Cleveland based mid-'80s jangle pop and/or power pop trio. Brothers Bill (guitar/vocals) and Tommy Fox (drums/vocals) and Ken Hall (bassist/vocals) start a band, specializing in covers of The Beatles, The Who, and The Ramones. The underdog superhero vocals are key. Peak moment for the band: "Little Rage" featured on a joint single with Yo La Tengo in 1987. Another golden jangle pop moment, another non-one-hit-wonder come and gone.
Jangle pop goes back to 1964-65, Byrds and Beatles (Jackie DeShannon and Carol Kaye), and is based on but not limited to the sound affects of a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, or according to novelist Michael Chabon anyway. I'd still vouch for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000); and enjoyed his novel Telegraph Avenue (2012)about a record store always on the verge of going under. But I don't know anything beyond that and I didn't like the Wonder Boys movie. Nonetheless, after spending an evening with his 100 song playlist of jangle pop history I'm ready to thank him for a sweet tour through this sub-genre of often maligned guitar pop and conclude Chabon knows jangle pop a lot better than I do.
My introduction to the jangle pop timeline was the late-'70s, early-'80s window, Tom Petty, Shoes, REM, The Dream Syndicate, Soft Boys, like that. In 1980 I felt like Chrissie Hynde doing "Stop Your Sobbing" was the single perfect capsulization of jangle pop history as far as I'd come to know it at that time. I loved that electrified "The Bells of Rhymney" folk rock sound, and even better with some Mod max r&b new wave energy like The Pretenders underneath it. Come to think of it, I felt more or less the same about the Pretenders' Kinks cover as I did about The Records "Starry Eyes" from 1979. This was a jangle pop/power pop golden age for me; uptempo jangle pop, Punk/new wave jangle pop that pushes tempo. I loved that stuff.
So I know most of Chabon's jangle pop playlist from its beginnings up to REM or the Smiths or The Jayhawks, even if I might have gone sometimes myself with different songs. But to be honest, the formula of jangle pop (and power pop, for that matter) did eventually wear out on me some and I began somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s to tune a lot of it out. After that when some jangle pop (or power pop) would come to my attention I was more jaded and harder to please. With old crank cliche attitudes about the most popular stuff of the day, none of whom I will waste your time by insulting again now.
Bonus then that Chabon's 100 song playlist not only includes a lot of the old classics I already knew and loved but some sweet new discoveries for me too. This gem from '87. The Mice from Cleveland. A 2003 release on Rough Trade from the Delays, the lead guy has since sadly passed, called "Hey Girl." Heavenly vocal group jangle pop. And Warren Zevon, of all people, from 1966, Lyme & Cybelle, "Follow Me." Chabon appears to be a serious fan and excavator of the deep jangle pop tracks.
"I would sell my mother for a chance to play guitar in his band
We're still playing all the old songs in the garage but it's just a mirage."
Whose band? A song about wanting to make hit records or play with the kind of guy who makes hit records. They want to play with the guy with the "Red, Red Lights in his eyes," in "his band"; not so much Joey Ramone but this mythical figure with the Red Lights of rock stardom in his eyes. This could be the singer, Eric Li, but he sounds doubtful.
The Marbles stardom constituted being regular headliners at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City in NYC 1976-1977. They made a shambolic power pop garage rock sound, serviceable, running on amateurish enthusiasm and proficiency. It works but it's not the special part. The special part is the lead vocal and multi-part harmonies; the call and response between them. The contrast of the slow building and frail lead vocal lifted up by the rough multi-part vocal harmonies, including two brothers. A total knockout.
The group harmonies are triumphant. Beatlesque in the best sense; a whole greater than its parts. "Red Lights" is a power pop, jangle pop, woulda/coulda/shoulda been smasharoo from 1976 but it came out on a small independent record label, Ork Records, and disappeared. Not that I'm blaming Ork Records. They deserve credit for documenting this fragile retro-futurist gem of a record, and nearly four dozen other punk/new wave/power pop songs orbiting around CBGB's in the late '70s.
Also ROIR Cassettes, where I first heard "Red Lights" as a standout track on their 1982 comp called The Great New York Singles Scene. In 1976 the Marbles were pre-Knack proto-New Wave band in their ties and Beatles' haircuts. There is a whiff of Sha Na Na oldies about them but the rough uncut diamond glitter of their 4-part harmonies makes it new and eternal rock & roll.
I can't find much else by the Marbles. Try "Computer Games" or "Fire and Smoke." The bassist, Jim Clifford, shares ten songs the Marble's made between 1975 and 1978 and might be the only guy in the world trying to keep alive their memory. The lead singer, Eric Li, the contrast of his downcast vulnerability with Howard and David Bowler's brother harmonies absolutely key to the heroic underdog Marbles sound, dies of a drug overdose in 1989. Impossible now not to hear this as his song.
A funny part of getting into the deep cuts of the disco era, as I've mentioned before, is how eventually everybody's doing it, everybody seems to get around to making their disco track. B.B. King. Little Feat. Camel. Barbara Streisand. The Beach Boys. Even the opening act at Woodstock!
"Going Back to My Roots," Richie Havens (1980): Havens covering Lamont Dozier's 1977 original, about going back to Detroit to see family. Black family. The Roots TV series chronicling the saga of an American family going back to Africa aired in '77. But Havens turns the song into a global multicult anthem and inspiring model blueprint of the spiritual side of House music. The deconstructed dancefloor parts give it that proto-House production feel and Haven's soulful voice an anthemic and universal pop heft that is indomitable. "I'm not talking about the roots in the land/I'm talking about the roots in the man/It's not red, it's not white, it's not yellow, it's not black, it's down to earth."
Richie Havens with Groove Armada live in Brixton (2002): Numerous other versions chart over the years, peaking in the US with NYC disco group Odyssey in '81, and then a founding Italo House version for the FPI Project in '89, and other chart appearances in South Africa and UK and other parts of Europe again in '89 and '94 and '99 and 2002. At this point Dozier's disco classic is practically a standard of House style dance music. Here's Havens still bridging disco's spiritual House music soul with EDM millennials.
