When I'm dead and gone
My vibrations will live on
In vibes on vinyl through the years
People will dance to my waves.
Mark E Smith, “Psykick Dancehall” The Fall 1979
Images are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the mind craves them, and, of late more than ever, the keenest experimenters find twenty images better than one, especially if contradictory; since the human mind has already learned to deal in contradictions.
Henry Adams, A Law of Acceleration, 1904
I’m far from being the biggest Fall obsessive or even the biggest Fall obsessive I know, my involved love of their output only taking me as far as the end of the Brix years and Extricate plus The Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall documentary, yet I’ve clearly been influenced enough to rip them off. I heard “How I Wrote Elastic Man” not long after its release in 1980 thanks, probably, to Don Campbell who imported all their early singles and drummed a little for The Spies. Don’s own band was called Eat This Grenade, a line from “Fiery Jack”, and another The Spies/The And Band member Mark Thomas would combine his admiration of MES and Marc Bolan into the start of his own unique style of communication. “How I Wrote Elastic Man” struck me as what we now call meta, with its shifting viewpoints, the obvious self-reference or fourth wall breach, the writer beleaguered by fans and critics demanding to know how he does what he’s never sure that he can do again. Damn, this is a fine lyric.
His soul hurts though it's well filled up
The praise received is mentally sent back
Or taken apart
The Observer magazine just about sums him up
E.g. self-satisfied, smug
I'm living a fake
People say, "You are entitled to and great."
But I haven't wrote for 90 days
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"
Three or four years after I heard “How I Wrote Elastic Man” I appropriated its first line, and its rockabilly quickstep rhythm, as the kick-off point for this song. I’ve sworn to the two-headed idol in the hills of Gagadoo that this blog would not be about my own music, but MES hated people copying The Fall.1 It torments us artists that we might be thought of as imitators, mere copyists, pale shadows, when we start by aping our greats (even as we fantasize that our great taste in steals will be noted by the cognoscenti), and the ways we incorporate the bookmarks of our inevitable, essential influences into our work can make or break us as artists, at least in our own minds (critics call this “the anxiety of influence”). As Dylan said, great artists steal, i.e. they remake their plagiarisms as their own, but there is no one right way to do this. MES often used his influences as characters in his songs, thus also stealing their names for his lyrics as he did so, which turned out to be one of the right ways.2
In 1986 my brother Ian sent me a cassette, one side of which contained most of The Clock Comes Down The Stairs, an LP by a band called Microdisney who had started life as enthusiastic Fall fans in Cork, Eire, fronted by a ranting Cathal Coughlan. By the time I heard them, they sounded like the Beach Boys might have sounded fronted by one of Ireland’s mythic bards (with a modern MES-sized chip on his shoulder, thrown out in wittily acidic asides). Throughout Cathal Coughlan’s long lyrical career there’s a mingling of the historical truth and the personal fiction, and a similar approach to nationalism and culture, in the service of a different, less reactionary attitude, a sleeve-worn heart in which the sentimental and the satirical are openly at war. Here’s a verse and a chorus from “Owl In The Parlour” on Coughlan’s last solo album The Song Of Co-Aklan which seems to me to show both the influence – in the jarring juxtaposition, and the angry assertion – and the difference – unlike MES, Coughlan admits to knowing what he’s talking about, and his irony doesn’t distance us from his true feelings. The best thing we can get from our models in the end is the license to be ourselves.
On the hunt for Hitler's bitcoin
with my pal in Tennessee.
He waves those flags not made in China
explains the dollar bill to me.
Time will erase us, that's the truth.
Loves, lies, locations, wisdom, youth.
Time will erase you, seems to hurt.
No-one need replace you or your curse.
I would in due time steal a line, and a riff, from Microdisney as the kicking-off point for a couple of my songs. Tom Lehrer said it best: “let no one else’s work evade your eyes”.
The comedy pastiche song is a fine British tradition; my parents owned an EP by the Baron Knights which amused us kids even when we didn’t know the originals of songs like “Girl Don’t Come”. The Fall were set up for parody by Leeds garage punk outfit Armitage Shanks (named for a brand of toilet) on their Smash The Cistern EP when MES uttered perhaps his best-known line, at a time of the greatest of the band’s many line-up travails, not long after the band imploded onstage in New York: "if it's me and yer granny on bongos, then it's a Fall gig."3
And then there’s The Sleaford Mods, with an obviously Fall-ish rapper and repetition ethos, who co-incidentally wrote a rather nasty song called “Armitage Shanks”.
Luke Haines, another British artist playing fast and loose with historical truth, and a collaborator with Cathal Coughlan and Microdisney, even wrote one of his concept albums, Adventures In Dementia – a micro-opera, around the idea of MES going on a caravan holiday incognito – here’s “Cats That Look Like M.E.S.”
