Commentary

A Mark E. Smith spoken-word “rap” (credited only to himself) with an eerie instrumental backing; a style of delivery with its roots in the very early days of the group, when MES seemed to fancy himself as a bit of a Lenny Bruce-type on stage.

The track includes a number of themes which can be found across the history of The Fall – for example, the cyclical nature of history and time (a notion that can be found in various writers including Nietzsche, who MES cited as an influence).

MES discussed his intentions in an interview (alongside Martin Bramah) with Graham Lock in the NME, 1979:

One of the most intriguing moments on the albums [sic] is the brief title track, a rap which has Mark proclaiming “I still believe in the R&R dream, in R&R as primal scream“. I ask him for elucidation.

Mark: “I regret doing that, it came over more serious than I though [sic] it would. But it’s true. I still believe in a kind of purity, that we come from a long line of people who’ve tried to do things like that – like Gene Vincent – people who were in rock ‘n’ roll ‘n’ doing it well but whose attitude was different.”

Martin: “It’s like you’re giving a part of yourself. You’re not trying to be something else, but be as real as you can.”

Mark: “Trying to leave summat really. The dream of doing that. Like, you can use primitive methods to communicate – which is why I’m in it ‘cos I haven’t got any skills and you need a backer in most of the arts – but rock ‘n’ roll is the only form where you can do that. Which is why it’s beautiful. Rock ‘n’ roll isn’t even music really. It’s a mistreating of instruments to get feelings over. And the way people abuse that dream in the music business is terrible.”

And the title itself? Does that mean you feel persecuted because of the dream? Mark wanders towards the boundaries of the comprehensible.

Mark: “The witch trial is very relevant to me. Like I was saying before, this is our war, this is our witch trial. I also believe that things happen in circles, that sets of people go through things in different environments, but basically the same things. Like the witch trials get rid of all the creative people, and I think that’s why you get people like they are now – because their culture is taken away from them, they’re smashed down.

“It’s not so much that we’re persecuted. But we are part of that voice…”

Lock, Graham, 1979, p.7. See “Sources/Links”, below for online version.

MES returned to the rock ‘n’ roll theme when interviewed alongside Marc Riley by Jamming magazine in September 1979:

IS THE “I STILL BELIEVE IN THE R ‘N’ R DREAM” LINE SARCASTIC OR SERIOUS?

Smith: It’s half and half – it’s ambiguous. But I do in a lot of ways. People say The Fall aren’t rock ‘n’ roll, you know. My attitude is that we are rock ‘n’ roll, you know; my attitude is that we are rock ‘n’ roll and no other fucker is.

Riley: It’s just what they consider to be rock ‘n’ roll, like screwing and…

Smith: Like if you get down to the basics of rock ‘n’ roll, if you go back to the mid-’50’s – those bands had the right attitude.

I WAS GOING TO ASK WHETHER YOU DID CONSIDER YOURSELF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL…

Smith: I do. I consider other bands not rock ‘n’ roll. The term rock ‘n’ roll is overused and it stinks, which is why I said R ‘n’ R – an abbreviation.

WHY DO YOU CONSIDER OTHER BANDS NOT ROCK ‘N’ ROLL?

Smith: Because a lot of them don’t keep to the spirit – they get into technique, they get into effects in the studio, and they get into playing their instruments. Or they get into bringing singles out, bringing albums out, doing tours – that’s not rock ‘n’ roll. Like people used to say “Oh, you’ve got a really good drummer” or “Oh, you’ve got a really good guitarist” – that’s a fucking stupid thing to say. Nobody knows – who cares? Audiences don’t know who’s a good musician, but they know what’s good – they feel it and they know it’s good. It’s like me – I can’t sing but I know what I’m doing is good. And I know that rock ‘n’ roll is not the plying [sic] of instruments – you don’t play instruments in rock ‘n’ roll, and bands that do are copping out in my estimation. Bands that, like, go into the studio, do a guitar solo, then go back and put loads of effects on it, so it’s not actually a guitar solo you’re listening to, but a control board. Do you get me? And I think that’s not rock ‘n’ roll.

Fletcher, Tony, 1979, p.26.

According to Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream took their band name from the words to this track:

…and they didn’t take their name from the inner-child-healing primal-scream therapy that John Lennon and Yoko Ono underwent at the hands of US psychologist Arthur Janov in the 1970s. ‘See, it’s all shite,’ Gillespie shrugs, sipping tea in his publicist’s office. ‘We got the name from the first Fall album [“I still believe in the R&R dream/R&R as primal scream,” from the title track of 1979’s Live at the Witch Trials]. It sounded like a great name for a band.

Bobbie Gillespie, in Q magazine, October 2008.

