Prole Art Threat - The Fall

Part 1 - as in from heaven

Detail from The Hireling Shepherd by William Hollman Hunt

The literature inspired by The Fall is already well out of hand and growing as indecipherable as much of the band’s music, but not so much in New Zealand where the discourse concentrates on Flying Nun’s near-disastrously silly Fall In A Hole enterprise, well covered by Matthew Goody recently in his book Needles and Plastic. Here, I consider The Fall as a pop group, with a fine run of pop singles and albums that showed us songwriters of the 1980’s another way to do things, and, in next week’s Part 2, I’ll discuss their immense and ongoing cultural influence. Was it Eno who said only 6 people bought the first Velvets album but they all started a band? The Fall were like that. I heard on the news after Andy Rourke died that the Smiths were arguably the most influential 80’s band, and they may have been the best, the greatest, most loved, or whatever, but they weren’t the most influential on other musicians because most other musicians weren’t good enough to copy them. Whereas The Fall, like the Velvets, were a band you could sound a bit like soon after picking up an instrument of any quality, which is not to underestimate how much better they were at it than us, but it seemed possible and the results were gratifying. Nor are the Smiths the cultural influence, outside of music, that The Fall have become.

Punk was many things, but its Year Zero effect created post-punk. It was the at-long-last expression of Nietzsche’s Universal No in relation to music and consumer culture. (Wellington band Shoes This High were the ultimate, literal form of this, with half their songs directly dedicated to nothing – “The Nothing Song” – and the other half not far off). Everything that had been popular or accepted was anathematized. No more prog complexity, no more foppish pretension, no more blues scales (The Fall even eschewed the use of effects pedals – everything is austere, but eventually lushness and beauty will be heard from these thin, bare sounds, created by great industry and artistry alone). No more sex and romance, no more attempts to create a happy feeling. This meant – ironically, given that the post-punk bands all more or less subscribed to Rock Against Racism – that the vast African-American tradition in pop and rock was swept away (inability was probably as big a factor here as ideological unwillingness) so that white musos set to work creating something of their own, a set of ideas worth others appropriating. The West Germans of the “krautrock” bands, major influences on post-punk, had done the same thing a decade earlier from a pure spirit of anti-Americanism, to come up with ideas that would be borrowed by Kanye West, among others. Yet this Year Zero effect in post-punk was the default – love of black music, the need to express sexual and romantic feelings – most of the post-punk bands found a way to sneak in one or both of these again under their masks of austerity and puritan rigour (P.I.L. and dub, New Order and house music, The Cure’s great run of romantic pop songs, The Fall’s rapper ethos). Once MMDA and the Happy Mondays came along this restriction was annulled, no longer needed for cred; soul and sex were cool again.

The Fall’s finest answer to post-punk negativity (competing with their sense of humour) was to develop a musical form of the ghost story, a quintessentially romantic creation that allowed the expression of tenderness and evocation of nostalgia and the feeling for genius loci again and again. The lyric to “Spoilt Victorian Child” lovingly weaves a spell Smith is reluctant to break, even though the deliberately mismatched musical accompaniment seems to demand it - it’s hard to hear this jaunty song as the morbid riff on The Turn Of The Screw that its lyrics suggest to me, we all love someone of the Spoilt Victorian Child sort despite, or in part because of, their being “spoilt” as the Victorians understood it. “Bill Is Dead”, one of the very sweetest of Fall songs (from Extricate, 1990), began as an attempt to write something “Smithsian”.

