memorex for the kraken: the fall’s pulp modernism

Part I1

“Maybe industrial ghosts are making Spectres redundant”
— The Fall, Dragnet sleevenotes2

“M.R. James be born be born

Yog Sothoth rape me lord

Sludge Hai Choi

Van Greenway

Ar Corman”
— The Fall, “Spectre Vs. Rector”3

“Scrawny, gnarled, gaunt: Smith doesn’t waltz with ghosts. He materialises them.”
— Mark Sinker, “Look Back In Anguish”4

Who can put their finger on the Weird?

It’s taken me more than twenty years to attempt this deciphering. Back then, the Fall did something to me. But what, and how?

Let’s call it an Event, and at the same time note that all Events have a dimension of the uncanny. If something is too alien, it will fail to register; if it is too easily recognised, too easily cognizable, it will never be more than a reiteration of the already known. When the Fall pummelled their way into my nervous system, circa 1983, it was as if a world that was familiar — and which I had thought too familiar, too quotidian to feature in rock — had returned, expressionistically transfigured, permanently altered.

I didn’t know then, that, already, in 1983, the Fall’s greatest work was behind them. No doubt the later albums have their merits but it is on Grotesque (After the Gramme) (1980), Slates (1981) and Hex Enduction Hour (1982) where the group reached a pitch of sustained abstract invention that they — and few others — are unlikely to surpass. In its ambition, its linguistic inventiveness and its formal innovation, this triptych bears comparison with the great works of twentieth-century high literary modernism (Joyce, Eliot, Lewis). The Fall extend and performatively critique that mode of high modernism by reversing the impersonation of working-class accent, dialect and diction that, for example, Eliot performed in “The Waste Land”. Smith’s strategy involved aggressively retaining accent while using — in the domain of a supposedly popular entertainment form — highly arcane literary practices. In doing so, he laid waste the notion that intelligence, literary sophistication and artistic experimentalism are the exclusive preserve of the privileged and the formally educated. But Smith knew that aping master-class morés presented all sorts of other dangers; it should never be a matter of proving (to the masters) that the white crap could be civilised. Perhaps all his writing was, from the start, an attempt to find a way out of that paradox which all working-class aspirants face — the impossibility of working-class achievement. Stay where you are, speak the language of your fathers, and you remain nothing; move up, learn to speak in the master language, and you have become a something, but only by erasing your origins — isn’t the achievement precisely that erasure? (“You can string a sentence together, how can you possibly be working class, my dear?”)

The temptation for Smith was always to fit into the easy role of working-class spokesman, speaking from an assigned place in a given social world. Smith played with that role (“the white crap that talks back”, “Prole Art Threat”, “Hip Priest”) whilst refusing to actually play it. He knew that representation was a trap; social realism was the enemy because in supposedly “merely” representing the social order, it actually constituted it. Against the social realism of the official left, Smith developed a late-twentieth-century urban English version of the “grotesque realism” Bakhtin famously described in Rabelais and his World. Crucial to this grotesque realism is a contestation of the classificatory system which deems cultures (and populations) to be either refined or vulgar. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argued, “the grotesque tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms of, designating what is high and low”.5

Instead of the high modernist appropriation of working-class speech and culture, Smith’s pulp modernism reacquaints modernism with its disavowed pulp doppelgänger.

Lovecraft is the crucial figure here, since his texts — which first appeared in pulp magazines like Weird Tales — emerged from an occulted trade between pulp horror and modernism. Follow the line back from Lovecraft’s short stories and you pass through Dunsany and M.R. James before coming to Poe. But Poe also played a decisive role in the development of modernism — via his influence on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry and their admirer T.S. Eliot. “The Waste Land”’s debt to Dracula, for instance, is well-known.6 The fragmentary, citational structure of a story like Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu”, meanwhile, recalls “The Waste Land”. More than that: as Benjamin Noys argued in his paper “Lovecraft the Sinthome” (given at the recent “Gothic Remains” conference at Sussex), the abominations from which Lovecraft’s strait-laced scholars recoil bear comparisons with cubist and futurist art: Lovecraft, that is to say, turns modernism into an object of horror.

Yet Lovecraft’s texts are exemplary of Weird, rather than straightforwardly Gothic, fiction. Weird fiction has its own consistency, which can be most clearly delineated by comparing it to two adjacent modes, fantasy and the uncanny. Fantasy (and Tolkien is the exemplar here) presupposes a completed world, a world that, although superficially different to “ours” (there may be different species, or supernatural forces) is politically all-too familiar (there is usually some nostalgia for the ordered organisation of feudal hierarchy). The uncanny, meanwhile, 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 Weird, however, 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. Hence the defining image is that of the threshold, the door from this world into another, and the key figure is the “Lurker at the Threshold” — what, in Lovecraft’s mythos is called Yog Sothoth. The political philosophical implications are clear: there is no world. What we call the world is a local consensus hallucination, a shared dream.

Is There Anybody There?

