thought processes are firing properly. Having said that, I’ve got a large pot of Assam in front of me stewing happily away.

So let’s begin - well I was going to go off into a rant about the heritage rock industry but it was getting a bit incoherent. Anyway, where I was going was this - Grotesque is a stunning piece of work, an artistic high watermark and it certainly doesn’t deserve the obscurity within which it languishes. Its top level, mind blowing, high echelon transcendental shit. To my mind,  it is completely unique, does everything on its own terms and is 100% successful. The rough and ready production veers all over the place, which should be recipe for inconsistency, but perversely does nothing to affect the cohesiveness of the album. There’s no dead weight, no filler and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

There’s a common perception, it would appear, that The Fall are in some way difficult or impenetrable, or that the music is simply nasty or the lyrics willfully obscure. I think in reality that this is rarely true, but that in order to engage with this music you actually have to stop what you are doing and listen to what is going on. Fight the idea of background music as opposed to something you sit down and listen to. Maybe this is because we know, deep down, that with 99% of music out there nothing of any real interest is being said, so we refuse to engage. What would happen if people started listening and really thinking about the cod-profound-reading-Nabokov-in-a-showy-manner-on-public-transport lyrics of Sting, or the extended piano backed empty platitudes of Coldplay? That’s picking some extreme example for the sake of illustration, but you get the gist, People aren’t too stupid to comprehend poetry, they’re just buried under tonnes of anodyne lyrical cardboard. Grotesque is a great album to listen to uninterrupted and undistracted. This may of course be why the enforced imprisonment of a long journey down an autoroute afforded the time to properly engage with and become absorbed by it.

The album opens with a piece of music that is really hard to describe - Pay Your Rates. By turns scratchy, punky bop, then atonal, languid, shambolic collapse. MES demanding -

Pay your rates! Pay your water rates!
If your rate’s too high, write a snotty letter

The ‘snotty letter’ - the English passive aggression, the bureaucracy, the estates - the well meaning but ultimately poor town planning of the ‘neurotic red landscape’. This is all an appropriate setting of tone for the whole record, which although swerving through various narratives seems to have at its centre a highly brutal look at the English culture and psyche. That’s how it feels to me anyway. A state of the nation that a nation would rather not hear. A nation that wants to see itself as keeping calm and carrying on, the self-congratulatory stoicism of Kilping’s ‘If’, but who are in fact ridden with neurosis, class war, ugliness, petty jealousy, prejudice, gross incompetence, stupidity and an excessive trust for authority. This comes in with a vengeance with the almost pastoral English Scheme. Well its half pastoral, half the as Fall cabaret band, with the cheesy organ returning, bringing the shiny foil curtain WMC vibe. Very poppy and almost delicate. Lyrically it is a tour through the English Scheme, where the ‘clever ones tend to emigrate’, like:

Like your psychotic big brother, who left home
For jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome
He's thick but he struck it rich

and Albion’s myriad failings are dipped into, including

Peter Cook's jokes, bad dope, check shirts, lousy groups point their fingers at America

So - love this song. Its a perfect little portrait that says more than the sum of its words - we’re dealing with little English signifiers and cultural cues. I wonder how this translates abroad. I wonder how it translates to people outside of the age it was written in - I was just a toddler when this was release, but I’m just about old enough for most of this not to go over my head.

This picture of right-on middle class political correctness is recognisable today -

He's the greenpeace in us all
He's the creep-creep in us all
Condescends to black men
Very nice to them
They talk of Chile while driving through Haslingden

Maybe today they are less interested in Chile, but might be a member of Respect. You know the type - well meaning and essentially on the side of good, but encumbered with their own prejudices filtered through a gauze of post-colonial guilt, self-loathing and fear of the working class.

New Face In Hell. Another pop gem. With a kazoo. An engaging and comical story of a suburban CB enthusiast who accidentally discovers a secret state operation, tells his neighbour and is then framed by the state for the state’s murder of his neighbour. Again, this shows Smith’s talent for storytelling in a the constrained medium of the song. In just a few lines, he tells you everything you need to know. You can fill in the rest from the archetype of the suburban hobbyist - the drab shed, the mug of tea, the tank top, hours spent there, only emerging to eat the tea rustled up by wife or mother.

