1. The Outsider
‘I
wanted to write out of the song. I wanted to explore, to put a twist on the
normal. People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know
what to do with the other people that enter their heads’
Mark E. Smith, 2008
‘Someone's
always on my tracks
In a dark room you’d see more than you think
I'm out of my place, got to get back
I sweated a lot, you could feel the violence
I've got shears pointed straight at my chest
And time moves slow when you count it
I'm better than them, and I think I'm the best
But I'll appear at midnight when the films
close’
Frightened, Live at the Witch Trials,
Smith/Bramah, 1979
The
Fall are one of those rarefied bands I’ve always turned to whenever I start to
feel complacent or indifferent or even seduced by the mainstream establishment-led
value system or the ‘English Scheme’ as Marc E Smith once wrote it. A working
class autodidact, part of Smith’s legacy will be his masterly toying with
identity politics and the middle class paradigm which fuels this ‘set up’. In
its current guise in these times of austerity, caused by people obsessed by too
much wealth, we are invited to gawp in disgust or fear at poverty ridden, drug
addled ‘chavs’ in television programmes commissioned by successful TV
executives who often themselves appear to have risen to the heights of
middle-classness from humble beginnings. That Smith riles against (but at the
same revels in) this type of stereotyping is nothing new, it was part of the
Punk ethic from which The Fall erupted. But whereas most of those Punk
originators were tamed and subsumed into the system, The Fall as orchestrated
and organised by Smith, resisted.
Smith’s
dogged sense of self, refused to be flattened by the media saturated world he operated in. He was on its case to the point of
pedantic annoyance. Fully aware of the pits and falls of the cultural system,
he chose an ethic of hard unforgiving experimental graft to bring us more than forty
years of music that now that he’s gone off to other complicated universes
brings yet another reminder that our culture is rescinding itself in the name
of some non-alignment global pact about obsessions and addictions to the rise and
fall of the dollar, yen, sterling, bitcoin and all the rest of the capitalist
led orientations of this neoliberal era. That Smith wasn’t interested in more
than just enough money was very clear given his deliberately chosen trajectory
into musical success which he filtered in terms of his beliefs rather than sell
out his vision.
I
doubt he would have agreed with what I’ve just written about him. But that was
always the problem with Smith; he was difficult to pin down, forever the
contrarian with an acute sense of cutting through the bullshit.
2. In Your Area
‘You've
got comics in full bloom
McCarthy reincarnates soon
See the bones on the two-way faces
The me generation
See the traces of
The madness in my area’
In My Area, Totale’s Turns,
Scanlan/Riley/Smith/Pawlett, 1980
I
crossed paths with him once in the late 1990’s. He was walking down West End
Lane towards Maida Vale probably on his way to another intense Peel recording session.
He had this grimace that was simultaneously hilarious. He hated London, which
he saw as full of mercenary eyes. Prophetic or not, he was right to be cynical
about the capital. What should have been, and once was a bohemian and
affordable place to live was fast becoming overpriced and gentrified. A new
breed of property speculators and the rise of the rentier class were moving in
on all over us like a disease, leading us to the frankly criminal state of
affairs which is the London I live in today. Not that this gentrification is
confined to the south, it has spread even to Smith’s hometown of Prestwich:
‘Gentrification happens so quick, it happens here. This pub used to be a bit of
a rough house, and you get these middle class fellas coming in with baby’s
round their neck. And that’s their idea of austerity, coming in here!’[i]
Back
in 1985, I picked up my first Fall album ‘The Wonderful and Frightening World
of…’ The opening track Lay of the Land,
with its part-gothic, part-psychobilly sonic sensibility across which are lain
seemingly potty lyrics vocalised by a sardonic northerner had me transfixed.
Later, at art college, when given a visual diary project to be put to music I
took my 35mm camera loaded with slide film and documented my first
semi-conscious drift/dérive around the liminal bad land spaces of my suburban
hometown on the outer edges of North London and used Lay of the Land as the soundtrack. These were spaces that attracted
a multitude of turpitudes from the lighter side of illicit sex, teenage
parties, drug taking and gang fighting to the sites of much darker
misdemeanours which were all too often places which bisected the former zones
of innocence deflowered.
I
didn’t think much of the results of my work, but it was cathartic given my own
disturbed familial beginnings in life and the random unsituated violence which regularly
haunted my neighbourhood. I certainly didn’t know anything about the likes of
Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov and the Situationist International at that stage.
