The Otherwise

by Mark E Smith

  By the time of his death, he had been writing lyrics for over forty years. The earliest text cited here is ‘Futures and Pasts’, which was written in 1976. Whereas the final ‘Couples vs. Jobless Mid 30s’ was composed in 2017. It's tempting to say that over the decades Mark had been evolving his style. But in reality his unique manner of using words and crafting narrative arrived fully formed at the very start of his career.

  Listen to the earliest recordings of The Fall, and you can hear that lyrically everything is already manifest: the down to earth North Western cynicism mixed with science fiction concepts, ideas borrowed and repurposed from classic gothic literature, a fascination with heightened states, psychic energies and multiple time lines, an ear for unusual turns of phrase, archaic words and attention grabbing word clusters, an eye for unlikely characters and a propensity for divergent storylines.

  During the last decade of The Fall's existence, aware that he had come to be viewed by some as a kind of post punk poet laureate, Mark elected to short circuit matters. His vocal delivery had always been rich in character, low in musicality, but now it became ever more raw and untamed. Here was rock and roll vocalization rooted in the guttural delivery of Don Van Vliet, but delivered with such vitriolic force it seemed to share a currency with the savage ululations of Diamanda Galas. It was as if unintelligibility had become an aim.

  Yet, even as he was ruthlessly cutting back on both his word count and his clarity, Mark could not help but generate texts which still bristled with narrative hooks, improbable connections and intriguing references.

  I should emphasise that I'm not claiming the following 25 examples represent the very best Fall songs. Although I would venture that at least some of them do. Rather, my intention is to discuss what I consider to be some of Mark's finest texts, purely in terms of how they operate as narrative fiction. What I offer here are of course merely my own interpretations. Other equally valid perspectives are most certainly available.

  I should also mention that I am in no way suggesting that Mark's lyrics can be decoded in a way that reveals all their secrets and hidden meanings. They can't. Because impenetrability was hard wired into their very construction. Not even Mark himself knew the true meaning of all his words. Whilst some of his lyrics or sections of lyrics were keenly crafted, others were the result of him speaking off the top of his head. He would then transcribe his words from recordings. These might be used pretty much verbatim, or cut in with other more structured ideas.

  He also included lines or phrases that were deliberately meaningless.

  “I always try and put a little crack in it,” Mark remarked, in a 1984 interview for the book Tape Delay. “And I always try and put lyrics that mean nothing and like jumble it all up”.

  So it's not simply a case of lyrics that invite multiple readings. It's actually a case of lyrics that cannot have one definitive reading, because any absolute sense was hidden even from their creator. Consequently, you may take it as read that what follows barely scratches the surface.

  If nothing else, I hope this encourages you to go online and read Mark's words in isolation. At the end of each entry, I've picked out a key line from the text that I believe demonstrates the fact you are in the hands of a master storyteller.

  By the way, I am perfectly aware that the main purpose of these kinds of assertions and lists is to provide the reader with something to disagree with.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  THE

  1970S

  ‘Futures and Pasts’

  One of the three earliest complete lyrics Mark wrote in 1976 (along with ‘Repetition’ and ‘Oh! Brother’). It's a series of narrative fragments that begins with the arresting lines ‘I was in a sleeping dream, when a policeman brought my mother home’. This feels like a traumatic image from childhood: ‘I didn't scream, I was too old for that.’

  Then it spins into a drunken dream experienced much later in life. It's almost as if the narrator is seeing the same policeman again, but this time he's lost in a fog. It might be the fog of time, or could it be some kind of supernatural occurrence? Certainly the repeated line ‘I understand but I don't see it’ is suggestive of a connection with a presence or energy that is beyond normal perception.

  The narrator remarks that he is able to read the faces of men and women much older than he, and divine the secrets of their lives. Mark often stated that he could read people by their faces. The text also contains the earliest lyrical example of his distrust of nostalgia, when he remarks that if someone is pining for their childhood, they should remind themselves how much they hated it at the time.

  key line: ‘At the bottom of the street it seemed there was a policeman lost in the fog.’

