Lyrics

Everybody likes me 
They think I'm crazy 
I pull my string and I do my thing  

Two steps back
Two steps back
Two steps back
Two steps back

I don't need the acid factories 
I've got mushrooms in the fields
Julian said, "How was the gear?" 
They don't sell things to you over there
A cigarette goes out when you put it down

Two steps back
Two steps back
Two steps back
Two steps back
 
Had a look at the free festivals
They're like cinemas with no films 
You could make a fire with the seats
You could boil up some cig dimps 
Or get into the sound
Wait for the ice-cream to come around

Two steps back
Two doors down
Two steps back
Two steps back

I meet my old friends there
They queue up for cash there
They are part Irish
They have no conscience
They get threatened by the cracker factory 

Two steps back
Two steps back
Two steps back
Two steps back
(Two steps back)
(Two steps back)
(Two steps back)

Cracker factory
A place where you get into the working routine again
Rehabs for no-hopes 
Pre-fabs for jobless dopes 

(Two steps back)

Commentary

https://twitter.com/MartinBramah/status/1878457549999026199

The original The Fall was a teenage mushroom cult.

Martin Bramah (@MartinBramah), posted to X/Twitter 12 January 2025, 3:02 PM. [Link to X].

“Two Steps Back” debuted live at the Manchester Apollo on 19 August 1978. It was only played about 15 times in total, before its swansong in the spring of 1979. The last securely documented performance is at the Stowaway Club, Newport, Wales, on 4 April 1979. (A bootleg recording circulates which is often dated 27 May 1979 – for example by The Track Record – which would constitute the occasion of the song’s final performance if the date was correct. But the evidence is against it.)

On record, the song is credit to Mark E. Smith and Martin Bramah. Evidently the song was dropped from setlists after Bramah left the group.

In 2024, Omega Auctions (who have been acting on behalf of Mark E. Smith’s family in gradually selling off batches of his possessions and archive) sold a handwritten setlist for the gig at Eric’s, Liverpool, 28 July 1978. The setlist has been annotated, with text that seems to be a thought that had occurred to MES on the night or thereabouts, apparently in connection with “Futures and Pasts“, which was played that night. But most of the text ended up in the lyrics for “Two Steps Back”.

‘At the 20th Century, I said saw the Cracker Factories Re-habs for No-hopes. Pre-fabs for jobless dopes / All with futures and pasts’

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Strangely, I haven’t found much discussion of the meaning of the title, even at annotatedfall.doomby.com. Perhaps it’s too obvious. But “two steps back” is commonly encountered as part of the phrase “One step forward, two steps back”, which is used to express frustration with the thwarting of progress, to the extent that you feel you’re actually going backwards.

In the context of the song, it could be interpreted in a number of ways. For example, while Operation Julie (see below) smashed an LSD-making ring in Britain, it wasn’t long before it was being reported that supplies had recovered. “One step forward, two steps back” might in that light describe the futility of the war on drugs.

If you Google the phrase, you’ll find “the internet” attributes the origin of the phrase to a parable or table of a frog in a well. But the original “frog in the well” story was supposedly one of “two steps forward, one step back” – the moral message concerns the value of persistence and slow progress rather than outright retreat. The frog does eventually escape the well, it just takes a long time. But what you won’t find is is any actual reliable research showing how “two steps forward, one step back” might have evolved into “one step forward, two steps back.”

The Fall were of course signed to Step Forward Records for a time (I.R.S. in the U.S.), releasing the albums Live at the Witch Trials and Dragnet and the singles Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!, It’s the New Thing, Rowche Rumble, and Fiery Jack on the label. Both Step Forward and I.R.S. were run by Miles Copeland III, whose autobiography was titled, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: my life in the music business (2021).

Given the chronology, it’s possible that “Two Steps Back” is a negative comment on Step Forward Records. But there’s no clear information in the song to help us develop that interpretation.

The “best” source I have found on the history of the phrases, and “best” is definitely relative, is a posting in 2013 to the linguistlist listserv mailing list by Benjamin Barrett [see “frog in the well”: linguistlist]. Barrett had tracked down some 19th century references to “the frog in the well”.

So I’ve started some research of my own.

