Alton Towers

(1)

Grey
Decline
In excelcis (2)
And the waves
Through the slits
In San Rocco (3)
Look very different
And are no longer any way sublime (4)
How to get out
How to stay thin
The spawn of J. "Loaded" Brown (5)
And L. Laverne crawl around (6)
The crows
Look very different today
And the crows are not reflecting
Any form of quality
At all (7)
On the saint of advertisers dead (8)
How to get in
How to get out
The spawn of J. "Loaded" Brown
And L. Laverne
are laughing
In excelsis
Mongs crawl around
And their sons are singing songs
In Leeds, Montreal and Rome
How to get out
How to stay in
The spawn of J. "Loaded" Brown
And L. Laverne
With the dept. of no name (9)

1. Alton Towers is a theme park in Staffordshire, England, that occupies the site of an Iron Age fort, later a medieval fortress, and still later a castle. Its theme song is "In the Hall of the Mountain King," by Edvard Grieg, which was composed for Ibsen's 1876 play Peer Gynt. The bass line of the Fall song is similar to the theme that tuns through Grieg's piece, which may be why the song has this name. Veritable hordes of rock acts have had a stab at Grieg's theme, including Rainbow, ELO, The Who, Savatage, Helloween, Brian Setzer, and Marillion. The lyrics to Grieg's piece are sufficiently amusing to merit inclusion here (in English translation):

Slay him! The Christian's son has bewitched

The Mountain King's fairest daughter!

Slay him!

Slay him!

May I hack him on the fingers?

May I tug him by the hair?

Hu, hey, let me bite him in the haunches!

Shall he be boiled into broth and bree to me

Shall he roast on a spit or be browned in a stewpan?

Ice to your blood, friends!

 

The Macc Lads, a British punk band from Macclesfield, released a song called "Alton Towers" in 1994. There is no apparent connection to the Fall song, but it does contain the memorable lyric "Fuck cunt wank shit."

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2. In excelsis is Latin for "in the highest degree." The phrase appears in the hymns "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" and "Angels we Have Heard on High," and there is a cantata by Bach called "Gloria in Excelsis Deo."

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3. San Rocco (named after a 14th century saint, called "St. Roch" in English) is most famously a church in Venice, Italy. There is also apparently an Italian restaurant in the Manchester area with that name, which may be what MES is thinking of here. "The waves through the slits," on the other hand, could suggest a Venetian view through, appropriately enough, Venetian blinds. According to Simon Wolstencroft's memoir, MES visited Venice frequently (thanks to Dan).

Both San Rocco's could be in play, and to compound the matter, in the comment section Danny has advanced another theory: "the waves through the slits" could be a reference to the "double-slit experiment" in which light passing through very narrow slits exhibits wave-particle duality, in other words displays properties of both particles and waves which had been thought to be mutually exclusive. See note 7 below.

And here is more, from Dan:

An echo of these lyrics that I've just spotted in a 2010 Quietus interview:

Whenever I go to Italy, or Venice where I've only been two or three times, I'm never out of the churches. You find these little churches, and they're open for three hours a day, some old priest comes and lets you in. And they've got Titian, you know what I mean? It's like being in a Hollywood film from the 50s, so rich. You forget the size of these things. They'll have these slits in the stone, like arrow slits, and the light will come in and hit Jesus in the eye, and it looks like he's crying. 

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4. The sublime in art usually refers to an experience of nature as powerful or overwhelming, rather than beautiful or tranquil. Joseph Turner's 1805 painting The Shipwreck is a famous example of a depiction of the sea that attempts to convey an experience of the sublime.  

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5. James Brown is a British journalist who founded the magazine Loaded,  a popular "lad mag" (or what is called a "men's magazine" iin the United States); lad mags are publications that are targeted at males and that usually include pictures of, and material about, attractive women. MES gave what is perhaps his most notoriously inebriated interview to Loaded in 1997, in which he threatened and berated the interviewer (and several other parties into the bargain). At one point, he refers to the interviewer as a "Macc lad" (i.e. from Macclesfield), which is the closest thing I could find (thanks to Reformation) to a connection with the song mentioned in note 1.  

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6. Lauren Laverne (Lauren Cecelia Fisher) is a British DJ, television presenter, and sometime rock and roll musician who is the source of perhaps the most anodyne controversy in the history of the Fall. Interviewing Mark E Smith, she inquired whether he was ever tempted to kick his wife out of the band; he replied "Don't get funny with me," and the interview proceeded to its conclusion, at which point Laverne happily proclaimed that MES was a congenial fellow, despite his reputation for prickliness. Nevertheless, she has since declared that she was so traumatized by this brief remark that she can no longer bear to listen to the Fall.

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7. Nineteenth Century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and, following him, 20th Century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre described the experience of anxiety as a state of mind in which things appear stripped of significance, presenting themselves as meaningless. The crows are also perhaps reminiscent of Wallace Stevens' famous poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," in which the titular birds are placed in various scenes or juxtaposed with various phenomena in such a way that they condition or congelate a range of meanings. The final stanza, however, presents the reader with the bare presence of a blackbird, no more and no less than a part of a simple winter scene. This last blackbird is not made to reflect any kind of quality, it is simply placed before us in such a way that we are not called on to contextualize or interpret its presence in a cedar tree:

It was evening all afternoon. 
It was snowing 
And it was going to snow. 
The blackbird sat 
In the cedar-limbs.

It seems that the world in this song has been stripped of beauty and mystery; the waves in the double-slit experiment (see note 3 above) have robbed the waves of San Rocco of their sublimity, the crows are denuded of quality, and below we see "mongs" (I know) crawling around on their hands and knees, considering the ground rather than the heavens. At the same time, the double-slit experiment is not your typical reduction of the world to bare facts we might expect in such a context: the human observer, for one thing, occupies a dispositive position in such experiments, and the world discovered is, if not in any obvious way a reflection of human desires, at least a correlate of the cogito (at least indirectly, as it is not so much an actual observer as the experimental parameters she has set that are dispositive, if I understand it correctly). The realm of value in this song is reduced to the twin banalities of advertising and chattering celebrities; in that sense, we could almost see this song as a miniature "Garden," without the theology of the latter or very much of its sublimity. 

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8. The patron saint of advertisers is Saint Bernadino (thanks to dannyno).

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9. Smith often sings an abbreviated word phonetically, as with "dept." here ("dept." also appears in "Lie Dream of a Casino Soul"). "The department of no name" is mentioned in "Is This New," also on Imperial Wax Solvent.  

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Alton Towers: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 2008