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Apologies to anyone who doesn’t find my staff pick an appropriate place to document my ongoing struggles with mental health, because that’s where we’re starting again. It’s been a rough week for me. Money has always been a very negative trigger for me. I so envy people who grew up with a healthy attitude toward money, because talking and even thinking about money is apt to make my brain go completely haywire. I wouldn’t say I grew up poor, but my parents lived paycheck to paycheck throughout my childhood, and while they were often clearly stressed about money, they never talked about it with or even in front of me. Consequently, money became, for me, a boogeyman, a shadowy presence that could manifest at any moment and completely ruin your day or even your life. I’d like to think I’m a smart guy, but I have trouble applying logic to financial matters. I can never seem to see the potential for a positive outcome, and instead I’m left cowering in fear of the boogeyman, my brain an ineffectual lump of fear and insecurity.
I’ve been dealing with a lot of grown-up business stuff as part of the process of buying the store, and it’s really been stressing me out. Like, a lot. I’m not even sure why, really. If something happens and things don’t turn out the way I expect, I’m sure we’ll find another path forward, and no matter what happens my friends and family and everyone who is part of the Sorry State extended universe will be with me wherever the road leads. But that’s not what the voices say, and the voices are loud right now. And thanks to my fucked up relationship with money, I don’t talk about it with anyone. I just whisper cryptic fragments and complaints into the megaphone that is this newsletter.
When you’re feeling down or stressed, what better way to counteract that than by revisiting the music of your favorite band? I was talking about the Fall with Tom from Static Shock Records a few days ago, and that prompted me to pull out the record I’m writing about this week. Before that, though, a quick story. Tom was telling me about how he sold his Fall LPs before he moved from England to Canada and was regretting it because he had really been feeling the band lately. Then I remembered that, way back in 2010 (if I remember correctly), Tom gave me a copy of the Fall’s second album, Dragnet. I was about to drive his band the Shitty Limits on their second and final tour of the US, and before they flew over, I mentioned casually that I was looking for an original pressing of Dragnet. Even though it was just a few days before they left, Tom managed to source a copy and gave it to me as a gift when they arrived. He apologized because it was a little beat up, which was no bother to me, but then years later I came across a pristine copy in the bins at Chaz’s in Durham (shout out Chaz and R.I.P. Bull City Records, which had its final day of business this past Sunday). I rarely keep duplicates of records, but the copy Tom gave me held so much sentimental value that I never got rid of it. And now, over a decade and a half later, I get to send that copy back to Tom to fill a gap in his collection. Lovely how that worked out.
I could easily write about Dragnet_—in fact, it would be cool to share with you the Dragnet-inspired coffee mug my potter wife made me a while back—but I’ll have to save that for another day. Because today I wanted to write about another record Tom and I were talking about: 1983’s Kicker Conspiracy_.
The Fall had a penchant for releasing records in weird formats. I’ve heard some people speculate this was a semi-intentional act of sabotage to keep their records out of the charts, since the main singles and albums charts never seemed to know where to put a record like Slates, a 10” EP that might be the Fall’s single best record. Whatever the reason, Kicker Conspiracy certainly fits the bill. It’s four songs spread across four sides of 7” vinyl… a double single? A maxi-EP? A single with a bonus disc? Who’s to say, really? If you’re trying to put the Fall’s music into boxes and categories, you’re on a fool’s errand. Maybe that’s what the weird formats are all about?
Even the side designations are idiosyncratic. Starting with side AA, the title track is, in my estimation, a very good to excellent Fall song. While it’s from 1983, it sounds more like the Fall of a few years earlier, and much about it is prototypical early 80s Fall: the rockabilly tinge, the driving bass line, and the catchy chorus with Mark’s trademark falsetto yelp. The lyrics are about professional football / soccer, and that’s something I know absolutely nothing about, so perhaps that’s the reason it doesn’t resonate with me as much as other tracks, but musically it’s banging and memorable as fuck.
Side AB, though, is the real gem in my book. “Wings” might be in my top five favorite Fall songs. It’s odd in that, while most Fall songs have the bass at the musical center, “Wings” is built around a guitar riff, and an absolutely brilliant one at that. It’s this mysterious, haunting thing that repeats for the entire song, but I never get tired of it. I think they could play it for another ten minutes and I wouldn’t mind. And while the bass isn’t the lead instrument, the way Steve Hanley moves around that guitar line is just beautiful, and as eloquent an example of his brilliance as you’ll find. The rest of the band plays it understated, which leaves a lot of room for the lyrics and vocals, which are outstanding. At the beginning of the track, we hear that the song’s speaker “purchased a pair of flabby wings” (what an image!), and from there it gets way, way weirder. Gremlins, time travel, paradoxes, “incorrect things…” I have no idea what to make of the whole thing, but the words and images tickle my brain in the most pleasing way. Like all the Fall’s best music, it’s a song I could listen to for the rest of my life and never feel like I’ve figured it out.
The second disc of Kicker Conspiracy features two tracks from the Fall’s many Peel Sessions. The first, on side BC, is “Container Drivers,” one of the most recognizable songs from their third album, 1980’s Grotesque. This Peel Session version is a little different from the album version, but not notably so. Great song, but I can’t think of much to say about it here.
Then you get the big closer on side BD, “New Puritan.” This is the song Tom called out when we were talking about the record over email, and it’s kind of a mythical Fall song. While there is a pretty great version on the canonical live album Totale’s Turns, this Peel Session version is the only time the Fall recorded “New Puritan” in a studio. Musically, it’s in that minimal and haunting vein a la “Wings.” The lyrics, though, are what really fascinate me, because they find Mark E. Smith talking about the music industry, and maybe even the Fall’s place in it (as usual, it’s hard to tell). “Bands send tapes to famous apes” seems typically cynical in the manner of _Grotesque_’s “C ‘n’ C-S Mithering,” but then there’s the famous couplet that so succinctly summarizes the dilemma of the perpetually ahead-of-the-curve artiste:
The conventional is now experimental
The experimental is now conventional
Preach it, brother! And then there’s this verse:
Why don’t you ask your local record dealer how many bribes he took today?
What do you mean “What’s it mean? What’s it mean?”?
"What’s it mean? What’s it mean?"
Putting aside for a second that the record dealer writing this has never once in my life been offered a bribe (I’d love one! I’m broke!), I love Mark shouting with increasing agitation, “what’s it mean?” It’s like I was saying about “Wings:” I love the way it tantalizes me with these cryptic details, but playfully withholds anything that would enable you to pin it down, to say clearly what it “means.” That’s the game, but it’s not really a game because the space between confusion and understanding is productive. Maybe it’s where imagination lives? As if to illustrate his point, this verse comes at the end of the song:
I curse the self-copulation
Of your lousy record collection
New puritan says “Coffee table LPs never breathe”
When I hear “the self-copulation of your lousy record collection,” what I take it to mean is that when a record is successful, a wave of copycats will swoop in and try to replicate its success by copying it. It’s the same process by which the experimental becomes conventional, and it suffocates the imagination and the artistic impulse. What’s a “coffee table LP?” One that sits on your table to show your taste rather than being played? Maybe? Maybe not! That Mark E. Smith is a wily one, and I’d like to think he’s somewhere in the great beyond, smirking at us trying in vain to figure it out.