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’.

1984 Music: U2, The Unforgettable Fire

Release date: 1 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so. 

U2 were the focus of much critical ire and jealousy almost from the start of their career, but the Liverpool bands whose thunder they stole were perhaps especially bitter. Head-On, Julian Cope’s memoir of his time in the Teardrop Explodes contains this ironic, self-mocking anecdote: 

Meanwhile, our New York show was a stupid and mistaken ‘double bill’ with U2 at the Palladium in Lower Manhattan. 

In Liverpool, we thought that U2 was a bad joke, a record company’s idea of a northern group. They talked of passion as if it was their exclusive right. Ho-hum. …

Double Bill, huh? We went on first, did really well and left. I’d seen U2 in the soundcheck. Led Zep, man. Uncool. But they were dead sweet and a bit younger than us, so we gave them some leeway. They weren’t gonna do shit anyway. To quote Gary Dwyer, U2 were really called the Hope Brothers. ‘Cause they’ve got two hopes of making it: Bob Hope and No Hope.’ 

This dismissive attitude is perhaps the only thing on which Cope and erstwhile friend Ian McCulloch agree. The latter has several famous bon mots about U2, but I’ll quote one from a 2011 interview: ‘U2 have never been liked in Liverpool. We know a fake when we see one.’ 

‘Fake’ was of course the direst insult anyone could muster for a pop or rock group in the 80s, although it was flung in all directions – notably against synth bands by fans of ‘real’ music, that is, music made with ‘real’ instruments – like guitars. In the eyes of their detractors, however, it was U2’s obvious straining after sincerity that left them most open to the charge of fakeness. Such are the incoherent politics of authenticity. 

I can only say that for this Liverpool resident and several of my friends, the release of The Unforgettable Fire was the most exciting musical event of 1984 (sorry Ocean Rain). It also received a cautious welcome in the music press of the time. Here’s Paul Du Noyer (another Scouser) in the NME on 6 October: 

It seemed about time for U2 to make their worst album. But they haven’t. 

It seemed like they’d moved from an early artistic peak (‘Boy’) to a commercial peak (‘War’) and what with America sewn up they were set for something rather more comfortable, and rather disappointing. In the old U2 you saw a straining after greatness, and that was the magic. But by 1983 their shows suggested a band who’d now achieved their own notion of greatness, and looked content to re-cycle it for as long as anyone wanted it. 

It got a bit pompous. And I got a worrying suspicion that if you crept up to this magnificent edifice U2 had become, and if you gave it a little rat-a-tat-tat with your knuckle, you might hear something hollow. Just in time, U2 have swerved off to one side. In ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ I think they’ve made the record they needed to make. Swopping Steve Lillywhite for the production team of Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois, they’ve staved off the predictability which threatened to wreck their original promise. The results are generally as welcome as they’re surprising. 

The old four-square rock unit has been de-constructed. In its place there’s a panoramic soundscape, multiple textures, subtle shifts in emphasis. In parts, U2 are scarcely recognisable. String and synth arrangements abound, sometimes replacing the group line-up entirely. 

Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker wrote along similar lines, although with stronger reservations: 

“The Unforgettable Fire” is the other side of the coin from “War”. Where the latter opened with the shattering paramilitary drumbeat of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Fire” launches into the long shimmer of “A Sort Of Homecoming”, whose sort-of-mystical lyric adorns the romantic maroon-and-gold sleeve: “See the sky the burning rain/She will die and live again/tonight”, sings Bono. It’s all a bit Kerrygold-country. 

