Commentary

Even The Light User Syndrome (1996), which is often dismissed as a whisky-rash of an album, has its moments. I still hear people talking about ‘Cheetham Hill’; and the likes of Primal Scream just robbed the whole sound of that album in the 90s.

Mark E. Smith, in Renegade: the lives and tales of Mark E. Smith (2014), by Mark E. Smith and Austin Collings, p.193.

Credited to Mark E. Smith, Simon Wolstencroft, and Cerebral Caustic/The Light User Syndrome producer Mike Bennett, “Cheetham Hill” was included on the album The Light User Syndrome (1996). It is a duet between MES and Bennett; live, Bennett or Brix would sometimes end up singing the whole song on their own if MES was not in the mood to join in.

The alternate version of the track found on the Cheetham Hill compilation from Receiver Records (RRCD247, first released 1997) ends with MES singing a high-pitched coda, the lyrical content of which I cannot make out, whereas the album version is slightly shorter and ends with something pre-recorded and echoey, which I also cannot make out. That’s the only difference I can hear; the lyrics seem to be the same.

Cheetham Hill is an inner city area of Manchester, parts of which have long been associated with street prostitution (see Manchester Prostitution Strategy 2007/8 (draft)).

Sean Smith asked MES about the area for a 2006 interview with The Big Issue in the North:

One of the tracks on the new album is called Cheetham Hill, which for the benefit of readers further afield, is an inner-city area of north Manchester…I’m new to all this so tell me about Cheetham Hill, Mark. Do you spend a lot of time there?

‘Not if I can help it, no,’ he replies. ‘You see these middle class drivers going up and down Cheetham Hill Road in their big cars. They’re just slumming it. You can see it has a reputation, but it’s a lot safer than…’ he peers at me intently, ‘where do you live?””

MES interviewed by Sean Smith, 2006.

The theme of the song is based on an obvious pun: “Cheetham”/”cheat ’em”. There’s substantial guesswork, though, in deciding how far to reflect the pun in the transcription.

Julia Adamson (formerly Nagle) and Mike Bennett, interviewed by Daryl Easlea for the sleeve notes to the 2022 Iconoclassic Records remastered edition of The Light User Syndrome (p.12):

Julia: We’d rehearsed at Cheetham Hill. It was OK, I remember trying a few parts and ideas. The song’s lyrics were apparently related to this and I recall programming this song up with Simon.

Mike: We were going through Cheetham Hill witnessing the curb crawlers. A lot of it was written in cards, on tape. Mark was always very observant…

More from Mike Bennett from the same source (p.13):

Mike: Well, it’s a small vignette, Mark wanted someone to play a punter, a Londoner, visiting for a casual encounter.

The song was received well. Listeners to John Peel’s radio show voted “Cheetham Hill” into sixth place in the 1996 end-of-year “Festive Fifty” [Link to John Peel Wiki]. Simon Wolstencroft, whose experiences of recording The Light User Syndrome were not happy, thought “Cheetham Hill” a “good track” on a “patchy” album (along with “Spinetrack”, “Powder Keg” and “He Pep!”) (see Wolstencroft, 2014, p.163).

Footnotes

1. I think the station in question might be Manchester Victoria train station, which is not far from the Manchester city centre end of Cheetham Hill Road. ↩︎
2. The Lyrics Parade (incorporated into the a-z song listing at thefall.org) and annotatedfall.doomby.com both have “Salford” here instead of “suburb”, as does the first edition of my Flickering Lexicon (https://dannyno.org.uk/fall/flickeringlexicon.htm). But having listened very carefully, I think it’s definitely “suburb”. ↩︎
3. This seems like a sudden switch of sex in the focus of the lyric. But perhaps I’m making too many assumptions about the sexuality – or indeed sex – of the protagonists. ↩︎
4. Derogatory slang for a homosexual man [see Wiktionary]. ↩︎
5. On annotatedfall.doomby.com, user @Martin cited the following lyrical addition when the song was performed at Jilly’s Rockworld, Manchester on 13 May 1997: “And this London visitor had this to say: his name was Simon Spencer.” Of course, that doesn’t mean the “London visitor” was always and originally supposed to be Simon Spencer (the subject of the song “Spencer Must Die”; he had done production work for The Fall around this time). Spencer used the name D.O.S.E. for some of his solo productions; Inch was his duo with Keir Stewart. Spencer died at the Glastonbury Festival in 2003. ↩︎
6. A Mercedes Benz – a German luxury car brand, associated with wealth.
   
   Simon Wolstencroft’s book, You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide (2014), identifies the inspiration for this line:
   
   “A couple of weeks after the break, Mark rang me to ask if I would come over to his house later that afternoon to witness the signing of the band’s new record contract with Jet Records, a name I was familiar with from my sister’s ELO collection. As Mark was putting the kettle on, our new record label boss pulled up outside the house in a huge blue Mercedes (referenced in the song ‘Cheetham Hill’), and on entering he introduced himself. His name was Frank Lea, he was briefly a second drummer in glam rock band Slade and had once run Trojan Records.” (p.161). ↩︎
7. “Passion wagon” is slang either for any van or car, because of their use for sexual assignations, or specifically for a car intended to impress a potential sexual partner. The Oxford English Dictionary also records a military usage: a truck used to take soldiers “to the nearest town for recreational purposes, esp. to meet women.” (My own research found that the reverse was also true: vehicles that took women to military bases were sometimes called “passion wagons”). See “Sources/Links” below for Diane Cooke’s article in the Manchester Evening News (1995). There are some other associations to note. The folk band The Houghton Weavers wrote a song called “Blackpool Belle”, about a train that went from “northern stations” to Blackpool: the last line of the song goes, “And the Passion Wagon would steam back home and we would go to town”. Finally, Passion Waggon were a 1960s band from Rusholme, Manchester. ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “Cheetham Hill” [Archived]
• Cooke, Diane (1995). “My street car named Desire”. Manchester Evening News, 22 March. p.5. [Available online, newspapers.com]
• The Fall (1996). The Light User Syndrome. 2 x CD re-release by Iconoclassic Records: ICON 1052 (2022). [Discogs]
• Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
• John Peel Wiki: 1996 Festive Fifty
• Manchester Beat: Passion Waggon (Rusholme)
• Smith, Mark E. with Austin Collings (2009). Renegade: the lives and tales of Mark E. Smith. London: Penguin. (Originally published by Viking, 2008). [Available online in the Internet Archive]
• Smith, Sean (1996). “Smith and Nonesense”. Big Issue in the North, 8 August. pp.12-13. [Text available online via The Fall Online – Bibliography] [Archived]
• The Track Record: “Cheetham Hill”
• Wikipedia: Cheetham, Manchester
• Wikipedia: Cheetham Hill Road
• Wikipedia: Houghton Weavers
• Wikipedia: Mercedes Benz
• Wolstencroft, Simon (2014). You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide: a memoir. Trowbridge: Strata Books. (2nd edition published by Route Publishing, 2017).