Lyrics
Net cap of five eight thousand pounds
They sweat on their way down
Grey port with customs bastards
Hang around like clowns
The uh uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Bad indigestion
Bad bowel retention
Speed for their wages
Suntan, torn shirt sleeves
Suntan, torn shirt sleeves
Uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Look at a car park for two days
Look at a grey port for two days
Train line, stone and grey
Train line, stone and grey
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
This is not their town
Big cigars come out of the ground 1
Sweat on their way down
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Uh uh containers and their drivers
F Jack's a distant relation 2
Communists are just part-time workers
And there's no thanks from the loading-bay ranks
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Look at a car park for two days
Look at a grey port for two days
Train line, stone and grey
RO-RO, roll on - roll off
Uh uh containers and their drivers
Speed for their wages
Uh container drivers
Uh containers and their drivers
Commentary
< Post in progress >
Footnotes
- The songs on Grotesque share themes and even fragments of lyric, often subtly but sometimes explicitly. This line should be read alongside “the estates stick up like stacks”, found in both “C’n’C-S.Mithering” and “The N.W.R.A.” The stacks may be chimney stacks (or smokestacks): a landscape of residential tower blocks resembles factory chimneys. The “cigars” in “The Continer Drivers”, then, may either be another reference to the tower blocks, or to actual factory chimneys. Or, to take another angle, a “stack” is a also slang word for the ash at the end of a cigar, which, if that is what MES had in mind, means the figurative meaning of both lines in all three songs would be based on resemblance to cigar-ash stacks not chimney stacks. I guess we’ll never know, but It works either way. ↩︎
- Fiery Jack, obviously, the subject of the 1980 single “Fiery Jack”. ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “The Container Drivers” [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.
- 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: “The Container Drivers”
- 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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