"Going Back to My Roots," Lamont Dozier (1977): For Dozier, the great songwriter who co-wrote and produced 14 Billboard number one hits with Motown, living in LA at the time the song was about going back to his Black roots in Detroit. An intimate psychological (if epic) journey; the original clocks in at over 9 minutes long. But Hugh Masekela, South African trumpeter, producer, anti-apartheid artist, contributes to production and takes the song back to Africa. The final section moves explicitly into Afrobeat territory, chanting in Yoruba and carrying on with the collaborative energy of sizzling global funk music; so LA to Detroit to Soweto. It's a great track, if maybe a little disjointed by its Dozier and Masekela sides. But Havens' voice and the way his discofied version fully transforms the song into this multicultural global dance anthem really takes it to another level for me. Makes it a post-disco global disco classic.
In a way this is just another golden era hiphop song about "gold diggers" but True Mathematics gets all philosophical about it: "When the material girl in you comes out will the lover in you see what the love is about?" And, crucially, the funk is sharp and bouncy as it could be. TM is Kenny Houston, sidekick on some Public Enemy albums. Surprised he doesn't rap more as he gives as good as he gets from the Bomb Squad: Carl Ryder (aka Chuck D), Hank Shocklee, and Eric "Vietnam" Sadler. I like the original but TM's version is popping; similar funk vintage to Young MC's "Bust a Move" (1989) or EPMD'S "You Gots To Chill" (1988). Hiphop or rap music is, basically, funk made with turntables, a mixer, a synth/sampler, a drum machine, and a rapping DJ or MC. If you like funky beats and pop hooks this cannot miss. In a classic hiphop persona, the disinterested observer of human relations, "some guys will use you/some guys will love you," TM raps, "But I'm neither one/just here to observe."
The original comes from Shalamar's 1980 album Three for Love:
My memory, spotty as it is, is that I first heard about The Fall from Carter Wood in 1979.
Carter went to my high school, although we never hanged out in high school. He wrote for the school newspaper, took college prep classes, and was on the Honor Roll. In high school, by contrast, I was busy going to keggers with my buddies and trying to find ways to be alone with my girlfriend; and playing a little sports, although I wasn't all that good at that either. School was an afterthought; I felt no pressure to get good grades at home and found it exceedingly easy to skate by. In short, we didn't travel in the same circles. But a couple years into college, Carter going to Reed, me Portland State, we ran into each other at a Wipers show in Portland and we saw some more shows together over the next couple years; The Rats, Sado-Nation, Gang of Four, like that. He knew lots of punk or especially post-punk stuff like The Fall and turned me on to them.
Grotesque ('80) was the first album, The Fall's third long player, that I fell for. Truth be told, my initial reactions to earlier albums, Live at the Witch Trials ('79) and Dragnet ('79) were much less enthusiastic; too shambolic, too dry and tuneless to my virgin Fall ears. But already by '81's '77-'79 Early Years, a cassette collection I ended up playing to death before losing, I was already reevaluating and thrilling to a handful of early classic Fall numbers: "Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow," "Industrial Estate," "Repetition," "Psychic Mafia," and "Rowche Rumble," etc. Listening to this early stuff again recently I can't get "Bingo Master's Breakout," their debut single, out of my head.
The Fall were always on the surface forbidding, noisy, often sounding as if on the verge of collapse. They found some difficulty getting recorded in those earliest years, like other longstanding post-punk survivors The Mekons, because even independent record labels, like Rough Trade, thought they were too incompetent as musicians to sell records, or enough records to justify production and distribution costs anyway.
Mark E. Smith (MES), the band leader, always center of attention on the mic, talk-singer, poet or wordy crank, take your pick, was the initial draw and, as it has turned out nearly forty years later, the only lasting figure in The Fall. MES was a punk! Not the cliche punk stereotype but as if you had found a real one in the wilds of England (read: outside London). He came off like an update of one of those 17th century English ranters depicted in Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Angry, inscrutable, disjointed but unflappably cocky in his right to speak for himself. Whatever he was yammering on about he was a "Hip Priest," a "Slang King," and crucial to his staying power, he had a uncanny knack for writing catchy, impossible to escape earworm hooks.
Again, not that I ever had much of an idea of what was really going on in MES's lyrics or ever studied them too closely. I've learned later he was into the books of Philip K. Dick, John le Carre, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, and other weird fiction authors. I knew The Fall name came from an Albert Camus novel. But his earworms, for me, were never more than a hook, a fragment of the lyrics, and often as earwormy for the catchy way his vocal played off and against the music, his sneering slurs and chants set against angular, cut-up, bass-drum-driven (equally catchy) tempos; in short, as catchy for the music as for his actual words or anything they added up to. I've learned only much later that the words in one of my favorite earworms by The Fall were not even MES's original lyrics.
A longstanding early favorite of mine was "Lie Dream of the Casino Soul" (1981). It lived in my brain for years as an impossible to escape earworm; specifically, a dramatic bridge that is repeated twice in the track. The music drops out, a simple circus-y keyboard figure and a chunky guitar riff strike a spare groove, before MES intones dramatically, "Meanwhile in the States/Proles retch/Dancing in the streets." It took the internet age for me to finally learn that the actual MES lyric in "Lie Dream" goes: "Meanwhile in the sticks/Proles rich/Dance in cardboard pants"?! Obviously, I was projecting. But, also, it just goes to show that often MES/The Fall's knack for hooks was as much about the music, the sonic punch of a musical passage, as about MES's words.
Still, MES definitely had a way with hooks made out of trigger words and provocatively conspiratorial language; "Hail the new puritan," "Jew on a motorbike," "What About Us?" etc. This was his earworm superpower. "LEAVE THE CAPITOL! EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!" off the Slates EP,* also '81, maybe my first wave Fall peak, was another MES hook stuck in my head for eons. But I really had little idea what he was actually going on about, other than he hated London and wanted to blame it on Rome. I never looked into it too much. More recently, I thought I'd maybe ran into the source of "Exit This Roman Shell" in this history book I ran into recently, Escape From Rome, before I realized the book came out in 2019. Still, a rich historical allusion is what MES's image of London or Britain trapped in dead Roman traditions tapped into.
