THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MIGHTY FALL: 9. “THE BEST FIRMS ADVERTISE THE LEAST”

”Compound in it’s directness...”
- Sleevenotes, ’Perverted by Language'

”Had forgot what others still tried to grasp...”

Okay, the Fall's last long player might have been a retreat and relative disappointment. But ’Hex’s ‘lava’ tracks such as 'Winter' suggested a different Fall, a Fall which would come to dominance with 1983’s 'Perverted by Language'. The lyrics and even the title of ‘Hexen Definitive’ refer back to ‘Hex’, leapfrogging the album which lay between.

There are self-styled ‘true’ Fall fans who take this as the beginning of the end, partly because it’s the first to feature Brix. (More of her later.) But in many ways it stands alone. It’s the post ’Hex’ direction which Smith previously claimed wasn’t there. It’s a leaner, more laconic Fall, pared down and stretched out, riffs extended past sanity, bass lines like train tracks heading off to the vanishing point. It’s more measured, more mantra-like, the nearest the band ever came to sounding serene and transcendental.

It’s less in thrall to the Velvets than in disciplehood to Can. Smith has said “I've liked Can since I was about 13 or 14.... I like the way it's open-ended.” Precisely hitting on the element picked up here.

It’s like an alternate history where the band had taken up a different template to 'Spectre vs Rector,' and instead of digging for demons had chosen to soar on wings. (Flabby or otherwise.) It’s the least garage-band, the – though Smith would truly spit at this word – artiest Fall album. At times the band even lose their signature lumberingness and become almost majestic.

‘Hex’ had hitched together two fast tracks - ‘Fortress’ and ‘English Deer Park’. This album closes by coupling a slow piece, ‘Hexen Definitive’ with an even slower one, ‘Strife Knot’. Which means that rather than ending the album fades into the ether, summing up much of its spirit. (No pun intended. Oh okay, pun intended.) ’Tempo House’ is another “definitive rant”, which even draws complainers into its complaint. But while ’C+C’ was most definitely a rant, this is more like an incantation, a spell cast over the bothersome.

Where ’Hex Enduction Hour’ had flaunted incoherence a sleevenote here insisted it was “compound in its directness”. Significantly it broke with the standard scrawl-at-a-wall cover ‘design’ of the previous four albums, for something that looked (in its own way) even artistic. For my slender dollar, it’s the finest of Fall albums with ’Garden’ standing as their finest moment. (If closely followed by ’Winter'.)

Except of course no Fall album was ever reducible like that. ’Eat Y’self Fitter’ is the only track which could have been on ’Room To Live’, another rough-edged parody song, taking its title from a Kellogg’s ad. While the incendiary ‘Smile’ burns all the more brightly when surrounded by such serenity, like a volcano suddenly blasting off in the Pacific.

”I got the idea from a book”

Bassist Steve Hanley has called ’Garden’ and ’Smile’ “the great unremitting guitar songs” of the album. True, but they’re bookends. The guitar on ‘Smile’ is intense and incessant, each iteration raising the ante. All tension, no release, it perfectly conveys when rage boils inside you but remains lidded, the rictus grin you fix while some wanker spews his bullshit at you. (Smith wasn’t exactly known for keeping his feelings to himself, but that’s the feeling the song conveys.)

Despite the frequent references to “anarchy” it seems less aimed at anarcho-punks and more those who expressed a fashionable fin-de-siecle feeling through their choice of eyeliner, to who “decadence” and “anarchy” were equivalent terms. “Would ask for lager in the town of Auschwitz” Smith spits in the Peel Session version. He once said it was “about the hypocritical type that says he wants anarchy but are in fact very bourgeois”. (Though ’English Deer Park’ suggested he had no more time for anarcho-punks. I’m not suggesting he liked anyone.)

Whereas on ‘Garden’, though the guitar’s equally dominant, it’s expansive, resounding, each iteration building on what went before rather than reiterating it. It’s as ominous and foreboding as ever but at the same time stately and majestic. Dary Easlea found it “fascinating in its excessive repetition”.

As already said, Fall tracks are not, in the main, works of poetry or literature which just happen to be set to music. Making sense of this band is simply not the way to go. ’Garden’, however, is something of an exception. It’s stuffed with allusions which do form a coherent picture. (Well, sort of.)

The title clearly refers to Eden though, as we’ll come onto and despite the band’s name, it’s more primordial than pre-lapsarian. And this helps us to realise the most fitting thing of all - this timeless track is about timelessness. Remember time had been a fixation of Smith’s since the early days, and ’Hex’ had brought to the mix the mythologised roots of European culture. And these kind of combine here.

The first of the two Gods described is clearly Odin. The Norse God was symbolically associated with the number three, for example with the Horn Triskelon. In the legends he hung himself from the one tree at the world’s centre in order to gain wisdom, depictions of which often show him hanging from one leg. (The same image as the Hanged Man card in the Tarot deck, leading some to infer it derived from the Odin myth.) Which could be said to make him three-limbed, here rendered as “a three-legged, black-grey hog”. (Well he was a shapeshifter.)

“The second God” is represented by way of contrast with images of linear motion - “fountains that flowed”, “blue shiny lit roads”, “the brown baize lift shaft”. If we didn’t guess from “the bells stop on Sunday when he rose”, then the repeated line “Jew on a motorbike” could be said to give the game away. (Slightly presaged by the hooded Friar on a tractor, who shows up in ’The NWRA.’)

As Wikipedia will tell you of Odin “the entire scene, the sacrifice of a god to himself, the execution method by hanging the victim on a tree, and the wound inflicted on the victim by a spear, is often compared to the crucifixion of Christ.” Added to which, both appear dead for a length of time, only to rise again. And if Odin is associated with threes, Jesus is part of the Trinity. All fair enough, but it does stray towards that “all stories are one” bollocks peddled by New Age gurus, suggesting that comparisons that are easy to find are oftenjust as insignificant.

But Smith seems more focused on the differences. Particularly when recited over that measured beat the image of the figure slowly turning, established early in the song, cements itself on the mind’s eye. So when the flowing fountains show up they make for something of a contrast. Why else would Jesus be associated with fountains, lit roads, motorbikes and phones? They’re not exactly Biblical references. It’s because one is the God of circular, the other of linear time.

More widely, the imagery constantly swaps between ancient/arcane and modern/trivial. Even the title could refer either to Eden or a manicured front lawn. In a typical Smithism, Odin’s ancient nature is conveyed through reference to “films on TV, five years back at least”. Because if Jesus can have a second coming, why not Odin as well? (“Wild Bill Hick shaves and charts at last. The second god's sad - he's coming up.”) Two ancient Gods, seemingly consigned to myth, rise from the depths like Godzilla, in a world we had foolishly imagined now belonged to us. Whereupon they seem most likely to ask “who’s been sleeping in my bed?”

It’s perhaps significant that the song segues into ’Hotel Bloedel’, which has the same juxtapositions of ancient and modern as a means to convey the recurrence of the seemingly dead. “Hidden fragments, surface now/ Repetitious history/ One more time for the record”, in it’s layering (with even the vocal lines overlaid on one another), seems connected to the “household pet” twirling to reveal Odin, or the reference to “a Kingdom of Evil book/ Under a German history book”. As Faulkner liked to say: “The past isn’t over. It’s not even past.”

If the theme of ‘Garden’, reduced to a word, is “return”, that of ‘Hotel Bloedel’ is “repeat”. History isn’t linear, a graph by which we can track our progress. Our history is more like the mind of a PTSD sufferer, a stuck record endlessly reliving some primary trauma. Brix’s raw screech repeats the chorus like she’s the Fates, part describing part proscribing, while Smith narrates the incidents which are actually recurrences.

And what’s a hotel but a reiteration of the same thing, stacked repeats of the same room, none of them being where we belong? Smith recites years as if they’re numbers on the doors of the rooms (“Two-oh-one-three”).

”The Place I Made the Purchase No Longer Exists”

“Warning!”, Smith had written on the Press Release for ’Hex’, “there are no blonde birds on the cover or in this record.” (A comment which is possibly a post-feminist statement, but more likely not.) Ironically, just such a character appeared first on 

’Perverted by Language’ and went on to have a greater role in subsequent events. 

And so some came to see Smith’s new wife Brix – glamorous and above all American - as a kind of Yoko Ono, smoothing out and even glamming up the band. The 1984 singles ’Oh Brother’ and ’C.R.E.E.P.’ were even accused of being...sensitive souls look away now... commercial!

And true to tell the Fall did lose something. But they traded it. Their golden age for their silver. Brix didn’t break the Fall. If anything, it was the opposite. Without her, they’d most likely have been unable to match past triumphs and sunk into a half life. She helped create a whole new band from the ashes of an old one.

They lost a sense of precarity, the feeling they were exploring strange and foreign territory. But they gained in horsepower. They’d been like a wild holy man – deranged and unpredictable, incoherent but compelling, turning in several different directions at once. They became disciplined to the point of being well-oiled, locking into a beat like atank regiment crossing open country. The old Fall were like semi-distinct alchemical symbols scrawled on a wall. The new Fall were like a thick coat of emulsion. The old Fall were wayward, the new Fall straight-ahead.

Sometimes it feels like Eighties Britain was full of great music, but due to a booking error it all got front-loaded and was gone before we reached the mid-point. If the Fall had appeared as a new band (which essentially they were) in the desert of those times, they’d have been hailed as saviours.

But Brix's input should be put together with Smith's obstinate and persistent refusal to serve up the oldies live. Gig-goers were lucky to hear anything more than two years old. So the Fall were always starting from Ground Zero, alwayssounding fresh and current. 'Repetition', the mission statement number they'd once played pointedly to piss off audiences, they'd soon started to get requests for. So naturally they'd refuse to play it, Smith deriding anyone who asked for it - “You do not pay us enough to dictate our actions”.