Instead
The Fall had given me access to a sense of evocation via Smith’s sense of an urban
psychedelic exorcism drawn from his fascination with esoteric/visionary writers
such as Arthur Machen, Malcom Lowry, H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K Dick. It was apparently
from Machen that Smith drew his alter-ego Roman Totale XVII, a rebellious
figure drawn to the outside mysterium of
the Welsh Mountains from an urban fiery within: ‘Machen’s style of writing
horror and the supernatural into everyday occurrences, especially urban
metropolitan settings, is echoed in The Fall’s urban gothic. The horror is
located under the surface of things.’[ii]
Roman
Totale surfaces prominently in the opus ‘The
N.W.R.A’ (The North Will Rise Again) wearing an ostrich headdress, covered in
tentacles, his face a mess and dwelling underground, screwed over by a dubious
local businessman called Tony. In Mark Fisher’s brilliantly perceived essay
exploring the influence of pulp modernism on Smith’s writing Fisher observes:
‘Lovecraft is the exemplar here: his tales and novellas could in the end no
longer be apprehended as discrete texts but as part-objects forming a
mythos-space which other writers could explore and extend. The form of ‘The
N.W.R.A’ is as alien to organic wholeness as Totale’s abominable tentacular
body. It is a grotesque concoction, a collage of pieces that do not belong together.’[iii]
Fisher’s reading (a reading he readily admits to being just that, rather than some definitive
understanding of Smith’s trademark lyrical jouissance) sees Totale’s failed
redemption as standing for a North unable to re-establish its former glory whether
Victorian or ancient, suppressed by its own nouveau riche aspirations: ‘More
than a matter of regional railing against the capital, in Smith’s vision the
North comes to stand for everything supressed by urbane good taste: the
esoteric, the anomalous, the vulgar sublime, that is the Weird and Grotesque
itself.’[iv]
Smith’s
lyrics and his deliverance of them have a schizophrenic quality echoing another
key influence in William S. Burroughs cut-up technique. Here Smith is attracted
to the daily pulp of magazines and newspapers: ‘I like crap, me. The local
advertiser and all that. The rubbish that’s written in there is quite
fascinating. Free newspapers, the Metro and all that shit.’[v]
This mixing up of the literary arcane with the throwaway mundane, the ‘high’
and the ‘low’ interjected with Smith’s tetchy
often humorous social realism is what makes repeated listening to The Fall so
absorbing and challenging.
3. Futures/Pasts
‘I
was in a sleeping dream
When a policeman brought my mother home
By the window I didn't scream
I was too old for that
I was in a drunken dream
The pubs were closed
It was three o'clock
At the bottom of the street it seemed
There was a policeman lost in the fog’
Futures and Pasts, Live at the
Witch Trials, Smith/Bramah, 1979
But with
all the fascination about Smith’s cantankerous personality as the grouchy double-talking
outsider as well as the Dadaist approach to meaning and performativity it’s his
poetic ability that is left wanting. The song Futures and Pasts is an exquisitely paired down encapsulation of
suburban dysfunction using a dream state saturated with fog and booze overseen
by an inadequate authority figure where memory slips uneasily between the
present, past and an implied future. Bill
is Dead from Extricate is a celebratory love song like no other, while The Reckoning from Middle Class Revolt
is one of the most reassuring and upliftingly defiant songs about unrequited
love I’ve ever heard. The opening track Alton
Towers on Imperial Wax Solvent finds Smith crooning like a deranged stalker
against what could be a seedy Tom Waits style jazz meander – although it has
been speculated that it was actually inspired by Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of
the Mountain King’. Before the lyrics descend into chaotic clipped asides comes:
‘Grey
Decline
In excelcis
And the waves
Through the slits
In San Rocco
Look very different
And are no longer any way sublime’
Alton Towers, Imperial Wax Solvent, Smith/Spurr,
2008
4. Dictaphone Man/Lost in Music
In a
long overdue but already old essay on musical experimentation as a tactical
anti-establishment component employed by The Fall, Robert Walker points us
towards what he calls ‘dictaphonics’.[vi] The
use of lo-fi recording equipment such as dictation and home tape recorders (in
the studio or out in the ‘field’) as well as Smith’s penchant for projecting
his voice through guitar amps, megaphones and anything else which conveys a
sense of dissemblance, is designed to disrupt ‘the acoustic, spatial, and
temporal complacency of the established rock formula.’
It is
also used more uniquely as a key compositional device. The haunting, oppressive
sounding Spectre vs. Rector from the
1979 album Dragnet opens with the band recorded as though we are listening to
them muffled and drifting up from some hellish basement: ‘The intentional
muddiness of the ghost band that Smith sings over in the first part of Spectre
vs. Rector is then wrenched away by the real band, an opportunity to use the
claustrophobic squall of replayed sound to act like a character lurking in the
space of the record. The fact that the two versions sit over each other uncomfortably
adds to the songs dank atmosphere. The unflattering acoustic helps convey a
sense of otherness because its tonal quality is outside of our own expectations
of a piece of music.’[vii]
Walker
counts at least fifty songs from The Fall’s output which use dictaphonic
insertions with varying degrees of prominence, approach and affect. The most
recognisable being Smith’s use of the Dictaphone to create multiple voices emanating
from the same person (himself) as a way of exploring his fascination with
multiple identities and splintered personalities. And perhaps it is in this bi-polar
way that John Peel’s much loved proclamation that The Fall are ‘always
different, always the same’ might be understood.
[i] Mark
E Smith, louderthanwar.com/mark-e-smith-final-interview/, July 2017
[ii] Mark
Goodall, Salford Drift: A Psychogeography
of The Fall, Mark E Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics, Ed.
Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Routledge, 2016, p48
[iii]
Mark Fisher, Memorex for the Krakens: The
Fall’s Pulp Modernism, Ibid, p105
[iv]
Ibid, p105
[v] Mark
E Smith, thequietus.com/articles/07465-mark-e-smith-interview-the-fall,
November 2011
[vi]
Robert Walker, ‘Dictaphonics’: Acoustics
and Primitive Recording in the Music of The Fall, Mark E Smith and The
Fall: Art, Music and Politics, Ed. Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Routledge,
2016
[vii]
Ibid, p80 :Walker sites the influence of musique concrete here (John Cage,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer et al) but also fellow mavericks like
Brion Gysin, Burroughs and Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.
Text by Olly Beck 2018
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