"New Face in Hell," another early fave, sported lines that went: "Wireless enthusiast intercepts government secret radio band and uncovers secrets and scandals of deceitful type proportions." He appeared to be mocking communications snoops while confessing his avid curiosity in scuttlebutt. Like he's swapping shop talk with his conspiracy theory buddies at the pub. MES was also often satirizing the pop music process; the hype machines at NME and elsewhere in the music press. Or bragging about how legendary he was and is to the bitter end; or bitching about how unappreciated he remains. He was funny, caustic, obscure, over half the time I experienced his vocals mostly as gruff barks, yowls, cleverly accenting the tempos, that varied between circus funereal melodrama and Bo Diddley on drugs.
The title of "NFIH" refers to a movie from 1968, the paranoid conspiracy theory vibe "of deceitful type proportions" is vintage MES.
Original postpunk sublimity. The Fall's music in the early 1980s was called "Mancabilly," for Manchester rockabilly; or MES called it "Country 'n' Northern," as in northern England. MES sums up his favorite things as: "Scottish people, cats, Coronation Street [British soap opera set in Manchester], and Can." Like Can, OG German Krautrockers, already legends by the late '70s, the Fall were a mixture of high and low, progressive primitivists, if you will; MES going all in for the spoken word as performance art but always set to shambolic tribal postpunk sounds. He asserts "I am Damo Suzuki," former Can vocalist, notorious for his improvised free-associative lyrics, in one Fall song. In sum, The Fall, 1980 to 1984, that lineup, MES, Marc Riley (keyboards, guitar, banjo), Craig Scanlon (guitar, piano), Steve Hanley (bass, guitar), Paul Stanley (drums, keyboards), Karl Burns (drums, guitar), and Brix Smith (guitar), were the Fall peak in my first wave experience of the band.
I know some people think the Fall were over after Hex Enduction Hour ('82), when Marc Riley left the band and Brix joined. I'm less partisan about Riley or Brix on guitar; I love both Grotesque ('80) and Hex Enduction Hour, Riley's albums, and Perverted By Language and Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall ('84), (more or less) Brix's albums, for different reasons but more or less equally. During this classic period the band could do the slow Sturm und Drang, darkening MES's working class crank poetry (like Suzuki, like Pere Ubu, like Nick Cave), but were best for my money at uptempo, polyrhythmic, heavy melodic bass rumble and clatter (including often two drummers and always some pounding extras, plinky keyboards, kazoos, etc). The thick bass center of that now classic Fall sound is as signature post-punk Manchester as New Order's Peter Hook or anybody else. This was peak postpunk Fall for me.
I remained on board through Wonderful and Frightening World (WAFW). I mean, I listened to each of their studio releases from Grotesque to WAFW pretty soon after they came out and played them many times. But I started to drift after that, turning to other music, other records, giving only glancing attention to The Frenz Experiment ('88), and then nothing for years after I am Kurious Oranj ('88). I even saw them a couple of times in this period, good shows. I liked the title track "I am Kurious Oranj. Another bass-centered guitar jangle, reggae inflected, flourishes of atonality, MES rocking his claptrap about being the unappreciated hitmaker. The sound is there but, and this had maybe been coming on for me for a bit, maybe "Slang King," which I liked, but maybe sealed the deal for me in 1984. It felt like MES was already settling into a schtick, too much repeating himself, the cut-up poetry of a self-aggrandizing crank from working class Manchester, England.
Cool but I drifted away. To be sure, some of it was what I was doing with many of my punk/new wave/postpunk favorites in the late '80s. They quit or fizzled or I lost interest and moved on to something else: Husker Du, Public Enemy, MJ, Madonna, New Zealand's Flying Nun Records, etc. Really, too much music, too little time for listening to music. But maybe some of it was I ran into a wall with the MES persona? It had grown stale.
Rip It Up and Start Again
I returned to The Fall recently while reading Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again (2005).
Reynold's avowedly "personal history" of postpunk music between 1978 and 1984. I've gathered since reading the book it has its critics. I will paraphrase: Too British, too much Green Gartside/Scritti Politti, a whole section devoted to the tenuously postpunk, "The New Pop and New Rock" (from Human League to Frankie Goes to Hollywood)." I have some sympathy here for both sides (more Talking Heads/Eno in the next edition, please) but I liked the angle Reynolds takes: postpunk was any music that was essentially created as inspiration or reaction to the Sex Pistols hostile takeover of the British charts at the end of 1977 and beginning of 1978. This covers the conventional postpunk canon, PIL to Throbbing Gristle. But also 2-Tone to Duran Duran, the latter of whom early on explicitly cite the Sex Pistols commando assault on the charts as a model (even if they were equally committed to not sounding anything like ugly punk rock, which they snarked in the music press at the time).
Anyway, Reynold's write-up of The Fall tweaked my interest. He makes a compelling case for recognizing Hex Enduction Hour ('82) as their best album. I feel like I toggle between HEH and Perverted by Language ('83). But what I realized most in Reynold's informative review of The Fall's long career was how much more Fall there was after I tuned out. MES died in 2018 at the age of sixty; he was a alcoholic and struggled with his health for years. Still, the most lasting legacy of The Fall might be how long they lasted. Between 1988, when I tuned out, and 2018, MES's death, The Fall put out twenty more albums. They've put out over fifty live albums, only a couple of which I've heard. And a bunch of singles; most I'd heard up to "Free Range" from 1992 but I don't think anything after that.
