Lyrics
O'er grassy dale, and lowland scene
Come see, come hear, the English scheme
The lower class want brass, bad chests, scrounge fags 1
The clever ones tend to emigrate
Like your psychotic big brother who left home
For jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome
He's thick but he struck it rich, switch
The commune crap, camp bop, middle class, flip-flop
Guess that's why they end up in bands
He's the creep creep in us all
He's the creep creep in us all
Condescends to black men
Very nice to them
They talk of Chile while driving through Haslingden
You got sixty-hour weeks, and stone toilet back gardens
Peter Cook's jokes, bad dope, check shirts, fancy groups 2
Point their fingers at America
Down pokey quaint streets in Cambridge
Cycle our distant spastic heritage
It's a gay red, roundhead, army career, breadhead
If we was smart we'd emigrate
Commentary
< Post in progress >
… one day Mark comes into the rehearsal space waving a tape at us. ‘Listen to this!’ he says, slipping it into his portable cassette player. It’s a rough recording of chirping birds with an ice cream van in the distance. ‘I was getting the milk off my window ledge and I thought, “Listen. That’s the sound of the lower-class English summer, is that.” We need to build a song out of it. Get on with it lads! …’
… Marc Riley started by inverting the sound of the ice cream van into a keyboard riff and we played along, creating an ironically golly little gem. Mark seems quite pleased. ‘English Scheme!‘ he says. ‘Play it again and I’ll sing.’ To our delight, the pace fits with the minimum of tweaking. The only problem is the sound of the keyboard, which Mark Smith thinks is too light. ‘You’re playing it like a floppy mong!’ he insists. ‘I don’t want to be thinking of a Blackpool Pier family show bar, do I? It needs to be more bored kids chucking bricks through dirty windows!’ But Marc Riley’s convinced the jangly sound of his keyboard is what creates the irony of the piece and after some dispute he wins the argument.
Steve Hanley’s account of the recording of “English Scheme”, from The Big Midweek. Hanley and Piekarski (2014), p.72.
Footnotes
- “Brass” meaning money. ↩︎
- Many thanks to HenryP in the comments for spotting that “lousy groups” should be “fancy groups.” The Orange Book has “lousy groups”, but that isn’t what can be heard on r ecord, and the doomby edition of Annotated Fall had corrected it as long ago as 2017. But I’m using my concordance texts as the basis of entries here, and must have missed the update. ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “English Scheme” [Archived]
- Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
- Hanley, Steve and Piekarski, Olivia (2014). The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall. Pontefract: Route.
- 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]
- The Track Record: “English Scheme”
- Wikipedia: Haslingden
First of all, thanks for the endeavour – a great task in more than one way.
I was having a nose around my old favourites and “lousy groups” stood out to me here – always heard it as “fancy groups”. Anyhow I checked the old site on the archive and that had the same.
Not sure if you are welcoming comments yet but I guess you can moderate if not!
Comments are very welcome. Thanks for spotting that “lousy” should be “fancy”, It’s “lousy groups” in the Orange Lyrics book, but the old doomby site (https://web.archive.org/web/20240614122928/http://annotatedfall.doomby.com/pages/the-annotated-lyrics/english-scheme.html) had changed it to “fancy” (because that’s what it is on record) as long ago as 2017. I must just not have updated my version of the text.
But given the doomby annotated fall has had it right for years, what archive were you looking at? https://thefall.org/discography/data/album03.html (i.e. based on the old Lyrics Parade)? Long superseded, those versions.
Spotted a couple of other mistakes too.
Sorry, when I said archive I meant doomby on the internet archive!