Oh aye, you're a good lad 
Oh, here is a pound note 
That stupid bitch, they were made for each other

You should have met his brother
His mother was deaf and dumb

Well that stupid get 
Played games with names
Of the place he'd worked
Of the women he tupped 

He thought he were envy of the music scene
Part of the choosy scene
Envy of the music scene 

Here comes long hair for the fair
No pay just take all the way
Those bastards stripped me bare in front of all those people

Spat peanuts in my hair
And all the leaves are brown 

And be part of the music scene
Envy of the choosy scene
Part of the music scene 

And aye you're a good lad
Oh, here is a new flat
That stupid twat
Made for each other

You should have met his brothers
Real fuckers 
That stupid kid
Played games with names
All the gigs he'd worked
And the women he'd fucked

He was part of the music scene
Envy of the choosy set
Part of the music scene 

Leave a mark on the city
I'll smash your doors down
Become a demolition worker
A mental construction worker 

And behind our conscious minds
Our affections are turning grey 

Yeah, we're part of the music scene
Envy of the choosy scene
Part of the music scene 

Part of the music scene
Part of the choosy scene 

"Six minutes!" 

"Six forty!"

"OK, studio, that's plenty"

Commentary

…you get things like Music Scene, which is very personal, in a way it’s very sef-indulgent [sic], but also it says a lot, because it’s so personal people just take anything from it. It’s amazing, the interpretations that Music Scene has had.

Mark E. Smith, from an interview with Mark E. Smith, Kay Carroll and Craig Scanlon by Martin Clayton and Simon Whale in Printed Noises, #4, 1980. (no page numbering [p.4])

Credited to Mark E. Smith, Martin Bramah, Yvonne Pawlett and Marc Riley, “Music Scene” appears on The Fall’s debut album, Live at the Witch Trials (1979).

The album was recorded 15-16 December 1978, by which time The Fall had been performing it for about eight months. The song’s earliest known live outing was at Band on the Wall, Manchester, on 30 April 1978 (which was Una Baines’ last gig with the group, apart from the occasions at the Stowaway Club, Newport and Knights Grange Barn, Winsford on 4 and 5 April 1979, when she replaced an indisposed Yvonne Pawlett).

“Music Scene”‘s last known performance was at the Stowaway Club, Newport, Wales, on 4 April 1979, which as noted above marked the penultimate appearance Una Baines made with The Fall, standing in for Yvonne Pawlett.

Martin Bramah left the group before the end of the month. We don’t know what was played at the remaining gigs, but it would appear that Bramah’s departure was also the kiss of death for “Music Scene”: it was never played again once he had gone.

Historically, the song has had a mixed reception. Tommy Mackay’s 40 Odd Years of The Fall describes it as “aimless and random”.

According to user @balddb1 on annotatedfall.doomby.com (comment #27, 26 September 2023, the background music at about the 5m:15s point is the B-side of Napoleon XIV’s 1966 single “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” (the B-side was the A-side reversed, and titled “!aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT oT gnimoC er’yehT”. I can’t hear it, but record the point here for future review.

Sounds Like…?

Tommy Mackay (2018, p.19) says that “Music Scene” borrows the bass line of Public Image Limited’s “Fodderstompf” (1978).

From Ian Wood’s review of The Fall at the Carlton Club, Warrington on 26 February 1979:

I was stunned by the entire set, but ‘Music Scene’, as now reworked, was a classic piece of rock ‘n’ roll from any viewpoint. It’s The Fall’s ‘The End,’ made up from a melody line copped off Dale Evan’s ‘Happy Trails,’ a standard Motown bass riff and heavily overlaid with Martin Bramah’s quite unique guitar improvisation.

Wood, Ian (1979). “The Fall: Warrington”. New Musical Express, 24 March. p.49.

There’s a misplaced apostrophe there. Wood means Dale Evans’ “Happy Trails” (1957?), which she sang with her husband Roy Rogers. Anyway, see what you think. There are many different recorded versions out there, but here’s a TV broadcast version from 1978:

Footnotes

1. A line adapted from The Velvet Underground song, “The Murder Mystery”, from their post-Cale third album, The Velvet Underground (1969). Note that there are two simultaneous voices: “Down below the fire hose (Oh, you’re such a good lad) / Weep and whisky fortune (Here’s another dollar)” ↩︎
2. “Get”, originally from the Old Norse “geta” as in “beget”, meaning offspring, descendent or child in middle English and according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary now only used in that context of animals. It is used here in a slang/dialect sense akin to “git”. As the Shorter Oxford says, in Scottish/Northern English dialect, “get” means “a brat, a bastard”, and in general slang it means “a contemptible person, a fool, an idiot”. ↩︎
3. Like “get”, a word used of animals: “tup” is a verb meaning “copulate with” – specifically a ram with a ewe (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary); “tup” also means “ram”. “Tupped”, used of human beings, is therefore slang for “fucked”. ↩︎
4. Pronounced “sken”. MES did sometimes like to deliberately mispronounce words for presumably comic, or other, effect (“leg-end”, “victuals”, etc). That might be all this is. However, annotatedfall.doomby.com user @TamFg pointed out (comment #3, 2 September 2015, graduating to note #4) the word “scene” derives (via Latin) from the ancient Greek “skēnē“, meaning (according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “tent, booth, stage, scene”. Kind of fits, doesn’t it?
   