Perhaps Smith was the Dylan of British punk – drawing on influences outside of music, forever changing his style and backing band, refusing to ever look back, pursuing a persona in interviews as much as in song, specialising in vituperative "truth attacks" and never more so then when asked to explain himself. (He repeatedly insisted he had no time for Dylan, surely suggesting there must be something to the comparison.)

But that doesn’t cover the biggest overlap. Nick Southgate has commented “Bob Dylan’s lyrics were simultaneously supersaturated with meaning, while also empty vessels for listeners to import their own issues and interpretations.”(‘The Wire’ 262, Apr. 14)

Smith's songs play a still greater game of chicken, straying further from the brink of lucidity, like jigsaw pieces of concepts and images shaken together. He can show a Dada disdain for meaning which is positively explanation-baiting - “the love of Paris infects the Civil Service”, “God damn the pedantic Welsh”. (Phrases which often migrated from song to song.) 

Yet other lyrics form up into successions of gnomic yet evocative utterances, which seem to suggest at something without ever coming out and saying it – “the blue shiny lit roads”, “everybody hears the hum at 3am”, “the wings rot and curl right under me”. As Marc Burrows (no relation) has pointed out, Fall tracks are “more idea-worms than ear ones.” There's the constant tug of that underlying feeling that somewhere along the line it might add up to something. Better play it one more time.

In short, Smith had the knack for making any nonsense sound like it might make sense somehow. Even when it clearly didn't. Which is the single most important thing to understand about the Fall, head and shoulders above any other.

Not that knowing the trick stops it working on you. In fact it’s just part of the process. If Fall songs are full of magicallycursed objects, perhaps taken together they form one in their own right. We become like addicted gamblers returning to bet on the same rigged deck. As Mark Fisher said “[our] enjoyment involves a frustration – a frustration, precisely, of our attempts to make sense of the songs. Yet… if it is impossible to make sense of the songs, it is also impossible to stop making sense of them – or at least to it is impossible to stop attempting to make sense of them.” He later concluded, quoting ’Wings’, “There’s no way back. The place I made the purchase no longer exists.”

But with Smith it was more than not being able to make sense of the songs, the songs themselves seemed unstable. It was always impossible to work out whether the Fall were a raw-edged garage band, playing what music they could, or some kind of art-rock ensemble affecting primitivism. But it's more than that, even...

Of the classic bands I listened to in that era, only Swans and Throbbing Gristle rivalled the Fall for polarising reaction. It wasn’t even that people couldn’t stand them, they simply refused to believe that I could! It had to be either an elaborate pretence on my part or a symptom of mental illness. Which leads into Paul Morley’s well-know wobble, after one of the many times the band collapsed into acrimony – "what if he wasn't a genius, what if he was an old drunken tramp?" And life might not have to have worked out very differently for him to have become become someone who shouted at parking meters in the street which clutching myriad plastic bags.

It’s not that the Fall had bad tracks. Most bands have bad tracks and they had surprisingly few of them, at least in this era. It's doubting your ability to tell the difference. Even now, I can have my Morley moments and momentarily wonder if I really had just been kidding myself all along. Which seems part of it too. There's another thing Smith said to Middles: "When I started buying records, the ones I liked were the ones I could only half-understand. What I don't like about a lot of records today is that they're too clear. There's really no fascination or mystery left."

Marc Burrows (still no relation) decided to deep-end by listening to nothing but the band for a full month. Sounding surprisingly sane afterwards, he concluded “the Fall, it turns out, are not a band you can merely ‘like’.” Which would be a fitting way to end things. Except there's a better one - Smith's pay-off line at the end of Peel Session track 'Mess of My':

"Fill the rest in yourself."

(Coming Soon! Krautrock ist nicht tot.)

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MIGHTY FALL: 8. ‘THE WINGS ROT AND CURL RIGHT UNDER ME’

”Yeah, it’s like, it’s a bit sort of reedy, John, somehow, it’s weedy, sort of...”
- Mark E Smith

Diluted Slang Truth

After the unexpected success of ’Hex Enduction Hour’, Smith booked studio time for a single then informed the band they were recording an album. Older readers will recall this is precisely the trick he pulled with ‘Slates’. Ever mischievous, he then shook things up further by excluding some band members from certain sessions. And ever contrary, he effectively devised not a follow-up to ‘Hex’ so much as an anti ‘Hex’. ’Room To Live’ came out later in 1982.

As new numbers were written on the road, there was normally a backlog of material ready to record. But this time much of it was jettisoned. The epic ‘Backdrop’, which had been either opening or closing their set, was never to see a studio recording. The result was their only album to have no tracks featured on a Peel session.

Considering how often Smith shook his dice, he proved a strangely unerring ability to throw sixes. Yet this, the first time he’d bet and throw low, proved that all along he’d been gambling rather than meta-gaming. As time went on, particularly in the Nineties and Noughties, he’d gamble more and more recklessly and more than once lose his shirt. The Fall flew without a safety net. Which meant when the Fall fell, they fell.

And so, straight after the longest Fall album so far, came the briefest. (Discounting ‘Slates’, which was conceived as a mini-album.) It was not well received, with no more of that reaching No. 71 in the charts business. It’s seen as the weak link of their golden age. (Unless you count the live ‘Totale’s Turns’.) ‘Detective Instinct’
is in all honesty near-six minutes of tedium. When four of it’s seven tracks appeared on the subsequent live album ’Fall In a Hole’, arguably all sounded better there.

Paul Hanley, in ’Have A Bleedin Guess’, suggests Smith’s motive was less musical than political, to disrupt the shopfloor unity of the band to make it more malleable. He quotes Smith: “I played the same trick on the group as the people who bought the record. I suppose I’m a contrary bastard”. Yeah, could be, Mark.

Whereas Mick Middles runs with a different Smith quote: “I felt we were in danger of turning into some sort of big band, like the sort of epic rock sound that the Bunnymen were moving towards at the time, and that’s never been the idea of The Fall. That’s why ’Room To Live’ was such a necessary album.” ‘Hex’ had worked not just well but too well, there was simply no space to go further in that direction.

True or not, that may pinpoint the problem. After ‘Hex’ it seemed a step back, a retreat to the already-trod. A fact which gets even stranger when you consider it was sandwiched between their two strongest works.

Strangest of all, it somehow managed to combine feeling regressive with providing something of a sonic challenge. The album closer ‘Papal Visit’ leaves you regretting any ill word you ever said over ’And This Day’. It’s quite possibly the most daunting track of the band’s whole golden age, against which ‘Spectre Vs. Rector’ sounds like a crossover hit.

The Pope really did visit Manchester and, befitting the extemporised nature of the recording, this looks to have been an impromptu reaction. It’s more than usually balanced on the knife-edge between genius and madness. I’m torn whether to liken it to Throbbing Gristle or, another final track on an album, PiL’s notorious self-confessed last-minute quota-filling ‘Fodderstompf’. It also seems one of the two golden age tracks never to have been performed live. (It’s companion, perhaps ironically given the title, is ‘Live At the Witch Trials’. Though that was more of an interlude. Believe it or not, even ‘WMC Blob 59’ got four.)

Yet for all of that there are classic Fall track to be found here. Admittedly two of them do use the full band, 'Joker Hysterical Face’ and the furiously abrasive ‘Solicitor In Studio’, so aren’t subject to Smith’s self-sabotaging.

Though that makes the measured menace of ‘Hard Life In the Country’ all the more interesting. Unlike the other stand-out tracks on the album there’s no record of it being played live beforehand, so presumably it was thrown together in the studio – Smith’s one six among the snake eyes. It’s also the one track which you could best argue has something over the live ’Fall In A Hole’ version. (Though, much like ’Who Makes the Nazis’, the world really needs both versions.)

It feels like a couplet from ‘Jawbone and the Air Rifle’ - “The villagers dance round pre-fabs/ And laugh through twisted mouths” – blown up into song length. Perhaps the most audaciously pared-down track since ‘CnC – S’ Mithering’, its lumbering tempo drips with implied threat, a remorseless inevitability suggesting that ultimately the locals are going to get “their due”. There’s the great line about his defensive garden railings being confiscated “for government campaigns”. And it lays on Smith’s classic black humour:

”It's hard to live in the country
”It has a delicate ring
”Nymphet new romantics come over the hill
”It gets a bit depressing”

Smith recalled leaving his house under someone’s stewardship while touring Australia, “but he let all the scum of the village in and they, like, wrecked the place… so the village did close in on me.”

Though we should always be wary of confusing the (often mundane) impetus for songs with their ‘meaning’. It’s probably more the point that, for a front-man of a band who were almost permanently on the road, and from someone who could probably have powered half of Lancashire by attaching it to his gob, Smith seemed remarkably disposed to sociophobia.

The track conveys the paranoia last distilled this neatly in ‘Frightened’ and ‘A Figure Walks’, where the collective will crowd in on and devour the individual. (And notably the title track is also about your home being invaded by an undifferentiated mass.)

”Day By Day, The Moon Gains On Me”

Happily, things soon picked up again with the successive singles ‘The Man Whose Head Expanded’ and the double A-side which gave us ‘Wings’. A track which kicks off with the brilliantly matter-of-fact line “purchased pair of flabby wings”, as if time-travelling wings are for sale in the shops. It’s in some ways an update of ’Various Times’, only with the same character showing up in each episode. And the character seems… wait for it… something of a stand-in for Smith. In fact...

”Recruited some gremlins
”To get me clear of the airline routes…
”They had some fun with those cheapo airline snobs”

...sounds very much like him forming a band and venting over the music industry all over again. And the academic assaulted with “a gust of cheap magazines” always reminds me of Brecht’s dictum: “The masses’ bad taste is rooted more deeply than the intellectual’s good taste.”

But needless to say it all ends in tears. The magic wings turn out to be as much a cursed object as the medallion in ‘Winter’. He has to pay off those gremlins “with stuffing from my wings,” killing himself to live. Before that opening line the track starts with the repeated refrain “Day by day/ The moon gains on me”. And you could parse ‘Wings’ as employing time travel as a means of/metaphor for defying death, zipping about the chronology to present mortality with a moving target - but with it inexorably drawing in on you.