The earliest use of “one step forward, two steps back” I have found is in The Referee in 1880, in an article complaining about the state of the roads and pavements:

The big thoroughfares have been almost impassable at times lately, being covered with a thick layer of greasy mud of the consistency of butter. It has been one step forward, two steps back, and down on your nose to finish with.

The Referee, 5 January 1880, p.8.

There’s also a pamphlet by Lenin entitled (in translation), One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: the crisis in our Party (1904) [Wikipedia: One Step Foward, Two Steps Back].

I found the alternate phrase “two steps forward, one step back” in a 1921 editorial in the Daily Mirror:

The German mark is still “Jazzing about,” as we have heard it put in the City; and nobody seems able to account for its astonishing “two steps forward, one step back.”

“German Bankruptcy?”, Daily Mirror, 9 November 1921, p,5

More research required!

Of Acid Factories and Cracker Factories

The song mentions two types of factory: the acid factory and the cracker factory. Both are referred to in terms that indicate they are regarded as in some sense detrimental or repressive or antithetical to liberty.

Although there were literal “acid factories” that MES might have been referring to – for instance the Leathers Chemical Company sulphuric acid plant at Trafford Park (the lyrical reference to “crap in the air” in the song “Industrial Estate” is about air quality around Barton Dock because of the chemical industries based there) – he likely has LSD production in mind. The lyric starts out by contrasting “acid factories” with “mushrooms in the fields”, setting up an obvious opposition between natural and synthetic highs (it’s all chemicals in the end, of course). It is unclear, within the song, whose opinion this represents. Note Martin Bramah’s X/Twitter post about The Fall quoted at the top of this post.

A few months prior to the debut live performance of “Two Steps Back”, defendants from Britain’s biggest drugs bust – known as “Operation Julie” after one of the police officers involved, Julie Taylor (hence The Clash song, “Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad”, from 1978’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope) – were put on trial at Bristol Crown Court. On 26 March 1977, following a two-and-a-half-year investigation, police raided the people behind two major LSD laboratories in England and Wales. The raids removed an estimated 90% of LSD from the British market (see Lee and Pratt, 1978; Kelly, 2011; Ebenezer, 2015). The trials started on 12 January and concluded on 22 February 1978; seventeen convicted defendants were then sentenced on 8 March 1978.

Live at the Witch Trials was recorded in December 1978, so MES could have taken inspiration from coverage of Operation Julie. But the lyrics were close to their Live at the Witch Trials form from early on, on the evidence of live performances. So too early for anything that might have come up in former Detective Inspector Lee’s programme for BBC 2’s Brass Tacks documentary segment: “The Non-Existent Junkies”, broadcast 23 August 1978.

Front page, Sunday Mirror, 27 March 1977. The day after the Operation Julie raids.

Pull Both Ends is a musical – a romance based around a Christmas cracker factory – with lyrics and music by John Schroder and Anthony King, scripted by Brian Comport, and directed by Leslie Lawton (Lawton and the musical director, Alyn Ainsworth, both had links to Greater Manchester; the former attended Sale Grammar School and debuted on stage with a Manchester University drama group, the latter was born and brought up in Bolton and founded the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra). It was premiered at Manchester’s Palace Theatre on 14 June 1972, moving to the West End with a run of 36 performances at the Piccadilly Theatre, London, from 18 July 1972. It starred Gerry Marsden of Gerry and The Pacemakers, plus – and it seems it was really their vehicle – the BBC-contracted dance group The Young Generation (MES would later mention them in the song “Garden”). An LP of the show appeared in 1982 (see Discogs). The show was poorly reviewed (Beryl Jones’ review in the Manchester Evening News was mixed, see newspapers.com) and is considered a flop. (For more info see The Guide to Musical Theatre, Theatricalia, Wikipedia: Dougie Squires#The Young Generation).

The Cracker Factory was a 1977 novel by Joyce Rebeta-Burditt. It’s about an alcoholic housewife who ends up in a psychiatric hospital (i.e. the “cracker factory”, so perhaps the phrase was also used in Prestwich to refer to the hospital there). The novel was adapted into a TV movie starring Natalie Wood (directed by Burt Brinckerhoff, script by Richard Shapiro), first broadcast by ABC in the US on 16 March 1979, but not shown on British TV until the BBC broadcast it on 20 October 1980. The novel might have been known to MES, but the film was obviously too late to influence the song.

