Commentary

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“Printhead” was originally titled “I Go To Pieces” (which is obviously a line in the lyrics). Debuted at the two gigs at Bowdon Social Club on 14 February 1979, it appeared with that title on set lists (examples of a couple have survived: The Nashville Room, 1 March 1979 and The Lafayette, Wolverhampton, 2 March 1979). A song with that title was repeatedly referred to in the music press (and cited as a potential single). It seems probable that it was changed because on 16 May Rachel Sweet released a single with the same title; a cover of a song written by Del Shannon and previously recorded by Peter and Gordon (1965). It’s not impossible that M.E.S. might have had the Del Shannon song in mind as well. There’s also Gerri Granger’s Northern Soul single I Go To Pieces (Everytime…) (1971). But given M.E.S. had already titled the song, it’s more likely to be the appearance of the Rachel Sweet cover that led to the change, rather than the existence of songs that he probably already knew about.

Who is the “printhead”? The song is often assumed to be targeted at a music journalist or fanzine writer, or at music journalists as a class. But it’s not. For example, bzfgt, at the original doomby.com-hosted Annotated Fall wrote, “The song is a fairly straightforward dig at music journalists, a common target for MES, especially in interviews”. “I’m a printhead” is therefore understood to be sung ‘in character’, as a journalist. But it isn’t.

A closer reading of the lyrics reveals that Mark E. Smith is offering a critique of the role of the music press, not attacking it as an institution, or not only attacking it as an institution. Smith – or, if we want to be less literal about it, the narrative “I” of the lyric; it’s possible he’s singing in character as a member of a band – is commenting as a consumer of the music press on how musicians and by extension the music business depends on the music press. M.E.S. explained where he was coming from in an interview with Printed Noises fanzine:

I get really psychotic in life, bring out loads of songs about the music business but who wants to know? It’s a bad thing, but I think it should be told. Printhead is like that – a lot of people don’t realise about print, and what the papers do. A lot of bands live by the papers, y’now they get stomach upsets in the morning. I went through it for a short while but I think it’s very funny. I’ve met loads of people who were crying their eyes out because they’d just had a bad review from someone that’s just learned to write. In my mind it’s just pathetic. They get away with loads of things because they think journalism is a subculture, which it isn’t. I’ve read reviews of our gigs which are just reiterations of what I, or somebody else has said. It’s disgusting that people can get £100 a week for doing that.

The Fall don’t get many bad reviews, we’ve noticed, because a lot of journalists have sussed we’d know exactly what they were up to. I could tell you so many journalists who’ve copped out on The Fall, they’ve just fucking broken. They’ve come down to do something very good or very bad on us, we’ve pushed ’em to do it, and in the end they couldn’t.

Interview with The Fall, Printed Noises, #4 (1980). Spelling errors etc. preserved.

Sounds Like… ?

According to Craig Scanlon on the Hanley brothers’ Oh! Brother podcast (Season 2, episode 7, 25 April 2022), “Printhead” was based on The Stooges’ “Not Right”. See: https://play.acast.com/s/605f39df77590c5e123f9e5c/6265a5f4f6db2100121105d5.

Footnotes

1. “Horror has a face” is a line from the film, Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). But the “horror face” line is there in the first performances of the song in February 1979, and the film came out well after that, so there’s no borrowing going on from that source. ↩︎
2. By the time the song was debuted, The Fall had had three “two page” features in the weekly music press (not counting the features in the monthly ZigZag or the Rock Against Racism paper, Temporary Hoarding): see Heyhoe (1978), Penman (1978) and McCullough (1978). ↩︎
3. There is a pun here on “in creases”/”increases”. i.e. your face on a magazine cover is folded over. At the point this song was debuted, The Fall’s only mainstream music press cover had been for Sounds, 4 November 1978, ↩︎
4. “W.C.” is an abbreviation for “water closet”, an old fashioned but still widely seen abbreviation for a toilet. M.E.S. here uncharacteristically obviously jokes about it also being an abbreviation for “working class”. ↩︎
5. The preceding lines are borrowed/adapted from Ian Birch’s review of The Fall’s single, “It’s The New Thing”, published in Melody Maker, 18 November 1978:
   
   “Current darlings of (some of) the press, the Fall simply haven’t delivered the goods to match their drooling coverage. I’m delighted for them to be radical nomads on new wave’s frontier, but symbolism will backfire if the music isn’t also up to scratch. “New Thing” is a marginal improvement on the grossly overrated “Bingo Master’s Break-Out” E.P. and sees a slightly more accessible move. Nevertheless, it’s little more than a big, thrashing beat with instruments colliding and everyone getting drunk”. ↩︎
6. They were (see note above)! ↩︎
7. At the beginning of 1979, New Musical Express and Sounds cost 20p. Melody Maker and Record Mirror cost 18p. ↩︎
8. Because the ink with which the weekly music press (Melody Maker (1926-2000), New Musical Express (1952-2018, 2023-present as a monthly), Record Mirror (1954-1991) and Sounds (1970-1991) in particular) was printed would come off on your fingers as you turned the pages. The same applied to most newspapers of the era. ↩︎
9. Those paying attention – and on this site this is all of us, obviously – will rightly wonder whether this is the right way round. In standard English, if you substitute one thing for another, that means you’re replacing the latter with the former. So if you substitute margarine for butter in a recipe, you’re using margarine instead of butter. The substitute is listed first, and the thing being replaced is listed second. Therefore, if you “substitute an ear for an extra useless eye”, you are replacing the eye with the ear. This strikes me as carrying the opposite meaning to what was most likely intended, but it is what it is. See Trask (2001, p.276), who uses the example of substitution in football (soccer). Grammatically, if Shearer leaves the field and Owen takes his place, Owen is the player who has been substituted, and Shearer has been replaced by the substitute (Owen). The substitute, who is the one being substituted in a substitution, is the replacement.
   
   However, given my point about his probable intention, it seems M.E.S. may be using “substitute” colloquially. Trask goes on to note that, “In football commentator’s English, it is usual to say that Shearer has been substituted, or that he has been substituted by Owen”, a colloquial usage he describes as “never acceptable in formal writing.” So although the technical meaning of “substitute” is clear enough, ambiguity arises because a lot of people don’t know how to the word properly. I’m not against informal usage, particularly in the lyrics of rock songs, but how can civilisation survive when a colloquialism carries the exact opposite meaning to the standard meaning? God help us if there’s a war.
   
   Why can’t I just enjoy listening to The Fall these days? ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “Printhead” [Archived]
• Birch, Ian (1978). “The Fall: It’s The New Thing.” Melody Maker, 18 November. p.17.
• Heyhoe, Malcolm (1978). “Why The Fall Must Rise.” New Musical Express, 18 March. pp.20-21.
• Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
• McCullough (1978). “Free Fall: The Last Great Band not in Captivity”. Sounds, 4 November. pp.14-15.
• Penman, Ian (1978). “Between Innocence and Forbidden Knowledge… Comes The Fall”. New Musical Express, 19 August. pp.7-8.
• Pringle, Steve (2022). You Must Get Them All: The Fall on Record. [paperback edition]. Pontefract: Route Publishing Ltd. [Online store]
• Printed Noises (1980). “The Fall”, interview by Martin and Simon Whale. #4. [No page numbers]. [Undated apart from “1980”. There is mention of “Beach Club” at Oozits, which opened on 16 April 1980, and other dateable items are early 1980, so publication probably at the back end of the first quarter of 1980.]
• The Track Record: “Printhead”
• Trask, R.L. (2001). Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English. London: Penguin.
• Wikipedia: “I Go To Pieces” (Del Shannon)