An A-Z of The Fall - G
G is for...
Daren Garratt
Perhaps the most often misspelled of group members, he was (alongside Pete Greenway) in Pubic Fringe, who supported The Fall on several occasions. He first appeared on stage with the group in 2004, adding backing vocals to 'Touch Sensitive' at the 29 July gig in Stourbridge. He covered for Keiron Melling’s paternity leave in late 2013 before playing – highly effectively – as second drummer throughout much of 2014-2015; he also made a valuable contribution to The Remainderer. Daren played with The Nightingales as well, and made a fleeting appearance in the recent documentary King Rocker.
German
MES wasn't averse to throwing a bit of German into his lyrics, even if he couldn't actually speak the language at all (Brix suggested he tried to learn it from Nazi war movies). 'Das Vulture Ans Ein Nutter-Wain', for example, is grammatical nonsense; the closest you can get to a translation is ‘the vulture and another one’ or even ‘the vulture lands on the nut-wagon’. The German used in 'Bremen Nacht' is, The Annotated Fall suggests, 'highly corrupted'.
Other German references include the East German protagonist in 'Athlete Cured', 'repetition in West Germany', the 'German history book' in 'Garden' and an East German rabbit (see below) in 'What About Us?'
There's a detailed and interesting piece on this topic by Martin on the Fall Forum.
EDIT: Not for the first time, I have been corrected by dannyno. The original version of this post said below that Eleni was born in Greece, whereas in fact she was born in Sauerland, Germany.
Gibbous
Gibbous means ‘marked by convexity or swelling; of the moon or a planet: seen with more than half but not all of the apparent disk illuminated’. It appeared in 'Van Plague?' (‘A body's waste 'neath a gibbous moon’) and 'Hittite Man' ('You have no idea about the gibbous morons you have unlollied on this earth'). Discussing the latter in 2013, Smith suggested that he'd 'gotten' the word from one of his favourite authors, H. P. Lovecraft (Lovecraft uses the word twice in his 1919 story Dagon). The word also found its way into a song title on New Facts Emerge:
Glass of water
MES rarely wrote directly about physical relationships ('In The Park' and 'Bill Is Dead' being rare exceptions), so the line 'many have found pleasures in curvaceous women / their undulating curves upper and lower' in 'Serum' is a bit of an outlier. The ardour is swiftly dampened, however, by the following 'but what I really need is a glass of cold water'. This echoes a piece of advice from his father that Smith quoted in Renegade: ‘if you’re feeling too sexy, have a glass of water and a run round the backyard’.
Glow Boys
A 1998 short film by Mark Aerial Waller in which MES plays 'the caterer'.
Goats
'Married, 2 Kids' from Code: Selfish contains the memorable phrase, ‘peculiar goatish smell’. The Thomas Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs (the film version of which featured ‘Hip Priest’) contains these lines: ‘Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odour is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it’s the smell of schizophrenia.’
Al Goldson
Roadie who read Smith’s spoken-word piece ‘Enigrammatic Dream’ at Blackburn in 2002, captured on the Touch Sensitive DVD.
Gorillaz
MES contributed vocals to ‘Glitter Freeze’ by Damon Albarn's Gorillaz in 2010; that summer, he joined them on stage at Glastonbury to perform the track. Being a guest didn't deter him from a spot of amp fiddling.
Gossip Girl
Smith often delved into TV for inspiration, but American teen drama Gossip Girl was still a rather surprising reference point. 'Nate Will Not Return' from Erstaz GB discusses the character of Nate Archibald through a series of rhymes with his name: 'sublimate', 'replicate', 'New Jersey State', 'straight', 'crate', etc. The best is 'I might visit the gallery known as Tate'.
Granny on Bongos
In November 1997, Smith's bad behaviour prior to a gig in Belfast resulted in the musicians going on strike - or MES sacking them, depending on whose version you read. Smith discussed the incident with the NME in 1998, an interview which gave rise to one of the most frequently repeated quotations about The Fall.
There followed an extraordinary story about an abortive gig in Belfast. Mark E Smith sacked The Fall, reinstated them again and then re-sacked them before offering to perform with an acquaintance of his - a 50-year-old one-eyed poet and some backing tapes. His comment? "If it's me and your granny on bongos, then it's a Fall gig."
The quip is nearly always misquoted as ‘…it’s The Fall’, including on the back cover of Dave Simpson's The Fallen. However, it’s unclear whether Smith himself even said it. According to Robinson, the phrase was reported to him by Bernard MacMahon, who was credited as associate producer on The Marshall Suite. In 2019, Dave Bush suggested that he was the origin of the phrase:
‘[I] told Mark I could do some programming for them and make them sound brilliant. He asked me what I knew about the group and I said, “If it’s you and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.” He laughed so much he used that line himself.’
Great British Bake-Off
John Doran of The Quietus, when interviewing MES in 2013, asked him 'have you been watching the Great British Bake-Off?' This led Smith into a rambling but entertaining diatribe about cookery programmes, which then took in property shows ('should be banned... that's an estate agent's job') and reminiscences about daytime TV shows like Crown Court. Doran described it as 'the riskiest interview gambit I've ever gone with on a whim'.
Greece
As with Germany, there are several Greco-Fall links. Eleni was of Greek ancestry and I mentioned Anorimoi in A. 'Theme From Sparta F.C.' is narrated by a supporter of the (fictional) Sparta FC; in 'Insult Song', Eleni is referred to as 'the mad Greek woman, The Hydra' and Orpheo McCord as 'the ancient name from Greece'; 'Dedication Not Medication' perhaps owes a debt to ‘Cold November’ by Greek minimal synth duo Paradox Obscur.
The dialogue that introduces 'Happy Holiday' is a Greek translation of the opening lines of 'English Scheme'.
Bill Grundy
A TV presenter who is of course best known for his infamous Sex Pistols interview. A clearly inebriated Grundy introduced the version of ‘Cruiser’s Creek’ that appeared on Seminal Live (recorded, whatever the sleeve might say, at The Festival of the Tenth Summer, Manchester G-Mex, in July 1986).
‘I have never seen five thousand yobbos in my life… a bit later, I’m going to tell you about how I made the fortune of punk rock.’
Gulf War
‘The War Against Intelligence’ was, according to Simon Ford, ‘the original title for [Shift-Work] until the Gulf War started and Smith decided to change the title to something less controversial’. At first glance, this seems a little fanciful, MES generally being less than averse to causing controversy. However, it should be remembered that a bizarrely wide range of songs were banned from radio broadcast at the time, including Cutting Crew’s ‘(I Just) Died in Your Arms’, ‘Love Is a Battlefield’ by Pat Benatar and even Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’.
It has also been suggested that ‘Arms Control Poseur’ (the title of which came from a 1988 New York Times article ‘Foreign Policy Fake, Arms Control Poseur’) predicted the Gulf War, based on the line ‘I feel the inevitable battle creep nearer and nearer’.
The conflict was also referenced in 'So What About It?': ‘Year of Bomb / TV wars 24 hours’.
Gunther o' Leipzig
Comments
Post a Comment