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.

How I Wrote Elastic Man (Single) / Totally Wired (Single) / Peel Session #3 (1980)

Pete says:


One of the interesting things about this retrospective (over and above all the quality music we've been listening to) is just how fragmented it has been.  Mainly this is due to how we've organised ourselves, which is basically taking sensible chunks of recorded output, but that in itself reveals a couple of truths regarding The Fall - that they're prolific, that they don't follow your standard pattern of record, release, tour that many bands do, but also that they're moving and developing so fast that your sensible chunk might be an album, or a couple of the many amazing singles they were churning out in the late 70s/early 80s, a session or two, some live stuff.  So you might say that in trying to trace a narrative here, to plot a progression, we've made life tricky for ourselves, because just doing the albums might have been clearer, or doing a year at a time, or something like that.

However, maybe this week can be seen as one were we can see a band that have arrived at a set of sounds that's going to see them good for quite some time.  In this context we can speculate that, whereas Witch Trials was a noble stab in the dark, Dragnet was your leap into a brave new world, and Totale's was a glance back over the shoulder, the various things we're listening to now are the first proper steps in Falltonia.  Now clearly, Falltonia is a place that moves and shifts and does all sorts of crazy things - this is a band that never stays still, and rejects the notion off consolidation (just ask everyone who played on Witch Trials (probably even Riley)) - but even so, there is a Fall Sound (now thats a phrase that I'm going to be typing again before this crazy train stops), and I think this week sees the band starting to confidently make the most of it.

'Fiery Jack' may have instigated the rockabilly Fall, but 'How I Wrote Elastic Man' nails it, and even begins to toy with it from the very first languid guitar riff introduction.  A jaunty verse is offset with a rather more pained chorus, though its MES who shines - his tale of the artist crippled by public expectation (and ignorance too - all the way through 'all the people ask me how I wrote Plastic Man') whips between first and third person, self-loathing and misogyny, the sublime and the ridiculous, resulting in a tangible character, and yet another advance in this mode of lyric writing.  Its B-Side plays with the horror-lyric thing that MES so clearly enjoys, a daftish tale of 'City Hobgoblins' played for laughs (ish) all energy and thrust. In terms of a single encapsulating a band at that moment of time, showing two diverse angles of themselves, yet still, always, revealing in that Fall sound… well, you have ears I suggest you use them.

But then… THEN… the next single, coming only two months later ups the ante again (well, half of it).  'Totally Wired' is probably just a fucking marvellous song, all booming toms and call and response vocals and northern funk, but it could just as well be seen as the updated manifesto of the Fall.  It's taught, its tense, its funny, in just the way that fellow at the bar is seriously funny all night until he twats someone.  It takes from poetry and speech and rock preconceptions in equal measure, embraces daftness, sets out its parameters early and fully mines them for maximum effect.  It's knowing and clever and pure pop goodness:

Can't you see? A butterfly stomach round ground. I drank
a jar of coffee, and I took some of these.  And I'm totally wired.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.  The finest Fall single thus far.  The B-Side, however, though impressive in its playing, leave me cold, and therefore I'll move on to…

The Peel Session. Now, we've looked at two of these and they were undoubtedly impressive, suited the band, afforded them good recording facilities and the freedom to explore.  Great.  However, number 3… well, if we hear a better one I'd be very surprised…  Some have said that Peel session versions of tunes are more often than not better than the official recordings, an opinion I've often questioned.  However, there is something very special about this one.  For a start, the four tunes are corkers.  Secondly, the band sound energised and focused, clearly buoyed by their recent (artistic) successes and fully aware that they have an album about to be released which surely - clearly! - will propel them to international stardom and glory.  Finally, I feel that this session is an audible example of a key element of the Fall finding exactly what and how to play - step forward Steve Hanley, bass wrangler extrodinare.

Three of the four tracks here are totally dictated by the bass, and the fourth demonstrates that sometimes the best thing a bass can do is just play the obvious thing and let everything else get on with it.  'Jawbone and The Air-Rifle' is pretty much a bass line with words over it and some other stuff.  It seems odd hearing it now, as it won't be properly recorded for ages, but since we can revisit it, lets just focus on Hanley's contribution.  In the verse he dictates the rhythm entirely, whilst being unafraid to just thud appropriately.  The chorus he dictates the rhythm AND the melody, while again not being afraid to thud.  And in the bridge he shows that thudding isn't just a 'safe place' for him, and that he's quite able to move around, coaxing life into something that might sound add-onish without it.  In 'The Container Drivers' he roots the whole thing down with his stupendously simple playing, which in turn allows other instruments to wander off and be bonkers - owing to the lyrics this song has to be pop, just has to be, or it'd be stupid.  Hanley's playing facilitates Scanlon and Riley to meander off and helps MES's bathetic story of lorry drivers to shine.  And on 'New Face In Hell' Hanley brings da funk.  Again.  More on all this songs soon, suffice to say that I was delighted to rediscover which Fall song it is that has provided the Collins's household with a favourite catchphrase 'you never can tell, you never can tell'.  Doesn't look much on paper, I know.

