Jawbone And Air Rifle \/ In The Park \/ Sex \/ Leave The Capital \/ Spectre Verses Rector \/ Pay Your Rates \/ Impression Of J Temperance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i192.photobucket.com\/albums\/z149\/pengy1966\/pengy1966%20stuff\/KYPP669.jpg\")
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Chaos cassettes were quite well known in the early 1980’s amongst the\u00a0record store\u00a0visiting punk public for releasing great tapes by Discharge,\u00a0Vice Squad and Chron Gen. Here the label go out on a limb and release a cassette by a band so far removed from the early 1980’s ‘punk scene’, that no doubt some of the more narrow minded members of the great punk public of those days may well have thought rather unfairly that the label was “having a laugh John!”. Great band, great cassette.<\/p>\n
This release is a quality mixing desk tape originally recorded at a weekend of gigs in December 1980 at the old Aklam Hall\u00a0venue underneath the Westway in Ladbroke Grove, a venue which was then\u00a0renamed\u00a0as Bay 63 later on in the decade, and even further on the same decade was then renamed The Subterrania.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Interview below ripped off from frieze.com and\u00a0massively\u00a0altered via spell\u00a0and grammer check\u00a0by myself cos the version on that site\u00a0was so naff. You may continue to spot the odd error which I may of missed after spending\u00a075 minutes doing all the altering. Should not moan too much though as that site did the bulk of the work!<\/p>\n
Mark E Smith <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n`Yer got sixty hour weeks, and stone toilet back-gardens <\/span><\/p>\nPeter Cook\u2019s jokes, bad dope, check shirts, lousy groups <\/span><\/p>\nPoint their finger at America <\/span><\/p>\nDown pokey quaint streets in Cambridge <\/span><\/p>\nCycles our distant spastic heritage <\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s a gay red, roundhead, army career, grim head <\/span><\/p>\nIf we were smart we\u2019d emigrate.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n(Mark E Smith, The English Scheme, 1980) <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAs with Joyce, Beuys, and Wyndham Lewis, the historians will be arguing about Mark E (for Edward) Smith until the kingdom comes. 20th Century culture has been kept alive by the irritants which work their way under its skin. In this much, Wilde\u2019s late-Victorian aphorism, \u2018To be great, one must be misunderstood,\u2019 required a new century to prove its accuracy. Mark E Smith, who could so easily be the subject of a myriad Sunday supplement profiles, has remained a shadowy and mistrusted figure, silhouetted on the banks of the cultural mainstream. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAs our times appear to demand art terrorist outsiders, Smith has called the era\u2019s bluff by refusing easy routes to fashionable and commercially lucrative acceptance. Whilst Damien Hirst prepares to suspend his Turner prize in a vat of formaldehyde, Mark E Smith – unknown to many – continues to ply his trade as an independent musician, philosopher, historian, writer, wit and fly-in-the-ointment. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSmith formed the group, The Fall (after the Camus novel), in Manchester in 1977. At the time, he was working in Manchester Docks as a customs clerk. This was a time when the metropolitan impetus of punk rock was being challenged by the provinces. The deliquescing anarchy of the Sex Pistols and The Clash was giving way to the studied neurosis of Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire. But The Fall had no place – nor wanted one – in either camp. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFrom their inception, Smith\u2019s Fall were bloody-minded-outsiders, possessing an extraordinary-nary ability to get up noses. At a time when post-punk fashionablilty was about to disgrace itself with the saccharine posturing of new romanticism, The Fall looked like a cross between a class outing from Please Sir! and a crew of chagrined pipe-fitters on their afternoon off. In 1980, pop music was re-inventing itself as a kaleidoscope of carefully stylised factions; The Fall, immovable in their determination to remain aloof from the posturing of their peers, quickly earned not only incomprehension but also hostility. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn their early performances, they brought the volatility of a bad night in a Wakefield Working Men\u2019s Club to a scene which believed itself both to be self-contained and self policed. The rhetoric of The Fall was similar to suddenly finding oneself in a slanging match with a vituperative Mancunian lorry-driver. For this invective, The Fall have never been forgiven. Challenged with the notion that The Fall drew their menace from the twilight of punk rock, Smith replied with a dismissive sniff, \u2018Punk? Fuck that stuff. I wouldn\u2019t have it in the \u2018ouse!