Long live that booze and sulfate-loving bard of bile, Mark E. Smith. Mad Mark, the Hip Priest, the New Big Prinz–whatever you choose to call him, Smith has worn more bad sweaters and written more inscrutably brilliant songs than The Clash and Elvis Costello (of whom he once said, “When you’re mired in the shit of the times with bland bastards like Elvis Costello and Spandau Ballet, you begin to question not only people’s tastes but their existences”) put together.
Indeed, the hardest thing about this assignment was choosing which of the acid-tongued one’s many great albums to review. I almost settled on 1984’s The Weird and Wonderful World of The Fall, then on their 1979 debut Live at the Witch Trials, but finally chose 1982’s Hex Enduction Hour–the band’s fourth full-length LP–because it’s raw, chock full of barbed witticisms, and makes a big, droning din. At times it comes close to pure caterwaul, and if there’s one thing I love it’s caterwaul. Perhaps the UK Motown Division honcho who balked upon hearing Hex put it best: “I see no commercial potential in this band whatsoever.”
Smith himself more or less agreed with Motown’s assessment; in his slapdash but highly entertaining book Renegade, Smith says, “Hex Enduction Hour was a big fuck-off to the music industry. It was probably the first time I’d got to a point where I knew I was alone with my ideas.” He adds, “I thought this is it… the last one we’re going to do.” Lucky for us, Smith is no soothsayer: not only was Hex Enduction Hour not his swan song, it’s probably his masterpiece, and some 33 years and 26 studio LPs later The Fall is still alive and poking human stupidity in its blind eye.
Formed in Prestwich, Greater Manchester in 1976, The Fall—who borrowed their name from Albert “The Groovy Existentialist” Camus’ novel of the same name—have released some 30 studio albums, not to mention enough EPs, live LPs, and compilation albums to fill the gigantic gallery of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. During that time Smith, by all accounts as paranoid a boss as Joseph Stalin, has gone through musicians the way Orson Welles went through industrial-sized bags of Fritos. Indeed, The Fall has had more members—some 66, give or take a few–than there are citizens of Fucking, Austria. (Yes, Fucking’s a real place, and I plan to move there.) As for Smith, he knows damn well he’s the band, and makes no bones about it. As he once said, “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s The Fall.” (That’s a lineup I’d love to see. My granny plays a mean pair of bongos; her hands are a great groovy geriatric blur.)
Smith has said, “Rock and roll [is] a completely non-musical form of music,” and unlike the slightly more commercial The Weird and Wonderful World of The Fall, on Hex Enduction Hour he seemed dead set on proving it. “I was trying to rough it up,” he says in Renegade, in part by deliberately encouraging the musicians to play out of time. The album was recorded during The Fall’s two-drummer era, and the perpetual drum pummel plus Craig Scanlon’s shards-of-broken-glass guitar make for some epic clash and clangor. “And This Day” alone is noisier than Blixa Bargeld and Black Dice put together.
“The Classical,” which Smith has said “sums up the [album’s] fuck-you-very-much attitude best,” opens with some barbaric drumming followed by Mad Mark at his most inscrutable: “There is no culture is my brag/Your taste for bullshit reveals a lust for a home of office/THIS IS THE HOME OF THE VAIN!/THIS IS THE HOME OF THE VAIN!” and “HEY THERE FUCKFACE!/HEY THERE FUCKFACE!” at which point Scanlon comes in on guitar and Smith shrieks “Kill it!/Kill it!/Kill it! A/Kill it/Kill it A!” And so it goes, the band clamoring away at a rapid clip until Smith begins to intone, ironically most likely, “I never felt better in my life” over and over and the song closes in a tintinnabulation that brings to mind Smith’s comment on his contemporaries, “I’d rather listen to the Polish builders clanking away next door than any of that crap.” Well, I suspect those same Polish builders are in the studio at the end of “The Classical,” and their clanking is fantastic.
“Jawbone and the Air Rifle” comes at you like a brickbat out of the slums of Manchester, with Scanlon playing a fleet and repetitive guitar riff while Smith snarls about a curse incurred by a late-night rabbit hunter who has a run-in with a cemetery groundskeeper. The latter gives the hunter a jawbone, and after that “No bottle has he anymore/It could be his mangled teeth/He sees jawbones on the street/Advertisements become carnivores/And roadworkers turn into jawbones.” “Jawbone” is the rare Smith song that tells a real, easily understood tale–most of Mad Mark’s lyrics sound like tossed-off stream-of consciousness Joycean gibberish, heavily larded with caustic wit. “Jawbone” also changes speed at the oddest times, which is just what Smith was aiming for: “That’s the good thing about Hex,” he once said. “I was experimenting with speeding up on a track and slowing down.”