All hail the new puritan
Righteous maelstrom, cock one

(NB - there is an argument it's 'cook one'.  It isn't, to my ears at least)

But the jewel in the crown of this week, over and above all this class is the Peel session, electrified glory of New Puritan.  From its scratchy, ill-recorded beginnings on Totale's to this monstrous, towering, terrifying thing, embracing chanting - either of the tribal or football terrace variety - discordant scratchy guitars, sparse yet driving drums.  This, seriously, is up there with the very finest of The Fall, and its no wonder that they never managed a proper studio recording of it that topped this effort.

Its the lyrics though which take it into the stratosphere - its a crazy mix of England old and new: "The grotesque peasants stalk the land / And deep down inside you know everybody wants to like big companies".  Sounds seem to cross this mishmash of time and equate with one another in peculiar ways: "It's a dinosaur cackle / A pteradactyl cackle / In LA a drunk is sick on Gene Vincent's star on Hollywood Boulevard".  The listener is never sure quite where to settle, the singer relentless in surging on - this is clearly important dammit, but goodness knows why.  And yet - its not important like some Dylan stuff sounded important, vital, essential.  No, its too self-aware for that, and shuns analysis with stuff like "The conventional is now experimental / The experimental is now conventional" and even manages to undermine itself with "Why don't you ask your local record dealer how many bribes he took today?" which manages to work only because its snottily funny, a throwback to the early live stuff, a knowing acceptance that this music is too dense, too clever for the vast majority of the record buying public.  It's bile, and self-aggrandisement, and pure bollocks, and pure brains.  I don't think I could take a whole album of New Puritan's, but by god I'll surrender willingly to this one.  Perhaps the best thing thus far.

To finish - I have two theories:

1) The 'why the Fall are like the Beatles' theory.  I shall touch upon this some other time.

2) The 'listen to the self-interview' theory at the end of the Grotesque re-release.  And speaking of which...


Ed says:

The following is one of the many ways that art works - little aspects of one thing influence the next, influence the next and so on. Native Lancastrian LS Lowry spends most of his life knocking up his naive paintings, which are clasped to the bosom of both the establishment and the common man. In the late 1960s, bubblegum psychedelia practitioner, Francis Rossi of pre-denim Status Quo seeks refuge from his wife and mother in law in the outside toilet. His forty five minutes on the bog are not squandered, as he pens ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, a piece of heavily phased daftness that draws on the work of Lowry for its title and has a rather catchy one string one note hook. Thirteen or so years later, The Fall release the single - “How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’” which half cribs the melody line and mocks the title. Anyway - influences can and should come from anywhere.

This week we’re looking at eight songs from 1980. Two singles and a Peel Session. This is the good shit:



We’ve already established in previous installments that we’ve been gradually ramping up the quality - words, music, performance - well I won’t keep banging on about it, but we’re in a seriously good period here. I will attempt to do it justice with my weak-ass lit-crit, but I, like the rest, will be found wanting. Instead I can present you with some personal impressions which you may take or leave.

Those idiot acquaintances you barely tolerate will no doubt trot out the lazy tabloid line that all there is to Mark E Smith’s lyrics are a series of non-sequitors with the -ah suffix. And you trust those idiot friends? Well, I imagine they’re harmless, but you - you’re more inquisitive, aren’t you? Listen to this and what you get is literature, poetry - shit that if you clothed it in the finery of Hampstead would be much lauded across the round tables of the Late Review and the like.

Importantly, you get narrative. Lots of narrative. Rich, lush, detailed narrative and characterisation. Fanciful situations, allegories. If you are trying to write - songs or whatever, this is a quality you should aspire to. Tight, edited, expressive, imaginative. Not just banging together vaguely thematic rhyming couplets like some sort of unimaginative tit.

