For the past couple of days, my musical obsession has been The Fall. I have been listening to the band's albums in order, starting with 1979's Live at the Witch Trials. Oddly enough, I started off on this "Fall" jag when I listened to Southern Mark Smith by The Jazz Butcher (the joke of the song is that Mark Smith is decidedly "Northern").
Anyway, while listening to the draGnet album, I was struck by how amazingly good the song Before the Moon Falls sounds:
The lyrics are a masterful conjuration of the choices faced by a smart troublemaker in an economically disadvantaged area:
Up here in the North there are no wage packet jobs for us
Thank Christ
While young married couples discuss the poverties
Of their self-built traps
And the junior clergy demand more cash
We spit in their plate and wait for the ice to melt
I must create a new regime
Or live by another man's
Before the moon falls
I must create a new scheme
And get out of others' hands
Before the moon falls
I could use some pure criminals
And get my hands on some royalties
Before the moon falls
That's a good bit scarier than the more traditional "demonic possession" horror narrative of Spectre Vs. Rector.
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3 comments:
I had tickets to go to see the fall last year but was too ill to go. Apparently, he spent most of the set skulking at the back of the stage not singing. Would still loved to have been there.
I don't remember listening to them in collage. I'll have to catch up.
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I had tickets to go to see the fall last year but was too ill to go. Apparently, he spent most of the set skulking at the back of the stage not singing. Would still loved to have been there.
He seems like a prickly sort. The couple of hundred ex-bandmates would probably have some stories to tell.
I don't remember listening to them in collage. I'll have to catch up.
They were much more of a small cult band than a lot of other punk and post-punk groups. I don't recall hearing them on the radio when I was a lad, and I learned early on that the "left of the dial" was the place to be on the radi-adi-o.
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