Mark E Smith remembered

Mark E Smith may be gone, but not forgotten by Kev Nickells.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the last order’s half past ten, brevity’s the soul, a fucking time ago innit. By class, vivisection. Applied Shem literally. Where’s the fucking drummer Mark? fucking drummer.

fags leatherjackets and a fucking cockglorious stentorian jebend barcornered who’s fucking pissed him’s fucking self. absolute powershit pisswit shitflung/shitf’lung everyfuckingwhere and gets en-geniused by witfucked fuckwits with fucked wits. Shem’s the gunblade etc hello hi.

Been there fam: “On their…John Peel…members…alcohol…living [not && …] ‘leg-end’…some bollocks about Germanic renderings…millionth…[cough]…returntoformbusinessasusuallwhydotheystillbother [delete as applicable]…wife…relatively…uh…always the fucking same but fucking always fucking different…fucking… 

The most boring thing is the writing. All of it. Every last fucking hack [Here Comes Everyone] that deigns to churnly churn. Churned obituariesed doggereled, lazy recycled pish. Oh, fucking jobs. Jobs are fucking rubbish. Anyone had an office job? shut the fuck up about turnover then. Sentimentality stitches bands together, stultifyingly pointless exulatation of, etc, homoeroticstasis. ’twas ever thusly outside of rock. by G_d the canon is the preserve of the worst white people, CEOs to a man [ is to a man ]. No fucker ever complained that the fourth viola of the London phil got replaced, less Africa 70. notwithinimicallystanding sexism, rock’s greatest problem is total lack of a fucking grip on matters actually in IRL (cf, women, etc).

I re-read Finnegans Wake over Christmas, in Gdańsk. (barely understand a whit — mówienie po polsku jest bardzo trudne). My prickery pelucid herewith, obvs. been saying for years, shegged my ability to read fiction. What does a good guitar band sound like? Realistically, it’s Franco‘s TPOK & The Fall. No prick’s heard the former, obvs. The fucking Fall fucked my ability to enjoy guitars. No bad thing, it’s a shower of piss and the Fall. But you’re well-versed in these platitudes by now annum shag?

Talks to the Joyce society. I always wanted that’s the bastard drilled about. Curiously sexless, the Fall, and yet Joyce was ornery and horny, hornery beginagain (fiddly-ay, fi-ay-o). Might be bollocks mind. Plenty yarns in the, daft African pop you call bull’s blood.

Class was that we’d fucking read. All of us. Dear the fucking Guardian it’s not a mystery or in some way surprising. There was a time when people uni themselves because, just, because it was there. A time that, by the bywise, produced mendacious, imperiously cruel shits. Daily Mail-reading edgelord prickstands. “contrarians gonna contrate” is liberalism writ and rendered probably etc. Reading a book while having a regional accent / colony epithanatos these etc. let’s not ahead of etc etc.

FHR, youwanner, workinprogress, lol

…we shall refer to it as axiom aleph; this is, fundamentally, the holistic principle of Fallism; it is also, therefore, fundamentalist. Its central tenet is that of non-separation, a partial analogue to the absolutist non-discrimination of Dzogchen Buddhism or Patristic Marcionite teachings.” [This was, of course, a caprice]. And here we are with a fucking closed canon. “…one of the presumed core tenets of bet axiom canonical orthodox Fallism is that scrutability is false discrimination… youwanner

The story of the Imperial Wax Solvent artwork with the wee ink rabbit. I like that one. Small acts of detail and small acts of perennial enscription of self. Most bastardry but a bastardry of exquisitely prickishly imposed detail. HCE.

mayhaps clucking crux, herewith

What did you do in the war? Can you imagine saying “this nation’s saving grace”? It’s as great an answer as a mis-spelled Odyssey. Or “pornographic letters”. or execute Valentinus, marcionite, gno.

Dedication / medication. The last actual fists actual fight I had was at a Fall gig. The guy was an absolute fucking weapon. Pouring beer down people’s backs, groping women. Not saying it’s every Fall fan* but a bunch of those pricks look at that abusive cockend bassist-gaslighting and think it’s the done thing. It’s really not. That’s the problem with guitar music in general, isn’t it? Valorisation of the individual. Gives the same sorts of same probably middle class white men the same probably same sorts of shitty ideas about how to act in probably society. As above, so below, minima non different maximis. Exculpate. All Weinstein.

*That is exactly what I’m saying. Fuck Fall fans. Pricks, all each and every last each actual every one. The bald-headed league are abuse defenders. Doubly so those enpelted.