Laptop laptop
what is laptop
a teatray with cats inside
laptop
the cats that look like M.E.S
inside laptop
a riff on The Fall’s “Laptop Dog”
Do not underrate what I say
I'm very intolerant of laptop craze
A big creature will stalk you
And it will alliterate and proclaim
laptop ignorant
Everybody proclaims
Laptop ignorant
Recently, 5 past members of The Fall have formed survivor supergroup House Of All. With approximately 60 former Fall members, there were approximately 5,461,512 possible 5-member line-ups to choose from, yet House Of All largely consists of household names - Martin Bramah, The Fall’s first guitarist, whose own stream of Northern mysticism has always run strong, paralleling Smith’s without crossing it, Steve Hanley, the inventor of the most massive Fall bass lines, his brother and Fall memoirist Paul on drums, second drummer (and author of another memoir, You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide) Simon Wolestencroft,4 and late-period guitarist Pete Greenway. The creation of House Of All was controversial with Smith’s family, but the self-titled album, recorded in 3 days, speaks for itself.
Last but not least, The Fat White Family, who had their own harrowing “never meet your idols” encounter with MES at Glastonbury in 2015, had already avenged themselves in a way he must have loved, giving him a second life as a serial killer in “I Am Mark E Smith” in 2014.
(There’s a whole new generation of smart English rappers whose densely coded lyrics suggest a Fall influence to me. One day there may well be a third blog in this series).
I curse your preoccupation with your record collection, it’s only music John. The ghost of MES steps beyond such trivial pursuits, and gets its nicotine-stained fingers into modern philosophy. I’ve linked to the Substack of Sam Kriss before, because he’s the best writer on the internet; his work ties ancient or arcane systems of coded knowledge into modern culture, on websites named after Fall songs – Idiot Joy Showland and Numb At The Lodge. Because the work of MES is such a system; he’s the Nostradamus or Dylan of our time, you can find a cryptic line to predict or explain everything if you listen hard enough.
And then there’s Mark Fisher, who brought Fall studies into academia, writing online essays on post-punk culture under the name k-punk, founding the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, inspired by the industrial-zoned ghost stories of MES to redevelop Derrida’s concept of hauntology to explain modern English life under “late capitalism”. The very phrase “late capitalism” is an article of faith in the inevitability of communism as predicted by Marx; at the CCRU Fisher and colleagues like Nick Land and cyberfeminist Sadie Plant developed the concept of accelerationism beyond the panoply of disasters to capitalism welcomed by the likes of Posadas in the 1960s, to encompass virtual technology; the term Accelerationism is said to derive from Roger Zelazny’s 1967 Sci-Fi novel Lord of Light, perhaps inspired by Henry Adam’s 1904 A Law Of Acceleration. In this chapter from The Education Of Henry Adams, Adams lamented the ever-increasing pace of technology and science, but the accelerationists welcomed it, as if its own exhaustion of the planet and of human potential is the only force strong enough to destroy capitalism. The concept resembles the Vorticism (“a short-lived but ambitious movement that aimed to give artistic expression to the vitality and raw dynamism of the machine age”) and Futurism of a century ago, when avante garde artists wrote hymns to battleships. At this point it’s probably worth remembering what MES thought of the internet; this finely-coloured modernist version of “Fibre Book Troll” is from The Fall’s penultimate album, Sub-Lingual Tablet (2015).
Mark Fisher’s most-discussed contribution to musical culture was his feeling that innovation had stalled, that “retro” had become normalized, in the words of colleague Simon Reynolds “that the 21st century so far has been a Zeit without a Geist: an atemporal time of replicas, reenactments, reissues, revivals, and other syndromes of cultural recycling that put the “past” into pastiche.” As Fisher told Crack in 2014,
I suppose coming to musical consciousness at the end of post-punk, when there was a more or less explicit intolerance towards the recent past, never mind the deep past of cultural time, that was what created my expectations. And when that played out, other areas of music took over, most notably jungle, which when you heard it you thought, “I’ve never heard anything like this.” That’s the simple sense of future shock. Of course, it’s not that things really emerge ex nihilo and you can’t then retrospectively construct the elements that went into this new synthesis. But nevertheless, new syntheses were continually being produced, and I think reliably up until, not quite as punctual as the year 2000, but up until 2003 we could still keep hearing new stuff and keep expecting it. Since then, we’ve got increasingly accustomed to the idea that we won’t really hear anything new again. That’s what I mean by the underlying, inherent negativity. The negativity is there in our expectations whether we admit to it or not.
I seem to know plenty of people who still feel this way, but I think it’s by now only an individual trait (here I am, an old man writing about The Fall, yet even I know better) or, insofar as it still exists in 2023, pertains to a few influential sets of mainly male gatekeepers in magazines like Mojo,5 and to the over-cautious attitude of big record companies and legacy media in a world where streaming services and social media have rendered them redundant to any tech-savvy, connected, and adventurous listener. Retro isn’t an attitude you’ll find prioritized by say, the Bandcamp Daily writers. I grit my teeth when I find radio time or column space or vinyl production resources given up to reissues of classic albums that were never denied attention and respect and the chance to multiply in the first place. You wanna reissue or talk about Judee Sill or Connie Converse, go ahead, make my day, but Joni or The Kinks simply don’t need more of that same attention they’ve always had.
