Dedication Not Medication

(1)   

And Pierce Brosnan how dare you prescribe 
Sad grief and bed wet pills? (2)
Good grief bed wet  (3)
Sad grief bed wet...pills

Hurly Wurly how can you prescribe
Sad grief and bed wet...pill? 
Rayland Wordley how dare you prescribe sad grief bad chest
Sad grief bed wet ... pills? (4)

Ringler Worthy how dare you prescribe me
Bed wet pill and deep grief?
Connie Cookie how could you subscribe (5)
Bed grief wet pills?
Bad grief, bad wet
Bed wet...pills
Bad luck
Zip up!
Curly
Bed wet good grief
Good grief bed wet
Zip up
Zip up

LP VERSION:  (6)

MES: What'd I say to you? For a change, we're put in a good position here. Because... it's actually something good we could work with... ya know, it doesn't mean... ya know...

Other: You're a major player here, Mark. You could change the entire direction in one move. And I think it's not often that we're at this point this early in the procedure....

MES: What about the corporation?

O: Con...Connie and Cookie?...Erm, they subscribed.

MES: Say- we've got to thank them for their full....

O: (laughing) Their full cooperation... 

O (with MES dictating in the background): ...with the fall and their associates.

MES: I would say the anti-Fall-ization. I would say the anti-Fall.

O:Anti-Fall? Anti-Fall association. Their full cooperation with the anti-Fall association.

MES (singing): Curly wurly how could you prescribe
Bad grief and bed wet

Connie Cookie how could you subscribe
Bad grief, bad pills
Bad grief
Bed wet... PILLS! 

Wurly wurly how dare you prescribe
Bed wet, good grief
Good grief, bed wet
Zip up! Zip up!
 

1. At one point "Dedication Not Medication" was the working title of the Fall album that was released as Sub-Lingual Tablet. The song was originally called "Bumblebee" when it debuted in Augest 2014. In September of that year the Fall toured in front of a backdrop which read "Dedication Not Medication. You Decide."  Would it be pedantic to point out that, if "You" were really the decider, it perhaps should have read "Dedication Or Medication"? If so, a thousand pardons. 

From Q magazine, 2015:

“I took this orange speed,” he begins, unbelievably, but the detail of the story is lost within the whirlpool of his voicebox. The gist is: the orange speed, taken some time ago, slowed his urinary function. Amazing. One of his new songs, Dedication Not Medication, deals with the reverse of this condition, accusing “Pierce Brosnan” of prescribing “bedwetting pills.” It’s about Smith’s doctor.

“I’ve always thought the most dangerous drugs are prescribed antidepressants,” he says. “They tried to prescribe me some, for my chest, to stop smoking. That was the final straw. Luckily, I’ve mates who know about pharmacology, as you can imagine…”

See comment number 17 below, where fall fan links to a video of Ray Davies at Glastonbury in 2010 singing "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": "That's dedicated, not medicated..."

Antoine finds a strong resemblance between this song and "Cold November" by Paradox Obscur:

"The Paradox Obscur album came out on June 25, 2014 and according to Reformation! the first performance of "Dedication Not Medication" was on 30 August 2014, Fibbers York... I could easily imagine Eleni (seems to me this would be her kind of thing) playing this at home and Mark saying 'I want one like that!' as usual."

They are Greek; I don't know if that makes it more likely Eleni would have heard them, but maybe...

^

2. It is possible that the pills in question are anti-depressants, as these are sometimes prescribed for bed wetting (they sometimes help the problem but it is unknown how they do so). The two chief drugs prescribed for bed wetting are DDAVP, which decreases both thirst and urine production, and Tofranil, which is an anti-depressant.

Brosnan plays a physician in one movie--the laughable Stephen King adaptation Lawnmower Man. Antoine runs it down for us:

"Could Mark be making a reference to the awful Lawnmower Man film? As far as I can make out on IMDB, it's the only time he's played a doctor, which struck me as unlikely but it seems to be the case. And in the awful movie, he does use weird drugs to make these lab chimps super-aggressive and super-intelligent so they can be used as weird future weapons, or something like that. I also definitely remember reading an interview in which he mentions his doctors trying to prescribe antidepressants in an effort to get him to stop smoking. It might have been a scanned PDF on the Fall site, because my Google searches aren't turning anything up, I really wish I could find it. In any case antidepressants are sometimes used by folks trying to quit."

