January is always a hard time of year for me, it isn’t a lovable month anyway and I always breathe a sigh of relief when my birthday comes around to mark the end of it.
With nothing but a slate grey sky overhead all day, yesterday was one of those days that just seems never to have been born, laying down the ‘die’ in per diem. Working hard all day with cold hands* I wanted to find something to mirror my mood and my surroundings; caustic, inhospitable, angular, bitter.
The Fall Slates was the only real candidate.
The 1981 fourth album that wasn’t**, Slates is a prized nugget amongst the Fall-en. True believers cherish the hostility and obtuseness of it, the total lack of any attempt to ingratiate itself with the listener. You could say that in a hugely uncompromising discography Slates is the uncompromisingly-est moster.
I am not a true Fall believer, I’m just a dabbler; one of those despised milquetoast types who liked the Fall best when they’re playing at being a pop band with menaces, something they were occasionally brilliant at. Far from finding solid solidarity in Slates over the last couple of days it has repelled me, magnetically speaking, but that is kinda the point.
The line-up that recorded Slates is a pretty revered one in Fall circles – that is saying something for a band who in 2008 had 45 ex-members^. Marc Riley, Steve and Paul Hanley, Craig Scanlon made a great core group, capable of driving the music very rhythmically and equally taking it for some pretty weird detours. Your basic standard off-the-shelf Dadaist rockabilly outfit.
Wade in past the cover, with its live shot of the band, turned sideways obvs and its’ roll call of attractions ending with the injunction to ‘cost: Two pounds only, u skinny rats’, note that the two record sides are labelled subjective and objective and you’re already on the hard stuff.
Actually play the thing and you cross through into the phantom zone proper. Tracks like ‘Middle Mass’ just rattle past trailing nothing but serrated edges for the casual listener to try and grip hold of. ‘Prole Art Threat’ ditto. This stuff hurts.
It is all a bit too much for me, I latch onto the slower, nasty ‘An Older Lover Etc.’ widely interpreted to be a dig at (then) manager/lover Kay Carroll over a creeping, creepy guitar line and great bass, as Smith unkindly lays out why monogamy with an older lover is difficult.
You'd better take a younger lover You'll miss your older lover Her love was like your Mother's With added attractions
Quite. Kay Carroll, 11 years older than Smith, was not amused; I’m on her side.
‘Fit And Working Again’ is jauntier, as befits a song touching on suicide and British boxer Alan Minter taking LSD^*. Then ‘Slates, Slags Etc’ just goes full-on opaque – good luck decoding this plodding, two-chorder^^; I like it.
The vitriol spewing ‘Leave The Capitol’ is straighter-forwardian, MES giving his jaundiced views on London (which align with mine) over a great tune. Yes, an actual tune! You lucky skinny rats! And all for £2.
Slates is a thing. It does a very specific job for me, on occasion but I wouldn’t want to live in it. As always the band are clever, minimal, warped and MES just blazes.
Slates = very hos-TILE; how’s that for an elliptical Fall-type pun(gent)?
My copy of Slates is a very nice US 2016 reissue, complete with great insert/liner notes by Brian Turner. It is a better quality release and pressing than the original was, I’d recommend.
1048 Down.
*slaving over a keyboard, this isn’t some kind of Springsteen, workin’ on the highway type trip.
**a 10″ EP, Slates wasn’t the LP the label wanted and it wasn’t a single they could sell either. It didn’t fit either metric and in Mark E Smith’s telling Rough Trade decided to put their resources into a more compliant bunch of lads from Manchester led by a be-quiffinated narcissist and cut their losses with the Fall.
^I cannot recommend Dave Simpson’s book The Fallen, in which he tracks down and interviews each and every one of them, or tries to, enough. An angry Mark E Smith’s cover quote? ‘I just fucking burned it!’.
^*Minter who lost to, my favourite fighter ever, Marvin Hagler after saying ‘That black man is not going to take my title away’.
^^may I point the curious to the SUPERB website The Annotated Fall for thousands of words of discussion on this one song. Be careful, it isn’t for the culturally uninitiated.