The other notable cracker factory to consider is the Co-Operative Wholesale Society’s Biscuit Factory in Crumpsall (MES was born in Crumpsall Hospital, of course). C.W.S. Cream Crackers (AKA Crumpsall Cream Crackers) were produced there:

Footnotes

1. I have always assumed that “pull my string” referred to playing with your own penis, either literally or figuratively. If someone pulls your string(s), it means they are trying to control you or affect your behaviour manipulatively. If you pull someone else’s string, same kind of meaning, but you’re trying to manipulate or mess with them. There’s also songs like “Pull My String (Turn Me On)” by The Joneses (1972) and “Puppet Man (Pull My String) by Neil Sedaka (1969), which was covered by 5th Dimension in 1970 and notably contains the lines “But if you wanna see me do my thing / Baby pull my string”. But, come on, “I pull my string”? It’s something the narrator is doing to themselves. ↩︎
2. See discussion in Of Acid Factories and Cracker Factories ↩︎
3. “Gear” meaning drugs (“esp. cannabis, heroin, cocaine”, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang).
   
   This line is widely assumed to refer to Julian Cope, who knew Mark E. Smith and had been in the orbit (as a roadie, on some accounts) of The Fall and a fan of the group along with Ian McCullough and Pete Wylie. However, Cope himself has been a bit inconsistent about the matter. He has written that it is about him, but also said that people “assume” it is about him. On the one hand he wrote that he doesn’t recall a conversation like that, and that he was anti-drugs at the time, and on the other he’s said that although he was ‘straight-edge’ at the time, he spoke to MES about drugs theoretically.
   
   In Cope’s autobiography, Head-On, he writes (p.75):
   
   “I got a name-check on The Fall album in a song called ‘Two-Steps Back’. The lyric was a reference to magic mushrooms:
   
   “Julian said, how was the gear?
   They don’t sell things to you over here.”
   
   I was pleased as hell, but I was very anti-drugs at that time and could never remember any such conversation.”
   
   A few years later, answering questions from readers of Uncut magazine, Cope’s story was slightly different (see Lewis 2007):
   
   “Were you once Mark E Smith’s drug dealer?
   Philip Harrison, Leeds
   
   Well on the first Fall album there’s a track called “Two Steps Back” with the lyric “Julian says/how was the gear/they don’t sell things to you over here”. People assume this is about me, because Mark and I were quite good friends at the time. He’s only six months older than me and we used to write to each other a lot – Mark’s letters were always highly illustrated. The thing was, although Mark and I talked a lot about drugs in a purely theoretical sense, I was actually very straight-edge at the time. So I never sold him anything. I’m sorry if that’s disappointing.” ↩︎
4. No particular reason to think this needs a source, but a similar line can be found in Philip Hope-Wallace’s column for The Guardian, 5 November 1977, in which he talks about his experiences in a power cut:
   
   “I feel a reluctance to strike a light even, sit brooding that of course one should only have plastic vases and artificial flowers these nights, fumble for the telephone and call up a friend, merely to say “Are you in the dark too?” But he is in a cinema without a film to watch it would seem, and his eight-year-old answers for him…” ↩︎
5. It sounds a bit like “cigar” on record, but having listened to some live versions I think it’s “cig” and “cigar” is an artefact of MES’ accent. A “dimp” is a cigarette butt. It appears from some cursory research that it is possible to somehow recycle or reuse them through a process that involves boiling (using the fire of seats?). I haven’t looked into it too deeply; sounds like a terrible idea. ↩︎
6. Either a psychiatric hospital or a place where crackers are made. And crackers are either Christmas crackers or cream cracker biscuits. Cream crackers are more likely for local reasons. The “psychiatric hospital” meaning seems to fit the text better, but it could be that MES spotted the ambiguity and is exploiting it. Green’s Dictionary of Slang‘s earliest example of “cracker factory” meaning psychiatric hospital is Rebeta-Burditt’s 1977 novel, but Dalzell and Victor’s New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has an earlier example from Sidney Sheldon’s The Naked Face (1970). It’s not a common or old-established slang phrase, as far as I can tell, and seems to be a mainly American usage. See discussion in Of Acid Factories and Cracker Factories ↩︎
7. For many years the UK Government’s Department of Employment ran Industrial Rehabilitation Units, aimed at supporting the disabled, sick and long-term unemployed back into work, through “therapeutic” interventions including training, placements and “simulated industrial settings”. This, or something along these lines, may be what MES is referring to. Perhaps placements were available for patients at a local psychiatric hospital at the Crumpsall biscuit factory? However, I’ve not yet found any evidence of any pleasing link of that nature in contemporary newspapers. ↩︎
8. “Pre-fabs” are “pre-fabricated” buildings – perhaps referring to pre-fab homes, for example those built in response to the housing crisis in the years after the Second World War. For example, there used to be an ‘estate’ of ‘Phoenix’-design pre-fab houses (the number varies between 150-300 in the accounts I’ve read and I haven’t done the work to nail this down more definitively) in Heaton Park, Manchester (not the only such estate in Greater Manchester), built c.1947 but demolished by 1967. The site had previously been used in the First World War by the Manchester Regiment and converted to accommodation in the 1920s (See Historic England, 2022; Moffitt, 2021; The Prefab Museum; Prestwich.org.uk – huts; Wikipedia; Wilkinson, 2023)
   