We’re a long way from Steve Lillywhite here. In place of the harsh rock attack with which both he and U2 became inextricably entwined, producers Eno and Daniel Lanois have forged U2 into an electronic chamber-unit. The strident belting clamour of yore is virtually absent – the lovely single “Pride” is the closest to it, and even that offers a few different tints – and instead there are interleaving layers of synths, guitars and percussion. Melodic instruments are frequently used as near-abstract tonalities, shedding any distinct identity in favour of producing a wash of sound whose components can’t always be exactly enumerated. … 

My friends and I liked U2 because they were ‘our’ band: their lyrics contained many coded or overt references to their Christian faith. So they are also the favourite band of Robert, the protagonist of my novel, The Angels of L19. But my novel ends in summer 1984, so it doesn’t include any reference to The Unforgettable Fire. As the above reviews suggest, it was rightly seen as a significant departure from U2’s previous sound. To me, it remains a more daring break than the more trumpeted change of direction on Achtung Baby, and – along with Zooropa – it is their most experimental album. All the more remarkable then that it was their greatest success to date, and confirmed their hold on the American imagination, though possibly that had as much to with the accompanying world tour as the album, where the songs were presented more conventionally.

Reviews of the album are likely to use several words from the following checklist: atmospheric, shimmering, wash, texture, smear, effect (you’ll already recognise several of them from the NME and Melody Maker above). Adam Sweeting’s observation that it was no longer always possible to distinguish or identify individual instruments in this landscape of sound seems crucial. Previous albums had certainly used a lot of guitar effects – this was part of The Edge’s signature sound – but the sounds were still very identifiably a guitar. And any keyboard or violin overdubs were clearly and distinctly positioned in the mix. Here, instead of the astringent folk-inflected violin of Steve Wickham, used on War, there was a full chamber orchestra, and, whereas previously the group’s live sound was just four clearly separated channels, here they needed pre-programmed sequencers to come anywhere near to replicating the album’s sound.

Beyond all the vague adjectives I’ve just listed, I might note that the drum sound here is completely different from the gated reverb on War (or Sparkle in the Rain): it’s more muted and diffuse. And the drum patterns are also different: less of the goose-stepping martial snare and more rolling tom-toms, possibly in several different layers. Less beat, more rhythm. 

Obviously Eno and Lanois were partly responsible for all of this, but they didn’t push the band anywhere they weren’t ready or willing to go. And in fact the tracks that most clearly suggest the influence of Eno’s ambient albums, ‘’Promenade’ and ‘4th of July’ feel insubstantial and pointless in this context. The penultimate song, ‘Elvis Presley and America’, with a backing track of the album’s first song played backwards, is also unimpressive: interminable and lyrically incomprehensible, while the closer ‘MLK’ is just a sketch. So the album’s claim to greatness rests on its peerless opening sequence of four songs, including the singles ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ and ‘The Unforgettable Fire’, and on ‘Bad’ and ‘Indian Summer Sky’ from its second side. 

Is this a Romantic album like The Crossing, or a Futurist one like Sparkle in the Rain? The cover suggests the former, with a ruined castle shot on black-and-white infrared film to render it more unworldly, and a colour scheme of imperial purple and gold. The opener ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is certainly set in a natural landscape: ‘See faces ploughed like fields … The wind will crack in wintertime’ (‘Kerrygold country’ as Adam Sweeting says), although it seems to be a landscape ravaged by nuclear catastrophe. ‘Indian Summer Sky’ contains the lines: ‘In the forest there's a clearing, I run there towards the light, Sky, it's a blue sky’. But several other songs have no discernable setting at all, and insofar as they are (allegedly) about (someone else’s) heroin addiction, they presumably take place in Dublin (‘These city lights, They shine as silver and gold’). 

Really the landscape here is an internal one, and the songs are about psychological states – in particular, they’re about struggle. The absence of anything resembling a conventional love song is notable – there are relatively few of these in early U2 in general, and none at all here. In ‘Pride’ and ‘MLK’, the struggle is against external agents of oppression, but, perhaps significantly, this is someone else’s struggle (Martin Luther King’s); for the most part, the battle here is against oneself, or ‘the world’ in more general terms. In other words, it is as much existential as spiritual – the lyrics are also notable for the absence of the explicit references to God or the Bible one can find scattered through their previous albums. 

‘Wire’, the third track, tends to be treated rather dismissively, but it was then and remains one of my favourites:

Innocent, and in a sense I am 

Guilty of the crime that's now in hand 

Such a nice day, throw your life away 

Such a nice day, let it go … 

Is this the time 

The time to win or lose 

Is this the time 

The time to choose 

It doesn’t get much more existential than that.