At any rate, ready to acquaint myself with more of the Fall catalog I poked around and decided I'd also read long-time Fall bassist Steve Hanley's book The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall (2014) while digging into some more Fall. I always like doing this: reading about some music while listening to it. But it used to be magazines and music zines; now it's books. In this instance, this turned out limiting in that Hanley's account of the Fall's records stops in 1998 in a fiery breakup. So nothing really on The Fall's last two decades of records but good background on the longest-tenured Fall operation from 1980 to 1998.
The Fall have gone through many lineup changes since their beginning. The only mainstay 1977 to 2017 is MES. But Steve Hanley, bassist, is the longest running Fall member besides MES, lasting in the band from 1979 to 1998. Moreover, his resonant bass sound is considered, and this take has been endorsed by MES, foundational to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Riley and Hanley were roadies, hauling the band's equipment before being asked to join the band as teenagers in '79. Once up and running Hanley's bass became the axel around which The Fall's sound evolved.
Not sure if I've ever read a book about touring musicians who actually loved touring. Living on the road is hard. In the best circumstances the musicians enjoy some intensely strong performances and, hopefully, maybe some groupie party action, notably none in Hanley's account for The Fall, but life on the road generally sucks. In short, the corrosive grind of touring with an erratic, endlessly combative MES for eighteen years is the prevailing theme of Hanley's book.
And the final straw for the original lineup, or what was left of it, Hanley and Burns, was MES messing with their instruments on stage during a performance in 1998. They fought, stormed off stage, and finally once and for all any remnant of the early Fall band broke-up. That was that. But, must say, I actually remember seeing MES doing something like that on stage, messing with other band member's equipment and them visibly not enjoying it, at least ten years earlier. The last straw was likely a long time coming.
Another limitation of Hanley's book is as a source for greater insights into MES's lyrics. Hanley doesn't offer much. You'd like a phrase or two but then nowhere, he opines. And undeniable. MES at least some if not most the time, reportedly, used a cut-up style, remixing randomly a bag of lyrics; like Dadaists, William S. Burroughs. In Hanley's account the guys in the band paid most attention to MES's lyrics when they thought they heard lines insulting them. Otherwise, not much to offer.
(I don't know if I'll ever get to it but I see now there is a book about MES called Messing Up the Paintwork: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark E Smith from 2018 that might answer any remaining questions about MES's wordsmithing.)
Some of MES's irritating ticks were funny, though. Hanley complains that on early tours he was constantly making the band watch The Producers (1967) or Zulu (1964), so making fun of Nazis and Britain's Alamo last stand against native Africans. While in the tour van Hanley and his bandmates got into listening to The Clash, or especially other Manchester groups of the day, Joy Division, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, Smiths, and MES would invariably grouch about what shit they all were and force the band to listen to Frank Zappa.
If Hanley has an axe to grind it's that MES doesn't give the band or him enough credit for The Fall's music. As Hanley tells it, from 1980 to '98, some music was composed with the band all together, collaboratively, but most of it was MES writing the lyrics on his own, or early on with Riley or Scanlon, and the band, led by Hanley, coming up with the music on their own, without MES, and then going back and forth with MES editing songs via cassette copies and then finally rehearsals all together.
There is also a scene in Hanley's book when some reputable studio producer is having a final meltdown, fed up with MES's methods, lamenting his efforts to make the instruments and recording sound good in the studio, only to have MES take the recording home and alter it with a home cassette recorder and then ask the producer to turn his cassette recorded version into the record they put out! MES, not much of a musician, was instrumental to the Fall sound, from beginning to end; for better or worse.
And Hanley's bass sound was totally essential to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Both these things, MES and Hanley being crucial to the original, peak or classic, Fall sound, regardless of Hanley's grousing, are still true.
More stuff I've learned reading about and listening to The Fall again recently:
1) There is this Complete Peel Sessions box set of The Fall doing 15-20 minute live set recordings with DJ John Peel at the BBC studios that came out in 2005. The box compiles 24 sessions the band recorded for Peel's radio show between 1978 and 2004. The uncanny part is how Peel seems to get the best out of The Fall, many live in the BBC versions besting LP versions of Fall songs.
Sample classic session from 1980:
I'm not saying there are no duds in the Peel Sessions-- again, late '90s was obviously a very rough period, MES going through some kind of substance abuse breakdown-- but with Peel the strong sets stretch into the '90s easy, even the early '00s, after MES's breakdown. If there needs to be a one-stop- shop record with The Fall this would have to be my recommendation. It's very expensive but free all over youtube.
2) So, again, keeping in mind I knew almost nothing about The Fall's recorded output after '88, so Hanley's second and last decade, and then the next two decades this century, when MES put out 12 more albums. Maybe a song here or there but no albums. But I've been dabbling enough around these last three decades of The Fall lately to suggest it appears clearly that the breakup with Hanley and the old lineup in 1998, actually, artistically rejuvenates MES some. The Unutterable (2000), especially Fall Heads Roll ('05), and Your Future Our Clutter ('10), for examples of his post-breakup output, sound stronger again to me. Like MES learned how to rock out with his band again, even if this likely meant bossing them around, nearly all his post-'98 bandmates are a generation younger; and meant bossing them around in a way Hanley and the long list of other bandmate casualties could no longer endure. At any rate, in my best rock critic voice, if haphazard and terribly incomplete survey, MES's post-'98 records show MES was still integral to the composition of The Fall sound and could reproduce that sound, or exhilarating facsimiles, with other groups of musicians.
For instance, immersing myself again in The Fall for the past few months, what's striking to me is how much I've returned to this 27 minute master-mix of various versions of a song called "Blindness" or "(Deaf And) Blindness" that MES recorded with a Fall lineup in the '00s, after his breakup with the Hanley unit. A version appears on the last Peel Session in '04 and a studio version appears on the Fall Heads Roll LP* released in 2005. In addition to his knack for the verbal hook, MES retained a remarkable knack for recreating the classic Fall sound: Shambolic bass tunes, dirty metal guitar riffing, some twisted pop keyboards; the band loose but tight with MES. "Blindness" locks into this thick hypnotic groove, riffing guitar, heavy bass swagger, and a perfect minimalist keyboard melody. An intoxicating rocker you want to go on forever and it almost does clocking in at over 26 minutes of drone rock madness. MES barks out stuff, name drops some dead celebrities, a hook he repeats only the way he can,"Hey Blindman, Have Mercy On me," is about all of any story I pickup but there is again, all these years later, MES and his way with the hook. Also, this is very late postpunk mind you, even towards the end of the early '00s neo-postpunk thing, Interpol, The Killers, and near 30 minutes of a postpunk superjam bliss by The Fall to my ears.