   But as I pointed out on annotatedfall.doomby.com (comment #25, 5 September 2022), “sken” is a Lancashire dialect word with a range of meanings, but encompassing “look”, “stare”, “glance”, “cross-eyed”, and so forth, depending on the source. The word “scan” of course, can also mean “glance” or “examine in detail”. In a song where there is a higher than usual incidence of slang or dialect words (“tup”, “get”), maybe “sken” is the direction to go in. In which case maybe MES enjoyed the pun: “a look at the music scene”.
   
   But as I also pointed out, there’s also a single known example of the song appearing on a setlist as “Music Sken”, for the gig at The Nashville Room, London, 1 March 1979. See The Fall Online – Gigography: 1979 [link to image].
   
   Also, annotatedfall.doomby.com had some occurrences of “envy” down as “heavy”, alternately. I was one of those saying I could hear “heavy” at least some of the time. But I’ve gone back to “envy” throughout here, pending review. ↩︎
5. Apparently quoting “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas. Their song is explicitly set in winter, but brown leaves might more usually be a sign of autumn (or, I suppose, a very hot summer), i.e. the fall in American English. I mention this last point only because there are people who get very excited about it. ↩︎
6. Pronounced “sken”. Again. ↩︎
7. This is a bit of a guess, the vocal becomes indistinct. ↩︎
8. Yep, pronounced “sken”. ↩︎
9. annotatedfall.doomby.com has “metal”. “Mental” is what it sounds like to me, and it also seems to fit better in context, with the next line being concerned with “conscious minds”. ↩︎
10. A line sometimes used in “Stepping Out“. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that “California Dreamin’”, quoted earlier in the lyric, runs: “All the leaves are brown / And the sky is grey”. ↩︎
11. “Sken”, once more. ↩︎
12. At annotatedfall.doomby.com, user @Glenn F pointed out (comment #17, 23 November 2019), that at about 5m:32s the guitar starts playing the riff from “Repetition”. ↩︎
13. These last three lines are not part of the lyric, but appear to be the interventions of the studio staff, trying to bring the song to a close. Some fans have assumed this was staged, with some even believing the voice is that of Mark E. Smith (which it definitely isn’t). Apparently not, according to Martin Bramah (quoted in Simpson, 2019, p.92): “On ‘Music Scene’, about the authoritarian hand of the music business, the studio engineers are telling us to stop playing. It was so funny, we used it.”
    
    However, according to David Cavanagh, who interviewed Mark E. Smith for the various artists CD/magazine Volume Four in 1992: “That voice calling out the time on “Music Scene”… was the band’s driver – the son of the actor who played Len Fairclough in Coronation Street”. (see Cavanagh, 1992, p.84. Note that this is not presented by Cavanagh as a direct quote from Smith). This story has been widely repeated, for example in Mackay, 2018, p.20). It could be reconciled with Bramah’s account if “we used it” means that the group got the band’s driver to recreate what had happened in the studio.
    
    The producer of Live at the Witch Trials was Bob Sargeant, and the credited engineer was the “scientific but terrific” Alvin Clark.
    
    The actor who played Len Fairclough from 1961-1983 was Peter Adamson (born 1930, died 2002). He had two sons, Michael and Greig (sometimes rendered “Greg”, but I double-checked). Greig was born in 1963, and so was about sixteen years old in 1979 – unlikely to have been the group’s driver. Michael was born in 1954 and is the better bet since he would have been about 25 in 1979. ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “Music Scene” [Archived]
• Clayton, Martin and Whale, Simon (1980). “The Fall”. Printed Noises, #4. No page numbering [pp.3-5]. [Available online via the Manchester District Music Archive or The Sparrow’s Nest Library and Archive]
• Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
• Simpson, David (2019). “Album By Album: The Fall”. Uncut, Take 266, July. pp.92-94.
• The Track Record: “Music Scene”
• Cavanagh, David (1992). The Fall, in Various Artists: Volume Four. CD/booklet. pp.78-97. Volume: V4CD. [Discogs]
• Wikipedia: Dale Evans
• Wikipedia: Happy Trails (song)
• Wikipedia: Peter Adamson (actor)
• Wikipedia: “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” (song)