23. Two Steps Back

The Fall: Live At The Witch Trials (Step-Forward, 1979);
composed by Mark E. Smith and Martin Bramah

The Fall was the quintessential postpunk entity insofar as they postdated whatever punk was by a margin delineated entirely by Mark E. Smith’s willingness to expel breath as well as draw it, although his consonants did get dodgy in later years. More miraculous is that while the quality of the music he extracted from the many Falls always fluctuated by definition, it never declined like some fookin’ legacy act. So one’s personal mileage will differ. This track by the earliest edition is one of the more Deutscherok influenced – dark, hypnotic guitar and cheap electric piano patterns anchored by Karl Burns’s drums (the Fall, like Roxy Music with Paul Thompson, had a knack for never being without powerful and well-miked drummers), with Smith on top sprechstimming about various hallucinogenic experiences which this bunch was fonder of than many of their erstwhile contemporaries. But this is also one of the only Fall tunes that is not only fractious, it is also frankly melancholy without being cautionary. The last two verses are about Mark’s psychedelic comrades queuing up for the Dole, lest they be remanded to the “Cracker Factory” – rehab – where they can be re-retro-refitted for “the working routine again.” Two doors down.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).