At any rate, I'm not saying there are not times, before and after '98, when MES doesn't sound like the indecipherable crank street drunk calling out everybody; barking, slurring, semi-coherently at best. Again, I rarely pick up more than a phrase here and there without looking at a lyric sheet. But it must be said, what Fall albums and records I've sampled before and after the big breakup he never sounds again quite as sick and bad as he did in those final few years with the original lineup, and he remains to the end the inscrutable and hostile postpunk wordsmith; "Your Future Our Clutter," "Sub-Lingual Tablet," and, ending in 2018 with, "New Facts Emerge." Indeed they do.
3) Going way back to This Nation's Saving Grace ('85), regarded by the faithful as The Fall's best, or according to allmusic.com anyway, and Bend Sinister ('86), both of which I shamefully missed when I dropped out with The Fall in the mid-'80s, I would now add to their classic period, stretching that period from 1980 to 1986. TNSG burnishes MES's northern Mancunian nativist schtick while adding electro beats and proving again his mastery with the long edgy jams. "Bend Sinister," again, absolutely no memory beyond maybe "Mr. Pharmacist" via college radio, which stood out to me as a cover I knew, doubles down on "LA" from TNSG, and might be Brix's biggest Fall album. It appears to have more Brix song credits than ever. And there's this California surf-noir guitar/bass sound, not unheard of in the earlier Fall, but never more prevalent than on Bend Sinister that could be attributable to Brix. Anyway, both albums still focused in a way that starts to unravel and/or lose steam with The Frenz Experiment and I'm Curious Oranj, or that's my case anyway and I'm sticking to it for now.
Also, still notable that their only proper Mancunian anthem, "Hit the North," doesn't appear before The Frenz Experiment ('88), when it appears they were losing sufficient steam as a band to produce engaging albums and were becoming preoccupied with turning into a non-hit singles band. They maybe couldn't figure their way out of that stuck-place for awhile. Another tension in Hanley's book is he and Brix really wanted to see The Fall get big hits. MES wanted that too but only on his incorrigible terms, which were way too weird and tuneless and hostile for Top 40.
4) So how big of asshole and creep was MES really?
In Hanley's telling, basically, MES was a drunk, so was Hanley eventually, but MES was drunk most the time, and an even bigger asshole when he wasn't drunk; according to Hanley throughout several parts of the 1980 to 1998 period you could measure how long MES had gone without a drink by his temper. At about 45 minutes it was always time to duck and cover.
MES was also proudly nativist. He acted like he was a local polka king, and fancied he had connections with the local mafia, according to Hanley. He was incessantly oppositional, hated most everything that wasn't Scottish or from Manchester. Right from the get-go, in "Bingo Master's Breakout," it's like he imagines he's MC at a local bingo night, a mouthy nutcase breaking from the script and ranting to the local hangers on in a language he imagines only fellow Mancunians can understand.
This gives MES and The Fall a certain rooted charm but also had its limits. When asked about Brexit shortly before his death he is reported to have expressed support for Brexit and insisted that next England should immediately go to war again with France.
MES drops N-words in songs. I know of a couple instances. Once as "obligatory N-word plural," qualifying it as a scorned social role, not necessarily Black. And another time in relation to the Irish, I think. So I've never caught him using it in direct reference to a Black person but the N-word metaphor as a trigger word is part of MES's vocabulary, for sure. And maybe the school teacher in me but I can't hear it without cringing defensively. On the other hand, The Fall played in several Rock Against Racism benefit concerts back in the day, even though MES became a total crank about the music benefit concert scene once it blew up in the '80s. And MES relates with pride, true or not, that Bo Diddley once told him that The Fall were his favorite English group.
MES was also a serial homophobe in his lyrics, as I've alluded before, but nothing, thankfully, more insulting or criminal comes out in Hanley's long account. You get the impression early on he felt menaced by the aggressive interests of gay men, which as long as no one got hurt strikes me as funny. MES fleeing his gay fans. Another group to disdain with his petty hatreds.
As for women, Brix looks like a post-punk trophy wife to be sure, and MES was from the early '80s on mostly aloof and imperious with his bands, but he was also always bringing his girlfriends into the band, often to the chagrin of the rest of the old hands. Also then perhaps reflecting a small check on his tyrannical tendencies.
In Hanley's account MES is frequently throwing stuff in fits of rage, acting like a "Little Hitler" around shows, bossing people around, spitting invective. He throws pipsqueak publicists out of The Fall's backstage tour space on the regular. But MES's victims were typically, as the saying goes, and as it goes with most misanthropes, the people closest to him.
5) Finally, feeling more generous this time around with The Fall, here's their late classic phase again. (The Brix years, basically.) When they're scoring theatrical productions and going on TV. They still look awkward, then and now. It's their glammy pop phase, Smith in purple, Hanley looking like he's dressed for church, and Brix adding the LA glam punk Blondie wannabe look to our awkwardly turned out provincial northern lads.
But what an impossibly insider-baseball catchy post-punk doomed bid at a pop record. "Big New Prinz" ('88) is so preposterously not a Top 40 record and so undeniably a Fall record that you imagine maybe it was a big hit record. But, not quite, peaking at 59; "There's a Ghost in My House" was their actual chart peak reaching 30 in 1987. This was the best The Fall could do when they were actually trying to sell out. A triumph of style and personality. The tune has got that clap and stomp along Fall tempo, the choppy repetition, the compellingly postpunk tribal rumble of bass and drums. The noir guitar riffing is pro forma but encases the snotty attitude of a combustible pop song concoction. And then MES on the mic:
Check the record
Check the record
Check the guy's track record
Check the record
Check the guy's rock record
Then the band chanting in the background:
He is not appreciated
And then follows a salute to the legend, Slang King, The Big New Prinz:
Drink the long draught down
Drink the long draught
Drink the long draught down for the Big Priest!