A slow drag of a cold lake for a body that will never be found, “Hip Priest” opens with some very nimble cymbal work, some balls of brass bass, and the occasional ringing guitar riff by Scanlon, while Smith tosses off seeming non sequiturs. The tempo staggers along like Smith making his shitfaced way home from the local, with sudden jerks in tempo from fast to really slow, until at around the 4:30 mark Smith is joined by jagged shards of organ noise and some human droning. When he isn’t calling out, “That’s hip hip hip hip hit hit hit Hip Priest!” or borrowing Johnny Cash’s (or for all you annoying pedants who are sure to correct me, Kris Kristofferson’s) “last clean dirty shirt outta the wardrobe,” Smith’s griping about not being appreciated, or crowing, “All the young groups know/They can’t ever take advantage/Because I’m a Hip Priest.” It’s “Hip Priest” that plays at the climax of The Silence of the Lambs, and speaking of the silence of farm animals I recently had my first tongue taco, and now I feel terrible because there’s a cow out there who has to learn sign language.
“Fortress/Deer Park” is a fast-paced 6- minutes plus of drum thump and cacophony that opens with some Trio-type ping-pong synth and an idiot’s incantation. Then in comes Smith with the drums a’pounding while Scanlon plays a helter skelter guitar line. Two songs in one, “Fortress” is about the studio in Iceland where The Fall recorded parts of Hex. (In Renegade, Smith claims his was the first rock band Icelandic youth had ever seen, then adds regretfully, “I feel guilty for spawning The Sugarcubes and Bjork.”)
“Two hours!/With four left wing kids/I spent time in Nazi Fortress/Much discussion in room C-H-1-O-C-H-11,” sings Smith, then a droning organ signals the beginning of “Deer Park”—Smith’s recasting of the novel by loveable wife-stabber Norman Mailer. Smith sings, “Have you been to the English Deer Park?” along with such imponderables as “Say have you ever had a chance to meet/Fat Captain Beefheart imitators with zits?/Who is the King Shag Corpse?” He then begins to squeal in a falsetto, stammer, and repeat the same lines over and over while placing emphasis on different words each time, as the organ drones on “Sister Ray”-style and Scanlon, a guitar genius in my humble opinion, plays frenetic sheets of what the prophet Neil Diamond called “beautiful noise.” It’s a fantastic slice, or two if you prefer, of bona fide raucous’n’roll, and I can’t get enough of it.
Meanwhile, “Mere Pseud Mag. Ed” opens with some strummed guitar, to which Smith sing-songs, “His heart organ was where it should be/His brain was in his arse/His hand was well out of his pocket/His psyche’s in the hearth.” Then all hell breaks loose, with Scanlon firing off dissonant riffs and Steve Hanley percolating away on bass while the drums pound out a brutal beat and Smith spouts gibberish like “They were do-do like/They were comfort blanket type/Pho-do in fact/Pho-do in fact/Pho-do in fact/He had a weak pisser.” Then the song speeds up even more, forcing Smith to rush his cadence in a desperate attempt to keep up, and the whole shebang roadrunners to a close with some Christoper Walken-worthy cowbell and Smith singing “Mere pseud editor’s father” over and over and over again.
“Winter (Hostel-Maxi)” and its follow-up “Winter 2” are essentially one song, with the latter serving as a coda of sorts. A slow and relatively racket-free duo, both are dominated by Steve Hanley’s slow heart beat of a bass line, over which Smith talk/sings, “You got Manny in the library/Working off his hangover 3:30/You get the spleen at 3:15/But it’s 3:13,” at which point the drums explode, the guitar kicks in with some intermittent barbed-wire riffs, and the bass moves to the front of the mix as Smith continues to spit out lines like, “Anyway two weeks before the mad kid had said to me/”I’ll take both of you on!, I’ll take both of you on!”/Then he seemed the young one/He had a parka on and a black cardboard Archbishop’s hat/With a green-fuzz skull and crossbones.”
Then the organ falls in and out, doing a VU thing, until “Winter (Hostel-Maxi) fades out and “Winter 2” enters brushing the snow off its shoulders, with the only apparent difference between the two songs being the latter’s cool instrumental passage followed by some wicked droning “Sister Ray” organ. That and on “Winter 2” there’s slightly more drum crash and Scanlon’s guitar is more frantic as Smith shuts the song down with the lines, “The mad kid had 4 lights, the average is 2.5 lights/The mediocre has 2 lights, the sign of genius is three lights/There’s one light left, that’s the one light/That’s the science law/Courtesy winter.” I’m not certain what science law Smith is referring to, but I suspect he discovered said law inside a bottle of lager.
