Lyrics
Day by day the moon gains on me
Day by day the moon gains on me
Purchased a pair of flabby wings 1
I took to doing some hovering
There is a list of incorrect things 2
Hovered mid-air outside a study
An academic kneaded his chin
Sat in the dust of some cheap magazines
His academic rust could not burn them up
Recruited some gremlins, to get me clear of the airline routes
I paid them off with stuffing from my wings
They had some fun with those cheapo airline snobs
The stuffing loss made me hit a timelock
I ended up in the eighteen sixties
I've been there for one hundred and twenty-five years
A small alteration of the past can turn time into space
Ended up under Ardwick Bridge
With some veterans from the U.S. Civil War
They were under Irish patronage
We shot dead a stupid sergeant, but I got hit in the crossfire
The lucky hit made me hit a timelock
But, when I got back, the place I made the purchase no longer exists 3
I'd erased it under the bridge
Day by day the moon gains on me
By such things, the moon gains on me
So now I sleep in ditches and hide away from nosy kids
The wings rot and feather under me
The wings rot and curl right under me
A small alteration of the past can turn time into space
Small touches can alter more than a mere decade
Wings, wings, wings, wings, wings, wings
Commentary
< Post in progress >
“Wings” was first released as the “AB” side to the Kicker Conspiracy single (19 September 1983). It is credited to Mark E. Smith and Paul and Steve Hanley, which is surprising given the importance of Craig Scanlon’s riff.
Musical and Lyrical Evolution
The Manchester Martyrs / Fenian Ambush
A Possible Literary Descendent
China Miéville’s short story “Different Skies” features a seventy-one year old man who buys himself a pane of glass from an antique shop:
It’s about a foot and a half high by two wide. In the centre is a lozenge of deep red glass. Surrounding it in radial sections like slices of pie are eight triangles of what I think was intended to be more-or-less clear glass – to my spoilt late-twentieth-century eyes it looks green or blue, dirty and discoloured.
He has the pane installed in his study.
The Video
Footnotes
- ↩︎
- As I pointed out at the original Annotated Fall (comment #67, 8/8/2021), a key plot point in Philip K. Dick’s non-time-travel Time Out of Joint (1959) is the discovery of a stash of telephone directories and magazines – one featuring photographs of Marilyn Monroe, who does not exist in the protagonists’ world. One of the characters constructs a list of facts, drawn from the discovered publications, which he uses to identify ‘anomalies’. This strikes me as close enough to be a deliberate nod, but it could still be a coincidence: time travel stories not infrequently feature lists of incidents which are to be “corrected” one way or another through the intervention of a time traveller.
↩︎ - The ‘disappearing shop’ trope goes back at least as far as H.G. Wells: TV Tropes cites Wells’ The Crystal Egg (1897) and The Magic Shop (1903) (see TV Tropes: The Little Shop That Wasn’t There Yesterday). ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “Wings” [Archived]
- Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
- Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
- Miéville, China (1999). “Different Skies.” in White, Tony (1999). Britpulp! London: Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton. Reprinted in Miéville, China (2005). Looking for Jake and Other Stories. London: Macmillan. [Text available online in archive.org]
- 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]
- Smith, Mark E. (2008). vII. The Lough Press & AMarquisManipulationProductions. [AKA the Blue Lyrics Book]
- Smith Start, Brix (2016). The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise. London: Faber & Faber. [Text available online in archive.org]
- The Track Record: “Wings”
- TV Tropes: The Little Shop That Wasn’t There Yesterday [Archived]
- Wikipedia: Manchester Martyrs
- Wolstencroft, Simon (2014). You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide: a memoir. Trowbridge: Strata Books. (2nd edition published by Route Publishing, 2017).
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