He, apparently, drink too many long draughts down but is now a marvel for how long he actually did last as a postpunk Hip Priest, a proto-postpunk rapper, as if he were barking and shrieking into a bullhorn on a street corner, an oppositional crank and earworm artist to the very end!
Ever wondered why Pink Floyd never made a disco track? Everyone else did in the 1970s. Or one better or more than "Another Brick in the Wall," anyway. This 1980 Italo-disco workout might satisfy your curiosity. Easy Going are named after a gay club in Rome. They put out a handful of records between 1978 and 1980 and sound here like Floyd doing some robotic disco. No dance floor liftoff crescendos but a suitably hypnotic assembly line groove with some cutting edge 1980 electronic disco moves.
Bonus track: A goofy and energetic spin on Giorgio Moroder's electro-disco. And another significant subgenre deposit of Italo-disco or Euro-disco early 1980s. Hyper bouncy chirping tempos and rolling TV show synth fanfare. I adore pop disco instrumentals. "Plastic Doll," Dharma (1982)
"The Pop Group has this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything," once said Vivien Goldman, journalist, member of The Flying Lizards, and Chrissie Hynde's NME London flatmate in the late '70s.
The Pop Group were the first post-punk band or in that conversation, anyway. On paper they were irresistible, for their hilariously blunt agitprop titles alone: Learning to Cope with Cowardice; As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade; For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They were also very into Black music; members eventually formed relationships with On-U-Sound records that has lasted into the 21st century; a label devoted to reggae and dub and related beat music. In the burgeoning punk era British pop press of the late 1970s The Pop Group were a prototype post-punk band. So hot they were on the cover of NME before they even had a record.
And Mark Stewart's voice is the unmistakeable calling card of The Pop Group and Stewart's subsequent outfit, Mark Stewart & the Maffia, and in its loutish way a punk rock monument in its own right. Like a drunken pirate, inflamed with bitter lamentation. Like a 17th century ranter or 19th century romantic poet, caterwauling against the void. Stewart's maybe too smart and didactic and political for a goth icon but he carries on in gothic histrionics anyway. He grabs your attention, whether you like it or not. He'd probably make a great street corner preacher if he wasn't such an angry humanist. He often wails through a bullhorn like a street preacher, even if you'd have to really play close attention to make out much of what he is howling or muttering about.
Which is part of his achievement, turning his tuneless warble into this big scenery-chewing personality, apoplectic about the human surrender to entropy and passivity, or the placid indifference to the poly-crises raging all around us. Stewart is not having any of it and has some things to say.
In your face vocals are a common if not universal feature of punk rock singing, of course. And by such criteria alone Stewart is on a very short list of great punk rock singers. But, it should be noted for the same reasons, this makes anything with Stewart's voice impossible to listen to as background music, how I must admit I do most my music listening anymore. The dude will not blend into the music; or tends to "dominate the frame," is how producer Dennis Bovell once put it.
But in small doses, songs, Stewart's hectoring, shamanistic and dramatically delirious spells are cast; "We Are Time," "Where There's a Will There's a Way," "She's Beyond Good and Evil," etc. And maybe contrary to what you might expect from such a big personality Stewart is actually into the collaboration and band thing. I've never had a full blown crush on any Stewart album but there are times when nothing quite hits the spot like one of Stewart's dub-heavy funky free-jazz political jeremiads.
And this be, I'm afraid, one of those times.
A live record of The Pop Group from the '00s is titled "Idealists in Distress from Bristol." Mark Stewart is an idealist in distress and a post-punk original.
"Rob a Bank" (1980): Robin Hood as Punk Rocker.
"Where There's a Will There's a Way" (1980): Punk-funk, post-punk, perverted disco, etc.
"I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/'Til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," William Blake.
My short playlist case for Chrome as underground proto-cyberpunk musical missing link to Erik Davis's High Weirdness in California in the 1970s.
Damon Edge, creator of Chrome, after recording Visitation, 1976, their debut, sent the record to Warner Brothers but they rejected it. They told Edge it sounded like a "messed up Doors album." He took this as a compliment, of course. I might want to add a 'messed up stag Jefferson Airplane' but, yes, very apt. This is the only Chrome album that has such a bad '60s hangover vibe and isn't yet characteristically post-punk.
What if NYC's band Suicide lived in the Bay Area and had a thing for sci-fi Alien Soundtracks, consider Chrome's second album that came out in 1978? "Chromosome Damage" might be a worst case scenario. Bad trip psychedelia meets DIY tech. Helios Creed joins the band on the second album to solidify the nucleus of Edge and Creed through Chrome's classic period, Alien Soundtracks to 3rd from the Sun (1982).
"Zombie Warfare (Can't Let You Down)," off Chrome's '79 album Half Machine Lip Moves. Maybe their best album but there are several other legit contenders. As live music fantasies go Half Machine Chrome double-billed with the Wipers, not inconceivable, generates sci-fi psychedelic punk rock mind-melding live music energies. Cum feel the noize.
Here's Chrome, if I'm not mistaken, and I could very well be, but from what I could gather, 1980, "unreleased studio outtake," so tossed out but, more significantly, tossing off seemingly effortlessly a prototype of a particular feedback heavy guitar band emo-screamo vocal style that anticipates bands like Husker Du and Nirvana and Guided by Voices. Although, I can't say for sure how much actual guitar Chrome uses in this take because all the instrumentation sounds, as usual, heavily treated and filtered. Still, more rootsy and soulful than typical Chrome.
Chrome's New Wave bid, "Animal," off Red Exposure, 1980. I admire the boldly abstracted pop move but understand longtime fans find it a slight sell-out.