1984 Music: Simple Minds, Sparkle in the Rain

Release date: 6 February 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Not in 1984, but my next-door neighbour Richie had several of the group’s earlier albums, and someone else made me a tape of Sparkle in the Rain a few years later. 

It was compulsory in 1984 to compare Simple Minds with U2, whether to dismiss both groups, or to elevate one of the two above the other. For example, Don Watson’s review of Sparkle in the Rain in the NME on 11 February has a splendid pun for its headline: ‘Give the Kerr a Bono’: 

Perhaps it was inevitable that the flirtation with perfection that was [Simple Minds’s previous album] ‘New Gold Dream’ would leave them struggling to re-establish their identities. What is disturbing, though, is that in this process they appear to have fallen under the unfortunate delusion that they actually are U2. … in recent releases [singer Jim] Kerr and Bono seem to have merged into some form of common entity. 

First we saw Bono crouched in Kerr-like position on the cover of ‘Blood Red Sky’ (a Simple Minds title, if ever I heard one); now we see Simple Minds burying their subtle power of inspiration in the percussive huff and guitar grumble of U2 producer Steve Lillywhite. On occasions the result is a heaving and uncharacteristically self-celebratory affair in which, instead of carrying the listener upward, Simple Minds dump power chords on them from a great height. In its most affecting moments, though, it’s the grace of Simple Minds sound which saves the band from the ravages of the inelegant production. 

Colin Irwin’s Melody Maker review was much more positive. Tellingly, the U2 comparisons here are, while still present, an afterthought, delivered in passing: 

Electrifyingly determined, exhilaratingly [enormous], and so totally sure of themselves that it wounds, Simple Minds have come up with a stunner. They don’t mess around with [platitudes], they don’t waste their time on [aspirations], they just steam right in, sending misconceptions and reservations fleeing for mercy as they obliterate all opposition. You can’t stay non-committal for long listening to these boys. … 

The ebullient “Up On The Catwalk”, all jangling guitars and crashing chords, and the superb singles “Waterfront” and “Speed Your Love To Me” represent the more traditional rock end of the band, but swirling keyboards also play an influential role in the mountainous drama “Book Of Brilliant Things” … [which] is rich, evocative and mighty – shades of U2 with its almost religious portent, while Kerr’s relatively restrained vocals still wield that overwhelming sense of purpose and destiny that at the end of the day always rises to the surface. 

As these reviews suggest, there are several possible lines of comparison between Simple Minds and U2, beginning with the producer of Sparkle in the Rain, Steve Lillywhite, who also helmed U2’s first three albums. In fact, the sound most closely associated with his work from this period is not, as this track record might suggest, a guitar effect, but rather a technique for recording the drums, originally invented for Peter Gabriel’s third solo album in 1980, which Lillywhite also produced (the drummer was Phil Collins – credit for the recording innovation is disputed). One of my protagonists in The Angels of L19 describes this technique while listening to the Gabriel album: 

[It] was recorded with two microphones: one close to the drum kit, the other farther away to capture the echo in the room. The sound from the drum lasts about half a second; the echo has a longer half-life as it bounces around the walls. A machine called a noise gate shuts off the room mic when the volume on the close mic drops below a certain threshold. So the sound’s multiplied, but there’s no natural decay: the echo’s chopped off. 

Gated reverb. 

This effect, in a more exaggerated form, is all over 80s stadium rock. It accounts for the ‘big’ sound of the drums on these records, a sound which is also, simultaneously, somehow flattened and compressed. It’s very noticeable on Springsteen’s Born in the USA from 1984, for example, and throughout Sparkle in the Rain:

It’s most apparent on the snare- and kick-drum sounds I think, the ones you hit with the hardest impact (and indeed I suspect it doesn’t work as well on tom-toms).  

Sparkle in the Rain certainly represents a move towards a bigger sound for Simple Minds – perhaps also towards more conventional song structures (though they’d already shifted in that direction on their previous album, which featured their first two hit singles). For those more enamoured of the group’s earlier, experimental phase, Sparkle in the Rain therefore marks the point when they succumbed to bloated grandiosity, a direction rewarded when they hit it big after ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ was included on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack the following year. I follow the alternate line of thought, in which this is their last great album: its widescreen sound opening onto a world of excitement and possibility. 