“Edinburgh Man” is a pure love song to the city. But there’s one line in “Edinburgh Man” that gives away Smith’s position – “keep me away from the festival”. He can love Edinburgh as long as he avoids the middle-class pseuds there, the chattering classes, the media, the cultural academics, the bourgeoise creative classes. Morrissey hates the royals, the sense of aristocracy towering over him, Smith hates the nit-picking intellectuals who tell him what he’s saying, the media pundits who decide what the proles should be thinking. I saw an example of this on the TV3 AM show today – there was a question about hen parties and stag dos. The announcer ended the discussion by saying “I just think that in 2023 hen parties and stag dos are a bit…” Fair enough if those aren’t your traditions, they’re not mine either, but to be the educated voice addressing the nation and shaming the way people with fewer options than yourself mark their milestones, without even suggesting any insipid bourgeoise or crazy woke alternative, well it’s bit rich, and proves that classism persists – indeed, has grown – in a culture where the traditional forms of racism and sexism are well on the way to extinction. Admit it – you didn’t even get the frisson from reading the word classism there that you got from reading the words racism and sexism. A living, expanding-to-fill-a-vacuum, prejudice, hiding in a dead word. MES knew this – it’s the animus that drives so much of his best work. He wants to get under the skin of the professional managerial classes and the art wank crowd; they have the power to harm him and hold back the people he identifies with, they disrupt his thoughts with their asinine commentary, they ignore or “critique” the writers and literary forms he respects, they dispose of life and death, not the hereditary loungers perched on top, who would never try to change him or his kind.¹ Unlike the A&R department…

In the first two Fall releases, the Bingo Master’s Break Out EP and “The New Other Thing” single (both 1978), there are statements that lay out a program. “Bingo Master’s Break Out” itself is a hallucination of traditional English working class life; the manifesto “Repetition” displays its minimalist and Krautrock influences (vide “I Am Damo Suzuki”) through a Baader Meinhoff reference

Repetition in West Germany
Simultaneous suicides

ignoring the political – the Baader Meinhoff group was a Marxist terror cell, and three of its ringleaders committed co-ordinated suicide in prison in 1977 – to underline the uncanny, with dark humour, and “Various Times” is an antihero’s journey across history -

Alright we're going to go back
To 1940
No money
And I live in Berlin
I think I'll join up
Become a camp guard
No war for me
An old Jew's face dripping red
I hate the prisoners
I hate the officers
There's no fight
I think I'll join,
A Red Rose,
Leave Belsen
I'll go to Switzerland
A human resistor

(in a sort of sing-speak, with Smith’s voice breaking in the chorus to emit a sound like an angry seagull defending a chip wrapper – it’s no surprise that Peter Hammill was always high on MES favourites lists).
We are very far here from the Sex Pistol’s “Holidays In The Sun” or “Belsen Was A Gas”.² Only a well-read man would have known that the White Rose was one resistance organization in Nazi Germany, and that Red Orchestra (Die Rote Kapelle) was the gestapo term for all such groups, for the most part doomed and too brave to consider escaping to neutral Switzerland, or known how to use these references to portray an antihero and bring the backside of history to life. This was the “new other thing” – a densely literary (in a pulpy, unpretentious sense) approach to rock lyricism which would gradually reveal the pile of interesting paperbacks surrounding its author.

Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It's a large type minstrel ranch
This is where C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark
Have you been to the English Deer Park?

Colin Wilson (1931-2013) being the self-made working-class novelist and existentialist philosopher I referenced in my introductory post, whose novels appear on MES favourites lists and whose popular non-fiction works on crime and the occult offer a sound introduction to MES’s view of England.

“Totally Wired” was The Fall’s breakout hit in New Zealand, after the video was played on Radio With Pictures; thousands of Kiwis who, in those days, couldn’t buy speed for love or money were keen to signal their interest by buying a song so obviously about the drug.

I drank a jar of coffee, and then I took some of these
And I'm totally wired

The song reached #25 in the charts here on 10^th August 1981 (“Love Will Tear Us Apart” was at #18 that week, an unusually high place for Joy Division, put there by fans – very much the same fans – moved by Ian Curtis’ death). “Stars On 45” was #1 and “You Drive Me Crazy”, one of Shaking Stevens’ attempts at rock’n’roll revivalism, at #22.