Brosnan became the focus of disapprobation for his role in advertising Pan Bahar in India. The product is a "mouth freshener" (apparently a mixture of areca nut and spices) which has been "linked" to tobacco and mouth cancer. The news reports are incredibly shoddy, as the nature of this "link" is not made clear, with some reports suggesting that people like to mix it with tobacco, and others implying the product itself contains tobacco (which the company denies). The whole thing is a farce, and the farcical part is the news reports, which are clearly all cribbed from the same source, as they all use some variation on the laughably vague, if not meaningless, formulation "linked to tobacco products." An encouraging outlier is the Economic Times of India, whose intrepid reporters seemingly can be trusted to at least use Google before going to print; they maintain that areca nut itself has been linked to cancer, perhaps correctly. Although no one knows exactly what the scandal is about, Brosnan apologized for good measure, claiming to have been duped. 

I had to tell you that to tell you this: according to the27points on the Fall online forum, the side effects of this product "include toxicity symptoms such as increased saliva production, increased tearing, sweating, diarrhea, flushing, fever and...  incontinence. So the former Bond is to some degree dealing out sad grief and bed wet pills. How dare he!" 

Smychka Mayaqkovsky points out that the title line appears in "Nothing for Me" by Romeo Void (1981):

Dedication is the topic of the day
Dedication is what we need
Dedication not medication
Dedication not medication is what we need
But there's nothing for me

Thanks to The BEF for transcribing.

^

3. It struck me tonight how odd a locution "Good Grief!" is. A Google search convinced me that it originated as a euphemism for "Good God!" There's no evidence either way, as far as I could discover, but because of the phonetic similarity it seems very probable...a lot of euphemisms that replace oaths seem to be chosen for sound more than sense (in my youth I remember sometimes hearing people exclaim "Cheese and Rice!" Say it aloud if you are unsure why).
Anyway, the lyrics here take a few phrases and spin them around and alter them in a similar way: sad grief, bad grief, bed grief, bed wet, I even think I hear "bad wet" in there somewhere...

John Howard points out that the expression "Good Grief!" is associated, perhaps preeminently, with Charlie Brown.

^

4. I am very unsure about the names after "Pierce Brosnan." There is a video in which MES's lyric sheet can clearly be seen to read "RIngler Worthy," though.

^

5. It has been speculated that this could refer to Conway Paton and Stefan Cook, the proprietors of the Fall Online Forum, which is very much the unofficial Fall site. It used to be official, but MES broke with the admins in 2006...

But looky looky, here comes...Bert:

Hard to argue against "Connie Cookie" being about Conway/Stefan, but I'll try an alternative theory anyway. When I first heard this line, I immediately thought of "Kookie, Kookie -- Lend Me Your Comb" by Edd Byrnes and Connie Stevens. This song is referenced in the original lyrics to "The Mummy" by Bob McFadden, which The Fall covered (without the lyric in question) as "I'm A Mummy."

^

6. Thanks to Titfordshire for this transcription,  which I have slightly altered where I hear different. 

According to rik the other voice is Alan Wise; Reformation! has it as Simon "Ding" Archer, who has many more recent attested Fall appearances, however.

^

Dedication Not Medication: Fall Tracks A-Z

From Paul G:

From The Fall online and dated 11 May is this piece from cycling clothing company Milltag:

"The Fall released their new album, 'Sub-Lingual Tablet' on 11 May with one of the tracks titled 'Dedication Not Medication.' The song is about cyclist Dieter Wiedemann, a sporting hero of East Germany who kept under close surveillance by the Stasi before defecting to West Germany whilst qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics. Once in the west, he signed professional forms with Torpedo and fulfilled a lifetime ambition of riding the Tour de France. This limited edition jersey is styled on the Torpedo jersey and pays tribute to all those cyclists who strive for, and have achieved, excellence through sheer dedication."

3Loop music have emailed me some information about the Fall/3Loop/Milltag cycling clothing collaboration.

The discussions about a Fall cycling jersey began in November 2014. Instead of the suggested Mr Pharmacist theme, Elena (on behalf of Mark) suggested using 'The Fall Dieter Weidermann from our upcoming LP. Or Dedication Not Medication.' (At that time the working title of what was to become Sub-Lingual Tablet.)

So the idea came from Mr and Mrs Smith and after researching Wiedermann 3Loop came up with the jersey design.

The marketing was then worded to appeal to the cycling market which it was why it concentrated on Wiedermann’s achievements.