\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe\u00a0Live At The Witch Trials LP, was regarded as the death rattle of the 70s; this was music which seemed to deal with personal and political dissatisfaction in a manner which was both sinister and confrontational. By 1981, Public Image resembled a self-parody cabaret turn fit only for the chicken-in-the-basket circuit. The Fall, on the other hand, had made their sense of alienation a vital part of their art, laying the foundations for a creative process which has seen them through 15 LPs in as many years. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFor Mark E Smith, even irrelevance could be put to work for The Fall as a teenager; he would ride around Manchester on the top deck of a bus, shouting random words in a pointed manner at bewildered passers-by. \u2018Leper\u2019, \u2019Penguin\u2019 or, \u2018Grand motherf’ when delivered with the correct mixture of urgency and forethought, could obtain an effect that bordered on the sinister. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt was only a short step, aesthetically, from confusing Mancunian pedestrians with ordinary language to offending the music cognoscenti by challenging their self-satisfaction. Live At The Witch Trials was jarring and disjointed, making a virtue of its Northern bloody-mindedness:\u2019 We are The Fall! Northern white crap that talks back; we are not Black; tall; no boxes for us\/do not fuck us…\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAlready, Smith\u2019s campaign bore marked similarities to the BLAST Pan of Wyndham Lewis and the vorticist assault on inter-war Bloomsbury. Lewis was a Renaissance man without a culture vital enough to support the fulfillment of his talents. Similarly, Smith is locked in a position of trench warfare, blasting and bombardiering against a fashion-driven society which is indurate to all attitudes save its own conservative \u2018non-conformity\u2019. Thus, Smith is cast (again like Lewis) as a cat amongst pigeons, stalking the effete by saying the unspeakable. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nInterviewed 1979, Smith said: \u2018Nuking Russia might not be a bad idea as far as the bleedin\u2019world is concerned. They\u2019ve plunged a lot of people into miserable lives. You\u2019ve only got to be in East Germany to see it. It\u2019s a horrible way to live. It\u2019s like Middlesborough.\u2019 Again, in 1985: \u2018Live Aid? I smell a lot of Victorian bloody do-gooding about the whole thing. There are people in Hulme (Manchester) who are half starved, so why not send the aid to them? Never in a million years. And any country that can be invaded by the Italians must be a load of crap. Am I right?\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhilst Smith\u2019s polemic continues to affront every notion of political correctness, his audience recognises that his contrariness is merely a facet of a far more complex, and engaging, world vision. The ability to provoke and doubt, simultaneously, has often been cited as being fundamental to great art. Smith himself went some way to acknowledging this in 1988: \u2018Whenever I say anything, I often think that the opposite is true as well. Sometimes I think the truth is too fucking obvious for people to take. The possibilities are endless and people don\u2019t like that. They go for the average every time. Well, that doesn\u2019t interest me in the slightest.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\nFrom the very beginning, The Fall has been Mark E Smith\u2019s medium for expressing his unique world view: everything outside The Fall is meat for his stew. Within the chaos of The Fall, and within the oblique, humourous code of Smith\u2019s writing, there are precise patterns and a finely focussed lucidity. He assembles his lyrics in such a manner that found language, narrative, slang, double-talk, trigger phrases and rapid juxtapositions are combined to create a discourse which describes as it commentates. The style is not artless, as it may look, but the product of careful design. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u2018It\u2019s just precog,\u2019 says Smith. \u2018You write things down and you don\u2019t know what they mean but you know they\u2019re true and they come true later. It\u2019s not prophecy as such. It makes me laugh actually. I see things happening and I think, “Oh that reminds me of something.