If Lillywhite was by this point associated with guitar bands, Simple Minds don’t actually fit that description: guitarist Charlie Burchill is part of an ensemble in which keyboards are arguably more important, and he usually plays what amounts to rhythm guitar. Mel Gaynor on drums and Derek Forbes on bass were also very talented musicians and their instruments are just as much a part of the Simple Minds sound. 

Another point of comparison with U2 might be religious imagery and spiritual yearning. The Simple Minds album before this one, New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84) had a cross and a sacred heart on the cover, and single 'Promised You a Miracle' declared that ‘Belief is a beauty thing’, but, unlike Bono, singer Jim Kerr was uncomfortable in being identified as a Christian on this basis, and the lyrics for Sparkle in the Rain retreat even from these vague allusions to an entirely generalised invocation of awe, which may not even be spiritual. ‘Up on the Catwalk’ reels off an entertaining montage of inspirational figures, which includes Martin Luther, but also Nastassja Kinski and Robert De Niro. The imagined apotheosis here is entirely material: fame or celebrity. Or more specifically, perhaps the rush and ersatz communion of performing onstage, which Kerr certainly seemed to relish. By implicitly comparing himself to a fashion model, Kerr presents performance as something one does with the body as well as the voice – and his stage presence and mannerisms bore this out. 

Simple Minds and U2. If we cast our net wider, we might also make comparisons to Big Country, whose first two albums were also produced by Lillywhite. And If we add some non-Lillywhite bands – The Waterboys, The Alarm, maybe the neo-psychedelic Liverpool groups – we have a roster of what is sometimes called ‘the big music’ after the song by The Waterboys of the same name on their 1984 album, A Pagan Place. All these groups came from Britain’s Celtic margins, or from Ireland. And they weren’t just ‘big’: they were reaching for the transcendent and the sublime. This might suggest the Romantic tradition: an engagement with nature, with weather and landscape. Certainly this is there in Big Country’s first album, The Crossing (‘Fields of Fire’, ‘Harvest Home’, ‘The Storm’). But their second album was called Steeltown, and this also points to something distinctive about Sparkle in the Rain. 

The titular phrase comes from the song ‘Book of Brilliant Things’ – it’s tempting to read this as an allusion to the Bible, but the lyrics suggest a more literal interpretation: illuminated by light. What kind of light? 

I thank you for the shadows 

It takes two or three to make company 

I thank you for the lightning that shoots up and sparkles in the rain 

Some say this could be the great divide 

Some day some of them say that our hearts will beat 

Like the wheels of the fast train, all around the world 

Insofar as this is a landscape at all, it’s not a natural one: it’s a cityscape, animated by global transport networks of trains and aeroplanes. There’s certainly a lot of rain in this world (from the album title on down), but things ‘sparkle in the rain’ at night when the city is lit by streetlights – which also create the deep shadows summoned in the first lines of this lyrical excerpt – so perhaps the ‘lightning’ here is actually a shorting bulb or cable. Similarly, the ‘Waterfront’ in the album’s lead single is not the same thing as a riverbank: rather,  it’s a place where ships dock and unload. 

All this is not Romantic then, so much as Modernist, even Futurist. Not an attachment to place, but an attachment to movement as an end in itself (‘Speed Your Love To Me’), and to experience mediated by technology (‘Thank you for the pictures of living in the beautiful black and the white’) – compare ‘I Travel’ and ‘Thirty Frames a Second’ on the group’s earlier album, Empires and Dance. 

The lyrics are often rather simplistic, but they are treated as raw material for incantation: repeated over and over to acquire a faster and faster momentum, both forwards and upwards – particularly the ‘Just my imagination, You go to my head’ couplet on ‘Speed Your Love to Me’. The ‘wheels of the fast train’ on ‘Book of Brilliant Things’ are also summoned mimetically in the music after Kerr repeats the phrase later in the song (from 3:30), and for me this is the key passage on the album: