Lyrics
Silent views, hollow mind 1
Where you going?
Are you a thoroughbred kind?
Walk outside, take a look
Kick through the rubbish
Cos you don't give a damn
Had enough, you seen it all
All the faces
How come you're so tough?
Silent views, hollow mind
Silent views, hollow mind
You had it all
You've seen it all - that
But I reply, "you don't know fuck shit"
Silent views, hollow mind
How come pieces have come so sore
How come so sore
How come so sore
Commentary
An attack on somebody, apparently, although it strikes me as relatively restrained of its type. The target, or targets, of the criticism are unknown to the general public.
Credited to Mark E. Smith and Ed Blaney, “Hollow Mind” first appeared on the album Are You Are Missing Winner (Cog Sinister/Voiceprint, 2001). This studio version is the only version available. It was never performed live.
Musically, “Hollow Mind” owes a debt to “Jerusalem“, although Tommy Mackay thinks it is reminiscent of “My Ex-Classmates Kids” (2018, p.191), also on Are You Missing Winner. As with many of Blaney’s songs, it has an acoustic foundation.
Both Mackay and Steve Pringle characterise “Hollow Mind” as simple or simplistic. Mackay says, “You expect it go somewhere, like a Beckett play or something, and, like a Beckett play, it doesn’t really.” But he gives the song “top marks for random swearing.” (2018, p.191). Pringle describes it as “quite slight”, but with “a certain ramshackle charm.” (2022, p.375).
Footnotes
- Strikes me, probably wrongly, that there is a vague echo here of certain verses from Part IV of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) (written 1897, published pseudonymously 1898):
Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb
With crooked arrows starred,
Silently we went round and round
The slippery asphalte yard;
Silently we went round and round,
And no man spoke a word.
Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind,
And Horror stalked before each man,
And terror crept behind. ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “Hollow Mind” [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.
- Poets.org: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- Pringle, Steve (2022). You Must Get Them All: The Fall on Record. [paperback edition]. Pontefract: Route Publishing Ltd. [Online store]
- The Track Record: “Hollow Mind”
- Wikipedia: The Ballad of Reading Gaol