  ‘Various Times’

  Here is another early example of Mark's fascination with temporality as a narrative device. There are three different time zones in the story. Firstly the past: Germany in 1940, where a disaffected youth becomes a guard at Belsen concentration camp, and witnesses ‘An old Jew's face dripping red.’

  Then we're in the present: 1978. Following a report of a snippet of private conversation, the narrator informs us that he has a deep disdain for conformity and is planning to drop out of society.

  Next we're in the future, in the year ‘one nine eighty.’ This is a dystopian future, a bombsite of ‘black windows and smoky holes.’ A wounded man drinks weak beer in a world where they have ‘got rid of time.’ It seems time itself has become navigable, as we're informed that Dr Doom has just got back from the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. This is a nod to the 1976 Spider-man story featured in the comic Marvel Team-Up (issues 41–44) involving time travel, super-villain Dr Doom and the Scarlet Witch, partially set during the witch trials.

  The lyric also makes a telling reference to Ursula K. Le Guin's 1971 science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven. In the book, a man named George Orr is capable of creating a special energy in his dream state. This power is harnessed by a well-meaning scientist to change reality itself. Orr dreams up alternate worlds, yet each is more problematic than the last. For example, when Orr is instructed to dream of a world without racism, it turns the skin of the entire world's population a uniform grey.

  Mark remarked that he'd felt proud of the lyric to ‘Various Times’ when he wrote it, and perhaps surprisingly that the structure had been inspired by the Shangri-Las’ 1966 single ‘Past, Present and Future’.

  key line: ‘But I'm the sort that gets out the bath with a dirty face.’

  ‘A Figure Walks’

  Like the writings of M.R. James, this tale of mounting dread concerns the horror that may lurk just out of the corner of your eye. Indeed, the title itself sounds like it belongs in a compendium of James's short stories. Mark stated that it was “written during a long walk home wearing an anorak which restricted vision by two thirds.” The notion that it was an anorak, that most drab and quotidian of garments, which initiated the creeping unease is typical of Mark's sense of the macabre hiding behind banality.

  The narrator's fear that the figure may kill him leads to the line ‘A quick trip to the ice house.’ This is suggestive of a mortuary where the corpses are kept at a very low temperature. It's also possibly a reference to the 1978 BBC1 television ghost story for Christmas The Ice House. The drama, which had aired just a few weeks before ‘A Figure Walks’ received its on-stage debut, concerns a series of strange disappearances at a health spa.

  Meanwhile, the narrator's description of the figure itself is deeply unpleasant: ‘It's got eyes of brown, watery, nails of pointed yellow, hands of black carpet.’ In an interview with the NME, Mark stated that the figure was in fact a monster from outer space.

  “I think of it as my big Stephen King outing.”

  key line: ‘Thought brought the drought about.’

  ‘Flat of Angles’

  Mark described this as “an objective story song”, whilst his sleeve notes to the Dragnet album state “It's about the criminal elements who have no choice whether to go out
or stay in. Reminds us of tea and The Daily Mirror.”

  A man who has murdered his wife is hiding out in a small rented room. His father-in-law appears in a newspaper, holding up a photo of him. The murderer knows the police are closing in. The line ‘His veins are full of evil serum’ hints that he may also be injecting narcotics. He spends his days surrounded by dirty laundry, watching soap operas, feeling increasingly oppressed by the claustrophobic angles of the flat.

  Perhaps like Walter Gilman, the protagonist in H.P. Lovecraft's 1932 story The Dreams in the Witch House, the murderer's sanity is being tested by his rented loft apartment's strange geometry. There is also a suggestion of defeat in the title. As in: ‘I'm flat out of angles.’ Finally, the murderer is tempted outside by the sunshine, but by now his paranoia has become all-consuming.