\u201d Turns out it\u2019s something I wrote five years ago. I wrote a song called, Zagreb Daylight two years ago. We were playing in Zagreb and l could feel this horrible, murderous shit in the air. I had a feeling that yobs were going to rule the earth. I\u2019m half one myself you see. Anyway, I wrote this thing about a man in a shop with a dwarf behind the counter. It didn\u2019t go down well at all. If it came out a month from now, people would say it\u2019s topical. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nLike Wyndham Lewis, Mark E Smith will suggest the existence of a conspiracy behind most manifestations of modern culture. In songs like Oswald Defence Lawyer, Kicker Conspiracy, Bug Day, The War Against Intelligence, Rowche Rumble and Riddler, Smith appears to endorse what Lewis meant by, \u2018the immense false-bottom underlying every seemingly solid surface.\u2019 Interviewed in 1990, Smith stated: \u2018It\u2019s natural to gripe at things like British Telecom. One time I was using the phone a lot and I dialed a number, and I could hear people munching sandwiches and talking about my last phone call. I actually rang the operator and said, \u2018Look, I\u2019m trying to dial a fucking number here and I can\u2019t get through because your people are talking about my phone calls. Have you got a bloody license to do this?\u2019 And she slammed the phone down on me!\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIf The Fall are both Smith\u2019s vision of the world and his means of describing it, then the strange and frightening world of The Fall is peopled with grotesque characters whom Smith has invented. These would include Joe Totale, J.Temperance, Wireless Enthusiast, Fiery Jack, The Man Whose Head Expanded, Hip Priest, Man With Chip, Carry Bag Man and Slang King. One gets the impression that Smith\u2019s livid imagination was incubating this cast since before The Fall began. In many ways, his writing for The Fall has served to fill in the biographies of these characters; at the same time, Smith will write pseudonymously under their names. On the sleeve of 1980\u2019s Totale\u2019s Turns, R.Totale XVIII pens a note entitled, \u2018Call Yourselves Bloody Professionals?\u2019 and concludes with the comment, \u2018This is probably the most accurate document of The Fall ever released, even though they\u2019ll have a hard time convincing their mams and dads about that, ha ha.\u2019 Interestingly enough, the remains of R. Totale\u2019s ancestor are described elsewhere as being found buried on a Welsh hillside complete with instructions to unleash the content of certain tapes upon the world. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhen asked to clarify this assessment of these characters, Smith cautiously sips his beer before replying, ‘Man With Chip still going strong on the chat show. Cheap TV stance, yeah. Oprah Winfrey. Heh! Heh! Magnus fucking Pyke!\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u2018We\u2019ve got repetition in our music and we\u2019re never gonna lose it,\u2019Smith announced in 1978. Whilst critics have yet to agree whether The Fall, musically, are a din or a sublime symphony, the roots of The Fall\u2019s mesmeric intensity lie in the practice of repetition. In the most compelling Fall songs the group merely provides an open structure through which Smith roams like a suspicious caretaker, flashing his torch from one empty dark room to another. This is best illustrated in 1988\u2019s Dog Is Life\/Jerusalem, a lyric which featured the unique songwriting credit of William Blake\/Mark E Smith. As the song approaches a narrative passage, the music is pared down to an unflinching pulse over which Smith declaims: \u2018I was walking down the street when I tripped up on a discarded banana skin\/and on the way down I caught the side of my head on a protruding brick, chip\/it was the government\u2019s fault\/ I was very let down with the Budget\/I was expecting a one million quid handout\/I was very disappointed\/it was the government\u2019s fault.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\nAs Smith explains, the idea of The Fall has always been to write intelligent lyrics over a raw, basic beat. \u2018That\u2019s never changed really. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOne thing we always get is, \u201cthis is their most commercial album for ages\u201d. In fact, the LPs have become less and less commercial over the years and I\u2019m quite proud of that. The problem with that is people get this idea that we\u2019re determined not to do well. Which isn\u2019t the case at all. So we get Top 30 singles and they won\u2019t even consider us for Top of the Pops. It\u2019s the last thing they want. I think there\u2019s a fear of The Fall in that respect. If people heard us, they\u2019d find us entertaining and stimulating. Intelligence is actively discouraged these days though isn\u2019t it?