Footnotes

1. Rock ‘n’ Roll. See the quotation from the Graham Lock interview in the Commentary section. ↩︎
2. On annotatedfall.doomby.com, bzfgt noted that the phrase “primal scream” was apparently coined in 1970 by Arthur Janov, the American psychotherapist who pioneered “primal therapy”, popularised through his association with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It’s plausible MES was knowingly making the connection himself. The Fall were familiar not only with the counter-culture in which Janov’s ideas were popular, but lived in the shadow of Prestwich Hospital (Una Baines and Kay Carroll both worked there) and moved in circles influenced by anti-psychiatric critiques (see the entry for the song “Psycho Mafia” for some information on the Mental Patient’s Union).
   
   See also Jonathan Moreno’s comment on the occasion of Arthur Janov’s death in 2017:
   
   “One historian of music has observed that pop music shares with primal therapy the “rock shout,” which makes sense to anyone who has heard Lennon’s vocal on the Beatles’ cover of “Twist and Shout.” Whether therapeutic or not, the history of rock music as a protest against various forms of repression owes much of its appeal to the same human sources as Janov’s screams.”
   
   “Primal Therapy” probably isn’t of lasting therapeutic value. See Davis (2022), reporting on the views of psychologists including Sascha Frühholz and Rebecca Semmens-Wheeler. See also the “Criticism” section of the Wikipedia article on Primal Therapy. ↩︎
3. Puritanism emphasised discipline and both moral and theological/doctrinal purity. On annotatedfall.doomby.com, bzfgt connected this line to the song “New Puritan”. ↩︎
4. In medicine the term “spastic” is now regarded as offensive, but it formerly referred to someone with spastic paralysis (a condition defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “a condition in which some muscles undergo tonic spasm and resist passive displacement, esp. due to a disorder of the motor neurons, so that voluntary movement of the part affected is difficult and poorly coordinated.”). In particular, it would be used of a person with cerebral palsy. The National Spastics Society was founded in the UK in 1952 and originally focussed on Cerebral Palsy. In 1994 the Society changed its name to Scope, and widened its focus.
   
   In idiomatic use “spastic” was equally offensively used of anyone with a physical disability, whether that aligned with the medical use or not. But it was also used abusively of anyone thought to be incompetent or stupid. That is not how MES is using the term here. ↩︎
5. Individually each word has a longer history but the pairing of eggheads and boneheads (i.e. intellectuals or the intelligentsia – negatively characterised – vs supposedly ignorant “ordinary” people) is more or less proverbial and appears to be North American in origin. I found examples in U.S. newspapers from the early 1950s. The joke, “A sure cure for conceit is a visit to the cemetery, where eggheads and boneheads get equal billing” is origin unknown, but the earliest instance I have found so far is from 1977, where it appears as a “remembered quote” in Earl Wilson’s column in the Indianapolis Star, 7 January 1977, p.25 (view online in newspapers.com). ↩︎
6. Some renditions of the words have “queue” rather than “queued” here. I’m definitely hearing “queued”. ↩︎
7. Although “Live at the Witch Trials” is the title track of the album, Live at the Witch Trials, it’s not very long, isn’t really a fully fledged song and is somewhat buried at the ninth track. So for MES to deliver this line as emphatically as he does here, as though it were the opening track, is incongruous. ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “Live at the Witch Trials” [Archived]
• Davis, Nicola (2022). “Little evidence screaming helps mental health, say psychologists”. The Guardian, 23 September. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/23/little-evidence-screaming-helps-mental-health-say-psychologists [Archived]
• Fletcher, Tony (1979). “We are The Fall: no subtitles for us.” Jamming, No. 9. pp.24-27. Version of text reconstructed from notes with introductory context. Available online at archive.org: part 1, part 2 (originally published at ijamming.net)
• Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
• Janov, Arthur (1970). The Primal Scream: primal therapy: the cure for neurosis. New York: Dell Publishing Inc. Available online at archive.org. Note: there are many several later editions.
• Lock, Graham (1979). “Stopping, Starting, and Falling All Over Again.” New Musical Express, 7 April. pp.7-8, 40. [Reprinted in NME Originals #2 (“Punk” issue), summer 2002. Available online via The Fall Online: p.116, p.117]
• Moreno, Jonathan D. (2017). “The Passing of a Primal Therapist”. Psychology Today, 31 October. Available online: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/impromptu-man/201710/the-passing-of-a-primal-therapist.
• The Track Record: “Live at the Witch Trials”
• Wikipedia: Arthur Janov
• Wikipedia: Bobbie Gillespie
• Wikipedia: Primal Scream (band)
• Wikipedia: Primal Therapy
• Wikipedia: Puritans
• Wikipedia: Scope (charity)