How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’. A tale of artistic entrapment. How to follow a massively popular hit in the face of public approval? Writer’s block. They can’t even get the name right - Plastic Man? Elastic Man? Returning to the role of the jobbing writer devoid of inspiration

His last work was "Space Mystery" in the Daily Mail,
An article in Leather Thighs
The only thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes
So I'm resigned to bed
I keep bottles and comics stuffed by its head
Fuck it, let the beard grow
I'm too tired,
I'll do it tomorrow

And one of my favourite Fall lines ever:

The Observer magazine just about sums him up
E.g. self-satisfied, smug

Which has the lovely ambiguity - does the Observer Magazine sum the writer up or is the reader of Observer Magazine summed up by their newspaper choice? I prefer the second one as I guiltily flick through another snotty review of a restaurant i will almost certainly never visit.

However, clearly not autobiographical - the work is both top notch and abundant. Check the guy’s track record.

The B Side, City Hobgoblins further explores MES’ obsession with the supernatural and the spirit world. The spiritual(ist) cousin of Psycick Dancehall. Mark’s house is infested with supernatural energy, the undead are all around, but its not scary, its more manic and midly inconvenient. The ectoplasmic echoes of the past do not restrict themselves to the constraints of class -

Queen Victoria
Is a large black slug in Piccadilly, Manchester

Musically this A/B side follow on nicely from the Dragnet era - its great, super tight. Mike Leigh, the drumming teddy boy who contributed to Dragnet's weird and wonderful atmosphere is out. Ridiculously young Hanley brother Paul is in and promise is shown. I picture him being picked up and bundled into a van outside the school gates before being dragged to another gig. The promise is realised on the next single, Totally Wired, which is muscular tom pounding garage band nirvana.

Speaking of garage bands, which I kind of just was, your local neighbourhood garage band should hang their heads in despair and stop rehashing the work of their forebears forty years back - for what we have here is the last word in the evolution of freaky, brutalist instrument bashing. Modernist and primitive simultaneously - pushing things forward and pulverising everything at the same time. A catchy pop song for the twitchy and chemically enhanced.

You don’t have to be weird to be wired

A Hunter Thompson quote. Tense! Nervous! Headache!

I drank a jar of coffee and I took some of these. Now I’m totally wired!

Watch, because words only augment, look on these works, and despair - because this is some super cool business.



This was a Top 20 hit in New Zealand. New Zealand got it right.

The B side. Well its a kind of collage. We get a bit of last week’s Cary Grant’s Wedding. We get something from the future and we get Putta Block. Essentially a cut and paste tour through some still bubbling ideas or some offcuts that were too good to throw away? "We had salmon on the bus?" I don’t know. It’s compelling though

Two singles. Next the third Peel Session. Bang fucking bang, the mighty Fall.  Just under two years since the last one they return a class act and outfit to be reckoned with. I hate to get all hyperbolic - OK - I actually rather enjoy getting all hyperbolic, but this is grade A Fall. Four essential pieces of music. Confidence. Swagger (or ‘swag’, if you’re an idiot). All bunged through some sort of genre blending apparatus to arrive at something that may contain a few recognisable elements of RnR, country, NYC art rock but that is essentially in a genre of its own.

Container Drivers - I hate to use the word ‘rollicking’ but this is, well, rollicking. A further refinement to the whole Country and Northern thing. Storming white line fever semi-romanticsm of the container drivers who ‘get no thanks from the loading bay ranks’. Intercut with jagged guitars, like somone breaking windows during the most strung out and cranked up trucker hoedown you could imagine. Poetry wrung out of something as simple as ‘RO-RO, roll on-roll off’

Jawbone and the Air Rifle. Another narrative. Hallucinogenic tale of an impotent rabbit hunter who falls under the ‘curse of The Broken Brothers Pentacle Curse’. Visceral, attacking with a werid refrain which strikes me almost as owing a little to a Chas and Dave style singalong. Perhaps in a world where Chas and Dave were rabid occultists. This sequence is the middle:

The rabbit killer did not eat for a week
And no way he can look at meat
No bottle has he anymore
It could be his mangled teeth
He sees jawbones on the street
Advertisements become carnivores
And roadworkers turn into jawbones
And he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime
The villagers dance round pre-fabs
And laugh through twisted mouths
Don't eat
It's disallowed
Suck on marrowbones and energy from the mainland

Yes!