  The use within the lyric of the word ‘Dragnet’ (also the title of a US TV crime show that had aired in the UK during Mark's youth) is a reminder that although his work would always retain a distinct flavour of the North West of England, Mark was far from immune to American influences. Indeed this narrative could be said to play out like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

  key line: ‘The streets are full of mercenary eyes.’

  ‘Spectre vs. Rector’

  This is one of Mark's most remarkable texts, and it opens with an incantation and exhortation. It calls upon the horror authors M.R. James and Peter Van Greenaway and exploitation film producer Roger Corman, as well as Ray Milland, star of Corman's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's Premature Burial. But perhaps most significantly, it also calls upon Yog-Sothoth. In the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft Yog-Sothoth is the all-seeing ancient god locked outside the universe.

  What follows is the story of a Hampshire Rector possessed by a spectre. When the rector receives a visit from a detective, things take a violent turn. The detective struggles with the rector, who is under the control of the spectre. As the detective is blown against the wall, the spectre revels in its own power, uttering the words ‘I've waited since Caesar for this!’ This tells us the evil is a very ancient force indeed.

  An unnamed hero arrives, an exorcist who claims to have ‘saved a thousand lives’. In the tumult, the spectre enters the exorcist, but ‘the possession is ineffectual.’ By the end, all we know for sure is the rector has died, the detective (now referred to as the inspector) has been ‘driven half insane’, and the exhausted exorcist has retreated to the hills. The whereabouts of the spectre are unknown.

  Crucially, we have been made aware that the story is incomplete. After all, the different sections are titled Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Scene Five, Part Six and Last Scene. Like the narrator in M.R. James's ‘Count Magnus’, we have been presented with a body of documentation from which we must piece together an understanding of what has transpired.

  key line: ‘The rector lived in Hampshire, the spectre was from Chorazina.’*

  THE

  1980S

  ‘New Face in Hell’

  ‘New Face in Hell’ comes over like a highly compressed Graham Greene short story. In fact this is probably Mark's most straightforward narrative text. A wireless enthusiast – most likely a man operating a CB radio – finds himself unexpectedly listening in on a government plot. He decides to call on his neighbour and inform him of his discovery.

  The description of the wireless enthusiast being ‘secretly excited’, as he wants ‘friendship and favour of’ his neighbour may imply that he's hopeful for a romantic or erotic relationship. The neighbor is also described as ‘a hunter’.** However, upon arrival next door, the wireless enthusiast discovers his neighbour has been poisoned.

  As ‘a prickly line of sweat covers enthusiast's forehead’, he experiences the realisation that his neighbour has been killed by government agents. There is something especially pleasing here, in the description of he and his neighbour having talked of the government ‘on cream porches.’ Within moments, a government agent has arrived and arrested the wireless enthusiast. He is being framed for the death.

  Although the story has a satisfying conclusion, it definitely feels like we are only being shown a couple of scenes from the middle of a much wider narrative. What happened in the lead up to the events described? And what will ensue now the wireless enthusiast must stand trial?

  key line: ‘A muscular, thick skinned, slit-eyed neighbour is at the table.’

  ‘Impression of J. Temperance’

  This is a horror story, in which interspecies breeding results in a frightening abomination. A local dog breeder, by the name of Jermyn Temperance, is treated with hatred by almost everyone. He has intercourse with a bitch and, when it goes into labour, he calls Cameron, a vet and one of Temperance's only two friends. The bitch gives birth to a hideous hybrid being, causing the vet to flee and phone his wife in terror.

  In many ways, the new-born being resembles Temperance, yet its rat-like features render it horrifying. ‘The next bit is hard to relate’ says Mark. But the mention of ‘brown sockets, purple eyes’ tells us something is dreadfully wrong.