Actually these feelings, of feeling profoundly sick and massively confused, are all over everything else. Oh, did you hear D’Angelo‘s Black Messiah, speaking of sick and confused? That LP’s well peng.
I was only on one leg, B dot Mulligan stairhead latherbowl yes I will yes. The gunboat latherbowl beginagain yes.

keep moving the goalposts andbut to emphemerally amorphouses, to refute consitutency. A enforced state of jaundice imperpanence.

Platitudinal legacies; not horizontal, longditudinal. What will was will was a promise, as Joyce. If that looks thematurgic-crutchly (equally asinine-proplike) then it is. There are those who write exquisitely, and those who write-ruin. A slendered fucknone somehow both. The nastiest writing I know is Catholic. the first moment that floored, of all, probably, lyric: “You will not ever find with a surfeit of lumber / And make you imagine from hunger / Bread trees spinning, dripping with butter / Just 6 inches higher than your upstretched middle finger”. Most of English lyric is base and facile and Smith is a fucking cult-inducing horse. And if, probably, you can be convinced of the scantest trace of a fucking fuck, the last and also probably first good lyricist in English rock.

proper drunk. Not a venerable valorised but a nuanced one; as liberal-baiting and descending-helixly-pro-andpara-noia there’re/rrr sorts of sorting truth. not one we should engage but. a bellended truth. Not to confuse twatactions with those geniusly. On the one hand, prick; on the other, also prick. There are no acceptable gobshite w/c twats. “We are the conspiracy” etc.

I love you both and this will be sheer aitch ee double ell for me / I wear a red yes and how you kissed me under the Moorish wall

because all your mates are poor. Of class and bad fucking writing. Again, it is no great surprise that a man from Salford / Prestwich should read, and read to a high level. If you’ve ever met a tenured, or precarious, academic, you’ve met someone who not least withstands but actively supports class enmity; if those words are antagonistic then you’ve missed a trick, and moreover, never been to a council estate.

My favourite memory [etc]. These fucking are a fucking few of fucking my fucking favourite fucking things. Collusion with the trains. If Wiley has an MBE then surely we can indict Steve fucking Albini finally. Weather and whether Smith would’ve wanted it he certainly does on my last wick. Another strophe munificently: “I got a three foot rock hard on / but I’m too busy to use it”. I we must also, etc, Wise Old Man. Senior, product, stock replacer.

fucking Lou Reed right. fucking Lulu is a masterpiece. Inscrutable ugly embarrassing discgraceful etc. if rock be artform (doesn’t have to) then it’ll best buck up its shitting ideas and write about, for idempotent eg, impotence from the perspective of a pre-pubescent girl. what we’re up against. that was a situation, a circumstance (and a salacious humiliation of Metallica) rather than a pathology. RIP MES, INRI ect. His heart organ etc. The fantastic is in league against me.

Fail better or uply fuck more. 9 out of 10, they gave me. I’ve been strikethrough duped selfish. interminably I’ve wittered that the Fall are the last and first (aleph and omega et fucking c) but that’s a live culture. They, it… was a discrete body – and still so – where the ast is as Fall as the first (well actually not but ignore Witch Trials). I’d hold that Fall fans aren’t Fall fans that haven’t liked anything for 20 years, let alone 30, but Hex is a great record. But so is are will have been, equally and very, New Facts Emerge, Wise Old Man, Sub-Lingual Tablet. Promise to those of you that don’t like the Fall that have read thus farwards: your [*you’re] a fucking masochist; listen to those three records.

Interregnum: not to etc feint objectivity but I won’t be paying attention to etc thanks. I mean that there’s already altogether alreadyed a cunting great glut of dogshit white boys to wetly valorise as if resisting (actually, Lennonly, to perpetuate the worst. That should the new verbed, to Lennon — when we support an abusive dick and pretend it doesn’t matter that he’s both terrible and fucking pathetic).