“Part One: spectre versus rector

The rector lived in Hampshire

The Spectre was from Chorazina)…”

— The Fall, “Spectre Vs. Rector”

“Spectre Vs. Rector”, from 1979’s Dragnet, is the first moment — still chilling to hear — when the Fall both lay out and implement their pulp modernist methodology. “Spectre Vs. Rector” is not only a ghost story, it is a commentary on the ghost story. The chorus, if it can be called that, is a litany of pulp forebears — “M.R. James be born be born/Yog Sothoth rape me lord…” — in which language devolves into asignifying chant, verbal ectoplasm: “Sludge Hai Choi/Van Greenway/Ar Corman”.

Not coincidentally, “Spectre Vs. Rector” was the moment when the Fall really began to sound like themselves. Before that, the Fall’s sound is a grey-complexioned, conspicuously consumptive garage plink-plonk punk, amphetamine-lean and on-edge, marijuana-fatalistic, simultaneously arrogant and unsure of itself, proffering its cheap and nastiness as a challenge. All of the elements of Smith’s later (peripheral) vision are there on Live at the Witch Trials and on the other tracks on Dragnet — watery-eyed figures lurking in the corner of the retina, industrial estates glimpsed through psychotropic stupor — but they have not yet been condensed down, pulped into the witches’ brew that will constitute Smith’s plane of consistency.

On “Spectre Vs. Rector”, any vestigial rock presence subsides into hauntology. The original track is nothing of the sort — it is already a palimpsest, spooked by itself; at least two versions are playing, out of sync. The track — and it is very definitely a track, not a “song” — foregrounds both its own textuality and its texturality. It begins with cassette hum and when the sleeve notes tell us that it was partly “recorded in a damp warehouse in MC/R” we are far from surprised. Steve Hanley’s bass rumbles and thumps like some implacable earth-moving machine invented by a deranged underground race, not so much rising from subterranea as dragging the sound down into a troglodytic goblin kingdom in which ordinary sonic values are inverted. From now on, and for all the records that really matter, Hanley’s bass will be the lead instrument, the monstrous foundations on which the Fall’s upside-down sound will be built. Like Joy Division, fellow modernists from Manchester, the Fall scramble the grammar of white rock by privileging rhythm over melody.

Fellow modernists they might have been, but the Fall and Joy Division’s take on modernism could not have been more different. Hannett and Saville gave Joy Division a minimalist, metallic austerity; the Fall’s sound and cover art, by contrast, was gnarled, collage cut-up, deliberately incomplete. Both bands were dominated by forbiddingly intense vocalist-visionaries. But where Curtis was the depressive-neurotic, the end of the European Romantic line, Smith was the psychotic, the self-styled destroyer of Romanticism.

“Unsuitable for Romantics”, Smith will graffiti onto the cover of Hex Enduction Hour, and “Spectre Vs. Rector” is the template for the anti-Romantic methodology he will deploy on the Fall’s most important releases. After “Spectre Vs. Rector”, there is no Mark E Smith the romantic subject. The novelty of Smith’s approach is to impose the novel or tale form (“Part One: spectre versus rector…”) into the Romantic-lyrical tradition of the r and r song, so that the author-function supplants that of the lyrical balladeer. (There are parallels between what Smith does to rock and the cut-up surgery Eliot performed on the etherised patient of Romantic expressive subjectivity in his early poems.) Smith chant-narrates, not sings, “Spectre Vs. Rector”.

The story is simple enough, and, on the surface, is deliberately conventional: a post-Exorcist revisiting of the classic English ghost story. (At another level, the narrative is generated by a Roussel-like playing with similar words: Rector/Spectre/Inspector/Excorcist/Exhausted.) A rector is possessed by a malign spirit (“the spectre was from Chorazina” — described on the sleevenotes as “a negative Jerusalem”); a police inspector tries to intervene but is driven insane. (This a real Lovecraftian touch, since the dread fate that haunts Lovecraft’s characters is not of being consumed by the polytendrilled abominations but by the schizophrenia that their appearance often engenders.) Both Rector and Inspector have to be saved by a third figure, a shaman-hero, an Outsider who “goes back to the mountains” when the exorcism is complete.

The Rector stands for rectitude and rectilinearity as well as for traditional religious authority. (The ontological shock that Lovecraft’s monstrosities produce is typically described, any Lovecraft reader will recall, in terms of a twisting of rectilinear geometries.) The Inspector, meanwhile, as Ian Penman conjectured in his 1980 interview with the Fall “stands for an investigative, empirical world view”.7 The hero (“his soul possessed a thousand times”) has more affinity with the Spectre, whom he absorbs and becomes (“the spectre possesses the hero/ but the possession is ineffectual”) than with the agents of rectitude and or empirical investigation. It seems that the hero is driven more by his addiction to being possessed, which is to say dispossessed of his own identity (“that was his kick from life”) than from any altruistic motive. He has no love for the social order he rescues (“I have saved a thousand souls/they cannot even save their own”) but in which he does not occupy a place. “Those flowers take them away”, he said:

They’re only funeral decorations

And this is a drudge nation

A nation of no imagination

A stupid dead man is their ideal

They shirk me and think me unclean…

UNCLEAN…

In Madness and Civilisation, Foucault argues that the insane occupy the structural position vacated by the leper, while in The Ecstasy of Communication, Baudrillard describes “the state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private projection to protect him anymore”.8 Baudrillard is of course describing the schizophrenia of media systems which overwhelm all interiority. Television brings us voices from far away (and there’s always something on the other side…). For Baudrillard, there is an increasing flatness between media and the schizophrenic delirium in which they feature; psychotics often describe themselves as receivers for transmitted signal. And what is the hero of “Spectre Vs. Rector” if not another version of the “ESP medium of discord” that Smith sings of on “Psychic Dancehall”?

