Lyrics
The dwarf plays pool to prove his height
People play games when they lose in life
There's no sport, lad, just acid tension stomach flash
A madness in my area
I have seen the birth of bad
I have seen declining tracks
I have seen the madness in my area
Understand time till I'm asked about it
Years cross-check, days become a tick
Can't remember who I've sacked, just stupid faces looking bad
The madness in my area
I have seen the birth of bad
I have seen declining tracks 1
I have seen the madness in my area
Former friends suck on The Fall
Genuine white crap article 2
Their future cries of broken pain are idiot victims
Just adds to the madness in my area
I have seen the birth of bad
I have seen declining tracks
I have seen the madness in my area
Politic comic fools in full bloom
McCarthy reincarnate soon 3
See the bones on the too-late faces
The me generation
See the traces of the madness in my area
I have seen the birth of bad
I have seen the declining tracks
I have seen the madness in my area
I have seen the burrowmen 4
Frozen pain that is so bad
I have seen the madness in my area
I have seen the madness in my area
Madness in my empire
In the writer
The Berlin fighter
In the mirror
The doppelgänger 5
The new satire 6
Blood and sand 7
Commentary
< Post in progress >
Footnotes
- “Declining tracks” might refer to the railways going downhill in terms of profitability or popularity or quality or reliability. It could also refer to a type of conveyor belt found on docks, or a gravity railway. ↩︎
- cf. “Crap Rap“. ↩︎
- Presumably, but not certainly, a reference to Joseph McCarthy, the anti-Communist American senator. ↩︎
- Possibly “burrowmen” could be “boroughmen”. Not that it would help us much if it was. ↩︎
- Prosaically, a “doppelgänger” (see Wikipedia) is a person’s double. In the context of some of the lyrics, it may be relevant to note the claim (dubious in terms of actual historical evidence – see Joachimsthaler, 1999) that Hitler employed doubles as decoys (See Wikipedia).
In folklore, however, doppelgängers are a much stranger ghostly phenomenon, a kind of uncanny, haunting, phantom alter ego (cf. “A Figure Walks“, maybe?), often but not always thought of as sinister.
Doppelgängers not uncommonly feature in film and literature. For example, to pick just one author who we know MES read, there is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “William Wilson” (1839) (see Wikipedia). There was a BBC adaptation of this, with the same title, first aired in BBC 2’s Centre Play slot on 19 December 1976. MES watched it when it was repeated on 31 May 1978. We know this because he mentioned it in a letter to Ian McCulloch dated 7 June 1978 (the letter came up for sale via Omega Auctions in September 2020):
But in fact, if you go looking for literary/cinematic/etc doppelgängers in the 1977-1979 period, as potential clues or sources, quite a few turn up. BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Doppelganger by J.C.W. Brook in its “Saturday-Night Theatre” slot on 1 January 1977, and on 21 January 1977 MES favourite Colin Wilson presented Leap in the Dark: The Fetch, a “dramatised reconstruction” of the case of the 19th century French schoolteacher Emilie Sagee, who was supposedly haunted by her double. (See Wikipedia for more about the Leap in the Dark series). The Man Who Haunted Himself, a 1970 film starring Roger Moore (see Wikipedia), was aired on BBC 2 on 7 August 1978.
There is also Peter Van Greenaway’s 1975 novel, Doppelganger (Van Greenaway is mentioned, of course, in the lyrics of “Spectre vs. Rector” – albeit as “Van Greenway”):
Finally, MES may well have the read the article on doppelgängers in the Manchester Evening News of 19 May 1979 (p.7, Weekend Extra magazine), just a few weeks before the recording of the tracks “Rowche Rumble” and “In My Area” for the Rowche Rumble single. In the article, Bruce Sandham reports uncritically on a million-dollar “research” project being launched by the American Society of Psychical Research to prove that paranormal doubles existed.
↩︎ - Speculatively, perhaps a reference to Not the Nine O-Clock News (see Wikipedia), the start of the first series of which was postponed from April 1979 to October 1979 due to the calling of the general election that year. ↩︎
- “Blood and sand” is an expression of annoyance or frustration. A very mild expletive in its own right, I tend to think of it as a euphemism for variations on “bloody hell” lines, to which it seems roughly equivalent.
Blood and Sand is a 1908 novel (Sangre y Arena in Spanish) by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (See Wikipedia) It has been adapted for the screen several times, perhaps most notably in 1922 as a silent film starring Rudolph Valentino (see Wikipedia), and in 1941 in a version directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Rita Hayworth, Anthony Quinn and John Carradine (see Wikipedia). I’m not aware of any connections to the song.
However, Carradine also starred in Hitler’s Madman (1943, see Wikipedia), and in that film he plays Reinhard Heydrich (who had been assassinated in 1942). Heydrich famously shot at his own reflection in a mirror (see The History Place: Heydrich). Maybe the lyrics contain a vague reference to that incident. ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “In My Area” [Archived]
- Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
- Joachimsthaler, Anton (1999). The Last Days of Hitler: legend, evidence and truth. Leicester: Brockhampton Press. [Originally published in Germany in 1995 as Hitlers Ende (“Hitler’s End”)]
- 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]
- Sandham, Bruce (1979). “Could there be a carbon copy of you?” Manchester Evening News, 19 May. Weekend Extra magazine, p.7. [Available online via newspapers.com]
- 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: “In My Area”
- Wikipedia: Doppelgänger
- 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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