From the 1981 Chrome album, Blood On The Moon, another album contender. "The Need." Chrome's mature sound is a visionary amalgam of jittery punk, bad trip psychedelia, space rock, and a kind of space rock musique concrete that would morph into industrial music in the 1980s. Creed's noir guitar sound also a big influence on Sonic Youth.
I've tried less successfully with Chrome before. There is a muted quality to the production that makes everything sound distorted and staticky and so alienated and impenetrable but once you stop trying to get to some clear narrative center the sculpted, conceptual, abstracted shards of muted noise rock are catchy. Some wag on youtube mused, "Chrome are for Hawkwind fans into industrial music." That sounds about right to me.
Chrome are a combo of psychedelia, punk rock, and obsessive uses of DIY technology. High-low weirdness from San Francisco, California, in the 1970s. Hardcore fans seem to favor '82's 3rd from the Sun as a kind of aesthetic culmination but my sense of the album is it's when they settle into a more conventional dark metal sound and lose some of the weird charm of their earlier records. Edge leaves the band and moves to Paris in '83, ending what I'll call their classic period.
Very rough video from 1977. Devo still working out their costumes; going for a Robin Williams look circa Mork & Mindy. But rocking out like twisted punk rockers. They're feeling each other out, locking in, winding up the tension and rocking out like they invented a new robotronic punk superdrug. Very confident. Tweakers tight. Hailing from Akron, Ohio, once upon a time Rubber Capital of the World, Devo go from Kent State to "Rust Belt" ur-text New Wave '80s chart champions. Here they are on the verge of breaking out. Also fine example of the robotic, herky-jerky, neurotic nerd spazzing dance style characteristic of New Wave, especially the stuff with any kind of electronic sci-fi art school performative theatrical keyboards slant.
Or this one, again, very early and crude but at Max's Kansas City in NYC the summer of 1977. Landmark event on the rock era timeline: Devo performing for Eno and Bowie and industry flak before recording their stone cold classic debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo?, at some local NYC studio. Devo had been together since '73 and were seasoned enough but still what stands out here is their moxie and tightness. Charging into NYC and Max's with such nerdy swagger.
I saw them on their 1980 Freedom of Choice tour, at the old Paramount in Portland. It was rock 'em sock 'em electro dance music with jarring, colorful, pop culture montages on the big screen behind the band. Fun show. But maybe the end of their peak, as their albums seemed to drop off in quality thereafter. They began as a midwest nerd response to punk rock and end up as essential an ingredient to New Wave music as you're going to find, with Blondie and B-52's and Talking Heads and XTC and Human League and acts like that.
Devo belongs in a big salad of the best New Wave music circa 1977 to 1983.
Albert Otto Hirschman on Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation:
"As Karl Polonyi showed memorably in The Great Transformation (1944), the English Poor Laws, especially as supplemented and reinforced by the Speenhamland Act of 1795, represented a last ditch attempt to reign in, through public assistance, the free market for labor and its effects on the poorest strata of society. By supplementing low wages, particularly in agriculture, the new scheme was helpful in ensuring the social peace and in sustaining domestic food production during the age of the Napoleonic wars.
But once the emergency was over [Napoleonic wars], the accumulating drawbacks of the system of combining relief and wages came under strong attack. Supported by belief in the new political economy "laws" of Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo, the reaction against the Speenhamland Act [protecting poor agricultural workers] became so strong that in 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act (or "New Poor Law") fashioned the workhouse [debtor's prison labor] into the exclusive instrument of social assistance....
It was not long before this new regime aroused in turn violent criticism. As early as 1837 Disraeli inveighed against it in his election campaign: "I consider that this Act [of 1834] has disgraced the country more than any other upon record. Both a moral crime and a political blunder, it announces to the world that in England poverty is a crime."
In E.P. Thompson's retrospective judgement, "the Act of 1834...was perhaps the most sustained attempt to impose an ideological dogma, in defiance of human needs, in English history."
In Polanyi's history the "great transformation" in 1834 is a takeover, modern economic rationalizing, free enterprise ideology, and dominating Laissez-faire politics and the British empire setting the political economic standard and exchange rates around the world, essentially separating and elevating economics in political administration over other human needs in society, and to considerable corrosive effects, as Polanyi laments. By his lights, 1834, was in fact not so great a transformation at all. It was, basically, more like a hinge event, a fateful turning point, and marks the solidification of the oppressive politics that goes along with the development of classical liberal economic theory. Bentham and Malthus lead the debates and, especially the latter, demagogs Social Darwinism decades before Darwin: supporting poor relief is subsidizing the unfit and increasing scarcity pressures on the productive.
But there was also, yeah, an almost immediate Polanyi "double-movement" response, and no sooner is the Act of 1834 law, abandoning and/or imprisoning the poor, then working classes are protesting and pushing for voting rights and better working conditions. Asymmetric war ensues, to be sure, with no equal Newtonian reaction, not even close, grinding poverty, get-rich bubbles and brutal busts, worker's fighting for living wages, often against state or private militias, but enough people are getting by and getting ahead expanding on the great technological innovations of the day (electricity, indoor plumbing, soap, etc) and great migrations to the west in the States and South America and Australasia to stave off revolution.
Or until two massive world wars of the early 20th century, actually in an important sense culminating what was started in the 1834 end to the poor laws, cutthroat competition drunk on innovations in war technology and nearly a century of imperialist global gunboat diplomacy and trade-by-war profiteering finally culminates the industrial revolution with a couple of massively shattering industrial world wars. And especially because of the world wide great depression, precipitated by market bubble excesses, mind you, that was sandwiched between these two devastating wars.
These great transformations were great for exposing the crucial role the government plays in the economy, during war, and when the economy crashes, suggesting the possibility of re-integrating economics and politics with all of society's needs, a new political economic model of leadership Polanyi calls "embedded liberalism." The New Deal order was "embedded liberalism," and delivered about half a century of the best shared prosperity growth numbers the country knows. And so, supposedly, was "embedded liberalism" the language of the Bretton Woods international order set-up after WW2 in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. But, notably, these global institutions were pushing hard by the 1960s, by contrast, for neoliberal privatizing reforms long before Great Britain or the US handed over the keys to corporate rule again.
