Commentary

< Post in progress >

Footnotes

1. At the original doomby.com Annotated Fall, bzfgt noted that “A bluebottle can be a fly, a parasitic wasp, a squeaky-voiced Boy Scout played by Peter Sellers on the 1950s British radio comedy The Goon Show, or a police officer.” His money was on the wasp. I disagree: most British people would understand the word to refer to the blowfly, Calliphora vicina, which is the commonest of its type in the British Isles. Bluebottles also appear in the lyrics of “Arms Control Poseur“. ↩︎
2. It would great to be able to reveal here what “Bouncing Jackson” refers to, but nobody seems to know. At a gig at the Roundhouse, Manchester, on 20 March 1995, M.E.S. ad-libbed: “‘Bouncing Jackson’ is a poem I wrote about connections with carpets.” doomby.com Annotated Fall contributor @Bollocks suspected a reference to Inspiral Carpets (comment #5, 24/4/2019), and of course the previous year M.E.S. had provided guest vocals for the Inspiral Carpets’ single, I Want You, and memorably performed the song with them on Top of the Pops. But if Inspiral Carpets is the intended reference, the meaning is still entirely unclear. ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “Don’t Call Me Darling” [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.
• NatureSpot: Calliphora vicina
• 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: “Don’t Call Me Darling”
• Wolstencroft, Simon (2014). You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide: a memoir. Trowbridge: Strata Books. (2nd edition published by Route Publishing, 2017).