C'n’C-S Mithering. This actually looks like one of those droll fake Fall song titles beloved of lazy journos. One of the centrepieces, a tract, or specifically - ‘ a treatise’. There is a hypnotic and hallucinatory quality to it. Another one of these great Fall exercises in repetition - some intertwining all on-one-chord acoustics and a persistent nagging metronomic snare. The perfect bed for MES to unleash a long poem over the top, the musical repetition showcasing the lyrical invention. Delivery wise he’s riding the rhythm, his flow is ridiculous. Basically a very weird hip-hop track, in fact ‘this was going to be called crap rap fourteen’. Again, we have some fantastic state of the union style observations as well as a (fictional?) account of an American trip, where ‘Californians either think of sex or think of death’ and we visit the founder of the Tijuana Brass on his home turf:

Big A&M Herb was there
His offices had fresh air
But his roster was mediocre
US dirge, rock 'n' pop filth
Their material's filched

and castigating the English groups for acting like ‘peasants with free milk’.

I’m not going to relate the entire lyrics, because there are tonnes and because you should listen to it yourself. This is poetry of the highest order. Its better than most of the lyrics you’ll ever hear, its better than most words you’ll ever read. It segues magnificently into Container Drivers, which was covered last week. This version is just as good and as essential as The Peel Session version.

The Impression Of J Temperance - we’re back in Dragnet territory here, but we’re not looking back. That close martial drumming, the erratic buzzing of the keyboard, like a cardboard box of dying insects. The guitar here is amazing, abrasive, scything through the rhythm track, echoing Smith’s melody (yes - melody) lines. The story - its another extremely sinister pulp horror narrative, which also harks back to Dragnet. A vet is called out to deliver the birth of a dog that bears a horrific resemblance to its owner for reasons we perhaps don’t want to go in. The great thing about this is the climatic build up to the reveal of the grotesque beast, and MES frenzied screaming ‘This hideous replica! This hideous replica!’. More Hammer than MR James. Again, lyrically it is economical, but everything is there, either explicitly or implicitly.

In The Park is a straightforward rocker about post closing time shagging, with a few double entendres, which is itself works rather well and segues into the weird, experimental and fun WMC Blob 59. Which consists of a few segments of poetry over what sounds like a badly degraded tape of Nico, or a Nico-esque singer. Anyhow, it sets up the album for the final push.

Gramme Friday. Bedsit Peter Gunn-esque ode to the joys and pitfalls of amphetamines now that the weekend has come - ‘Hitler lost his nerve on it!’, includes the hilarious:

‘I am Robertson Speedo and this is my Gramme Friday!’

Building up and building up, but never reaching resolution - which is typical Fall thing - ramp up the tension, but offer no respite.

Finally, on an album full of essential material is the most essential of them all - The N.W.R.A , the North Will Rise Again. Its an involved, feverish speculative narrative set in the aftermath of a incompetently executed uprising (‘but it has turned out wrong’) - a medicore nation that can’t even conduct a civil war how’s supposed to ne. There’s a fantastic spoken intro which involves an epic Northern journey to Newcastle, shasing off feral children, the West Germans have shipped in trains,  bastardised versions of Fall songs are played on ‘Junior Choice’:

DJs had worsened since the rising. Elaborating on nothing in praise of the track with words they could hardly pronounce, in telephone voices. 