\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nInitially, the received idea of The Fall\u2019s audience was that of pale, spotty, adolescent males – bed-room misfits and train-spotters who wore anoraks with elasticated cuffs and lived off white bread sandwiches. The obscurity of The Fall appeared to demand supporters who were socially dysfunctional -the weird cousins of Clash fans. In time, however, The Fall have achieved a massive European following which covers all social groups from art world fashion victims to pot-bellied middle-aged rockers. <\/span><\/p>\n\u2018Fall audiences have always been a bit weird,\u2019 says Smith. \u2018Well, not weird actually. I think they\u2019re the salt of the earth. I get letters from kids in Wales. Their lives have been transformed by The Fall. I suppose, if you\u2019re on the dole in Wales, there\u2019s nowt else to do unless you\u2019re out burgling. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThese guys in Wakefield, miners and all that, they\u2019ve all grown up with wives and kids, and they\u2019ve been with us since 1978. They don\u2019t buy records anymore but they\u2019re still into The Fall, it means a lot to me. They read interviews I\u2019ve done and write me postcards saying, \u201cReel \u2018em in cock. The lads in the Wakefield Pit.\u201d Actually, we\u2019ve always caught the individuals. In Germany, we played this gig and the oldest man in the world was there. He must have been about ninety. Had grey hair down to his arse. He looked like God with a Fall LP under his arm. <\/span><\/p>\n\u2018It always annoys me when I hear other bands going on about how they\u2019re not a student group like The Fall. Student group? You must be fucking joking! I don\u2019t mean to sound prejudiced but, if you go to university, you\u2019re a bit daft anyway. I\u2019ve nothing against students, mind. We play student places quite a lot. You walk into the disco and there are all these kids on the dancefloorjigging around to Lynyrd Skynyrd records. When Slates (1981) came out, we lost our student audience overnight. I was fucking glad about that. <\/span><\/p>\n\u2018I feel a bit sorry for kids these days. They\u2019re obsessed with animals and all that that\u2019s quite nice I suppose. I’ve got two cats myself. But they\u2019re putting the frighteners on kids these days. Giving them anxieties they don\u2019t need. I saw something yesterday. It was horrible. These kids in tears about elephants. I blame the fucking teachers.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut, despite their position as a \u2018difficult\u2019 group already at odds with shifting musical fashions, The Fall\u2019s luddite tendencies have brought them into the focus of serious debate about contemporary art. \u2018Some of our stuff is art and some of it isn\u2019t,\u2019 Smith shrugs. \u2018We get it and we lose it like that as it happens. I think a lot of my writing is art but I\u2019m a bit shy about it and that\u2019s why it\u2019s not printed. I couldn\u2019t be so precious to force it on the public. I\u2019ve seen too many rock bands go out and pretend they\u2019re art. You get classed with them. I\u2019ve always been careful to keep away from all that. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u2018I\u2019d like to be considered as an artist but I don\u2019t want to get into David Byrne man, not knocking the guy, but he was never any good to begin with. They go for him in a big way out in America. He\u2019s not an artist like John Waters is an artist. l suppose Waters is a bit like me really; he takes trash, puts it together with what he thinks and does it very well But, basically, my attitude to life is to live. It\u2019s more important to be a man than an artist. I don\u2019t believe in me-artist syndrome. I think I stimulate people\u2019s brains by saying what I think. Always have done. But, when we tour America, we get people coming up to us saying, \u201cIf only you could be a bit more like Talking Heads.\u201d Well, we always had better backdrops than Talking Heads.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMark E Smith\u2019s writing anticipates and rejects academic criticism. Also, he has famously avoided offering analyses of either his records or his collaborative projects in theatre and dance. Of his play, Hey Luciani (1986) Smith says, concisely: \u2018It\u2019s like a cross between Me, Prisoner and Shakespeare. There\u2019s even bits that rhyme and stuff.\u2019 The more ambitious I Am Curious Orange (1986), a ballet with Michael Clark, dealing with the ascendancy of William Of Orange to the British throne, was summarised by Smith as, Me English get pissed off with their king, kick him out and get some Dutch bloke in.\u2019 As an historian, Mark E Smith possesses the self-assurance of AJP Taylor \u2018You don\u2019t hear much about Cromwell these days, despite the fact that he built England up to what it was. There used to be this statue of Cromwell outside Victoria Station, in Manchester, but they moved it and put it in some fucking park in Wythenshawe, behind some bush. Nobody knows about it!