I hate the guts of Shakin' Stevens
For what he has done.
The massacre of "Blue Christmas"
On him I'd like to land one on
(“Ludd Gang”, 1983)

That MES assumed, early on, that attacks on other, less righteous musicians should be included in songs is what I mean by The Fall’s rap ethos – another aspect of this ethos is self-reference, especially in the “Crap Raps” that preceded the band’s early sets – this example is the “Intro” from the 1979 live album Totale’s Turns:

We are Northern white crap that talks back
We are The Fall we were spinning we were stepping
Cop out, cop out as in from heaven
The difference between you and us is that we have brains
Cos we are Northern white crap
But we talk back
Uh oh, uh oh
Bang fucking bang, The Mighty Fall
The Fall, we are back, we are back
And this next number is Fiery Jack

A third aspect of The Fall’s rapper ethos is the proliferation of coded links between one lyric and another, so that understanding their totaleity requires the kind of “concordance” that used to be supplied for readers of The Bible, as well as the generation of codes in general, which creates an “in group” of listeners-in capable of deciphering, or inventing, the songs’ messages.³ We don’t find any rappers on MES lists of favourite music, and his rapper ethos seems almost to predate the US one (he did like reggae, especially Big Youth’s Natty Cultural Dread, and reggae toasting is an ancestor of rapping), but we do find Lou Reed’s Take No Prisoners, the 1978 freestyle live album on which Lou insults various music journalists and the audience, and disses rival musicians - “fuck Radio Ethiopia, I’m Radio Brooklyn”.
(A fourth aspect is the freedom taken with brand names in these lyrics, beginning probably with “Rowche Rumble”, a tirade against valium - negative in post- punk style, rather than aspirational).



The relative success of “Totally Wired” brought The Fall to New Zealand in 1982. I saw them play at the Christchurch Town Hall (the Clean were supporting, second time I saw them, first time I rated them). By then, The Fall had a muscular, united line-up with two drummers, and a mighty set based around Hex Induction Hour. At some point a few boot boys, who were to post-punk what the Hell’s Angels were to US psychedelia, there to share the bad vibes that fuelled their neo-Nazi pretensions, bum-rushed the stage, one of them getting on Smith’s wick – “Security! Get this boy off the stage!” We didn’t hear the kid’s comeback, but Smith’s reply was gold – “the problem with you is that you read too many English music magazines”. This incident seemed to induce a change in the band’s attitude. They’d recently had to run for their lives from a hostile crowd in Europe, and needed to make sure nothing like that ever happened again. The music got increasing brutal, and the first encore ended with a version of the “Black Night” riff with the taunting lyric “is this what you wanted, is this what you wanted?”. Followed by “Tempo House”, its slow persistent beat repeated till embedded in our brains, during which the band left the stage one by one, to the last drummer.
The audience was left stunned, as if an experimental sonic weapon had been used on them. No-one I met out in the foyer was able to speak a coherent sentence. We staggered into the night trying to gather our scattered thoughts. I wasn’t doing especially well anyway at this point in my history and it took me weeks to recover mine. It was, I later thought ruefully, overkill, the innocent suffering alongside the guilty, but by God I could respect a band who defended themselves like that.


Malgorithmic suggestion - Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, “Concentration Moon”

1. S: Why don't you like the Gang of Four?

Mark: Because their songs are about politics. They preach the leftist ideas. They went to University and belong to the privileged class. The problem is that they pretend to know what the working class wants. But they haven't got a clue. Sham 69 however knew what they were talking about and they were good. The English working class (including myself) find the music of the Gang of Four offensive, insulting, hurtful. I listened to their first singles a lot in those days. Later on I saw them live, too and then you could tell they lacked the feeling when they got to the heart of the matter. I mean, how could they talk about problems and changes in the world when they play like that. Maybe I am being cynical but it's more important to me to be honest to myself. I don't like the music of the Gang of Four. I prefer rock'n'roll bands.
From SPEX magazine 1981

2. Belsen symbolized Nazi horror for the post-war British because Bergen-Belsen was the first concentration camp liberated by the British Army. An American, Captain Beefheart, wrote “Dachau Blues” because Dachau was the first concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army. Auschwitz, the largest and most industrialized Nazi death camp, was liberated by the Soviet Army and became the Holocaust symbol for the two English-speaking worlds, replacing Belsen and Dachau, more recently.

3. Luckily this concordance has long been supplied by The Annotated Fall website.