The uprising is a shambles, our embedded reported tells us in lurid, dreamlike detail

But out the window burned the roads
There were men with bees on sticks
The fall had made them sick
A man with butterflies on his face
His brother threw acid in his face
His tattoos were screwed
The streets of Soho did reverberate
With drunken Highland men
Revenge for Culloden dead
The North had rose again
But it would turn out wrong
The North will rise again

Its an epic in the truest sense, musically its cohesive and driving, repetitive but ever evolving. There’s these lovely chiming guitars, that buzzing keyboard, held down by an insistent bass and drums. What The Fall manage to do here, and on the rest of the tracks that precede it on the album is to create a different way of doing things both lyrically and musically, and absorbing you into this world, making you look at your own differently. In doing so they also demonstrate how much scope there is to create art in a traditional rock and roll band set up and additionally highlight the woefull lack of ambition and artistry in most other bands for not doing it. In short, Grotesque is a revelation and every home should have a copy.

Pete says:


I'm at something of a loss at how to approach this this week, purely due to the fact that Grotesque is yet another step up - Dragnet blew me away as I'd forgotten just how class it is, and though I knew Grotesque a lot better it's still taken me aback. Most fundamentally, the unabashed confidence, the sheer verve of this music which really resists definition, eschews pigeonholing... it's really rather remarkable. As ever, its always, clearly, undeniably The Fall, but the way that that 'Fall Sound' mutates and changes and wears different guises is astonishing. And moreover, this is a proper album - well sequenced, recorded with an unconventional (some would say poor, but they would be wrong) yet utterly appropriate sound. It's the sort of record that, if the world were a more grown-up and thoughtful place, would appear on those periodic 'Greatest Albums Of All Time' lists, rubbing shoulders with Abbey Road and OK Computer and all the obvious stuff that 10% of normal people love and take to their hearts, 15% of music fans say isn't as good as their previous album, 5% of naysayers dislike purely because they make that kind of list, 20% of people have never heard of as they are young, or wilfully stupid, or dead, and 50% of people have bought just because everyone else did.

In fact, when you consider Grotesque's constituent elements you could argue that it's a very informative template of how to construct an album that'll stand the test of time - you've got your singles (ok, they weren't actually singles, but 'New Face In Hell' and 'Container Drivers' could easily have been), your energetic poppy album openers, your 'challenging' track (though listen up younger bands - any song that strongly implies dog fucking must be handled with care), and then with that backbone your meander through whatever genre you fancy - bluesy blank-verse-come-rap, sci-fi futurology, twisted surf tunes. Clearly nobody sits down at session one and draws a list of what type of songs to write (though Pisco Sour Hour do come dangerously close to at times), but when you consider the creative decisions that songwriters and musicians make at every step of the process I can think of a fair few bands that could do with a whole heap of Grotesque in their lives and the charts might be more interesting and music might actually do what it can do a lot more often - entertain, yes, and get you moving about of course, but also challenge and confront and delight and play tricks.

And while I'm on the subject (or at least near enough to switch tracks), let's put something to bed right now. MES is no one trick pony - "they say I rip off Johnny Rotten" he says here, and while I'm not confident enough to unpick that observation, the fact that people are accusing MES of
ripping of anybody is a utter joke. And that reminds me - though he says "I shout for the Fall" in the self-interview I told you to listen to last week, that's either working class self-effacement, or an acknowledgement that we really don't have the words to describe what MES does... or maybe we do actually but... erm, can somebody please remind me to return to this idea at some later point? Anyway, there is, I am sure, a great swathe of opinion that goes something like this -

Mark E Smith shouts.

Mark E Smith shouts and puts the suffix '-ah' after words.

Mark E Smith does not sing

Mark E Smith cannot sing.

Okay - one thing I am 100% confident on regarding popular music is this - if you cannot as a listener buy into the lead vocalist, then you're not going to dig their music. The music of The Who is lost to me, as I don't dig Daltry's voice. I yearn to find a way of appreciating Jagger, as if I did I would be able to enjoy a vast array of Rolling Stones which is apparently fucking ace.