Modern music writers of the “poptimist” type, mostly shills for the record companies with weaker rebuttals than mine, find Fisher’s hypothesis infuriating, but I think it’s still valuable, in a “so what are you doing about this?” sense, and I find myself agreeing with Simon Reynolds, who helped to popularize Fisher’s idea in its day, in his 2020 revisionist essay (No) future music?
Above all, it is the pitch correction and vocal design software such as Auto-Tune (invented by the US company Antares Audio Technologies) and Melodyne (developed by the German software company Celemony) that has opened up a distinctively 21st-century field of artistic action, and whose sound provides an era-defining ‘‘finish’’ that coats almost all popular music.6
There are reasons, then, to be guardedly optimistic about popular music’s ability to keep reinventing itself and conjuring a sound that would surprise denizens of the past, if Fisher’s teleportation system could carry it back through time for their appraisal.
‘‘Political retromania’’—the not slow at all but accelerating cancelation of the future—is what’s really a cause for alarm, as opposed to someone today making a record that precisely recreates the sound of The Yardbirds or indeed a replica 1990s jungle track.
Fisher died, by his own hand, in 2017; his colleague at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Nick Land has taken accelerationism to new levels, going over to The Dark Side to accelerate the destruction of capitalism. As Andy Beckett reported in The Guardian in 2017:
Iain Hamilton Grant, who was one of Land’s students, remembers: “There was always a tendency in all of us to bait the liberal, and Nick was the best at it.”
Since Warwick, Land has published prolifically on the internet, not always under his own name, about the supposed obsolescence of western democracy; he has also written approvingly about “human biodiversity” and “capitalistic human sorting” – the pseudoscientific idea, currently popular on the far right, that different races “naturally” fare differently in the modern world; and about the supposedly inevitable “disintegration of the human species” when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently.
Other accelerationists now distance themselves from Land. Grant, who teaches philosophy at the University of the West of England, says of him: “I try not to read his stuff. Folk [in the accelerationist movement] are embarrassed. They think he’s sounding like a thug. Anyone who’s an accelerationist, who’s reflective, does think: ‘How far is too far?’ But then again, even asking that question is the opposite of accelerationism.” Accelerationism is not about restraint.
More controversially, Land wrote about his use of amphetamines (much as MES rapped about his in countless songs), as a form of enlightenment necessary to keep in time with the accelerating zeitgeist. I have a friend, a Fall obsessive naturally, who stumbled into some of Land’s more cryptic work in lockdown and committed himself to a year of methamphetamine use in order to understand it properly. Who says philosophy can’t change anything! We’re entering a strange phase of history in New Zealand, where even members of the creative middle class, less adventurous than my friend, have come to desire amphetamine prescriptions as their preferred form of validation. Watch this space, because Aotearoa’s retro-parochial culture is ripe for acceleration.
Ne’ergorithmic push - Brix and the Extricated (playlist)
Y'see when he did that thing about Ian Curtis in Sounds he used a lot of my lyrics and I wrote this article saying this was fucking typical y'know, and Dave thought he was like that with us and then that came out. I mean I had to tell the truth. I mean it doesn't bother me, it doesn't interest me 'cos all the papers are full of rubbish, but he used my lyrics in his article and it upset me. Well, it didn't upset me, but I thought y'know, cross him off the list. He had a page to fill in a certain amount of time so he just put my lyrics in. Then he turned against us, which was really great. - MES
A band like Pavement really went to town [on copying the Fall]. Especially that Slanted and Enchanted [1992] album – and the artwork, too. He hated it. He hated people worshipping him. - Steve Trafford
The lines from “Psykick Dancehall” above, quoted in memoriam by Elena Polou, Smith’s third wife and the Fall’s umpteenth keyboardist, in a Vice oral history article also cited in footnote 1, are MES extrapolating from Sir Oliver Lodge’s “psychic recording” hypothesis to explain hauntings, as discussed in the first chapter of Colin Wilson’s best-selling Mysteries (1978); Wilson would be named in “The English Deerpark” on Hex Inductions Hour a few years later.
This wasn’t actually true, except as a way of defending his right to the name The Fall if he’d just fired the band. MES always wanted The Fall to sound a particular way, and frequently performed or recorded with others under his own name.
At this point in history it is easier to find, in print, a memoir from a survivor of The Fall than it is to find a memoir from a survivor of the First World War.
Do they even make Mojo anymore? They stopped making the stores that sold that magazine so I haven't seen it in a while. Are they still running in-depth features on Ride and Pulp? Ha! They'll never give that up, will they? Scott Seward, 2013
rock & roll isn't even music really. It's a mistreating of instruments to get feelings over - MES