   
   Map showing the location of the Heaton Park pre-fabs, opposite the Old Ostrich pub, between the park tunnel and the junction of Bury Old Road and Sheepfoot Lane. The roads – all “drives” – all have “-mere” as a suffix.
   
   This line is either an insult referring to a contemporary phenomenon concerning where the unemployed are being put, or an insulting proposal either by MES or ‘the authorities’ concerning where they should be put. ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “Two Steps Back” [Archived]
• Cope, Julian (1999). Head-On: memories of the Liverpool punk scene, & the story of the Teardrop Explodes (1976-82). [This is the omnibus edition with the sequel Repossessed (1999) published as Head-On/Repossessed]. London: Thorsons. [Note, Head-On was originally published in 1994 by Magog Books (a division of K.A.K. Ltd). Second edition, also 1994, by K.A.K. Ltd. Third edition published by Head Heritage, 1995 (also part of K.A.K. Ltd.]
• Copeland III, Miles (2021). Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: my life in the music business. London: Jawbone Press.
• Dalzell, Tom and Victor, Terry (eds.) (2005). The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Vol I: A-I. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Ebenezer, Lyn (2015). Operation Julie: The World’s Greatest LSD Bust. Ceredigion: Y Lolfa. [Publisher’s online store]
• The Fall Online: Gigography – 1979
• Green, Jonathan (2024). “Cracker Factory”. Green’s Dictionary of Slang. [Online]
• Green, Jonathan (2024). “Gear”. Green’s Dictionary of Slang. [Online]
• Historic England (2022). “A Brief History of Prefabs”. The Historic England Blog, 4 August. [Online]
• Hope-Wallace, Philip (1977). “Penny, Wise”. The Guardian, 5 November. p.6. [Available online at newspapers.com]
• Kelly. Jon (2011). “Operation Julie: How an LSD raid began the war on drugs.” BBC News, 12 July. [Online]
• Lee, Dick and Pratt, Colin (1978). Operation Julie: how the undercover police team smashed the world’s greatest drugs ring. London: W.H. Allen. (note: Detective Inspector Dick Lee led the Thames Valley Drug Squad at the time of the raids) [Available online in the Internet Archive]
• Lenin, V.I. (1969). One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Moscow: Progress Publishers. English translation, first published in this edition 1947. First published in Russian, 1904. [Available online in the Internet Archive]
• Lewis, John (2007). “An Audience with… Julian Cope”. Uncut, October, Take 125. [Text available online]
• Moffitt, Dominic (2021). “The rise and fall of the prefab council estates that used to be in Heaton Park and at Hough End”. Manchester Evening News, 19 September. [Online]
• The Prefab Museum Archive [Online]
• Prestwich.org.uk – huts [Online]
• Rebeta-Burditt, Joyce (1979). The Cracker Factory. New York: Collier Books. [Online in the Internet Archive]
• The Track Record: “Two Steps Back”
• Wikipedia: The Cracker Factory
• Wikipedia: Operation Julie
• Wikipedia: Prefabs in the United Kingdom
• Wilkinson, Damon (2023). “Life in the ‘magic’ estate of prefabs that once stood in Heaton Park”. Manchester Evening News, 10 December. [Online]