The difference with Mark E. Smith though is that you have to put aside any notion that melody is fundamental to singing... we'll go with 'singing' right now until I can think of a better word. For those of you that find that this concept is so difficult to comprehend that you're currently smirking at me then fine - off you pop, there's a whole world of Mariah Carey records to explore though you might want to avoid those nasty rappers she sometimes hooks up with, what are they all about eh, just talking over music?! Anyone can do that?! OK then, cheerio, just pull the door to on the way out, see you...
... good. The two key words I want to get over to those noble few of you who are left are balance and subtlety. Subtlety, because MES does not always shout, does not always stick '-ah' at the end of words, and most times is working the songs, using his voice in ways that benefit that word, in that line, in that verse of that song. And 'balance' because (if we focus on Grotesque at least) he's generally bang on, and yes that does include shouting and '-ah'ing, but also includes talking, reciting, rapping, percussion, story-telling, and even at times melody. And I do mean melody, proper singing, in not the most wonderful voice you've ever heard, but a proper singing, tuneful register.

So since I was unsure how to do this week, lets do it like this - an analysis of MES's vocals on Grotesque, or something like that anyway - I suggest you fire up Spotify and listen along...

And to neatly undermine everything I've just said, opener 'Pay Your Rates' has MES shouting away over buzzy guitars, insisting upon paying your water rates, writing snotty letters (oh hi, back again? Yes 'Always Be My Baby' is very good. Pop back in a paragraph or two). That is until the other bit of the song, where all the instruments collapse in on themselves, and dredge their way through some dense old chords at a slower tempo. At this point we get a seemingly calmer MES ruminating on 'debtors retreat estates', and then tunefully - yes, tunefully Mariah! - proclaiming 'Neuroticred landscape / A socialist state invention / The old government bones working'... it's funny, its daft, so much so that MES sniggers to himself just toward the end before everything hikes up again and we're told to 'PAY TOMORROW!'. But its the contrast - indeed, the balance - between the two sections that provides the humour.

'English Scheme' is funny too, but more satirical than merely daft (the mention of Peter Cook is telling). Its a fabulous lyric, but as with all good jokes its the way you tell it - for example, the drop into a lower, more-spoken register for the 'like your psychotic big brother' bit leading into the fabulous phrasing of 'for jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome'. MES's sense of timing is sensational, and even in something as seemingly spoken as this (and indeed 'New Face In Hell' next and 'C 'n C - S Mithering' after that) he manages to drag hooks out of nowhere. And Mariah - don't you dare suggest to me that the sing-song way that he delivers 'condescends to black men / very nice to them' doesn't make that line an utter triumph, effortlessly ladling scorn and derision on somebody with 8 words and without recourse to shouting or sneering.

As an example of how to take a ostensibly stream of conscious narrative and route it into song (music having a natural propulsion let us not forget, which is often why bad music is better than bad poetry. At least bad music moves itself along to a conclusion, whereas bad poetry either makes you - you! the poor unsuspecting Mariah! - move it along yourself, or affords a orator an opportunity to employ the ponderous pause) 'C-in-C - S Mithering' is supreme. As an example of how that narrative can transcend that rhythm, slave it to its own intentions, I'm not sure I know a better example. The first half of it is as precise an example of phrasing you will hear - split vaguely into three sections the way in which the syllables build up as it goes on, from for example 'three days / three months' to 'there was america / we went there' to 'a mexico revenge it's stollen land / they really get off on "don't hurt me please"', these snatches of life from the supermarkets of Lancashire to over-stimulated California build up, not exactly relentlessly - the bluesy chugging guitar backing doesn't really feel relentless - but inevitably. Having just thought about it in fact, there's an air of 'It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding' (one of my favourite Dylan tunes) about it, but an English, resigned, ironic... oh sod it, a northerness, a jokiness. The second half of the song is great too - and has lent Ed and myself our 'See you mate!' exchange which crops up from time to time - but the first half is class class class.

We touched upon 'Container Drivers' and 'New Face In Hell' last week, but its worth saying in this context that the way that MES sings 'the uh-containeeeers, and their driveeeeers' as if in wonderment is charming and helps the songs unironic, gleeful nature. And as for 'New Face In Hell' -

(well firstly, is it a shaggy dog story? I really want it to be for some reason.)