New Puritan. We saw the germ of this last time with the Totale’s Turns home demo. Now it returns with an apocalyptic state of the union. Self flagellating monks chant a kind of liturgical quasi latin in unison to introduce the track and the effect is cinematic, specifically it calls to mind the end of the world religious mania and witch burning scenes from The Seventh Seal. Or perhaps its more Monty Python's The Holy Grail. It feels medieval - pre-puritan in fact.The New Puritan curses

the self-copulation
Of your lousy record collection
New puritan says "Coffee table LPs never breathe"

New Puritan wields a rod of correction to the corrupt music industry where ‘bands send tapes to famous apes’ and is prophetic, again apocalyptic:

The conventional is now experimental
The experimental is now conventional
It's a dinosaur cackle
A pteradactyl cackle
In LA a drunk is sick on Gene Vincent's star on Hollywood Boulevard
Ha-ha ha-ha
Stripping takes off in Britain's black spots
The Kensington white rastas run for cabs
This I have seen

Musically it is driving, manic, focussed and staring straight ahead and importantly, massive. Large, widescreen - something new to The Fall and signs of what may be to come.

Finally, New Face In Hell. A story of intrigue with a kazoo. ‘This is off our new LP!’ We’ll be dealing with the LP next week and in more detail, so to some extent I want to keep my powder dry, but in short this is a great way to end the session - more narrative, creative writing and the strong vein of humour that runs through the music. Did I mention the kazoo?

That’s it for now. A great week - more ideas and fantastic music spread over two singles and a radio session than most bands have in their entire discography.

Fiery Jack (Single) & Totale's Turns (Album) (1980)

Ed says

Fiery Jack/2nd Dark Age/Psykick Dancehall #2

Where The Fall follow Dragnet with an absolutely killer single. The A side all chug, chiming harmonics, further exploration of the ‘Country and Northern’ thing, warped rockabilly with a touch a white line fever. Portrait of grizzled pub fixture?

I sat and drank
For three decades
I'm 45
Cause I am Jack
From a burning ring
And my face is slack
And I think think think
I just drink drink drink
Too fast to work
Too fast to write
I just burn burn burn

a working man who lives off hot dogs and pies using himself up. Insidious and worms its way under your skin.

For the B Side, 2nd Dark Age - a rant that feels pretty millennial. Doom! As with a lot of these lyrics, they are opaque and don’t always yield to probing, but you can always just enjoy the poetry of:

It's a second dark age.
No Psalm Sunday or any day.
The city is dead.
Bust. Ghost-dance rite. Tepid

Additionally, we have Psykick Dancehall #2, from a version of the song from last week’s Dragnet. What’s worthwhile here are some additional lyrics in the middle about Helen Duncan - who’s weird story is worth reading about (http://www.helenduncan.org.uk/). This further underlines the medium/ESP/supernatural themes of the song.

Totale’s Turns as a list with bullet points and stuff.

The Fall as smart arse noise cabaret band with MES as master of ceremonies.

1. Mostly a live album, recorded in the Working Mens’ Clubs  of Doncaster, Preston and Bradford during the winter 1979/1980. Clearly as a southerner born in 1980, this is another world to me, but in my head it is more David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet than Peter Kay’s Phonenix Nights - i.e. subtle undercurrent of menace, overflowing ashtrays, yellowing wallpaper, Double Diamond, tough crowds.

2. The band are a well drilled, firing on all cylinders, snarling beast of a group. Further exploring the Country and Northern thing that we’ve seen developing in Fiery Jack, a grimy but surprisingly detailed chug providing the perfect platform from which MES to do his thing. The two guitars in particular chime in and out beautifully. Hanley handling the bass like he is trying to play it and dismantle it at the same time.

3. MES’ ‘thing’ is pretty much compering, controlling the audience, hectoring the audience, admonishing the band, relating tales, telling jokes. Allowing no breathing space to encroach from any outside agencies, moving from front to confidence. Working them like a professional. Vocal tics on display:

• the yelp
• the ‘ah’ suffix (beloved of the lazy journalist-ah) 
• the strangulated scream

4. Excerpts:

• “The difference between you and us is that we have brains! Bang fucking bang, The Mighty Fall”
• “Last orders half past ten. This is a groovy number (aghh)!”
• “This is The Fall and this is the drudge nation. Your decadent sins will reap discipline. Still it is unclean! Unclean”
• “We’re breaking it in easy for you”
• “Come on, get a bit of fucking guts into it”
•  “Can you get it fucking together instead of showing off!”

5. A great live album makes you want to be there, makes you wish you had been there there. This is one of those records.

6. This is all good. Notable highlights however include:

• groovy number Rowche Rumble - “Valium!” which is full of unresolving manic tension. 
• Muzoweri’s Daughter - more funereal, more processionary, more heavy bass drone, more dread. Riley pops up towards the end to offer some of his trademark totally pointless backing vocals, but we can live with this.
• A less caustic but certainly no less demented version of Spectre vs Rector
• Something new! Cary Grant’s Wedding. Switches erratically between rockabilly and some sort of final reckoning, storm the citadel theme. Ridiculous, in the best possible way.

