Lyrics
Three days
Three months
Three days
Three months 1
A treatise
A treatise
To explain these
First was cash'n'carry house dance
In Lancashire there, eh
In King Nat Ltd empire
Kwik-Save is there
The scene started here
Then was America
Then was America
We went there
Big A&M Herb was there 2
His offices had fresh air
But his rota was mediocre
U.S. dirge, rock 'n' pop filth
Their material's filched
And the secret of their lives is ...
All the English groups act like peasants with free milk
En route
En route to the loot
To candy mountain
Five wacky English proletariat idiots
Californians always think of sex or think of death
Five hundred girl deaths
A Mexico revenge, it's stolen land they really get it off on
"Don't hurt me please"
Rapists fill the TVs
And the secret of their lives is S.E.X.
I have dreams, I can see carloads of negro Nazis
Like Faust with beards, hydrochloric shaved weirds
This was going to be called crap rap fourteen, but it's now Stop Mithering
The things that drain you off and drive you off the hinge
Boils, dirty socks, the ceilings collapse
The Sunday morning loud lawn mower
The upstairs Jewish girl damn hoovering every thirty minutes from valium cig withdrawal
She wants communal, fluent flat household
I want privacy
The bastard dentist doctors surgery
Clip, clop, ring, knock, ring, stop mithering
The estates stick up like stacks
The estates stick up like stacks
The residents keep wild dogs
And on that father's bedroom closet top
Electric blanket boxes, surplus johnnies, demob pictures
To their children they sing, stop mithering
You think you've got it bad with thin ties, miserable songs synthesised
Or circles with A in the middle
Make joke records, hang out with Gary Bushell
Go on Round Table - "I like your single", "Yeah, uh, great!"
A circle of low IQs
There are three rules of audience
My journalist acquaintances, go soft, go places, on record company expenses
I lose humour, manners become bog writers, don't know it
The smart hedonists, same as last verse, allusions with
H in electronics, on stage false histrionics,
Corpse mauling dicks, pose through a good film, him, him
Stop mithering
I'm not joining conventional rock band
The conventional is experimental, the conventional is now experimental,
And is no way noble, and I'm no choc-stock thing
So stop mithering
Engineers save up for cars
I try to let down their tyres with matches to make them molten
Ouch! Ouch!
They say I rip off Johnny Rotten
They always strike for more pay
They say "See yer mate", "Yeah, see yer mate"
"See yer mate", "Yeah, see yer mate"
"See yer mate", "Yeah, see yer mate"
"See yer mate", "Yeah, see yer mate"
To their mothers they sing, stop mithering
He even did fail the penile tissue test
He hangs out for sex
He enters magazine contests
White tan horror in the mirror
Spotty exterior hides a spotty interior
He is not your enemy
He is not your enemy, his name is not Harry
The secret of Cash and Carry
Commentary
< Post in progress >
C’N’C_STOP MITHERING contains references to i.e. free adverts for Kwik Save and King Nat Ltd. an area of cash and carry warehouses near Manchester town centre – see we advertise free for these, so don’t try the anti-commercial crap bit on us, sonny boy. It’s post-Hollywood, a place described by actor Robert Donat as one big Ideal Home Exhibition.
“Statement-cum-handout for ‘GROTESQUE (After The Gramme)”, The Fall Foundation, “Terminal ’80”.
Note: The Manchester-born Donat was quoted on the subject of Hollywood in the magazine Film Weekly, 10 August 1934: “Bungalows, boulevards — the whole place is just an Ideal Home Exhibition.”
There are a number of occasions where The Fall pair two different songs together as one track on record.
- “Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow” (Live at the Witch Trials)
- “Fortress/Deer Park” (Hex Enduction Hour)
- “Hexen Definitive/Strife Knot” (Perverted by Language)
- “Dog is Life/Jerusalem” (I Am Kurious Oranj)
- “Octo Realm/Ketamine Sun” (The Unutterable)
- “Y.F.O.C./Slippy Floor” (Your Future Our Clutter)
Where doing so can be justified, I will treat these as separate songs for the purposes of this project, and provide each part with its own entry. But what of “C’n’C-S.Mithering”? Two songs or one?
Technically it seems there are two songs here; they were not always played together and the “C’n’C” (“Cash and Carry”) part was sometimes used as a prelude to other songs (“C’N’C Black Night” and “C’n’C Hassle Schmuck” and a version of “Cash and Carry” that amounts to “C’n’C Stars on 45” appear on official releases, for example – and I have decided to treat them separately). Once Grotesque had been released, however, it appears from an initial perusal of the gigographies that they invariably went together.
The two parts do appear to be variations on the same lyrical and musical ideas and on record it is not at all clear where the line between them should be drawn. So I’ve decided not to draw one.
For discussion of the histories of “Cash and Carry” and “Stop Mithering”, see below.
Cash and Carry
Stop Mithering
Footnotes
- The Bible, 2 Samuel 24:13 (King James Version): “So Gad came to David, and told him, and said unto him, Shall seven years of famine come unto thee in thy land? or wilt thou flee three months before thine enemies, while they pursue thee? or that there be three days’ pestilence in thy land? now advise, and see what answer I shall return to him that sent me.” Whether this is what MES had in mind, I do not know, but it seems relevant somehow. ↩︎
- Herb Alpert (1935 – ) was the trumpet playing leader of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass who co-founded A&M Records with Jerry Moss (1935 – 2023) in 1962. Alpert and Moss ran A&M independently before selling out to PolyGram in 1989. They continued to manage the company but eventually resigned in frustration, subsequently receiving a multi-million pay-out because PolyGram had broken the terms of their agreement.
I.R.S. Records had signed a distribution deal with A&M in 1979 which meant that The Fall’s Live at the Witch Trials (1979), received an officially licensed US release with a different cover and a slightly different track-listing.
“At LA airport we’re met by a representative from A&M Records, the people who have licensed Step Forward over here. Everything’s suddenly big labels, showbiz and film sets.” – Steve Hanley, The Big Midweek (p.56), talking about The Fall’s tour of the United States in November-December 1979. The implication of the lyric is that The Fall also had a meeting at the A&M offices, perhaps even with Alpert in attendance. But in the absence of any concrete information, it remains an implication. ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “C’n’C-S Mithering” [Archived]
- Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
- Hanley, Steve and Piekarski, Olivia (2014). The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall. Pontefract: Route.
- Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
- Pringle, Steve (2022). You Must Get Them All: The Fall on Record. [paperback edition]. Pontefract: Route Publishing Ltd. [Online store]
- Smith, Mark E. (1985). The Fall Lyrik & Texte Von Mark E. Smith. In Deutsch & Englisch. With Drawings by Brix. Berlin: The Lough Press. [AKA The Orange Book. Available online in The Internet Archive]
- The Track Record: “C ‘n’ C” (i.e. Cash and Carry”)
- The Track Record: “S.Mithering”
- Wikipedia: Herb Alpert
Views: 205
I love this. Small notes:
It’s “En route. En route to the loot.”
also it’s
“Or Mexico’s revenge, it’s stolen land they really get off on”, continuing the bit before about Californians.
Now you’ve pointed that out, it seems obvious.
On the other hand, the Orange Book has “on route”, as does this 1979 US-tour flyer:
I am not always a slave to the books. I think I might restore “on route”, but keep the “it’s stolen land they really get off on…” format. Tricky, though.