Smith’s own methodology as writer-ranter-chanter echoes that of the hero-malcontent. He becomes (nothing but) the mystic pad on which stray psychic signals impress themselves, the throat through which a warring multiplicity of mutually antatognistic voices speak. This is not only a matter of the familiar idea that Smith “contains multitudes”; the schizophonic riot of voices is itself subject to all kinds of mediation. The voices we hear will often be reported speech, recorded in the compressed “telegraphic” headline style Smith borrowed from the Lewis of Blast.

Listening to the Fall now, I’m often reminded of another admirer of Lewis, Marshall McLuhan. The McLuhan of The Mechanical Bride (subtitle: The Folklore of Industrial Man), understood very well the complicity between mass media, modernism and pulp. McLuhan argued that modernist collage was a response to the perfectly schizophrenic layout of the newspaper frontpage. (And Poe, who in addition to his role as a forebear of Weird fiction, was also the inventor of the detective genre, plays a crucial role in The Mechanical Bride.)

Part II1

M.R. James, Be Born Be Born

“Ten times my age, one tenth my height…”
— The Fall, “City Hobgoblins”2

“So he plunges into the Twilight World, and a political discourse framed in terms of witchcraft and demons. It’s not hard to understand why, once you start considering it. The war that the Church and triumphant Reason waged on a scatter of wise-women and midwives, lingering practitioners of folk-knowledge, has provided a powerful popular image for a huge struggle for political and intellectual dominance, as first Catholics and later Puritans invoked a rise in devil-worship to rubbish their opponents. The ghost-writer and antiquarian M.R. James (one of the writers Smith appears to have lived on during his peculiar drugged adolescence) transformed the folk-memory into a bitter class-struggle between established science and law, and the erratic, vengeful, relentless undead world of wronged spirits, cheated of property or voice, or the simple dignity of being believed in.”
— Mark Sinker, “Watching the City Hobgoblins”3

Whether Smith first came to James via TV or some other route, James’ stories exerted a powerful and persistent influence on his writing. Lovecraft, an enthusiastic admirer of James’ stories to the degree that he borrowed their structure (scholar/researcher steeped in empiricist common sense is gradually driven insane by contact with an abyssal alterity) understood very well what was novel in James’ tales. “In inventing a new type of ghost”, Lovecraft wrote of James,

he departed considerably from the conventional Gothic traditions; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish and hairy — a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man — and usually touched before it is seen.4

Some would question whether these dwarven figures (“ten times my age, one tenth my height”) could be described as “ghosts” at all; often, it seemed that James was writing demon rather than ghost stories.

If the libidinal motor of Lovecraft’s horror was race, in the case of James it was class. For James scholars, contact with the anomalous was usually mediated by the “lower classes”, which he portrayed as lacking in intellect but in possession of a deeper knowledge of weird lore. As Lovecraft and James scholar S.T. Joshi observes:

The fractured and dialectical English in which [James’ array of lower-class characters] speak or write is, in one sense, a reflection of James’ well-known penchant for mimicry; but it cannot be denied that there is a certain element of malice in his relentless exhibition of their intellectual failings. […] And yet, they occupy pivotal places in the narrative: by representing a kind of middle ground between the scholarly protagonists and the aggressively savage ghosts, they frequently sense the presence of the supernatural more quickly and more instinctively than their excessively learned betters can bring themselves to do.5

James wrote his stories as Christmas entertainments for Oxford undergraduates, and Smith was doubtless provoked and fascinated by James’ stories in part because there was no obvious point of identification for him in them. “When I was at the witch trials of the twentieth century they said: You are white crap.” (Live at the witch trials: is it that the witch trials have never ended or that we are in some repeating structure which is always excluding and denigrating the Weird?)

A working-class autodidact like Smith could scarcely be conceived of in James; sclerotically-stratified universe; such a being was a monstrosity which would be punished for the sheer hubris of existing. (Witness the amateur archaeologist Paxton in “A Warning to the Curious”. Paxton was an unemployed clerk and therefore by no means working class but his grisly fate was as much a consequence of “getting above himself” as it was of his disturbing sacred Anglo-Saxon artefacts.) Smith could identify neither with James’ expensively-educated protagonists nor with his uneducated, superstitious lower orders. As Mark Sinker puts it: “James, an enlightened Victorian intellectual, dreamed of the spectre of the once crushed and newly rising working classes as a brutish and irrational Monster from the Id: Smith is working class, and is torn between adopting this image of himself and fighting violently against it. It’s left him with a loathing of liberal humanist condescension.”6

But if Smith could find no place in James’ world, he would take a cue from one of Blake’s mottoes (adapted in Dragnet’s “Before the Moon Falls”) and create his own fictional system rather than be enslaved by another man’s. (Incidentally, isn’t Blake a candidate for being the original pulp modernist?) In James’ stories, there is, properly speaking, no working class at all. The lower classes that feature in his tales are by and large the remnants of the rural peasantry, and the supernatural is associated with the countryside. James’ scholars typically travel from Oxford or London to the witch-haunted flatlands of Suffolk, and it is only here that they encounter demonic entities. Smith’s fictions would locate spectres in the urban here and now; he would establish that their antagonisms were not archaisms.

Sinker: “No one has so perfectly studied the sense of threat in the English horror story: the twinge of apprehension at the idea that the wronged dead might return to claim their property, their identity, their own voice in their own land.”7

The Grotesque Peasants Stalk the Land

“Detective versus rector possessed by spectre

Spectre blows him against the wall

Says direct, ‘This is your fall

I’ve waited since Caesar for this

Damn fatty, my hate is crisp!

I’ll rip your fat body to pieces!’”

— The Fall, “Spectre Vs. Rector”

“The word grotesque derives from a type of Roman ornamental design first discovered in the fifteenth cenury, during the excavation of Titus’s baths. Named after the ‘grottoes’ in which they were found, the new forms consisted of human and animal shapes intermingled with foliage, flowers, and fruits in fantastic designs which bore no relationship to the logical categories of classical art. For a contemporary account of these forms we can turn to the Latin writer Vitruvius. Vitruvius was an official charged with the rebuilding of Rome under Augustus, to whom his treatise On Architecture is addressed. Not surprisingly, it bears down hard on the ‘improper taste’ for the grotesque. ‘Such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been,’ says the author in his description of the mixed human, animal, and vegetable forms:

For how can a reed actually sustain a roof, or a candelabrum the ornament of a gable? or a soft and slender stalk, a seated statue? or how can flowers and half-statues rise alternately from roots and stalks? Yet when people view these falsehoods, they approve rather than condemn, failing to consider whether any of them can really occur or not.”
— Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce8

By the time of Grotesque (After the Gramme), the Fall’s pulp modernism has become an entire political-aesthetic program. At one level, Grotesque can be positioned as the barbed Prole Art retort to the lyric antique Englishness of public school prog. Compare, for instance, the cover of “City Hobgoblins” (one of the singles that came out around the time of Grotesque) with something like Genesis’ Nursery Cryme. Nursery Cryme presents a gently corrupted English surrealist idyll. On the “City Hobgoblins” cover, an urban scene has been invaded by “emigres from old green glades”: a leering, malevolent cobold looms over a dilapidated tenement. But rather than being smoothly integrated into the photographed scene, the crudely rendered hobgoblin has been etched, Nigel Cooke-style, onto the background. This is a war of worlds, an ontological struggle, a struggle over the means of representation.

Grotesque’s “English Scheme” was a thumbnail sketch of the territory over which the war was being fought. Smith would observe later that it was “English Scheme” which “prompted me to look further into England’s ‘class’ system. INDEED, one of the few advantages of being in an impoverished sub-art group in England is that you get to see (If eyes are peeled) all the different strata of society — for free.”9 The enemies are the old right, the custodians of a National Heritage image of England (“poky quaint streets in Cambridge”) but also, crucially, the middle-class left, the Chabertistas of the time, who “condescend to black men” and “talk of Chile while driving through Haslingdon”. In fact, enemies were everywhere. Lumpen-punk was in many ways more of a problem than prog, since its reductive literalism and perfunctory politics (“circles with A in the middle”) colluded with social realism in censuring/censoring the visionary and the ambitious.

Although Grotesque is an enigma, its title gives clues. Otherwise incomprehensible references to “huckleberry masks”, “a man with butterflies on his face” and Totale’s “ostrich headdress” and “light blue plant-heads” begin to make sense when you recognise that, in Parrinder’s description, the grotesque originally referred to “human and animal shapes intermingled with foliage, flowers, and fruits in fantastic designs which bore no relationship to the logical categories of classical art”.

Grotesque, then, would be another moment in the endlessly repeating struggle between a pulp Underground (the scandalous grottoes) and the Official culture, what Philip K. Dick called “the Black Iron Prison”. Dick’s intuition was that “the Empire had never ended”, and that history was shaped by an ongoing occult(ed) conflict between Rome and Gnostic forces. “Spectre Vs. Rector” (“I’ve waited since Caesar for this”) had rendered this clash in a harsh Murnau black and white; on Grotesque the struggle is painted in colours as florid as those used on the album’s garish sleeve (the work of Smith’s sister).

It is no accident that the words “grotesque” and “weird” are often associated with one another, since both connote something which is out of place, which either should not exist at all, or which should not exist here. The response to the apparition of a grotesque object will involve laughter as much as revulsion. “What will be generally agreed upon”, Philip Thompson wrote in his 1972 study The Grotesque “is that ‘grotesque’ will cover, perhaps among other things, the co-presence of the laughable and something that is incompatible with the laughable.”10 The role of laughter in the Fall has confused and misled interpreters. What has been suppressed is precisely the co-presence of the laughable with what is not compatible with the laughable. That co-presence is difficult to think, particularly in Britain, where humour has often functioned to ratify commonsense, to punish overreaching ambition with the dampening weight of bathos.

With the Fall, however, it is as if satire is returned to its origins in the grotesque. The Fall’s laughter does not issue from the commonsensical mainstream but from a psychotic Outside. This is satire in the oneiric mode of Gillray, in which invective and lampoonery becomes delirial, a (psycho) tropological spewing of associations and animosities, the true object of which is not any failing of probity but the delusion that human dignity is possible. It is not surprising to find Smith alluding to Jarry’s Ubu Roi in a barely audible line in “City Hobgoblins” (“Ubu le Roi is a home hobgoblin”). For Jarry, as for Smith, the incoherence and incompleteness of the obscene and the absurd were to be opposed to the false symmetries of good sense.

But in their mockery of poise, moderation and self-containment, in their logorrheic disgorging of slanguage, in their glorying in mess and incoherence, the Fall sometimes resemble a white English analogue of Funkadelic. For both Smith and Clinton, there is no escaping the grotesque, if only because those who primp and puff themselves up only become more grotesque. We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in nature and is capable of re-combining nature’s products into hideous new forms.

On Grotesque, Smith has mastered his anti-lyrical methodology. The songs 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, fractured. It is impossible to definitively sort out the narrator’s words from direct speech. The tracks are palimpsests, badly recorded in a deliberate refusal of the “coffee table” aesthetic Smith derides on the cryptic sleeve notes. The process of recording is not airbrushed out but foregrounded, surface hiss and illegible cassette noise brandished like improvised stitching on some Hammer Frankenstein monster.

“Impression of J Temperance” was typical: a story in the Lovecraft style in which a dog breeder’s “hideous replica” (“brown sockets… Purple eyes… fed with rubbish from disposal barges”) haunts Manchester. This is a Weird tale, but one subjected to modernist techniques of compression and collage. The result is so elliptical that it is as if the text — part-obliterated by silt, mildew and algae — has been fished out of the Manchester ship canal (which Hanley’s bass sounds like it is dredging).

“‘Yes’, said Cameron, ‘And the thing was in the impression of J Temperance.’”

The sound on Grotesque is a seemingly impossible combination of the shambolic and the disciplined, the cerebral-literary and the idiotic-physical. The obvious parallel was the Birthday Party. In both groups, an implacable bass holds together a leering, lurching schizophonic body whose disparate elements strain like distended, diseased viscera against a pustule and pock-ridden skin (“a spotty exterior hides a spotty interior”). Both the Fall and the Birthday Party reached for pulp horror imagery rescued from the white trash can as an analogue and inspiration for their perverse “return” to rock and roll (cf. also the Cramps). The nihilation that fired them was a rejection of a pop that they saw as self-consciously sophisticated, conspicuously cosmopolitan, a pop which implied that the arty could only be attained at the expense of brute physical impact. Their response was to hyperbolically emphasise crude atavism, to embrace the unschooled and the primitivist.

The Birthday Party’s fascination was with the American “junkonscious”, the mountain of semiotic/narcotic trash lurking in the hindbrain of a world population hooked on America’s myths of abjection and omnipotence. The Birthday Party revelled in this fantasmatic Americana, using it as a way of cancelling an Australian identity that they in any case experienced as empty, devoid of any distinguishing features.

Smith’s r and r citations functioned differently, precisely as a means of reinforcing his Englishness and his own ambivalent attitude towards it. The rockabilly references are almost like “What If?” exercises. What if rock and roll had emerged from the industrial heartlands of England rather than the Mississippi Delta? The rockabilly on “Container Drivers” or “Fiery Jack” is slowed by meat pies and gravy, its dreams of escape fatally poisoned by pints of bitter and cups of greasy spoon tea. It is rock and roll as Working Men’s Club cabaret, performed by a failed Gene Vincent imitator in Prestwich. The “What if?” speculations fail. Rock and roll needed the endless open highways; it could never have begun in Britain’s snarled up ring roads and claustrophobic conurbations.

For the Smith of Grotesque, homesickness is a pathology. (In the interview on the 1983 Perverted by Language video, Smith claims that being away from England literally made him sick.) There is little to recommend the country which he can never permanently leave; his relationship to it seems to be one of wearied addiction. The fake jauntiness of “English Scheme” (complete with proto-John Shuttleworth cheesy cabaret keyboard) is a squalid postcard from somewhere no one would ever wish to be. Here and in “C and Cs Mithering”, the US emerges as an alternative (in despair at the class-ridden Britain of “sixty hours and stone toilet back gardens”, the “clever ones” “point their fingers at America”), but there is a sense that, no matter how far he travels, Smith will in the end be overcome by a compulsion to return to his blighted homeland, which functions as his pharmakon, his poison and remedy, sickness and cure. In the end he is as afflicted by paralysis as Joyce’s Dubliners.

On “C n Cs Mithering” a rigor mortis snare drum gives this paralysis a sonic form. “C n Cs Mithering” is an unstinting inventory of gripes and irritations worthy of Tony Hancock at his most acerbic and disconsolate, a cheerless survey of estates that “stick up like stacks” and, worse still, a derisive dismissal of one of the supposed escape routes from drudgery: the music business, denounced as corrupt, dull and stupid. The track sounds, perhaps deliberately, like a white English version of rap (here as elsewhere, the Fall are remarkable for producing equivalents to, rather than facile imitations of, black American forms).

Body a Tentacle Mess

“So R. Totale dwells underground

Away from sickly grind

With ostrich head-dress

Face a mess, covered in feathers

Orange-red with blue-black lines

That draped down to his chest

Body a tentacle mess

And light blue plant-heads.”

— The Fall, “The N.W.R.A”11

But it is the other long track, “The N.W.R.A.”, that is the masterpiece. All of the LP’s themes coalesce in this track, a tale of cultural political intrigue that plays like some improbable mulching of T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, H.G. Wells, Dick, Lovecraft and Le Carré. It is the story of Roman Totale, a psychic and former cabaret performer whose body is covered in tentacles. It is often said that Roman Totale is one of Smith’s “alter-egos”; in fact, Smith is in the same relationship to Totale as Lovecraft was to someone like Randolph Carter. Totale is a character rather than a persona. Needless to say, he is not a character in the “well-rounded” Forsterian sense so much as a carrier of mythos, an inter-textual linkage between pulp fragments.

The inter-textual methodology is crucial to pulp modernism. If pulp modernism first of all asserts the author-function over the creative-expressive subject, it secondly asserts a fictional system against the author-God. By producing a fictional plane of consistency across different texts, the pulp modernist becomes a conduit through which a world can emerge. Once again, Lovecraft is the exemplar here: his tales and novellas could in the end no longer be apprehended as discrete texts but as part-objects forming a mythos-space which other writers could also explore and extend.

The form of “The N.W.R.A.” is as alien to organic wholeness as is Totale’s abominable tentacular body. It is a grotesque concoction, a collage of pieces that do not belong together. The model is the novella rather than the tale, and the story is told episodically, from multiple points of view, using a heteroglossic riot of styles and tones (comic, journalistic, satirical, novelistic): like “Call of Cthulhu” re-written by the Joyce of Ulysses and compressed into ten minutes.

From what we can glean, Totale is at the centre of a plot — infiltrated and betrayed from the start — which aims at restoring the North to glory (perhaps to its Victorian moment of economic and industrial supremacy; perhaps to some more ancient pre-eminence, perhaps to a greatness that will eclipse anything that has come before). More than a matter of regional railing against the capital, in Smith’s vision the North comes to stand for everything suppressed by urbane good taste: the esoteric, the anomalous, the vulgar sublime, that is to say, the Weird and the Grotesque itself. Totale, festooned in the incongruous Grotesque costume of “ostrich head-dress… feathers/orange-red with blue-black line/…and light blue plant-heads” is the would-be Faery King of this Weird Revolt who ends up its maimed Fisher King, abandoned like a pulp modernist Miss Havisham amongst the relics of a carnival that will never happen, a drooling totem of a defeated tilt at social realism, the visionary leader reduced, as the psychotropics fade and the fervour cools, to being a washed-up cabaret artiste once again.

Part III1

Dont start improvising, for Christ’s sake”

The temptation, when writing about the Fall’s work of this period, is to too quickly render it tractable. I note this by way of a disclaimer and a confession, since I am of course as liable to fall prey to this temptation as any other commentator. To confidently describe songs as if they were “about” settled subjects or to attribute to them a determinate aim or orientation (typically, a satirical purpose) will always be inadequate to the vertiginous experience of the songs and the distinctive jouissance provoked by listening to them. This enjoyment involves a frustration — a frustration, precisely, of our attempts to make sense of the songs. Yet this jouissance — something also provoked by the late Joyce, Pynchon and Burroughs — is an irreducible dimension of the Fall’s modernist poetics. If it is impossible to make sense of the songs, it is also impossible to stop making sense of them — or at least to it is impossible to stop attempting to make sense of them. On the one hand, there is no possibility of dismissing the songs as nonsense; they are not gibberish or disconnected strings of non-sequiturs. On the other hand, any attempt to constitute the songs as settled carriers of meaning runs aground on their incompleteness and inconsistency.

The principal way in which the songs were recuperated was via the charismatic persona Smith established in interviews. Although Smith scrupulously refused to either corroborate or reject any interpretations of his songs, invoking this extra-textual persona, notorious for its strong views and its sardonic but at least legible humour, allowed listeners and commentators to contain, even dissipate, the strangeness of the songs themselves.

The temptation to use Smith’s persona as a key to the songs was especially pressing because all pretence of democracy in the group has long since disappeared. By the time of Grotesque, it was clear that Smith was as much of an autocrat as James Brown, the band the zombie slaves of his vision. He is the shaman-author, the group the producers of a delirium-inducing repetition from which all spontaneity must be ruthlessly purged. “Don’t start improvising for Christ’s sake,” goes a line on Slates, the 10” EP followup to Grotesque, echoing his chastisement of the band for “showing off” on the live LP Totale’s Turns.

Slates’ “Prole Art Threat” turned Smith’s persona, reputation and image into an enigma and a conspiracy. The song is a complex, ultimately unreadable, play on the idea of Smith as “working-class” spokesman. The “Threat” is posed as much to other representations of the proletarian pop culture (which at its best meant the Jam and at its worst meant the more thuggish Oi!) as it is against the ruling class as such. The “art” of the Fall’s pulp modernism — their intractability and difficulty — is counterposed to the misleading ingenuousness of social realism.

The Fall’s intuition was that social relations could not be understood in the “demystified” terms of empirical observation (the “housing figures” and “sociological memory” later ridiculed on “The Man Whose Head Expanded’). Social power depends upon “hexes”: restricted linguistic, gestural and behavioural codes which produce a sense of inferiority and enforce class destiny. “What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?”, Weller demanded on “Eton Rifles”, and it was as if the Fall took the power of such symbols and sigils very literally, understanding the social field as a series of curses which have to be sent back to those who had issued them.

The pulp format on “Prole Art Threat” is spy fiction, its scenario resembling Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy re-done as a tale of class cultural espionage, but then compressed and cut up so that characters and contexts are even more perplexing than they were even in Le Carré’s already oblique narrative. We are in a labyrinthine world of bluff and counter-bluff — a perfect analogue for Smith’s own elusive, allusive textual strategies. The text is presented to us as a transcript of surveillance tapes, complete with ellipses where the transmission is supposedly scrambled: “GENT IN SAFE-HOUSE: Get out the pink press threat file and Brrrptzzap* the subject. (* = scrambled).”

“Prole Art Threat” seems to be a satire, yet it is a blank satire, a satire without any clear object. If there is a point, it is precisely to disrupt any “centripetal” effort to establish fixed identities and meanings. Those centripetal forces are represented by the “Middle Mass” (“vulturous in the aftermath”) and “the Victorian vampiric” culture of London itself, as excoriated in “Leave the Capitol”:

The tables covered in beer

Showbiz whines, minute detail

It’s a hand on the shoulder in Leicester Square

It’s vaudeville pub back room dusty pictures of white frocked girls and music teachers

The bed’s too clean

The water’s poison for the system

Then you know in your brain

LEAVE THE CAPITOL!

EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!

This horrifying vision of London as a Stepford city of drab conformity (“hotel maids smile in unison”) ends with the unexpected arrival of Machen’s Great God Pan (last alluded to in the Fall’s very early “Second Dark Age”, presaging the Fall’s return of the Weird.

The Textual Expectorations of Hex

“He’d been very close to becoming ex-funny man celebrity. He needed a good hour at the hexen school…”
— Press release for Hex Enduction Hour

Hex Enduction Hour was even more expansive than Grotesque. Teeming with detail, gnomic yet hallucinogenically vivid, Hex was a series of pulp modernist pen portraits of England in 1982. The LP had all the hubristic ambition of prog combined with an aggression whose ulcerated assault and battery outdid most of its post-punk peers in terms of sheer ferocity. Even the lumbering “Winter” was driven by a brute urgency, so that, on side one, only the quiet passages in the lugubrious “Hip Priest” — like dub if it had been invented in drizzly motorway service stations rather than in recording studios in Jamaica — provided a respite from the violence.

Yet the violence was not a matter of force alone. Even when the record’s dual-drummer attack is at its most poundingly vicious, the violence is formal as much as physical. Rock form is disassembled before our ears. It seems to keep time according to some system of spasms and lurches learned from Beefheart. Something like “Deer Park” — a whistle-stop tour of London circa 82 sandblasted with “Sister Ray”-style white noise — screams and whines as if it is about to fall apart at any moment. The “bad production” was nothing of the sort. The sound could be pulverisingly vivid at times: the moment when the bass and drums suddenly loom out of the miasma at the start of “Winter” is breathtaking, and the double-drum tattoo on “Who Makes the Nazis?” fairly leaps out of the speakers. This was the space rock of Can and Neu! smeared in the grime and mire of the quotidian, recalling the most striking image from The Quatermass Xperiment: a space rocket crash-landed into the roof of a suburban house.

In many ways, however, the most suggestive parallels come from black pop. The closest equivalents to the Smith of Hex would be the deranged despots of black sonic fiction: Lee Perry, Sun Ra and George Clinton, visionaries capable of constructing (and destroying) worlds in sound.

As ever, the album sleeve (so foreign to what were then the conventions of sleeve design that HMV would only stock it with its reverse side facing forward) was the perfect visual analogue for the contents. The sleeve was more than that, actually: its spidery scrabble of slogans, scrawled notes and photographs was a part of the album rather than a mere illustrative envelope in which it was contained.

With the Fall of this period, what Gerard Genette calls “paratexts”2 — those liminal conventions, such as introductions, prefaces and blurbs, which mediate between the text and the reader — assume special significance. Smith’s paratexts were clues that posed as many puzzles as they solved; his notes and press releases were no more intelligible than the songs they were nominally supposed to explain. All paratexts occupy an ambivalent position, neither inside nor outside the text: Smith uses them to ensure that no definite boundary could be placed around the songs. Rather than being contained and defined by its sleeve, Hex haemorrhages through the cover.

It was clear that the songs weren’t complete in themselves, but part of a larger fictional system to which listeners were only ever granted partial access. “I used to write a lot of prose on and off”, Smith would say later. “When we were doing Hex I was doing stories all the time and the songs were like the bits left over.” Smith’s refusal to provide lyrics or to explain his songs was in part an attempt to ensure that they remained, in Barthes’ terms, writerly. (Barthes opposes such texts, which demand the active participation of the reader, to “readerly” texts, which reduce the reader to the passive role of consumer of already-existing totalities.)

Before his words could be deciphered they had first of all to be heard, which was difficult enough, since Smith’s voice — often subject to what appeared to be loud hailer distortion — was always at least partially submerged in the mulch and maelstrom of Hex’s sound. In the days before the internet provided a repository of Smith’s lyrics (or fans’ best guesses at what the words were), it was easy to mis-hear lines for years.

Even when words could be heard, it was impossible to confidently assign them a meaning or an ontological “place”. Were they Smith’s own views, the thoughts of a character or merely stray semiotic signal? More importantly: how clearly could each of these levels be separated from one another? Hex’s textual expectorations were nothing so genteel as stream of consciousness: they seemed to be gobbets of linguistic detritus ejected direct from the mediatised unconscious, unfiltered by any sort of reflexive subjectivity. Advertising, tabloid headlines, slogans, pre-conscious chatter, overheard speech were masticated into dense schizoglossic tangles.

Who wants to be in a Hovis advert anyway?”

“Who wants to be in a Hovis/advert/anyway?” Smith asks in “Just Step S’Ways”, but this refusal of cosy provincial cliché (Hovis adverts were famous for their sentimentalised presentation of a bygone industrial North) is counteracted by the tacit recognition that the mediatised unconscious is structured like advertising. You might not want to live in an advert, but advertising dwells within you. Hex converts any linguistic content — whether it be polemic, internal dialogue, poetic insight — into the hectoring form of advertising copy or the screaming ellipsis of headline-speak. The titles of “Hip Priest” and “Mere Pseud Mag Ed”, as urgent as fresh newsprint, bark out from some Voriticist front page of the mind.

As for advertising, consider “Just Step S’Ways” opening call to arms: “When what used to excite you does not/like you’ve used up all your allowance of experiences.” Is this an existentialist call for self re-invention disguised as advertising hucksterism, or the reverse? Or take the bilious opening track, “The Classical”. “The Classical” appears to oppose the anodyne vacuity of advertising’s compulsory positivity (“this new profile razor unit”) to ranting profanity (“hey there fuckface!”) and the gross physicality of the body (“stomach gassss”). But what of the line, “I’ve never felt better in my life?” Is this another advertising slogan or a statement of the character’s feelings?

It was perhaps the unplaceability of any of the utterances on Hex that allowed Smith to escape censure for the notorious line, “where are the obligatory niggers?” in “The Classical”. Intent was unreadable. Everything sounded like a citation, embedded discourse, mention rather than use.

Smith returns to the Weird tale form on “Jawbone and the Air Rifle”. A poacher accidentally causes damage to a tomb, unearthing a jawbone which “carries the germ of a curse/of the Broken Brothers Pentacle Church.” The song is a tissue of allusions — James (“A Warning to the Curious”, “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”), Lovecraft (“The Shadow over Innsmouth”), Hammer Horror, The Wicker Man — culminating in a psychedelic/psychotic breakdown (complete with torch-wielding mob of villagers):

He sees jawbones on the street

Advertisements become carnivores

And roadworkers turn into jawbones

And he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime.

The villagers dance round pre-fabs

And laugh through twisted mouths.

“Jawbone” resembles nothing so much as a League of Gentlemen sketch, and the Fall have much more in common with the League of Gentlemen’s febrile carnival than with witless imitators such as Pavement. The co-existence of the laughable with that which is not laughable: a description that captures the essence of both the Fall and The League of Gentlemen’s grotesque humour.

White face finds roots”

“Below, black scars winding through the snow showed the main roads. Great frozen rivers and snow-laden forest stretched in all directions. Ahead they could just see a range of old, old mountatins. It was perpetual evening at this time of year, and the further north they went, the darker it became. The white lands seemed uninhabited, and Jerry could easily see how the legends of trolls, Jotunheim, and the tragic gods — the dark, cold, bleak legends of the North — had come out of Scandinavia. It made him feel strange, even anachronistic, as if he had gone back from his own age to the Ice Age.”
— Michael Moorcock, The Final Programme3

On Hex’s second side, mutant r and r becomes r and Artaud as the songs become increasingly delirial and abstract. “Who Makes the Nazis” — as lunar as Tago Mago, as spacey-desolated as King Tubby at his most cavernous –- is a TV talk show debate rendered as some Jarry-esque pantomime, and composed of leering backing vocals and oneiric-cryptic linguistic fragments: “longhorn breed… George Orwell Burmese police… Hate’s not your enemy, love’s your enemy, murder all bush monkeys…”

“Iceland”, recorded in a lava-lined studio in Reykjavík, is a fantasmatic encounter with the fading myths of North European culture in the frozen territory from which they originated. “White face finds roots”, Smith’s sleeve-notes tell us. The song, hypnotic and undulating, meditative and mournful, recalls the bone-white steppes of Nico’s The Marble Index in its arctic atmospherics. A keening wind (on a cassette recording made by Smith) whips through the track as Smith invites us to “cast the runes against your own soul” (another James’ reference, this time to his “Casting the Runes”).

“Iceland” is rock as ragnarock, an anticipation (or is it a recapitulation) of the End Times in the terms of the Norse “Doom of the Gods”. It is a Twilight of the Idols for the retreating hobgoblins, cobolds and trolls of Europe’s receding Weird culture, a lament for the monstrosities and myths whose dying breaths it captures on tape:

Witness the last of the god men…

A Memorex for the Krakens