7. This is not completely a live album. The broadcast interrupted -

• That Man - a not too shabby pop song, but in the end kind of fails to stick. Accrington and 'Hovis land' get a shout out
• New Puritan - a home demo, one mic and rattly guitar job. The germ of something great, lyrically strident, sharp poetry and images. Word like this very exciting few lines:

In LA the window opener switch
Is like a dinosaur cackle
A pterodactyl cackle
Jet plane circle
Over imported trees 

8. And back to the previous programming to round things all off with a rousing and combative No Xmas For John Quays. Possibly the best version - closed in, head down, frenetic, focused, a maelstrom. Sound men are berated. The band is berated - ‘Can you get it fucking together instead of showing off!’. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Bang, the end, applause.

9. Sleeve Notes/Title. Right - I have this album only on MP3, legally purchased I might add, so I’ve missed out on some extra stuff that’s relevant. The sleeve notes have MES speaking through the persona of Roman Totale - I think Pete has the CD, so hopefully he can elaborate.

10. To conclude - a thrilling lo-fi collection showcasing a band more than hitting its stride, but hitting on something very special in a very focused, determined, deliberate way.

Pete says...

This week could always have been about another quality single and a budget live album thing.  However, on reflection its actually about a couple of giant leaps forward.  It's also going to be about being concise and focused as I seem to have run completely out of time this week.  Oh well.

… oh, well, concise.  Tight.  Focused.  Compare Fiery Jack to Bingo Masters Breakout - both character studies, but whereas Bingo was all gloss and sheen (lyrically at least) Fiery Jack manages to be both more obscure yet more insightful, and rather than telling a story of a character manages to capture some of their essence.  Stuff like...

And peace is a kite of materials you never catch
Come up for a snatch
Up from hell
Once in a while

… doesn't make much sense, but by the end of the song it all combines so that you really feel you know Jack.  All this lashed to a twisted rockabilly groove.  In terms of singles The Fall are on one hell of a run of form.  B-sides - 2nd Dark Age is pretty clumpy but entertaining, especially the bit about Abba, and the reworking of Psychic Dancehall an uncharacteristically pointless retread.


Totale's Turns was an odd career move.  At lest in hindsight it was - were we back in 1980, but a few months after Dragnet, a budget live offering which proudly proclaimed 'Doncaster! Bradford! Preston! Prestwich!' might well have had me bouncing with anticipation.  But looking back, after the thrill of Dragnet this seems just a little anti-climactic, though none the less essential.  What we have here is not just a live album with a couple of demo-y tracks thorn in for good measure - its also a minor rewriting of the band's short history thus far, and almost a manifesto.  MES has found his live footing, there's none of the slightly coy banter of before, he owns this environment, he owns the band, and quite frankly aside from being a little more verbose between songs and a lot more comprehensible this is exactly the MES that you'll get if you potter off and see the Fall now - clever, sneery, uncompromising, very, very rock and roll.  If he's not taking the band to task in No Xmas, or insulting the promoter during Rowche, he's toying with the audience, mocking them.  Its a very twisted version of what we love from our front-men, and masochistically compulsive.

But its the band who've made the greatest leap forward here… ok, so its an almost totally different band but bear with me.  The tunes utterly thunder along - Muzorewi's Daughter was already meaty, but god almighty it hammers you here, Spector vs Rector may not be as sonically oppressive as on Dragnet, but there's few musicians that could even contemplate this in a live setting, let alone pull it off, and No Xmas suddenly has lost any trace of silly, becoming an utter monster, circling round and round, sounding like a fight that is both happening, and is probably about to happen right in you face.  Cripes.

There is newness here - Cary Grant's Wedding swings from a doom laden chorus to a mainly chipper another chorus, and then another bit.  This is the sort of Fall song that gets your average Fall fan excited - lollopy, heavy, and with lyrical insights such as

Buster Keaton he turned up
He wasn't a woman
He didn't take hallucigens

… what does it mean?  Haven't a clue.  But its good.  I think.  Also new is That Man, which feels a bit like a Dragnet cast-off - bit Your Heart Out, bit Dicemanish.  It feels like a hyped-up 50s boy group + kazoo.  And of course New Puritan which (breaking all of my usual rules) I'll discuss next week.