- the level of detail in this narrative, delivered at great speed but with great clarity, is impressive not only lyrically and technically also. You hear words rush past you but in full colour - 'Aghast goes next door to his neighbour, secretly excited, as aforementioned was a hunter whom radio enthusiast wanted friendship and favour of.', 'muscular, thick-skinned, slit-eyed neighbour', 'cream porches' - all rounded off with the squealed hook of 'a new face in hell!'. You follow a fully rounded little story which means as much or as little as you want. And there's a fucking kazoo.

Are you getting this? There is great skill happening in these vocals. Artistic decisions have been made (whether instinctive or considered is irrelevant), and the way that MES sings isn't a compromise, he's not straining at the bit to do a three octave spanning melody here, he's chosen to do it this way in order to best mesh words, music, and voice together. Consider the amount of voices Bowie has - nasal Ziggy, operatic Station To Station, cockney Be My Wife - and then consider MES who probably hasn't a voice that could charm the birds from the trees, but he's a working man with a tool and by god he's getting good at using it.

Impression Of J. Temperance has dog fucking in it, yes, but don't worry about that - instead, focus upon the second line of each verse. Sung, tunefully, each second line of four. Now, what does that do to this song? Well, in my opinion, there's something very earthy, very base about J.Temperance, very English indeed, and what might be a dirge (I use that word non-pejoratively) is lifted by that line, heralded even. And to go back to something Ed said - if MES = The Fall then we can hear it when the Scanlon's guitar chimes back what Smith just sang. And the same thing happens in Gramme Friday, a proper demented surf number, a tune and everything, this could be busked so its clearly a proper sung song Mariah. But MES singing that melody is almost just a set up for the most severe vocalisation on the whole album when at the end of the song which sort of just falls apart under the weight of its amphetamine fuelled paranoia he begins to shriek - and I mean shriek, its the sort of noise you wake up at night having had a nightmare about - 'I can't relax!'.

Okay - so this is no drunken oaf managing to kid anyone. He might hate the description, but MES is an artist, and his words and his voice are his tools... and his band, of course (can someone remind me to pen something about 'Disposability and The Fall' please). The final track begins with perhaps the calmest bit of vocal on the album, and also probably my favourite moment. The N.W.R.A is essentially a story about a future where the tables have turned in England and in his own inimitable style Smith begins:

When it happened we walked through all the estates, from Manchester right to, er, Newcastle. In Darlington, helped a large man on his own chase off some kids who were chucking bricks and stuff through his flat window. She had a way with people like that. Thanked us and we moved on. 

'Junior Choice' played one morning. The song was 'English Scheme.' Mine. They'd changed it with a grand piano and turned it into a love song. How they did it I don't know. DJs had worsened since the rising. Elaborating on nothing in praise of the track with words they could hardly pronounce, in telephone voices. I was mad, and laughed at the same time. The West German government had brought over large yellow trains on Teeside docks. In Edinburgh. I stayed on my own for a few days, wandering about in the, er, pissing rain, before the Queen Mother hit town.

... I quote all this only to say that this is brilliant scene-setter, a proper little tale being told over some (at that moment) thoughtful chuggy music. And MES has a lovely storytelling voice, a real sense of timbre - the admiring tone for 'she had a way with people like that', the slight edge of steel on 'Mine'. And this is merely a set up for the thrilling moment when MES finds his singing voice (we've really got to work on this terminology) to proclaim:

I'm Joe Totale
The yet unborn son
The North will rise again
The North will rise again

And that's only the start to this behemoth of a lyric, with an air of post-appocalypse, a smidgen of social commentary...

I see that I have written much and possibly conveyed little. Let's recap. Grotesque is a remarkable album. Its a fully realised piece of work, is probably better than Dragnet, and contains more classic Fall songs than it has any right to. And while the band are on top form - my favourite Fall drumming performance thus far by the way, really tuned into what's happening - MES reigns supreme, both lyrically and vocally goddammit! And while I will not deny anybody the right to not get on with his voice, I compel anyone who hasn't given themselves the opportunity to buy into MES to properly listen, and ready yourselves for something which is at times peerless. I cannot recommend this record highly enough.