  The story's final lines are a classic example of unresolved horror: the creature simply slips out the door: the nightmare will continue. As a keen fan of H.P. Lovecraft, it seems highly likely that Mark took the name Jermyn from Lovecraft's 1920 story The Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, in which the ‘hero’ discovers that he himself is a descendant of interspecies breeding.

  key line: ‘His hideous replica, scrutinised little monster, disappeared through the door.’

  ‘The N.W.R.A.’

  This is the closing piece on The Fall's Grotesque album, a collection that saw Mark's storytelling skills take centre stage. ‘The N.W.R.A.’ (‘The North Will Rise Again’) is his longest narrative text, and certainly his most detailed, including sequences in Soho, Manchester, Darlington, Newcastle, Teesside Docks and Edinburgh.

  The story concerns a mass uprising in the North of England, and the narrator (at least initially) is one Joe Totale, who describes himself as the ‘yet unborn son’ of Roman Totale XVII. This would seem to indicate the narrative is a vision of future events, related from the perspective of either a fetus or a disembodied spirit.

  Mark had previously used the character of Roman Totale XVII to write the sleeve notes for The Fall's live album Totale's Turns (It's Now Or Never) and the single ‘Fiery Jack’. The character had also appeared in that song's B-side ‘Second Dark Age’, where he is referred to as ‘The bastard offspring of Charles I and the Great God Pan’. The Great God Pan is also the title of a novella by the Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen, whom Mark was a great admirer of.

  The northern uprising itself is doomed to ‘turn out wrong’ when a business acquaintance of Totale by the name of Tony becomes involved and corrupts the cause. This may well be a joking reference to Factory Records’ director Tony Wilson.

  In one particularly vivid scene, we learn R. Totale is hiding out underground, wearing an ostrich mask. The description also includes the lines ‘body a tentacle mess.’ Once again, this cannot help but summon thoughts of the creatures of H.P. Lovecraft, whilst confirming that Totale is not human in origin.

  key line: ‘The Arndale had been razed, shop staff knocked off their ladders, security guards hung from moving escalators.’

  ‘Winter (Hostel-Maxi)’

  A tale of spiritual possession, described in the press release for the Hex Enduction Hour album as concerning “an insane child who is taken over by a spirit from the mind of a cooped-up alcoholic, and his ravaged viewpoints and theories.”

  The narrator witnesses the child – referred to only as ‘The mad kid’ – walking with his mother, who is a cleaning lady, accompanied by their large, black dog. As they pass ‘the alcoholics's dry-out house’, the boy becomes agitated, demanding to be given the dog's lead. The narrator recalls how, two weeks earlier, the mad kid had spoken aggressively to he and a friend, shouting “I'll take both of you on!”

  In the dry-out house, an alcoholic n
amed Manny is being pressured into putting on a medallion. It may be in recognition of his attempts to stay sober, although, as we were informed earlier that Manny is ‘working off his hangover’ it seems more likely that the medallion is some kind of magickal artifact designed to initiate the spiritual transference. Either way ‘His soul went out of window, over the lawn and ran into the mad kid.’

  Despite the observation that the child has returned from the ‘backwards kids’ party’ the narrator acknowledges he may well be a genius: ‘The mad kid had 4 lights. The average is 2.5 lights.’

  Fall drummer Karl Burns has claimed that the ‘mad kid’ referred to a boy who had offered to take on both he and Mark in a fight. If this is to be believed, then it seems possible that Mark was rationalising the two outbursts he had witnessed: the offer of a fight and the demand to be given the dog's lead, as the moments when the boy was taken over by the ravaged spirit of an alcoholic.

  key line: ‘There was a feminist's Austin Maxi parked outside, with anti-nicotine, anti-nuclear stickers on the side.’

  ‘Wings’

  Here is another tale set in more than one time zone. The narrator accidentally acquires the ability to travel through time, when he purchases ‘a pair of flabby wings’ – a phrase ripe with Lovecraftian revulsion.