But, at any rate, by 1980, neoclassical, free market fundamentalism strikes back triumphantly, Republicans taking the Whitehouse and cutting taxes on big businesses while cutting social spending, and abandoning unions and workers to credit card debt and health care bankruptcies. And by the 1990s the big business corporate lobbies have turned against big environmental reforms and the bottom falls out of the working middle classes, wages stalling at 1979 levels into the 21st century.
Post-punk Amerindie guitar band Boston legends 1979 to 1985. "Peking Spring" was a local hit in '79 but the first I heard Mission of Burma was a 7" vinyl single, "Academy Fight Song," I bought with my hard earned dough at Singles Going Steady in Portland, OR in '80. Loved the bad college roommate tirade in it; I'm not your academy, your school, your philosophy, club, etc. Prep school punk; real Catcher in the Rye stuff; i.e., catchy, angry, and self-righteous punk declaration of independence. In an interview much later Clint Conley, the songwriter, says he was trying to do a Talking Heads song. And, indeed, there is a jittery New Wave-y pop quality to the song they rarely if ever return to in later records.
Back in the day I was a little underwhelmed by their next record and first EP, Signals, Calls, and Marches. There were standout tracks. "All World Cowboy Romance." And I like "(That's When I Reach For My) Revolver," although, apparently, most other musicians and artists think it is Burma's signature song. It's the most covered of their songs. I get this, I think, but actually prefer another version of the same song they do later on Vs, their only album, '82, or only album in their original post-punk era incarnation, at any rate, called "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate." Which is a sort of a punk rock Trustfall-song or an inside-out love song that Burma plays with all their scrappy might. Rocking out is in the ear of the beholder, of course, but these guys play music loud and hard. The principle reason they disbanded after a '83 tour, not forgetting the live album of a tour they put out in '85 as the maybe underrated The Horrible Truth About Burma, was because the Tinnitus in Roger Miller's hearing was getting so bad he couldn't continue to be around loud music so much anymore. Their material is heavy, dour, and obviously hard work, if a pulverizingly effective sonic force. But the exhilaration in "Certain Fate" is gleeful and rhapsodic. And in keeping Conley has said of this song that he was trying to do the Buzzcocks.
Live version gives you a look at Burma in their prime, with their original audience and band supporters at the Bradford Ballroom in Boston in '83.
Rock critics, it is my memory, used to disparage instrumental psychedelic riff rock droning like this as tedious filler. This might be known as the English major bias in rock snob era rock criticism, 1960s to 1980s. No words here. Just sounds; that sound like Glenn Branca's symphony of guitars covering Tommy James' "Crimson and Clover." Moment of zen.
I even liked a lot some songs off drummer Peter Prescott's Volcano Suns albums. I think there is that sense that Burma never quite lived up to their potential. Never broke through, had a smash hit. No A+ records or albums. True, maybe. But "Academy Fight Song" and Vs. are close. They were one of those volatile the-sum-is-greater-than-the-parts post-punk bands, brilliant, erratic, too loud and dissonant for the radio or anything beyond college radio but a creative burst of their own post-punk noise rock thing.
"The public gets what the public wants/you made your bed you have to lie in it/I don't want what society's got"
The Jam actually might have been the NewWave-iest band to come out of class of '77 British punk rock. "Going Underground" debuted number one on the UK Singles Chart. It was working class hero songster Paul Weller's first number one as well. Between 1977 and 1982 The Jam scored 18 Top 40 singles and were pop stars. Their reputation rests mostly on their first four Mod revival albums, in the style of "Going Underground," Beatlesque, "And Your Bird Can Sing," snappy power pop but, really, they start racking up the Top Ten records and Number Ones when they begin working Motown into their New Wave sound. And although I do like several more of those early singles, "In The City," "All Around The World," "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight," Sound Affects, from '80, with "Start!" and "That's Entertainment," is ultimately I think my favorite Jam album.
So I'm on a mini-Chris Knox kick. He's special. This might be what you could call Beatlesque, and there will be people who will have a problem with that. Not me. "'Cause it's you that I love/And it's true that I love/It's love not given lightly." Named New Zealand's 13th best song all-time.
Bonus: And, FWIW, the Beatlesque was no cheap pop move but a longstanding feature of much of Knox's music. From 1980, his punk rock band Toy Love doing "Don't Ask Me":
Chris Knox in a 1978 punk rock mohawk. The Enemy were one of the first punk rock bands from Dunedin, and for some mark the beginning of the "Dunedin sound"; New Zealand's indie rock sound documented and spread by Flying Nun Records. Very crude live recording. A guy in the band, probably Knox, complains about not being ready to play for the people who traveled a 100 miles from Christchurch to see them. Flying Nun was formed in Christchurch. Proto-NZ punk rock.
Bonus: Knox's next band, Toy Love, was definitely ready to play. A power pop songfulness pokes out of their headstrong noize.
This is peak disco, in its way. I like the original but Jones' disco Dominatrix gives the song an anthemic kick. Sly & Robbie are crucial too. After they burned disco records in 1979 at a White Sox baseball game in Chicago and disco was canceled by Top 40, Jones, like everybody else, had to market their music as something other than disco but Jones' cold and bitchy vocal performance here is pure disco. Make no mistake, Grace Jones' was an original Disco Diva, and a slave to the rhythm for life. The video looks like a screen test for a James Bond movie, too campy by half but I remember her being okay in A View To Kill. As good as Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; or Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, anyway. Pop stars have set a low bar so far but seem to do best in films when they just try to have fun. Apparently, serious acting is hard to do. In my memory Jones has a sly robotic humor, not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies. Grace Jones is an iconic figure in pop culture and a product of '70s disco. Thank God It's Disco Friday.
