Have a Bleedin Guess/Excavate: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall

• Published in: Lewisletter. New series 2021-10 (38), p.40-43
• Main Author: Shallcross, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Armed forces; Biographies; Consciousness; Creativity; Humor; Laughter; Rhythm
• ISSN: 1354-5310

Mark E. Smith, A Figure Walks (1979) Like Wyndham Lewis, Mark E. Smith, leader of the sui generis Manchester music group, The Fall, was not a man given to effusive praise of other creative artists. In a further integration of lyrical and musical disorientation techniques, Hanley notes that while recording the minimalist epic 'Winter', Smith deliberately engineered a situation in the studio whereby the rhythm track and the melody would become misaligned towards the end of the song, thus producing a dizzying 'timeslip [that] brilliantly mirrors his lyric's blatant disregard for the conventions of linear time'. On the album sleeve, the 'o' in 'World', is made to resemble a vortex: a gesture not only to Lewis's pre-war art collective, but also to Smith's fascination with the trap-door of existence, as evoked by Lewis's interwar notion of the 'immense false-bottom underlying every seemingly solid surface'. Nonetheless, in a further crosscurrent with his irascible predecessor, Smith appears to have mellowed into a more sympathetic middle-age - 'all the fierceness [...] transformed into laughter, to again quote Lewis's Soldier of Humour - as he adopted the role of benevolent dictator to the young charges in the group's final iteration.