“Just Step S’ways” is a great pulsating idiot’s heart of a song, and the bounciest number on Hex Enduction Hour. It opens with Smith saying, “When what used to excite you does not/Like you’ve used up all your allowance of experiences/Head filled with a mass of too-well-known people” as the guitar and the drums come pumping in at a jaunty tempo while Smith repeats, “Just step sideways from this world today” to the accompaniment of a repetitive guitar riff. And so it goes until the 2:20 mark, when things speed up and Smith sings, “Don’t let it beat ya/Don’t let it whip ya/Jump on the back of nicotine/Hit those lung wurm back rays/Just step outside this future world today” then repeats himself until the song comes to a sudden stop.
“Just Step S’ways” is one of my faves on the album, and not just because it name-checks one of my heroes (whom Smith undoubtedly loathes) in the line, “The Eastern Bloc rocks to Elton John.” (No wonder I have always had a soft spot for the Eastern Bloc. It’s their love for Elton John and cement-based ice cream.)
“Who makes the Nazis?” asks Smith at the opening of the song of the same name, and I can actually tell him—it’s Hasbro. Another slow boat across the surrealism-stocked river of Smith’s speed-spurred imagination, the song features a ponging bass line, some pounding drums, and low-key but dissonant guitar work by Scanlon. Smith sings, “Ya mind tellin’ me?!/Who makes the Nazis?” then answers his own question: “Balding smug faggots/Intellectual half-wits/All the Os” as what sounds like the world’s biggest lunkhead commences repeating “Yeah” in the background. Smith continues to ask “Who makes the Nazis,” sings apropos of nothing “Longhorn/Longhorn breed/Longhorn/Longhorn breed,” then some stuff (Nazis maybe) comes crashing down in the studio and what sounds like a kazoo makes a brief appearance as the song comes to its bizarre end. As Smith once said, and truer words have never been spoken, “You don’t know what you’re in for with The Fall.”
“Iceland” is a strange and beautiful song, and the perfect homage to that lonely, lovely island in the frigid Atlantic. It opens with some weird taped hissing (like the Arctic wind!) and slow bass throb. Then Smith says, “A plate steel object was fired/And I did not feel for my compatriots/Hated even the core of myself/Not a matter of ill-health” as the wind continues to howl, Hanley keeps up his bass throb, and a drummer commences ticking. Then Smith sings, “To be humbled in Iceland/Sing of legend, sing of destruction/Witness the last of the god-men/Hear about Megas Jonsson,” at which point Scanlon plays an unearthly beautiful melody on piano as the tempo slowly builds, with the drummers throwing in rolls, the bass pounding, and Scanlon going free form, Mike Garson-style, on the old 88. And on it goes, Smith (who probably stepped outside for a fag) strangely silent, as the dissonance slowly increases thanks to some slanted and enchanted guitar riffs and Scanlon’s forays away from the melody on piano, until finally three sharp strums of the guitar signal the song’s end.
Album closer “And This Day” is 10:20 seconds of mid-tempo tug and pull, with the drums playing a herky-jerky beat as Smith sings, “Everywhere/Just no fucking respite for us here/Dream theatre/And this day/No matter what all who fills baskets/Or who’s just there/The whole earth shudders.” The bass is all over the place, the guitar comes in and out shooting sparks, and the drummers continue to create mayhem as Smith repeats, “And this day” over and over. It’s a real noise fest of a tune, complete with some annoyingly wonderful whistling, and it only grows more dissonant as the drummers begin to play an out-of-kilter beat, Scanlon lets loose with some mind-melting feedback, and a cowbell gets the hell knocked out of it as Smith sings, “Your friends are dust/They’re in bits/They’re dust/Dusty friends/I cannot account/For this village.” “And This Day” is a veritable noise rock tutorial, and plenty of today’s noise bands (are you listening, Pissed Jeans?) could learn a thing or three from it.
Mark E. Smith is Non-Linear Man’s Shane MacGowan, a poet/bar fly sans MacGowan’s untended cemetery of a mouth (since fixed, or so I hear) and dark but ecstastic Yeatsian soul. And for forty-odd (as in very odd) drink-soaked years, Smith has been saying exactly what he thinks, safe in the knowledge that most of us don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. But it’s enough to know he’s pissed, and won’t ever stop kicking against the pricks. He may be as much bluster as he is bard, Finnegan’s Wake on a whiskey and speed binge, but he continues to send us brilliantly conceived communiqués on his valiant struggle against vapidity in the form of LPs that are every bit as outraged as they are oblique.
And if that lands him in the gutter rather on a pedestal, Smith doesn’t give a rat’s arse, which is what I admire about him more than anything. So drink the long draught, Dan, for the Hip Priest. The Witch Trials will not be televised.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
