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’.

Literary Fiction or Horror?

What kind of story is The Angels of L19? It’s published by a press whose mission statement emphasises literary fiction. I also submitted the manuscript to several publishers of speculative fiction, but when I met with an editor at one of these presses, she insisted she wasn’t the right home for my book: that it needed to be published by a ‘literary’ press. So there did seem to be a consensus on that point.

If we’re talking about the shape of my book’s plot, its structure, then it’s a redeemed tragedy (I have a guest essay upcoming on Lithub that will talk about this in relation to Tolkien’s idea of the eucatastrophe). But it can also be described as a horror novel.

There are four specific strands within the horror tradition that seem important here:

1) The Gothic. All horror novels are the children or grandchildren of Gothic novels, but in this case the genealogy is particularly clear. Haunted houses, doubles, labyrinths, supernatural beings, demonic pacts, the decaying corpse as the ultimate challenge to human reason: my book features all these Gothic motifs. But I’d particularly like to emphasise the idea of the Gothic as being about the return of the repressed, and the uncovering of secrets, including but not limited to the awful secret of what happens to our bodies after we die.

2) The Uncanny. There’s a prolific literature on this concept, often drawing on Freud’s seminal essay on the subject, but I’ll go with Mark Fisher’s definition: uncanny fiction is 'set in “our” world – only that world is no longer “ours” any more, it no longer coincides with itself, it has been estranged.’ The clearest example of this in my book is the semi-detached house: that is, a house accompanied by its own mirrored double, its own conjoined twin, to which it is sutured by a common wall that both joins and separates its two halves. A couple of key episodes in my story try to draw out the strangeness of this, with my doubled, mirrored house standing for the complex relations between my two protagonists, Robert and Tracey, who live on either side of its common wall.

3) The Weird. Again I’ll go with Fisher’s definition: ‘The Weird … depends upon the difference between two (or more) worlds - with “world” here having an ontological sense. It is not a question of an empirical difference – the aliens are not from another planet, they are invaders from another reality system.’ I talk about the applicability of the weird to my representation of angels and demons in an essay at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

4) Folk Horror. This is a more recent variation, which is generally about the hidden presence of atavistic forces within our degraded modern landscapes, which then reassert themselves and erupt into our disenchanted present. But while most versions of this focus on pre-Christian paganism, and often on forces associated with nature, I’m more interested in Christianity and medieval Catholicism as atavistic forces underlying modern secular life. This links back to the Gothic: in early Gothic novels, one of the repressed secrets that reasserts itself against Protestant rationality is precisely the medieval, which is associated with the irrational and superstition – the ruined abbeys and monasteries that were the preferred sites of Gothic encounters were ruined because of Henry VIII and the English Reformation. The Gothic is therefore haunted by the ghost of Catholicism – and so is my book.

None of these interests are antithetical to literary fiction, but their presence definitely suggests I’ve written a horror novel. 

To sum up:

Do you like literary fiction? Then you might like my novel.

Do you like speculative fiction, especially horror? Then you might also like my novel.

Official Publication Day and Essay on 'The Christian Weird'

Today is the official publication day for The Angels of L19, and I have an essay up at Ginger Nuts of Horror, which explores how the story uses the conventions of weird fiction to dramatise the Christian supernatural (angels and demons, etc.). It's called 'The Christian Weird'. Here's a brief excerpt:

In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher describes the weird as an eruption or egress from elsewhere – from outside – into our world of something whose very existence disrupts our notion of reality. For Lovecraft, one of the founding fathers of weird fiction, this transcendental, alien outside was never supernatural, even if ignorant people sometimes mistook it for such. But even if we reject Lovecraft’s materialism, there is a larger problem in representing the Christian supernatural in these terms: because the invisible presence of supernatural beings is an accepted cornerstone of Christian belief. Even if few believers claim to have actually encountered an angel or demon, their existence is taken for granted. They are not elsewhere: they are all around us. We just can’t see them. As such, they are familiar, and their depiction in art and fiction is conventional – indeed, it often verges on kitsch (feathery wings, bulging muscles, luminescent pale skin and blonde hair, etc.). But this need not be so.

Five Wounds: Interview on FBi Radio

Below is my interview on Canvas, the arts programme on FBi Radio, 94.5FM in Sydney, which was originally broadcast earlier this month. I sound reasonably coherent for a Sunday morning, although I am obviously trying to set a record for how many times I can use the words 'weird' and 'garbled' over the course of twenty minutes. Thanks to host Anna Burns.