It’s a classic example of the fuzzy logic which powers song lyrics. There’s no actual sense to it, but the mood is so strong it feels like there must be. And so it turns out that the wings can take you anywhere but back again, “the place I made the purchase no longer exists”, “erased” by all that time-rewriting. Inevitably the protagonist ends up sleeping under bridges as “the wings rot and curl right under me”.

The other side was about football.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MIGHTY FALL: 7. “THERE IS NOT MUCH MORE TIME TO GO”

(The previous part of our run-through the Fall’s history, on the mini-LP ‘Slates’, lies here.)

”When the album comes out, we’re all surprised at how well it does. We even get to No. 71 in the charts.”
- Steve Hanley, ’The Big Midweek’

”Appreciation Half Won...”

The roots of ’Hex Enduction Hour’ (1982) go back to a single released before ‘Grotesque’ – ‘How I Wrote Elastic Man’. It details the trials and tribulations of a writer who’s gone from outsider to celebrity while skipping the success bit you might expect to come in the middle. (Which is pretty much how it worked out. Smith often claimed his songs have proven prophetic, while skipping the one which definitely was.) So he’s haunted by his own history, the gormless public pestering him with inane clueless questions about labours past while blocking his passage through daily life...

“The fridge is sparse
“But in the town
“They'll stop me in the shoppes
“Verily they'll track me down
“Touch my shoulder and ignore my dumb mission
“And sick red faced smile
“And they will ask me
“And they will ask me
“How I wrote ‘Plastic Man’”

Smith was wont to insist the song’s about a writer, so couldn’t be autobiographical. But he’d also say he saw himself as a writer rather than a musician. And anyway he lied a lot.

And from ’Hex’,‘Hip Priest’ was in many ways its successor. The croon of the backing vocalists, which launches the song (“he-e-e-e’s not appre-e-e-ciated”) sounds mocking and self-parodic. But it may have been more heartfelt than it appears. Having already compared ’The NWRA’ to ’Revolution’, perhaps this was Smith’s ’Help’. Its less about the great British public and more about Smith’s reaction to younger groups, who he claimed would steal his thunder while sidling up to him for some kind of indie-cred absolution. (“It's appreciation half won/ And they hate their allegiance to hip preacher one.”) But both songs involve survival through scraping the bottom of the barrel: “I got my last clean dirty shirt outta the wardrobe.”

Despite his always insisting bad reviews and audience antagonism were his food and drink, Smith had come to feel… well, not appreciated for his efforts and was considering jacking things in. He recounted to ‘Sounds’ his feeling that “we’ve done enough, the scene’s crappy and we still can’t make any effect.”

Though as he went on to say, the process was paradoxically “good for me cause I could just go and let rip, which is why it’s a good album.” Figuring it might be his last shot, he resolved to throw everything into it. And the result is considered by many to be his best. While previous sleeve notes had used the pseudonym ‘R. Totale’, this time it’s ‘the BIG P”. (Typically he never spoke about any of this to the band, and in ’Have A Bleedin Guess’, Paul Hanley speculates over whether it’s a post-hoc rationalisation.)

Notably when the Hip Priest makes his appearance, announced in the lyrics, the track kicks in. The model is less tension/release than tension/eruption. It’s like a has-been drunk slumped at the bar suddenly turning back into a prize-fighter.

Much of the sound of the album had come about by accident. Drummer Paul Hanley had been too young to get a working visa for an American tour, so Karl Burns from ‘Witch Trials’ had returned. And when the tour was over the two teamed up. It marshalled them into a mightier, multi-cylindered affair. It was both the epitome of the Golden Age Fall and the birth of their Silver Age sound.

And, perhaps more by luck than judgement, this was the perfect line-up for the moment. The album often sounds like a bowling ball on full strike. Listen no further than the pummelling double-drummer twin-guitar action of opener ‘The Classical’.

Smith told ‘Sounds’ it was “the anthem of the record. I figured: if you want to say it, you might as well do it in the first song…. The ironic thing is that the record was intended as a piss off, but everyone loved it!"

If ostensibly about the music industry, Smith is from the first stating “there is no culture is my brag”, nothing to be spared his wrath. The title’s an ironic reference to a ‘culture’ which is only ersatz, while it builds into a mock-cheer singalong.

While ‘English Deer Park’ (another anti-London diatribe) smears atonal semi-drone keyboards across it’s forward momentum, like tar across the windscreen of a careering car, as if John Cale had joined the Seeds. The Fall were never more of a kick-arse, riff-driven garage band than here, changing chords as often as a broke man spends change.

And that weird title? “Enduction” sounds like a portmanteau of “induction” and “education”. Combine it with hex, let it last an hour and it becomes a self-curing spell Smith’s casting on himself, much as Bowie had with ‘Station To Station’. It was, to quote the album “hypnotic induction process/ His commercial last chance.”

So ‘Just Step S’Ways’ becomes the opposite pole to ’Hip Priest’, and the damning-in-every direction ’Classical’. A cure for what ailed Smith, as if what was intended as career suicide ended up reinvigorating him, a brain-stopping bullet which somehow just got it working again. It’s offer of liminal escape echoes ’Psykick Dancehall’:

”When what used to excite you does not
”Like you've used up all your allowance of experiences
”Head filled with a mass of too-well-known people
”Just step sideways from this world today”

Yet at the same time they piled on the riffs they become more and more influenced by dub’s collage approach to mixing, with track elements overlaid or breaking in from unexpected directions. ‘Who Makes the Nazis’ is one of their more discordant tracks, even by Fall standards. As sounds and voices appear from every angle, it seems less a band pulling together and more a composite of separate tracks. (Which it was, built around a toy plastic guitar and voices Smith has recorded on a dictaphone, a device he’d return to.) Notions of a coherent authorial voice are consistently swapped for a sound almost ferociously fractured, cacophonous and multi-layered.

”Valhalla brochure bit”

There was always a story to a Fall album. And the ‘story’ of ‘Hex’ came from its press release, it was “recorded in an empty cinema [in Hitchin]... in a studio made of lava(!)” in Reykjavik. (A story only slightly spoilt when you discover both venues actually contained fully functional studios.) And just like the drummers there was a dual sound to the album.

They’d visited Reykjavik before Hitchin, originally just to perform but while there had ended up visiting a studio in… as you may have guessed… a lava cave. Only two tracks were ever used – the afore-mentioned ‘Hip Priest’ and ‘Iceland’ - but they’re central. With Smith’s typical perversity, on what was intended as their parting shot, they suddenly take up what’s effectively a whole new direction.

John Peel used to speak of “the mighty Fall”, as if that was their full name. Tracks were normally built around full-on bass or guitar riffs. But here they were something quite different, slower and more incantatory. Yet neither were they reverting to the sluggish, stretched-out tempos of earlier tracks such as ’Frightened’. Lava actually provides quite a potent metaphor.

‘Iceland’ in particular was less built around a beat than a pulse. It was the Fall at their most Can-like to date, something else they’d later build on. ’Hip Priest’ had been written and performed pre-Reykjavik, albeit barely. Whereas this was recorded so quickly it was virtually improvised, with guitarist Craig Scanlon taking to the piano and keyboardist Marc Riley – yes, really - the banjo. The band were unaware of what Smith was going to do until he did it.

With shades of the site-specific recording of ’Spectre vs. Rector’, he starts the track with a tape of the Icelandic wind blowing. You can hear the clicking of the tape buttons clear as day, in fact they become part of the proceedings. It’s partly a stream-of-consciousness diary of his visit (he really did trip up in a local cafe) but partly a more spiritual reaction to his surroundings.

“What the goddamn fuck is it?
“That played the pipes of aluminium
“A Memorex for the Krakens
 “That induces this rough text”

(The inducing Memorex presumably being that recording.) The track’s unostentatious but insistent; not the erupting Lovecraftian horrors of ‘Temperence’ but the MR James chill, being touched by something spooky, not being sure what it is or whether what you sense is even there. At one point he says “make a grab for the book of prayers”, like it has all become too much and retreat’s in order.

On an album called ‘Hex’ it’s the most hex-like number: “Cast the runes against your own soul/ There is not much more time to go”. Yet as the track mades clear, he found Iceland simultaneously strange and familiar. You find, for the first time, your own reflection. Yet you don’t recognise what faces you.

But what’s most striking isn’t that it’s autobiographical but that it’s confessional. Smith, normally so assured, so derisory of others, chants “it was fear of weakness deep in core of myself”, like a shamanic initiate, unsure and uncomprehending of the world he’s suddenly encountering, unsure whether it will make or break him. And it was something of a rite. The track was attempted live once, still in Reykjavik, an attempt Steven Hanley described as so derisory it was abandoned, then never again.

So what was it that Iceland induced? As far back as ‘Crap Rap’ the Fall had been “the white crap who talk back/We are not black”. This was, in it’s way, a rejection of cultural appropriation. Black music, that was already being covered. By black people, in fact. Smith complained cosmopolitan-sounding bands “weren’t being true to their roots”. Perhaps echoing Can, always one of his favourite bands, whose Irmin Schmidt had commented “there were wonderful blues singers. But as a European, it’s a lie to try to play pure blues.” And Iceland seems to have galvanised Smith, with him writing against the track in the sleevenotes “Valhalla brochure bit, White face Finds Roots”. (His EccentRic cAps.)

White acts had long immersed themselves in black culture. Normally because that was quite simply where the best music was. But while social imbalances still exist between races, that’s not going to be a meeting of minds. Like a neighbourhood long neglected then one day found desirable, black culture too easily became white property and its blackness exoticised - just as black people get marginalised.

Ironically, this gained a handy name from it’s own adherents. Following an influential Norman Mailer essay, they were White Negroes. It reduced to the idea you could escape straightlaced white society with a bit of metaphorical blackface. So white artists would surround themselves with black skin in their music videos as a kind of appropriated cool. (Check out this Stones video for one example.) And the best response to this is the most obvious one – you’re not a “white Negro”, you’re just white you gormless prat.

With Mailer’s essay dating back to ‘57, the White Negro had influenced not just hippies but beatniks before them. So it was natural for punk to react against all that, post-punk perhaps more so. As Simon Reynolds has pointed out, this became a widespread feature. Robert Wyatt for example “was the closest there's ever been to an English soul voice... not someone trying to sound black - someone soulful, but English…. Post-punk is all about this play between Englishness... and the black musics that were the kind of source musics.”

On the other hand, that imbalanced encounter is at least an encounter. Talk of ‘white roots’ risks bypassing that play, flipping the mindset rather than escaping it, and landing yourself knee-deep in some stinky ‘white pride’ shit. And punk did that enough times too.

So, yes, we’re segueing backwards into the notorious line from ‘The Classical’: “Where are the obligatory…?” At which point we run into quite a fundamental problem in even talking about this stuff, as if all the words we know have suddenly let us down. If you say something like “the n-word” you sound like some prissy type who asks for directions to “the smallest room”. If you spell it out, you sound like either a seig-heiling scumbag or a gangster rapper. And I’m not sure I could pull off a convincing gangster rapper impression.

Even if things had moved a long way from the politically committed collective who played anti-racist benefits, even if he didn’t always treat those around him with scrupulous fairness, there’s no reason to believe Smith was racist. Whatever is going on in ’Who Makes the Nazis?’, and you would go mad before you got anywhere, it’s clearly not pro-Nazi.

The problem isn’t the intent. It’s that the intent is only obvious in the wider context of Smith’s writing. The other great song from the era to use that work is the Dead Kennedys’ ’Holiday in Cambodia’. Which clearly uses it to pillory the posh white kid bragging about his soul brothers in the black ghettoes. Insofar as I know, there was no controversy over that. Because they ensured their meaning was clear. Smith’s wasn’t. And you need to be sharp when playing with fire.

Though that might well be the game being played. We should also remember this was the very track which Smith intended as his ‘fuck you’ to the music business. Which may have also galvanised his desire to shock and offend. Sometimes you can burn a bunch of bridges with just one word. There’s two well-known stories which involve this word, one the unlikely-sounding tale that it cost the band a contract with Motown.

But the other tale, the one we know is true, is that Smith later revived it minus the offending word. Which kind of proves the point. We can say things we don’t mean when we’re wound up, but we can also calm down afterwards.

”All Entrances Delivered”

Nothing ever being straightforward about the Fall, ‘Winter (Hostel-Maxi)’ sounds like a lava track but was actually cinema. Both literally and metaphorically the album’s centrepiece, on the original vinyl release it was (somewhat inexplicably) split between sides. As the other main slow track it would seem to belong with ’Hip Priest.’ Except while that simmers with tension, which at points would erupt, ’Winter’ remains measured.

Smith was unusually helpful in the press release: "’Winter’ is a tale concerning an insane child who is taken over by a spirit from the mind of a cooped-up alcoholic, and his ravaged viewpoints and theories”. More unusual still, the lyrics back this up. The “mad kid… had just got back from the backwards kids party”, but now has hit a genius-level number of “lights”. While babbling “I’ll take both of you on”, the comedy line of drunks immemorial.

Which of course then just raises the question – why write a song about such a thing? Sex, summertime and cars are more common subjects, aren’t they? Let’s start with a handy hint, when Smith’s singing about a genius you can guarantee he’s singing about himself. And if there’s two geniuses here it’s likely he’s both of them.

We’ve already had John Lennon, let’s now compare Smith to Jim Morrison. Morrison liked to claim that as a child he witnessed a traffic accident, where the soul of a dying Native American went into him. (Feel free to believe that if you want.)

Similarly ’Winter’ is Smith’s mythopoetic account of his own origins – how the young Salford lad, a “backward kid”, was to became the inimitable Mark E Smith. On the album where he nearly stopped music, this is the story of how he started. The “entrances uncovered” line literally refers to street signs re-emerging into readability now foliage has retreated to bare branches, but also his own entrance.

I’ve no idea whether his mother was ever “a cleaning lady” as in the song, but he came from a solidly working class background. Equally, I’ve no idea whether at this point he was – or would have seen himself – as a fully fledged alcoholic. But songs aren’t about mapping neatly onto real life, they’re about throwing up associations. (Craig Scanlon later said “I always thought the mad kid was Mark”, while taking care to point out it was none of his business.)

But the significance of the comparison is its limits. Morrison took up his newly acquired soul much in the way a wealthy white New Ager wears an ethnic pendant. The exoticness is supposed to rub off on him, whitewash out his whiteness, make him cool. To the mad kid possession is more like a genuine shamanic initiation. The inmate’s genius and alcoholism seem to be inseparable, both gift and curse – as spelt out in the lines “please take this medallion/ Please wear this medallion”. (Notably another album track, ’Jawbone and the Air Rifle’, is based around the passing on of a cursed object.) 

Once taken over “he looked like the victim of a pogrom”. And then underlining all this a third time Smith adds himself into the song once more, witnessing his own fall into the Fall as he recounts how “the mad kid walked left-side south-side towards me”. It’s presumably this Smith, Smith the narrator, who recounts “I just looked round/ And my youth it was sold.”

And where could such a scenario come from? Notably the alcoholic genius needs to escape a quasi-benevolent institution, epitomised by (in a classic Smith-ism) a “feminist Austin Maxi”. Original guitarist Martin Bramah later recalled their formative years. “Living on the edge of Prestwich Mental Hospital… a lot of mentally ill people were wandering around Prestwich Village at lunchtime, so it was just part of life…. and so they found their way into the songs… As children we lived in fear of being dragged in there and never coming our again – as you do - ‘cause it’s this place where frightening men were living.” (‘Babylon’s Burning’, Clinton Heylin.)

These environs are thought to have influenced several early Fall songs, such as ‘Repetition’ (where their conforming role is to stop you digging that repetition) or the single ’Rowche Rumble’. And if it doesn’t seem much of a jump from “the alcoholic’s dry-out unit” to the nut house, early live versions of the track contained a reference to the Mental Health Act.

'Hex Enduction Hour' exploits the apparent contradictions of these different recordings by creatively juxtaposing them, ‘Winter’ segueing into ’Just Step S’Ways’ and the pulsing ’Iceland’ into the propulsive ‘And This Day’. And it's the Fall at their most Fall-like. Stewart Lee has said it's "probably the best album of all time".

Me, I'm not quite so sure. 'Jawbone and the Air Rifle', is an old track from a previous year's Peel Session, once considered for 'Grotesque', and sounds like it. (It could have replaced 'In the Park', that album's weakest moment.) But mostly there's something underwhelming about the final track, 'And This Day'. 

It's not a bad track, it's just when you've heard all you've heard and then find you're in for a ten-minute closer... well,you can't help but imagine another 'NWRA' is in the works. I first heard this album later than the others, as the label it had first come out on had gone bust. Which was followed by another delay as I waited for the track to finally click with me. I'm not sure it ever did.

In the liner notes Smith wrote beside it: "Desperate attempt to make bouncy good of 2 drum kit line-up". He was forever describing the Fall as alternately the best and the worst group in the world, like he didn't particularly distinguish between the two. But even so the man himself sounds a little unconvinced. Paul Hanley recalled "everyone just did their own thing, and it showed." Alas, the far finer 'Backdrop', which would have easily filled the slot in both length and quality, didn't receive its live debut until after recording was done and was fated never to make it to vinyl.

Despite which, I'd still say this was my second favourite Fall album. Which means my first choice is still to come. Place your bets. With only two albums to go, you've a fifty-fifty chance...

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MIGHTY FALL: 6. “RIDING THIRD CLASS ON A ONE-CLASS TRAIN”

(Continuing our run-through of the Fall’s back catalogue. The last part, looking at ‘Grotesque’, lies here.)

“Academic male slags
“Reel off names of books and bands
“Kill cultural interest in our land”
- ‘Slates, Slags, Etc’

”It’s De-louse, Safe-house Time”

With ‘Slates’, (1981) the unusual format of a ten inch LP (younger readers, ask your parents) came about by accident. Smith explained “the time was mid-February, the Fall, ORIGINALLY intending to cut 2 tracks [for a single] ended up with many more. As crumbs of nightmare filtered through, they decided to release the lot, as ALL TRACKS ARE RELATED.” (His ECCENTRIC caps.) Naturally, he never got round to explaining just how they were related. In classic fashion some, such as ‘Fit and Working Again’, were created completely from scratch.

It’s another great Fall album. But it was the first which didn’t push the envelope from its predecessor. The album after ‘Grotesque’ is really just the album after ‘Grotesque’. Moreover as the plan here is (more or less) to point out things as they first emerge, ‘Slates’ becomes relatively less promising to write about.

‘Prole Art Threat’ is a multi-character narrative like ‘The NWRA’, only more cut up and compressed. From the opening line (“I’m riding third class on a one class train”) it’s the class war recast as a paranoiac spy movie. And as spy films often take domestic settings - cafes, men reading newspapers in parks - and infuse them with a sense of menace they do become a perfect fit for the Fall.

The result is that working class revolt is not collectivised but individualised – a proletarianised Patrick McGoohan. “Real Bert Finn stuff” recalls Albert Finney snarling “don’t let the bastards grind you down” in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, perhaps crossed with Cockney spy Harry Palmer from ‘The Ipcress File’, more at risk from his toff bosses than his supposed foes. Structured like a garbled play or semi-redacted transcript, it adds to the suggestion that like ‘The NWRA’ this is a conflict really going on inside Smith’s head.

Ever the Northerner, Smith held a longstanding animosity towards London. ’Deer Park’, from the next album, would be a more literal accounting of its crimes. Here, ‘Leave The Capitol’ depicts “Victorian vampiric London” as a kind of luring mirage, an enchanting fairy kingdom which draws you into it only to suffocate you at it’s bosom.

What makes it seductive is the very stuff which makes it dangerous - “the bed’s too clean/ Water’s poison for the system”. Smooth is as abrasive to rough as rough is to smooth. He was a big Wyndham Lewis fan, and I’ve always suspected the inspiration for this track came from the Vorticist magazine ‘Blast’: “Victorian Vampire, the London cloud sucks the Town’s heart... officious mountains keep back drastic winds."

And London is an amassed force (“Hotel maids smile in unison”), society in concentrate form, against which resistance is by necessity solitary. “You know in your brain”, within yourself, you need to leave this place. It’s the Puritan opposition of inner strength to worldly temptation. “Straight home” means not Manchester (by my reckoning, another city) but “one room”, bedsit as monastic cell. (Compare to the earlier ’Flat of Angles’ where the released ex-con discovers “the streets are full of mercenary eyes.”)

”Full Bias Content Guaranteed” 

‘Slags, Slates Etc.’ is a successor to ’C+C’, and the origin of the term “definitive rant”. But while that had been a shopping list of individual gripes given a back-beat, here the slags and slates form an amassed, offensive force against the all-important first-person singer. The repeated diss “slags, slates and tapes” (from which the album gets its title), taken together, suggests an inferior copy. (Slag was originally a waste product, later modified into a term of – or word for - abuse. Slates were what schoolkids used to copy down comprehension before paper. And these were the days where you’d tape albums, trading your saved pennies for degraded sound quality.)

But there’d seem something vampiric about them, even if Smith wasn’t using the term elsewhere. He rages “Everything’s drained by the slates/They are the grey ones of our state, I relate”. (Perhaps in a similar fashion to Priestley’s short story ‘The Grey Ones’.) Like the lifeless feeding on the living, their paradox is that they constantly require the brightly coloured to feed on, but in their feeding inevitably reduce those colours to their own greyness.

So their sucking doesn’t just weaken you, it infects you with their own weakness. Those who can’t drain those who can. (There was a similar image in ‘The NWRA’, when the radio turns another track into an anaemic love song.) Hence as they “ream off names of books and bands” they “kill cultural interest in our land”, poison to all they touch.

The track may seem a rallying cry to resist them. Except Fall songs, though frequently polemics, are rarely delivery systems for messages to the wider world. They’re things in themselves, and they frequently refer to themselves. It’s truer to say the track is the act of resistance, Smith’s wrath is both response to them and defence against them, the more incendiary it gets the more inoculated against greyness it becomes. (In a similar fashion to the Hero making himself indigestible to the Spectre two albums back.)

It’s true the Fall would themselves borrow, openly and often wholesale. We’ve already seen how ’Frightened’ stole from ’Stepping Stone’. Further acts of shameless kleptomania will include filching a keyboard preset (the intro to ’Fortress’, from the next album) and (yes really) ripping off Spinal Tap (on ’Athlete Cured’). This has led some to see hypocrisy in Smith’s stance.

But when he’d rail against bands who he claimed plagiarised him, he’d simultaneously insist they sounded nothing like him. Which isn’t a contradiction. Smith was often respectful of past greats, at various points praising in song Link Wray and castigating no less than Shakin’ Stevens. (For “the massacre of Blue Christmas/ On him I’d like to land one.”) His ire was less against the library loan than the erzatz. Borrow in the spirit of the original, you make more. Those who offer only store-brand substitutes detract, piss in the same well they’re pulling bails from. On the later track ’Elves’, over a blatantly borrowed Stooges riff, Smith lambasted “the new rock scum/ Spitting on what’s good and gone.”

TS Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate, nature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Amen.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MIGHTY FALL: 5. “NO CONCEPTION OF WHAT HE’D MADE”

(The previous part, which began our look at third album ‘Grotesque’, can be found here.)

”Come, Come, Hear My Story…” 

But if ’C’nC’ was the musical sequel to ’Spectre vs. Rector’, the number that took up and ran with the narrative baton was the album’s closer - the equally acronymic ’The NWRA’. 

If you were allocated one number to demonstrate what the golden-age Fall were all about, this could well be your candidate. The ten-minute track feels epic and, drawing on a number of earlier themes and characters, defining – like the last reel of a film. Indeed the line “and the fall had begun” makes it sound like the song the band were formed to play.

Some contemporary listeners assumed the title spelt out 'North West Republican Army'. Despite it being... er... spelt out endlessly in the song - ‘The North Will Rise Again’. Which is most likely a flip of the American Southern rebel expression “the South will rise again”, perhaps picked up by Smith on tour.

And not long after the LP was released, the North really did rise. In ’81 a wave of riots spread across the country, taking in Manchester. The opening narrated section (“when it happened we walked through all the estates from Manchester right to Newcastle”) suggests touring habits keyed the band in to the powder keg state of the nation. He later commented to Mick Middles, “it was genuinely horrible before we went away. You could really feel the tension, just hanging in the air. It was obvious that something big was going to happen”.

Ironically, just as Britain burnt the band were off touring America. As they launch into the track in Chicago, as captured on the live album 'Part of America Therein', the compere even introduces them as “from the riot-torn streets of Manchester, England!” It’s unlikely that Smith was pleased to be placed with the post-Clash lumpenly literal ‘keepin’ it real’ school of punk, who he dismissed as “condescending French revolutionary bands”. (Hanley has recounted, after supporting the Clash in New York, Smith banned the band from listening to them.) Nevertheless he also commented the riots “should have happened a hundred years ago as far as I’m concerned.”

For let’s remember the easily forgotten - the Fall had once operated as a raggle-taggle collective, playing benefits for Stuff the Jubilee and Rock Against Racism. If legend be true, their original drummer lasted just one gig, ejected after writing the song ‘Landslide Victory’ to celebrate the Thatcher election.

Though Smith had long since begun his Robespierre reign of terror over and against any band egalitarianism, he’d not entirely abandoned notions of proletarian antagonism. The singles compilation 'Early Years', released the next year, had adapted Edgar Varese’s slogan “the present-day composer refuses to die” into “the present-day proletariat refuses to knuckle under”.

And ’The NWRA’ was where such opposed notions went head-to-head. Though Smith would undoubtedly rail against the suggestion, the track works like John Lennon’s 'Revolution' – an apparent polemic which actually comes out of, and is driven by, the author’s own conflicted state of mind on the subject. Smith concocts an array of bizarre characters, some real some imaginary, then sets them against one another in the hope the ensuing war might settle the war in his own mind.

Except Lennon, long-haired, endlessly hopeful and very very stoned, assumed that all this was inevitable, the only choice left being whether we wanted our revolution with violence or without, as if the issue was akin to ordering side salad. Whereas Smith is mulling over whether it will happen at all. Is writing the song some act of sympathetic magic which might make the whole thing come about? Or is a narrative being built because that’s the only way we’ll ever get to talk about it?

In a contemporary interview he stated: "I mean, everybody knows about the split between the north and the south in England, but 'The North Will Rise Again' isn't a political statement, it's a story, like a science-fiction story. The way I wrote it was from a few dreams I had after playing the north a lot - it's about what would happen if there was a revolution. It's purely fantasy, science-fiction stuff... It's just like a sort of document of a revolution that could happen - like somebody writing a book about what would have happened if the Nazis had invaded Britain. It's the same concept as that.”

And the song’s sung quite undemonstratively, in a relentless monotone, not a clarion call to arms but a mere witness to events. Unlike many of the other tracks on the album. In fact Smith got much more worked up over dirty socks.

The character R Totale had already been used by Smith as a pseudonym, on the sleevenotes of ’Totale’s Turns’. Whose press release explained “Roman Totale XVII was born in a coalshed under the buzz of a defective street lamp. From birth he roamed Britain as a self-proclaimed professor of speed speech…. He is the mental manifestation of the Fall camp, and dwells underground while above him trends grind on slowly and sickly.” (“Explained” may not be the most accurate word there.) He also showed up on ’2nd Dark Age’, a B side from the same year, as “the bastard offspring/ Of Charles I and the Great God Pan.”

Perhaps all that matters is that he’s simultaneously a stand-in for Smith and the personification of the North, and so becomes the spirit of the revolt. But his efforts are undermined by the “opportunist… business man” Tony who “seized the controls... [to] set out to corrupt and destroy this future rising”. (This is believed to be Tony Wilson of Factory Records by approximately every single human being alive in the world.)

Tony and Totale are set up as conflicting opposites. Tony’s twice associated with blue, taking a “bluey” (for any American readers, slang for a fiver) and wearing a blue shirt. Initially Totale stains his blue shirt red, presumably by taking a swing at him, as if red’s his totem colour. Though he then seems to give up on the whole thing, taking to “dwell[ing] underground, away from sickly grind, with ostrich head-dress”. And when he retreats underground, his face becomes merely “orange-red with blue-black lines”, as if in his malaise his redness is fading.

Like the Fisher King the personification sports the suffering of the land. So the rising transforms him physically (“face a mess, covered in feathers….”) even though he’s removed himself from the action. Or perhaps he and Tony are rival spirits of the North, at constant war. Whichever, the rising seems inherently self-contradictory. While security guards at the Arndale are hung and Soho pillaged, “DJs have worsened since the rising” and ‘English Scheme’ has metamorphosed into a soppy love song.

But, just as Lennon eventually swung more towards “count me out”, Smith thumbs-down the notion. Like Lennon, it’s the chorus line that lingers:

”The North will rise again?
”Not in ten thousand years
”Too many people cower to criminals
”And Government pap 
”When all it takes is a hard slap”

There’ll only ever be a handful of individuals in the whole of history with defiance enough to deliver that “hard slap”. Smith’s prior commitment, and later lingering dalliance, with collective action is to be laid to rest. From this point on Mark E Smith will have no time for anyone but Mark E Smith.

Which segues neatly into ’English Scheme’. Folk are forever trying to divulge the ‘meaning’ of a track, by abstracting the lyrics from the music and placing them on a web page, as everything that mattered slips through their clutching mitts. And the Fall are a classic example of the absurdity of this approach. Yet with ’English Scheme’ such scholars would get a reasonable notion. The lyrics are straightforward and the musical backing… well, it’s pretty much a musical backing. (Though Hanley claims it was written first.) And the lyrics effectively say “a plague on both your classes”. Smith even commented favourably on the positive response the track engendered in people, a great rarity for him.

And in many ways this isn't very surprising. Joe Strummer of the afore-mentioned Clash, often seen as the prince of punk protest, had once penned insurrectionary provocations such as '1977':

”In 1977
”Knives in West 11
”Ain't so lucky to be rich 
”Sten guns in Knightsbridge”

...but within a year was writing an older, wiser rebuttal of such fantasies with 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais':

”It won't get you anywhere 
”Fooling with your guns
”The British Army is waiting out there 
”An' it weighs fifteen hundred tons”

The faith in insurrection of ’1977’ was itself a weaker echo of the hope for world revolution in 1968, a displaced form of self-belief you could only keep from colliding with reality for so long. The hard-drinking, straight-talking persona Smith played to the music press increasingly became curmudgeonly and provocatively reactionary. I remember reading one screed where he’d dismiss the current crop of star bands one by one, finishing with “no, give me the Royal family any day”.

He once described the shift as ”a real pain for me.” Though he later conceded to Middles “I always used those right-wing comments to wind [the NME] up because I always knew how narrow-minded they were”. How much he’d really shifted, how much this was just a character he’d play and how much he became that character through playing it… it’s doubtful he knew himself.

Like ‘Revolution’, the song’s written to resolve a dilemma in the writer’s head. And, like 'Revolution’, it ends up leaning heavily on one side. But, like ‘Revolution’, it still can’t quite come down on it. Despite that being the ostensible purpose of the song. R Totale effectively exiles himself, yet the song is narrated (as yet partially) by Joe Totale “the yet unborn son”. The father retreats underground, which is often a symbol of pre-birth (as in, for example, the Zeus myth) creating a parallel between the two. But while R Totale counsels inaction, the “as yet” unborn Joe will one day emerge. And yet of course from that point the Totale persona was never used again.

But perhaps in the longer term the unborn son was proven right. Riots recurred in 1985, while the more recent 2011 outbreak soon spread to Manchester. The text of one of the Blackberry messages which triggered them (“to be honest I don't know why its taken so long for us make this happen”), closely echoes Smith's initial response.

”It Would Turn Out Wrong”

‘Grotesque’ might seem to show Mark E Smith split between two writing techniques – narrative and stream-of-consciousness. On ’Printhead’ (from ’Dragnet’) he’d even commented on “a barrier between writer and singer." A barrier many had hit, particularly in the previous prog era. Folk found to their cost that the immediacy of songs and the arcing ambitions of narrative were at odds with one another, that each would fight to displace the other.

But rather than try to resolve this, he exploits the friction. ‘Spectre vs. Rector’ does follow a standard narrative structure – set-up, conflict, resolution. Which was more or less replicated on other narrative songs here, such as ‘New Face In Hell’. Not ‘TNWRA.’

Smith's cryptic writing style can be taken as mere obtuseness, the challenge being to see through it to find the songs' 'meaning'. That's pretty much what was happening earlier, demonstrating how easy a trap it is to fall into. Yet to quote Mark Fisher again: "The temptation, when writing about The Fall’s work of this period, is to too quickly render it tractable."

As ever, how you say it is as important as what you say. Fisher continues that Smith’s writing is “alien to organic wholeness… It is a grotesque concoction, a collage of pieces that do not belong together…. The story is told episodically, from multiple points of views, using a heteroglossic riot of styles and tones.” Just as he married the mundane with the weird, Smith staged a shotgun wedding between grand narratives and stream-of-consciousness. It’s as if he found himself typing out an epic novel with one hand while scrawling random gnomic phrases with the other onto the same page, and resolved to do it more.

Typically for a post-punk band the Fall were as influenced by non-musical sources, with Smith insistent he was at root a writer rather than singer or songwriter. (Even giving himself a very unrockish middle initial.) And modern writers had often come to rebel against the neatly ordered world offered by narrative. It can scarcely be coincidence Smith was an avid reader of the cut-up world of William Burroughs.

But others took from Burroughs the notion that cut-up text could be stuck together to make up a meta-view, like the facets of a Cubist painting. And Smith did once describe this track as “supposedly objective”. Yet in that phrase it’s the “supposedly” which lingers. Overall, he’s much more a Dadaist, taking a Schwitters-style scalpel to meaning.

The sense that narratives are inherently incoherent and fragmentary, that you can’t tell stories with loud amplifiers, that the whole thing doesn’t really work, isn’t contested but placed front and centre. The Falls’ narrative tracks are also simultaneously anti-narratives. Remember his taunt from ’New Puritan’: “What d’ you mean, what’s it mean?/What’s it mean, ‘What’s it mean?’.”

And, not unrelatedly, ’The NWRA’ screws with time more than usual in a Fall song, which is saying something.

“The North had rose again
“But it would turn out wrong
“The North will rise again”

Smith describes it on the sleeve notes as “made up of parts 2, 3 & 1 ie right now, after and during.” It’s less time travel than the separation between time periods being broken down, events collapsing into one. There’s even hints the rising is itself against time, as if temporality itself is part of the political system that needs overthrowing.

“The streets of Soho did reverberate 
“With drunken Highland men
“Revenge for Culloden dead”

Smith would often write in a collage style even at the level of individual lines, skipping pronouns, colliding, compounding and compressing words and phrases rather than combining them. Take for example the opening to the later song ‘Backdrop’:

“The Leicester YOP instructor
“Emerged from corridor
“His state-subsidised cannabis haze
“Moved reptilian”

He’d often pronounce words phonetically or sing acronyms and abbreviations verbatim (eg “get up for ind. est.”, “D. Bowie sound-alikes” or for that matter “eg” itself, as used on the later ‘CREEP’). As if he was reciting not from a novel or poem but by rote from a shorthand transcript or speaker’s notes.

Taylor Parkes points out “It's language used as a tool of attack, but it's also an attack on language, its limitations and inadequacies.” Many a track sounded like a bunch of tape excerpts stuck together. (And often for a good reason.)

It was also there on the album sleeves, before you even got to the music. These were as home-made as punk, but rather than rough and immediate like street graffiti tehy were scrawled over with polemics and gnomic utterances. Smith told ‘Sounds’ magazine “I like the cover to reflect what’s inside.I love all those misspelt posters… those cheap printed cash ‘n’ carry signs with inverted commas where you don’t need them, things like that… a graphic designer would never get it right in years.”

And Smith’s singing, so often mocked by non-fans, worked with this. It shouldn’t be underestimated how much he needed a style of singing for someone who couldn’t actually sing, even by punk standards. Yet he found something which not only worked, but worked well with all of this. Smith was a keen Faust fan, who were themselves influenced by the German Sprechgesang tradition - literally ‘spoken singing’.

(And believe it or not, but there’s even a historical basis for this. Northern dialects of English, such as Smith’s Mancunian, are more influenced by Anglo-Saxon than the Latinised stuff spouted by Southerners such as myself.)

Up to ’Room To Live’, (two albums hence) the track lists come with song explanations, which are of varying usefulness. (One simply says “This is a very funny track. It's a pity you can't hear what's going on." Another pontificates for a while before conceding “this has little to do with song”.) If fellow Mancunians and arch-rivals Joy Division had cultivated a mystique by with-holding information, as typified by their austerely minimal packaging, the Fall took the opposite route to the same result – bombarding fans with semi-complete snippets, until they became a form of indecipherable white noise. Never knowingly understood.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MIGHTY FALL: 4. “...AND THE FALL HAD BEGUN”

(The previous part, looking at the second album, ‘Dragnet’ lies here.)

”The new-born thing hard to describe”
- ’Impression of J Temperence’

”A Treatise To Explain These”

The immediate follow-up to ’Dragnet’ was 1980’s ’Totale’s Turns'. A live plus offcuts album, it chiefly conveyed the confrontational nature of the band’s performances. Sleeve notes proudly relay the abuse slung their way like badges of honour. (“Everybody knows best groups come from t’ South”.) Though the album itself mostly captures confrontation going on within the band with no need of the audience. But with a cheap cover even by the Fall’s extemporised standards, it was clearly something of an interim release. And indeed later that year they were back...

As it turned out, if ‘Dragnet’ was a bold step forward from ‘Witch Trials’, with ‘Grotesque (After the Gramme)’ the dice man threw his first six. The dark seam they struck by recording 'Spectre vs. Rector' became something malleable and accessible, like a shaman first beset by spirits who slowly becomes able to bargain with them. Little if anything remains of the punk band who saw the Pistols. If history had prevented any further releases this would still be regarded as one of the classic albums. (Consequently there’s a bit more to say than normal. So I’ve split things into a more reader-friendly two bits.)

Overall, if ‘Dragnet’ conveyed the twitchy, paranoid sense of speed ’Grotesque’ has the acrid taste of brown acid. The cover, painted by Smith’s sister Suzanne, suggests this. Both previous sleeves had been in black and white, hippy pastoralism in negative. ’Grotesque’ is in gaudy colour – a shriek of lurid greens and feverish purples, all at war with one another. It looks like a Fall gig transforming into some sort of coven as it unfolds. (The vertical rope motif is, I think, intended to convey the edge of the stage.)

The only number to use both “grotesque” and “post-gramme”, ’New Puritan’ is effectively the title track. (Plus the sleeve part-illustrates the line “fans send tapes to famous apes.”) Yet, bar a demo version on ’Totale’s Turns’, it only appeared on a Peel session of the same year. (A typical Smithian idiosyncrasy.) It was only ever played live seven times, less than the seemingly unreproducible ‘Spectre Vs. Rector’.

As the Fall came into their own, so did their name. Sounding simultaneously righteous and infernal, Smith rants “plagiarism infests the land” like the word’s some synonym for pestilence, and “the whole country is post-gramme” as if what us fools take for daily reality is the world in some fallen state - with the tribulation coming soon. He cries at one point “righteous maelstrom”, at another “your decadent sins will reap discipline”.

Though he may have been a hard-drinking speed-freak who didn’t always treat his band the way the Musician’s Union would have favoured, though he may (as we’ve seen) express disdain for “small moralists”, Smith was in his wayward way a moral crusader – ceaselessly railing against stupidity, cant, careerism, hypocrisy and mere imitation, never settling for second best.

The grotesque is pretty much the collision of the horrific with the humorous by definition, each simultaneously lacing and souring the other. And despite the absence of overt parody songs the humour’s still there, merely darker and less overt. ’Impression of J. Temperence’ seems assembled from Lovecraftian kit parts, quite literally a shaggy dog story down to the gag-like punchline. It even has the much-parodied Lovecraftian trope of the foreign thing being described as indescribable (quoted above), immediately followed by a description. It’s almost absurdly easy to interpret, the Bunyanesque name of the title character underlining how it’s all about the return of the repressed.

And yet it’s delivered with such glowering menace! You couldn’t take the thing seriously, but it’s equally impossible to just laugh it off. It’s not resolvable, there’s no box to put it in. And much of that comes from the sound. Traditionally, in rock ’n’ roll motion was a synonym for freedom – songs would both move and be about things that moved. “Ridin’ along in my automobile” was a classic opener. Whereas this track is slow, ominous, as if frozen by dread.

Remember the old canard about a scream being a 33rpm laugh being played at 45? The Fall played the thing at 16, until you didn’t know where you were. You don’t ride along in this track so much as get mired in it. The line “I was mad, and laughed at the same time”, though from elsewhere on the album, best conveys things.

Meanwhile and by way of contrast he cries on the sleeve notes “C’n’N Music is born!”, a reference to the freshly minted genre of Country and Northern. In ’The Weird and the Eerie’, Mark Fisher contends of the Fall: ”It seems as if the whole record has been constructed as a response to a hypothetical conjecture. What if rock and roll had emerged from the industrial heartlands of England rather than the Mississippi Delta? The rockabilly… is slowed by meat pies and gravy, it’s dreams of escape fatally poisoned by pints of bitter and cups of greasy-spoon tea. It is rock and roll as working man’s club cabaret, performed by a failed Gene Vincent imitator in Prestwich. [But] rock and roll needed the endless open highways: it could never have begun in England’s snarled up ring roads and claustrophobic conurbations”.

Yet ‘Container Drivers’, like ‘Psykick Dancehall’, is a rare example of an up track from this downwardly named band. The opposite bookend to ’Industrial Estate’, it’s a post-punk trans-Pennine ’King of the Road’ performed in an industrial rockabilly style. The Annotated Fall notes Smith was once employed as one of the self-described “customs bastards” the container drivers sail past, no boss breathing down their neck but an open road ahead of them.

But like ’Psykick Dancehall’ this was something of a contrast to the rest of the album. It’s smartly set straight after the ultra-restrained locked-groove of ’C’n’C-S Mithering’, coming on like a break-out. It’s even incorporated in the cover artwork as an insert, the tail end of a lorry hurtling out of the frame.

”His Tattooes Were Screwed”

And speaking of which… ’C’n’C-S Mithering’ (an abbreviation of ’Cash and Carry, Stop Mithering’, Mancunian for bothering) is the first of two long tracks which dominate the album, and is the sequel to ’Spectre vs. Rector’ in the uncompromising stakes.

It’s the first of what Smith would later call “the definitive rants”, a stream-of-consciousness screed of bile with a backbeat, perhaps a successor to Dylan’s ’Highway 61 Revisited’, an ever-expanding shit list. It builds on the original Crap Raps (versions of which appeared on ’Witch Trials’ and ’Totale’s Turns’), but extended into insanity and beyond, stretching for seven and a half minutes. One section makes this basis clear...

”This was supposed to be called crap rap fourteen 
”But it's now Stop Mithering
”The things that drain you off and drive you off the hinge
”Boils, dirty socks, the ceilings collapse
”The Sunday morning loud lawn mower...”

Making ’Repetition’ seem grandiose and orchestral, it’s almost literally stripped down – a guitar strum, some rapping on the drums, a bug in the ear. It’s not even a repetitive beat so much as an isolated phrase, a snatch of a rhythm never resolving – a niggle that attaches itself to your brain.

It’s a variant of that comedy routine where the raconteur gets incandescently irate about crumbs on the kitchen worktop or the unflushed public toilet. A routine which gains its edge by leaving the audience uncertain whether this is part of the act or he’s really that obsessive. (Smith later wrote a furious diatribe about the light bulb going in his flat, when “you need light here even in the morning.”) And indeed it becomes somewhat frightening to witness one man with so much bile to spew over socks.

Notably, it doesn’t end but simply cut out, as if an open-ended shit list Smith will be adding to before too long. Live, Smith would often mix up and vary his lyrics. He said to Middles: "To me, a song's never finished and it's never good enough, that's why I don't write lyrics down. Once they're down on paper, you can't change 'em, and I like to change 'em, even just before I'm going on stage... Lyrics change shape and meaning all the time... Once something is written I like to either change it or just move on."

But never more so than with this track, as whatever was mithering him at that moment would be thrown in. Not only was it never worked into a finished number, it seems antithetical to that notion. Some songs are portraits, some are tableaus. This is an etch-a-sketch, to be wiped down after use and built up again from it’s very basic basics, always in the moment, never fossilising.

Next up! The other major track from ’Grotesque'. (Clue, not ’WMC - Blob 59’…)

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MIGHTY FALL: 3. “THE STREETS ARE FULL OF MERCENARY EYES”

(The previous part, looking at the first album, lies here.) 

”Those flowers, take them away, he said,
”They’re only funeral decoration”
- ’Spectre vs. Rector’ 

”Stupid faces looking back” 

Despite arriving only eight months after ’Witch Trials’, ’Dragnet’ (1979) brought important developments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when you consider the only band member to remain from the original EP was Smith himself. On ’Dice Man’, he made clear this new arrangement was the new normal:

”I push, push, push, push
”Throw the bones and the poison dice
”No time for small moralists”

And significantly just as he took sole charge he took up Blake’s line “I must create my own system or live by another man’s”. From then the band were productive, forward-looking and ever-evolving. New songs were constantly elbowing out old ones, developed on the road, added to the set as soon as written – sometimes while being written. And with the consigning of old songs went with the consigning of old band members...

You could write a book based on Smith sacking anecdotes, except someone already has. Suffice to say he was already singing "Can't remember who I've sacked/ Just stupid faces looking back" on the B side 'In My Area'. It can seem like there was a press gang principle at work, where some poor soul would pop out for a pint somewhere in Salford and wake up with a bass strapped to his chest and the tour bus already half past Antwerp.

As so often with rock music, it's such a good legend it's tempting to just print it. For many years we all believed everything Captain Beefheart told us about the Magic Band, that he'd directed all the music and had taught band members to play from scratch. Which turned out to be nothing but spin.

True enough, ’Dice Man’s tumbling insistence nothing should ever stand still is certainly one of the Fall’s main driving factors. And there’s doubtless some truth in the second-most-common claim, that the ever-present threat of the P45 was Smith’s way of keeping the rank and file in line.

Yet merely totting up the sum of players who passed through the band creates something of a meaningless mean. Craig Scanlon and Steve Hanley, both of whom start here, were to remain to 1996 and 1998 respectively. Karl Burns, who had drummed on ’Witch Trials’, skips here but alternates with or plays alongside Paul Hanley throughout the golden age.

And the era when the line-up was at its most fluctuating, the mid Nineties to the mid Noughties, led by some margin to the most uneven output. After which things solidified again. Yes, Smith was central. But the Fall were more than the main man plus his minions.

The paradox of the Fall is that even if they were always Mark E Smith’s band, they were still always a band. Other bands with such a sum total of members, such as Current 93 or the Waterboys, were more solo artists who traded under a band name. Whereas the Fall needed that group mind to function. The most cost-effective and obedience-decreeing model would have been to hire and fire session musicians as and when required. Smith vehemently rejected this idea, despite conceding meagre takings often made it hard to keep the full band running.

Scanlon, Hanley and others made significant contributions to the music, songs often starting with their riffs. Hanley’s book ’The Big Mid-week: Life Inside The Fall’ repeatedly reiterates the paradox. He recounts how classic tracks were written, sometimes without Smith even in the room. Yet he remains an outsider to Smith’s motivations and thought processes. It’s like reading about the Napoleonic Wars from the perspective of an enlisted foot solider, who occasionally gets his orders directly from the General.

So if the Fall didn’t work much like the Magic Band of legend, did they work like the Magic Band of reality? Yes, but with one important variant. Beefheart required accomplished musicians to realise the sounds in his head. While, to hold true to the three R’s rule, what Smith needed was a garage band – and knew it. He insisted “I have never had musicians in the Fall. I don’t like them as people.” (‘The Fall’, Mick Middles) Paul Hanley wrote in his account ’Have a Bleedin Guess’ that the band’s great asset was their ability “to use their non-musicianship to their advantage.”

Johnny Cash’s manager would confiscate the group’s instruments between gigs, figuring that practise might make them too perfect when freshness counted for more. Similarly, Alfred Hitchcock struggled against luvvieness, pronouncing actors to be “cattle”. He didn’t want to be asked what someone’s motivation was to open a door in a scene, he just wanted them to open the door. And Smith’s persistent scorn for musicians was really a disdain for musos, with their mystifying air of self-importance. He wanted a group who’d just play his repetitive, no-frills music without getting clever about it.

