Lyrics
Odeon 1
Sky
Uncanny
Bushes are in disagreement with the heat
L.A.
Uncanny
Person
They have filled boulevards with white snow, scum-ball
L.A.
This is my happening and it freaks me out
This is my happening and it freaks me out
This is my happening and it freaks me out
Commentary
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“L.A.”, to begin by stating the obvious, is Los Angeles, a well-known city in California, United States of America.
“I like LA a lot. I like the old Hollywood ghosts and shit. I love the old plastic bit of it, it’s more haunted than any old place. The atmosphere’s very still, I think that has a lot to do with it, so things stick a lot more.
“If you ever get really drunk in LA and wake up in the morning with a real hangover, your head is like burning off. You go out an the sun is blaring your face and there’s nothing on the street, just big roads, it’s all cars, you can’t walk anywhere. It’s really cool. I like all that shit, it’s really surreal. You can see how people go nuts living there.”
Mark E. Smith, interviewed by Edwin Pouncey (AKA Savage Pencil), see Pouncey, 1985, p.6.
Los Angeles is where Brix Smith Start was born:
I was born in Los Angeles, California, at the Cedars of Lebanon hospital at 8.30 in the morning, 12 November 1962. The name on my birth certificate said Laura Elisse Salenger.
Brix Smith Start, 2016, p.16.
Brix’s mother and biological father were divorced before Brix was two years old. Then her mother met a new partner, Marvin, and they moved to Chicago. Brix didn’t want to go.
LA had seemed alluring and glamorous to me. The weather was always perfect and the air, even if it was smoggy, smelled of gardenias and jasmine, patchouli and coconut. People on the streets were happy and LA life had an optimistic bounce. My passion for LA and the heartbreak I felt at leaving it would inspire me, years later, to write the Fall song ‘LA’ and the Adult Net song ‘Waking Up in the Sun’. They were love songs to a city, my real home, and the loss of my childhood innocence.
Brix Smith Start, 2016, p.65.
Brix’s composition may have been a love song, but Mark E. Smith’s lyrics are a somewhat different story.
Footnotes
- To British listeners, “Odeon” will probably bring to mind the UK’s biggest cinema chain, Odeon Cinemas (see Wikipedia), which may – or may not – be a deliberate lyrical connection to Hollywood (in Los Angeles). The first Odeon cinema opened in Birmingham in 1930. The unrelated Canadian Cineplex Odeon company opened a multiplex cinema in Los Angeles’ Beverley Center in 1982. Maybe that’s the reference.
Alternatively, perhaps “Odeon” and the next line, “sky”, should be treated together I found the phrase “Odeon sky” in “Sorry, Miss Crouch”, a short story by the Welsh poet Dannie Abse which was first published in Punch in 1978. There is a cinematic context here too:
“I had been to the cinema many times. I’d seen Al Jolson. And between films, when the organ suddenly rose triumphantly from the pit, it changed its colours just like the sky was slowly doing now – the Odeon sky. Amber, pink, green, mauve.”
The story has been reprinted in three Dannie Abse anthologies:
Miscellany 1: Volume 1 (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1981)
A Strong Dose of Myself (London: Hutchinson, 1983)
There Was a Young Man from Cardiff (London: Hutchinson, 1991)
It is also available in a couple of multi-author collections:
The Punch Book of Short Stories (ed. Alan Coren. London: Robson Books, 1979 and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980)
The New Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories (ed, Alun Richards. London: Viking, 1993) (reprinted as The Second Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories. London: Penguin, 1994). ↩︎
Sources / Links
- Abse, Dannie (1978). “Sorry, Miss Crouch.” Punch, 1 February. pp.194-196. [Text partially available via the Internet Archive]
- The Annotated Fall: “L.A.” [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.
- Pouncey, Edwin (1985). “Creek Show.” Sounds, 28 September. pp.6-7.
- 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: “L.A.”
- Wolstencroft, Simon (2014). You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide: a memoir. Trowbridge: Strata Books. (2nd edition published by Route Publishing, 2017).