1984 Music: The Fall, The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall

 

Release date: 12 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? No.

This is likely my final post on 1984 music.

I have a distinct memory of seeing the cover of Live at the Witch Trials, the first album by The Fall, in HMV and being weirded out by it: both the title and the spidery, inky artwork. It sat in the vinyl racks like some sinister hoodlum you would cross the road to avoid, and I duly gave it a wide berth, but its negative charisma also made it difficult to ignore entirely. I’m not sure if I ever even heard the music of The Fall in the 1980s – the likeliest place I might have encountered them would be on the Old Grey Whistle Test, or perhaps their John Peel–sponsored appearance on The Tube in 1983: 

 

I don’t know what I would made of this at the time. Certainly I would have dismissed The Fall’s pre-Brix output as too amateurish and lo-fi and abrasive, but on 1983’s Perverted by Language, 1984’s The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall, and several subsequent albums, there is at least some effort to meet the listener halfway. In any case, I now consider The Fall as one of the great bands of the era. 

Many of Mark E. Smith’s songs are really ‘about’ his stream of consciousness – a trail of impressions proceeding by allusion and association in the manner of James Joyce. Insofar as my novel is about hermeneutics – the way we interpret things, the way we infer meaning – then The Fall are the ideal band to soundtrack such an effort, and the cover of 1982’s Hex Enduction Hour is in this respect the ideal Fall cover, consisting as it does of Smith’s handwritten injunctions and observations, densely scrawled in defiance of all conventional notions of graphic design, but in a manner that recalls graffiti on a toilet wall. 

 

An entire website – The Annotated Fall – exists to catalogue interpretations of Smith’s lyrics, which typically cover more ground in a single song than many songwriters do in an album. But many of the songs are also stories (even if the events constituting those stories are sometimes unclear), or pointed diatribes about the music and cultural scene and The Fall’s place within it (you might assume this would be insufferable, but these songs are almost always entertaining, viz. ‘Mere Pseud Mag Ed.’ and ‘Hip Priest’, both off Hex Enduction Hour, which combine the diatribe song with the character song). 

All that suggests a complicated relationship with the music press, which will have to remain unexplored in this blog post, since for some reason I failed to copy the contemporary reviews of The Wonderful and Frightening World when I was in the British Library consulting the NME and Melody Maker. In any case, this is not all there is to The Fall.

The Angels of L19 refers explicitly to U2 as one of its inspirations – or at least, it is their music that my protagonist Robert uses as a reference point when he is trying to express himself. U2's early 80s aesthetic is clean, pure – its urge to transcendence is an urge to rise above dirt and impurity, from the realm of matter to that of spirit. But that movement is not what my novel actually enacts. The world it depicts is more like that of The Fall, in which the transcendent manifests as the weird: it doesn’t float above the world, but erupts into it via an insistently material form that partakes of its grottiness. It is both wonderful and frightening. It is, in other words, incarnated. 

Mark Fisher explains in his book The Weird and the Eerie that weirdness in the early work of The Fall is connected to the idea of the grotesque, and that:

The songs [on 1980's Grotesque (After the Gramme)] are tales, but tales half-told. The words are fragmentary, as if they have come to us via an unreliable transmission that keeps cutting out. Viewpoints are garbled; ontological distinctions between author, text and character are confused and fractured.  

This is also highly germane to The Angels of L19, although I can't really explain how and why without giving away crucial elements of the plot.

There is actually a small, indirect U2 connection on The Wonderful and Frightening World, in that it features Gavin Friday of The Virgin Prunes as a guest on a couple of tracks (the Prunes were Dublin provocateurs who were friends of U2 in the early days, and included Edge’s brother among their members). 

Mark E. Smith’s lyrics do have something in common with Bono’s early work: they are sexless. Although I only really know half a dozen of The Fall’s many albums, I have yet to find anything resembling a love song anywhere in their body of work. Instead, there’s a focus on the texture of everyday life unrivalled by anyone from this period except The Smiths, and on (semi-)fictional characters, who often exist dysfunctionally on the fringes of society, like the ‘Neighbour downstairs with one eye’ in ‘Craigness’. The range of subjects covered is suggested by a few songs released in the years prior to The Wonderful and Frightening World: 'Industrial Estate', 'English Scheme' (i.e. council estate), 'The Container Drivers', 'I'm Into C.B.' (i.e. citizens band radio: 'It's about more of a character type, ... People who embrace things that they don't really understand'). Who else would consider any of these subjects worthy of commemoration in song? One of my favourite Fall lyrics is from ‘Slang King’ (the song title no doubt a reference to Smith himself), which describes how: 

Three little girls with only fifty pence 

Had to take, had to put 

The Curly Wurly back 

A Curly Wurly is a type of confectionery:

Beyond the simple pleasure of seeing this everyday name in a song lyric, these lines perfectly encapsulate being at the newsagents with your friends and having a collective pool of funds (a Curly Wurly cost much less than 50p in 1982), and trying to work out what combinations of items you can buy (‘take’ followed by ‘put ... back’ is thus descriptive, not just a verbal tic to fill the line). 

  

Again, while this preoccupation with the everyday might seem to contradict the idea of weirdness, the weird only obtains its effect by contrast with the quotidian: it works by juxtaposition. So although God is absent from this universe, the supernatural is not. For example, on The Wonderful and Frightening World, ‘Ol’ Nick’ crops up in ‘2 x 4’, and the ‘elves of Dunsimore’ in ‘Elves’. Smith was a fan of weird fiction like that of HP Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, and frequently alludes to their work. Similarly, ‘Lay of the Land’, which opens the album, starts by quoting the chant of the so-called ‘Planet People’ from 1979’s belated Quatermass sequel starring John Mills.

This chant, which puns ‘Lay’ with ‘ley line’ is frankly a little silly, and is presented in the song in such a way to amplify this quality, so it’s kind of a deliberate barrier to entry for the album as a whole, perhaps meant to deter casual listeners. Whatever the song is about – perhaps some kind of low-level societal collapse, like that depicted as the backdrop to Quatermass – it again juxtaposes the sordid and everyday – ‘There's no-one there but crooks and death, Kerb-crawlers of the worst order’ – with the weird – ‘Eldritch house, With green moss’.

 

‘Eldritch’, meaning weird or sinister, was a favourite word of Lovecraft, and the moss here, which suggests an abandoned and overgrown location, thereby also suggests how the weird and eerie are often associated with the atavistic – with something buried and forgotten lurching back into life. But the line that sums up the album for me, and which could serve as an epigraph for my novel, comes from ‘Elves’ (it is actually a quotation from Michael Moorcock, another writer of fantasy fiction): ‘The fantastic is in league against me’.