\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSmith, spokesman of the \u2018prole art threat\u2019, maintains a similar single-mindedness towards the traditionally sensitive topic of money. \u2018Fear is relative to how much you\u2019re earning and what kind of threat you\u2019re under. But I can live on a fucking quid a week, me. And I have done. But, if I suddenly made a load of it, I\u2019d buy a house. I don\u2019t like shopping and all that. I like nice clothes. A good pair of trousers when you can. You usually find in Britain that the scruffiest people are the richest. Have you noticed that?\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut would Smith invest, seriously, in art? \u2018Course I would. Italian stuff mainly. Chairs and stuff like that. If I had an awful lot of money, I\u2019d buy some of that Catholic stuff – Tinteretto, El Greco\u2026 I like the colour in those paintings. But what would I do with it all? I\u2019ve got the books and that anyway. I\u2019m well into Venetian art. They always had a bit of humour about them. Like, they\u2019d put a German soldier in the middle of Me Last Supper. Stuff like that. <\/span><\/p>\n\u2018I look at some of the things in frieze, like the stuff with the tin cans. I did all that in the fifth year at school. You\u2019d get these sixth formers with Pink Floyd sleeves under their arms doing this stuff with green blobs and brown blobs. They\u2019d be going, \u201cOh, it\u2019s about the economy and the Third World debt\u201d Then they\u2019d tell me that my stuff wasn\u2019t art but it were miles better than their fucking horrible blobs. Ten years later, they\u2019re doing it for themselves down in Chelsea. That\u2019s the tragedy of being a self taught artist.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nInevitably, Mark E Smith is faced with the danger of becoming as marginalised as Wyndham Lewis became is his later and most prolific years. As yet, however, The Fall remain a question mark in the history of art. But Smith continues to blast. <\/span><\/p>\n\u2018Manchester council had this \u201cBring Art To The People\u201d Day,\u2019 he concludes. \u2018They\u2019re all raving socialists that lot. There were five exhibitions in bars around the city. It was a kind of art pub crawl. They wanted me to kick it off, snip the ribbon and all that I thought our fame was going down last year so I decided to do my bit. You\u2019ve got to keep a high profile. It\u2019s that kind of business. Anyway, we were dragged around these bars and showed all this art. There was all this Factory stuff done by some bloke who won\u2019t get out of bed for less than \u00a35000. These sub-Warhol drawings of Carry On characters. I\u2019m thinking, \u201cThis is crap!\u201d but you don\u2019t want to be rude about it, cus it\u2019s all middle aged people. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThey\u2019re saying, \u201cOh Mark, I never knew you were into art.\u201d I was going, “Oh yeah, I love a bit of art, me. I\u2019m into Tinzeretto and all that,\u201d and their mouths dropped. <\/span><\/p>\n\u2018So, we got to the third bar. By this time, the band were dropping off one by one and going home for a bit to eat. I stuck around and I was trying to make an effort \u2018cus there were all these art writers from the famous papers. I was talking to one woman about Wyndham Lewis and she went into this rant for about twenty minutes about how he was a fascist and all that. I was saying, \u201cAlright luv, we all know that. But at least he apologised for his mistakes.\u201d Then they were asking me which ones I liked. So I pointed to this painting on the wall – a black and white thing with barmen wearing leather coats and all these grotesque characters hanging about. It looked a lot like an Otto Dix. Then this bloke from the Council ambles over and says, \u201cActually Mark, that\u2019s not part of the exhibition\u201d. Turns out its just part of the wall Heh! Heh! It was easily the best though.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMichael Bracewell and Jon Wilde<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Crap Rap (actually Middle Mass) \/ English Scheme \/ New Face In Hell \/ That Man \/ Older Lover \/ Male Slags (actually Slates) \/ Gramme Friday (actully Prole Art Threat) \/ Container Drivers Jawbone And Air Rifle \/ In The Park \/ Sex \/ Leave The Capital \/ Spectre Verses Rector \/ Pay Your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-downloads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2217,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/2217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i192.photobucket.com\/albums\/z149\/pengy1966\/img456.jpg\")
<\/p>\n