But at the same time Smith was always throwing in the unexpected, to keep his recruits alert and responsive. Don’t play what you know, play in the now! Again there’s plenty of precursors to this, such as Miles Davis.

Further, Smith’s dice-rolling was in many ways more an American than a British attitude. Paradoxically, given his avowed Manchester localism. With the American underground scene independence went alongside a work ethic so strong it bordered on Protestant. Music was written and recorded quickly and cheaply, then the band moved on. If there was somewhere the band could play, the band would play there. But if audiences were to be sought out, they should never be appeased. The music industry was best treated as an irrelevance, at its worst an intrusion.

And that method of working created a positive feedback loop with the music, which wasn’t polished or radio-friendly but a work perpetually in progress. The requirement to be prolific meant the music evolved faster than with mainstream bands. Bands otherwise as varied as Black Flag, Big Black and the Butthole Surfers held to that philosophy.

While British bands were often more bohemian in outlook, perhaps because living on the margins was - at least at the time - easier. Mostly, though not entirely, through the dole. There’s the (possibly apocryphal) story that Virgin found Public Image a well-drilled machine for inhaling money and exhaling dope smoke and excuses.

Whereas Smith very much did have this work ethic, and the bulletin-like sound which came with it. He confessed he welcomed the discipline of financial necessity, which meant things had to keep moving to stay viable. In a man chiefly driven by dislikes, laidbackness seems to have been one of his greatest bugbears.

(Yet there’s one big exception to this rule. In the American underground, gobshite punks and freaks often proved surprisingly proficient in business acumen. The Butthole’s Gibby Hayes had studied accountancy, even making student of the year. Not things you would say of Smith. Only the Replacements rivalled him in a loathing of the music industry so deep they were even willing to screw with their own career to confound it.)

”My Vibrations Will Live On” 

But back to ’Dragnet’. Like it’s predecessor, it was split down the middle - punk numbers and sour, surreal parodies at one pole, longer, stranger tracks on the other. In fact the parody numbers, ’Your Heart Out’ and ’Choc-Stock’ were even more blatant, sharply accentuating the distinction between them and the ‘arty’ tracks.

Yet it sounded quite different. Chiefly because the keyboards, so dominant on ’Witch Trials’, are gone. Compare two of the key tracks, last time’s ’Frightened’ to ’A Figure Walks’, which are thematically similar but simply don't sound it. If ‘Witch Trials’ sounded sluggish and smeary, ‘Dragnet’ is scratchy, like sinister runes scrawled into a wall with a knife blade. It’s the most twitchy, most speed-addled Fall album, a scrawny, frazzled street character you’d instinctively avoid. Infamously, the recording studio lobbied to have their name taken off the sleeve, fearing the album could only cost them work.

Much as the first Hawkwind album had few lyrical references to space, ’Witch Trials’ had not particularly delved into the weird. (Perhaps only the brief title track.) Which makes the album opener here - ’Psykick Dancehall’, with its opening séance cry “is anybody there? YEAH!!!” - as much a mission statement as had been ’Frightened’. The sleeve notes stated “this place actually exists”, which it sort of did – even if the punters didn’t really dance to spirit waves. It was based on a 'psychic centre' which replaced a ballroom in Prestwick. With typical derision Smith soon dubbed it “Alcoholics Anonymous for psychics”, but the image was potent.

For, much like Blake spying angels in East End trees, Smith didn’t drop the street-corner subject matter of punk but revelled in colliding the uncanny with the everyday. (“My garden is made of stone/There's a computer centre over the road/ I saw a monster on the roof.”) A later, 1986 B-side was somewhat gloriously titled ’Lucifer Over Lancashire’.

Stewart Lee (him again) described the band as “kitchen sink realists who found Lovecraftian horrors lurking down the U-bend.” The Fall became like Alan Sillitoe and HP Lovecraft superimposed on one another. From this point on they would work as shamans and mediums, Smith spouting psycho-babble over endlessly lumbering basslines and trance-repetitive beats. While simultaneously taking the piss out of pop stars and adverts.

Plus the band’s patented self-referentialism shacked up with the weird and produced some shapeshifting creature you could never classify. ‘Before the Moon Falls’ opens with Smith intoning: “We are private detectives onward back from a musical pilgrimage. We work under the name of the Fall.” There was soon a somewhat bewildering array of pseudonyms and author surrogates in song.

Yet with its group cry of “yeeeah” there's something triumphalist in ’Dancehall’- it really is a kind of dancehall number. Rather than Lovecraftian forces invading our reality and rending it, it reverses the perspective, it’s about being able to bust out of the arbitrary limits to your life. And quite literally your life:

“When I am dead and gone
”My vibrations will live on 
”In vibes not vinyl through the years
”People will dance to my waves”

Whereas 'Figure Walks' not only picks up from where 'Frightened' left off, with the menace of the loner at night, it takes the original opening line (“someone's always on my tracks”) into another dimension. The spectre of street violence was then a common theme, but was either literal and visceral, as in the Specials’ ’Concrete Jungle’ (1979) or made into a manifestation of urban alienation, as in Stiff Little Fingers’ ’Big City Night’ (1982). But here the “something” which “followed me out” becomes (at least in the narrator’s paranoia) supernatural in its horror - “eyes of brown watery/ Nails of pointed yellow/ Hands of black carpet”.

And yet at the same time its the pack instinct personified, society's embodied judgement on its outsiders and scapegoats, disliking the unlike to the point of eliminating it. Its enmity is aroused by the “irascible” or a “genius”, in other words by Smith. The event's compared to the suicide of Socrates, as enforced by “the old golden savages”.

”Spectres Redundant”

And this strange melding of mundane and uncanny may have had it’s roots in Seventies Manchester. Middles has commented of Smith “it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to think of a single living artist, in the rock spectrum at least, where a locality is so deeply embedded within their work.” Joy Division’s Bernie Sumner commented on the city’s deprivation at the time, “it was virtually a ghost town” (‘Rip It Up And Start Again’, Simon Reynolds). If so, the connection was clearest in the track ’Spectre vs. Rector’, which became literally embedded in a locality. A sleeve note confirmed it had been partly recorded in a disused warehouse, with the comment “maybe industrial ghosts are making spectres redundant”.

Mark Fisher finds this “the moment when the Fall really began to sound like themselves…. any vestigial rock presence subsides into hauntology... Steve Hanley’s bass rumbles and thumps like some implacable earth-moving machine invented by a deranged underground race, not so much rising from subterranea as dragging the sound down into a troglodytic goblin kingdom in which ordinary sonic values are inverted.”

We’re used to levels of sound in music, elements neatly placed above each other like theatre flats. This sound has depth, but like peering into a murky pool where you’re never sure how far down it runs. In a sense it’s the band’s ’Sister Ray’, not so much the pinnacle of their career as the point where they got down to the very essence of what made them, their ur-moment. Fisher insists it’s a track (not a song), but in many ways it isn’t even a track – it’s more like a ritual which coincidentally got recorded. Of all the Fall tracks, it’s closest to the industrial sound of Throbbing Gristle. Though it’s their turning point it’s less a template than a crucible, a point where everything to date was boiled down to the bones, and then reforged into something more basic.

Nothing they recorded subsequently ever matched it for pounding extremism. In fact even Smith would concede the track’s ‘challenging’ nature, at the end of the live ’Chaos Tapes’ version thanking “everyone who helped me with my vendetta tonight”. Nevertheless, with pun intended, its spirit permeated every subsequent held-down chord.

And like ’Sister Ray’ the ostensible narrative less degrades into incomprehensible gibberish than barely appears above it. The track’s underlined by what sound like field recordings. Which seems to be because the original warehouse recording was committed to a single-mike cassette, with Smith’s vocals subsequently overdubbed in the studio. (Perhaps more necessity than plan?)

Everyone knows the horror trope where some bunch of berks perform a conjuration, then act all surprised when the resulting demon turns out not to be their idiotically expected obedient servant. They’re almost like those safety films telling kids not to mess about about in electricity substations. Look both ways, just say no, don’t call on Cthulhu. Nothing like that happens here. Rather than wait to be inserted when it’s place in the narrative arrives the incantation kicks off the track, and repeats… well, repeatedly.

Even if we take it as just the chorus, what song ever had the chorus coming first? It becomes like the “evil dust in the air” (a sequel both to the fog and haze of ’Witch Trials'), what Fisher calls “verbal ectoplasm”, taking hold of the listener. The song’s about an exorcism but ultimately is an invocation. You end up succumbing, just as much as the possessed Inspector.

The hero, the “strange man” who lives not among other men, seems another clear stand-in for Smith himself. Unlike the Rector or Inspector his name doesn’t conveniently rhyme with Spector, and he’s the one the Spector can’t possess. It’s not so much that he’s stronger or more virtuous than the others, he’s simply more indigestible. The very stuff which makes him shunned make him unpossessable, assimilatable by neither system, not good or bad but outside. We’re told “selling his soul to the devil” was “his kick from life”, and certainly he seems unconcerned either by the Rector’s death or the Inspector being insane.

And yet through all this the black humour of ’Industrial Estate’, the sense of life’s absurdity, is retained. Is it threateningly deranged or a knowing parody of absurd ghost story tropes? It’s pretty much both. That incantation once (semi) decoded turns out to be a spew of Lovecraftian calls (“Yog-Sothoth, rape me Lord”) and references to MR James but among those literary allusions is King of the B movies Roger Corman. It’s simultaneously trying to draw down the horrors of the netherworld on your head and pointing out its own clichés.

And Smith plays up the absurdity further on the live version (from the follow-up album ’Totale’s Turns’), breaking from the script to reflect “you probably know this if you’ve got the record”, before musing on the incongruity of telling stories through loud amplifiers.

’Frightened’ kicked off ’Witch Trials’. ’Spectre vs. Rector’ didn’t conclude ’Dragnet’, it was succeeded by ’Put Away’. But it upped the ante considerably. Where was there next for the Fall to go..?