Fall Monday Playlist #10 - Horror Stories
Hey you horror face!
M R James, Arthur Machen, H P Lovecraft
Slight change of plan: as last week's list was focused on the music, I thought we'd do a more lyrics-related selection this time. Smith's literary influences are as well-known as his musical ones; the the work of the three gentlemen above, for example, informed his work equally as much as the sound of Can, Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground. Here are ten of the best Fall horror stories.
Lay of the Land
TWAFWO's opener has a distinct folk horror flavour, reminiscent of stone circles and pagan rituals. Whilst there is a Lovecraft reference (‘eldritch house’), the inspiration comes mostly from Quatermass, The ‘lay, lay’ chant was taken from the 1979 ITV series starring John Mills as Professor Bernard Quatermass, a character who first appeared in 1953’s The Quatermass Experiment.
Jawbone and the Air-Rifle
More folk horror. Smith's tale of the rabbit killer's graveyard encounter with a grave-keeper gets very Wicker Man, with villagers dancing around prefabs and ‘suck[ing] on marrowbones and energy from the mainland’.
Hotel Bloedel
The first Fall track to feature a non-MES lead vocal, 'Hotel' was a re-working of one of Brix's tunes from her old band Banda Dratsing called ‘One More Time For The Record’. It tells the tale of the group's stay in a hotel near Dachau that had ‘a reasonable smell of death’ because of its proximity to an abbatoir - MES and Brix witnessed a member of staff carrying ‘a large, clear plastic bag of blood’.
A Figure Walks
Inspired by a walk home where Smith’s vision was restricted by his anorak, 'Figure' is filled with darkly horrific imagery: ‘eyes of brown, watery / nails of pointed yellow / hands of black carpet’. At London’s Lyceum on 25 March 1979, Smith introduced the song with: ‘This one's a slow one, dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. The psychologist said that he thought the shadow was his father. The shad was his dad.’
Hittite Man
Not perhaps as clearly a 'horror' lyric as some of the other on this list - although it does contain the phrase 'scalded crucifix' as well as 'gibbous', one of Lovecraft's favourite words - but it certainly sounds like a horror story. It's an ominous rumble, with eerie rustling, crackling and clinking lurking in the background.
Detective Instinct
Although it contains the disturbing line ‘he was a blubbering heap / he should have served himself up / preferably in a restaurant with meat’, this is another that earns its place on the list mainly because of its darkly malevolent sound.
Impression of J. Temperance
An unsettling tale of a dog breeder’s grotesque experiments: ‘the new born thing, hard to describe / like a rat that’s been trapped inside a warehouse base, near a city tide / brown sockets, purple eyes / and fed with rubbish from disposal barges.’ The lyric is well matched by the by the sinister, oppressive atmosphere created by the steady but relentless snare, stabs of discordant freakshow organ and shrieking guitar.
Bremen Nacht
MES described the song's origins in a 1988 interview for Sounds:
‘I'd been to Bremen twice before on tours. The first time I just puked my ring up all day spewing up this black liquid. When I went back there this time I just went crazy. The gig had a really low steel roof - it was this German polytechnic with steel everywhere, metal shutters on the windows which made it real claustrophobic. The dressing-room was like a fucking gas chamber, man… In the morning I had all these handprints on my leg, bruises from the inside that looked like a child's handprints.’
This version comes from Live In Cambridge 1988.
Dktr. Faustus
Smith's take on the Faust legend, in which the protagonist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. MES claimed to have been inspired by a 'fairy tale book' rather than Goethe or Marlowe. Inevitably, dannyno unearthed the likely candidate, Folk Tales and Legends.
Spectre vs. Rector
As relentlessly ugly and aggressive as anything in the group's back catalogue, 'Spectre' is filled with references to M R James and Lovecraft. It's likely that MES was inspired by two Roger Corman films - The Premature Burial and The Haunted Palace - that were shown on British television only a couple of months before the song made its live debut. (The Haunted Palace also seems to have been the inspiration behind Dragnet's cover - see The Annotated Fall for the details.)
This version was recorded in Bradford on 29 February 1980 and appears on Totale's Turns.
Many thanks, as ever, for reading and listening. Next week we will get to the 'We Are The Fall' playlist.
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