D’lyrics even contour? Can I lend you a blender. even look like? Today my favourite lyric is probably “Even when I work with an acoustic artist I can never be whack / Everybody totally loved mine & Ed Sheeran‘s track / maybe it’s because ginger is an anagram of black” (JME, “Murking”). Alterity, or and or an arrogance inverted: Do I look like / I need advice / printed on my forehead.

using the word road / to sound good on the road  speculative and / and / or colophon in a JF Lyotard book “who knows not how to run knows not how to hide”, yet man like Wiley’s on MBE ting colophon’s aren’t legally binding though innit anyway the thing is that English lyric music is mostly, if not mostly, cack and there’s very nary a care for a lyric outside of Smith plenty of bootlickers and I mean really there isn’t a band that produced much more than a witticism or two as opposed to a whole fucking canon and yes I said yes and much as there’s no link whatsoever it’s grime, always grime, that picked up the baton although more formal and in so many ways yes I said yes yes and not really similar because scansion timing beats strophes terminal rhymes stanzas but but invention or at least a fucking affection for a fucking word and yes I said yes yes and it’s spurious but here’s the thing ye yes ye yes the thing is that athelete’s foot consistently uses On The Road in the same way the way the excessive -ate works in Nate will not return yes I said yes and I’m, not, in fact that, bothered that, it’s spurious because it’s not supercilious and, yes, lyric is punctus and scission and concession but not remittance to form and Stream Of fucking Consciousness doesn’t cut it to describe, the Fall, because Stream fucking Of Consciousness also doesn’t cut it to describe, the proper approach to lyrical form but, yes I said yes yes, the thing is that the majority of lyrics are fucking shite than the Fall are not fucking shite and neither is Wiley, MBE, yes o yes.

Buck Mulligan beginagain is a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. I mean it makes sense that Smith would like Joyce if only because the bloodless naïfs and vituperous shits flanking and following were fuckless wankstands, passed Even ad Addam’s.

and in a world of yarns — “probably bullshit” — … oh wait, I wanted to againsay something about liberal baiting. anyway, the whole thing with liberal baiting is that you’re very often going to end up saying something that goes with the title “on music, politics, and refugees”. “…than you’ve had hot dinners love” isn’t so much prophetic as it is winding up Moran long before she became an intolerable white feminist. Anyway, yarns. I’m fully on-board with the watches psychic one. Proper old-school myth-making like the estates of old dears’ tea leaves.

And the last great band was Eleni era. Dave Spurr. Fucking criminal best band is last band, and or only a wife away from yet another great Fall line-up.

In space (and NZ for that matter), no-one can hear you presenting on Radio 6. INCIDENTALLY every last time I’ve turned on Radio 6 in some 15 years has been playing UKIP strategist-in-chief’s band.

Ah, it’s all fucking lazy though. The Chicago now triptych “do you work hard” artists are feckless, not particularly blaming this or that, it’s rare you’ll meet a musician with a job, it’s often you’ll meet some feckless entitled shitplant. Probably this isn’t the context for socialism and, honestly, the reason “white feminism” is an insult is the same that Smith hated socialism. Erroneous, but fully because the middle classes are the handmaidens of terror.

People only need me when they’re down or gone to seed. It’s an appreciation hard won.

It’s not just MES that’s being mourned here — although those of you with the faintest of nouses will realise the industriously mourning are shillest — I’m thinking of the other folk I didn’t write about properly when they went (or went to seed). Swells‘s writing on cancer are fucking brutal: note present, tense. A skein of light coiled around: the last of the, unreflexively give the beginning o’ fuck about gone. Hail the new, puritan.

Daniel 3 4:5 : “That which the palmerworm hath left, the locust hath eaten: and that which the locust hath left, the bruchus hath eaten: and that which the bruchus hath left, the mildew hath destroyed. Awake, ye that are drunk, and weep, and mourn all ye that take delight in drinking sweet wine: for it is cut off from your mouth.”

Not ready to say goodbye yet. Not ready for 20 years of appalling re-issues. And worse, the colony of bad writing. “Always the same, always different // Rowche Rumble”. Invidious jukebox. I’d rather another 20 years of inscrutably Fall, inscrutably Smith. 1 Corinthians 2:16: “For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that we may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” Or just a pacific silence from all who would aggrandise themselves and write on the subject. Aggrandise themselves, and write on the subject. recursive pedigreeless regurgitation “…some hippy halfwit / who think he’s Mr Mark Smith”.

difficult splits look like, street poisoned, or haunted or otherwise engorged with, dead or passed memories and like every good, Fall fan, I’m a cockendbloody library of, protein protection look like before going out fol de rol carry on, Mr Hughs, etcetera.

It’s no measure of authority or anything that this is bitter, not mournful. Not celebratory. Devotion is that I haven’t actually stopped thinking of the Fall; it’s not just that they’re a band I loved but I’ve entirely structured fucking everything for more than 20 years around that stupid fucking band. Devastation, not medication.

and that nine out of ten they gave me.

…it’s definitely The Fall — inscrutable, audacious, sometimes probably awful, always the best band. Always. Always. thousendsthee. LPs. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a love a long the [rivverun etc]