John:
I was at the St. Andrews gig. MES did a fairly short set, with Julia
Nagle on Keyboard and tapes. Excellent, low-key performance -- very odd
to be able to see a live audience cottoning on to just how _funny_ the
stuff is, even odder to hear Smith having to break his timing to allow
the laughter to subside. Can't report many further details due to the
amnesia of sheer gibbering fandom -- I was sitting at the back with Bill
Herbert and my mate Oscar when Smith and Nagle arrived and sat at our
table. Seemed a lovely guy, very nervous about reading and incredibly
patient with all the pod-people who "just wanted to shake his hand"
(Bill, Oscar and I, by contrast, remained frozen in mid-heartbeat till
Julia Nagle broke the ice and we ended up chatting about The Fall).
Nice moment at the end, when MES came back to the table and asked Bill
if he wanted to do a duel (Julia Nagle: "do you mean a duet?") -- the
folder of papers appeared and he handed Bill the handwritten lyrics to
the song "Life Just Bounces". They did it as an encore, so I've now
heard WN Herbert and Mark E Smith reading the lines "On TV last night
somebody claimed their dog had been molested by a textile chemist".
Malcolm Phillips was there too, and may have been far enough from the
event horizon to remember more -- Malcolm ?
As to whether it's poetry, well, some of the songs do stand up rather
well when spoken: he did "Idiot Joy Showland" from 1991:
"Microcosms come and go
and it's amazing what they show
your sportsmen's tears are laudanum
in Idiot Joy Showland" --
but the thing that's always struck me about Smith's lyrics is the way
they seem to be all available in his head at the same time -- he'll be
performing a recent song at a Fall concert, and suddenly he'll drop in a
lyric from 20 years back. When the band are on a roll, you'll rarely
hear the same version of a song twice. Follow them as long as we
obsessives must, and you trace a network of cross-referencing and
refunctioning to rival anything in Beckett or Burroughs.
I actually like "The Post-Nearly Man" (Smith's solo spoken-word CD from
1998 [Artful CD14]) more than anything The Fall have done in the past
half-decade, though be warned that it's a difficult listen: fragmented
bits of dictaphone monologue and multi-voice pieces derived from
sketches for a SciFi/occult screenplay (the opening quote's from HP
Lovecraft). At one point the dialogue goes on inaudibly while a plane
goes overhead. Some excellent one-liners and at least one song. At
it's best it's close to some of Burroughs' early tapes -- something like
"The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah", which resembles a pirate radio
broadcast from Hell.
Peter
------
>From "Visitation of an American Poet" [ amended from the transcript at
http://www.freedonia.com/%7Ejeff/fall/pnm.html ]
Act 2
I now had a bubbling black large seafood plate
SF type load of problems at my gate
Purple squid less of pink and what's that thing on the left wriggling
Small irritant
Behind right upper motel balcony was a poet teacher and dressed
accordingly
Remember there'd be four/five viewpoints
Would even step out of the house
Frisco I was in Frisco
Chain gang
Thompson type held a visit number two
Second visitation seizure in hotel
Excitement on face gut wrench hospital
Cat odour lysergic acid smell
(Corn bubbly) it's the smell of hallucinating delusional
When mixed with a prescrip stuff of dear family doctor
New alias monthly
Spreadeagled in driveway
Come up soon for the third visit
That was in the future
The visit of an American poet
Gothic green goblin gnome
Cast her adrift my first mistake
Let her into the motel in Frisco.
http://www.manson88.freeserve.co.uk/
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