Bury Pts. 1+3

I'm not from Bury (1)
I'm not from Bury, man
I'm not from Bury
I'm not from Bury, man

Stop messing around, clown
I'm Wolverine (2)
I'm from Bury
A French Prince, I said

This song means something
Every song means something
Automatic (3)
Swap again
Bills
I got bills
I got bills
On my elbows
And two kids to go with it

I'm On
I'm On

All that road is battle
Battle plan
I'm from Bury, as in Bourée
A French composition
On a fluted instrument (4)
I can, I can

I can make strong lands
Rendering, writing off
Of the milk of my elbow
Re: folders left-handed CD

And you will suffer all the seasons
On the sides of municipal buildings
And used to stop drafts
In glass fronted AERT homes (5)

Then one day a Spanish king
With a council of bad knaves 
Tried to come to Bury (6)

A new way of recording
A chain round the neck (7)
Ding, off he trots (8)
You can't say anything nowadays
I said "if"      (9)
I'm from Bury

Stop messing around, clown
I'm Wolverine
I'm from Bury
A French Prince, I said

This song means something
Every song means something
Automatic
Swap again
Hit it!

And two kids to go with it

I'm not from Bury
I'm not from Bury, man
I'm not from Bury
I'm not from Bury, man

Is the artistic Mark in fact
Got rid of vermin
Like the grey squirrels
By reading out
Ben Marshall's articles (10)
or user recordings
on his vile manufacturing community (11)

I'm from Bury

1. Bury is a town in northern England. According to Mark E. Smith, "This song is really about Bury, a city ten miles to the north of Manchester. In Manchester we hate the people from Bury, an old...where nothing has happened for the last 400 years. All those who go to Spain come from there, ha ha!" 

From another interview:

(Reformation)

And from the Quietus in 2010:

"So, I was very amused to see that Bury Council got the exclusive first showing of the 'Bury 1+3' video.

MES: Really! Someone told me about that but I just thought they were taking the piss. People in Bury seem to like it... they're from Bury! [much laughter]"

According to a news item from May 6, 2010 on the Domino records site, "The [Bury] video is being premiered in the UK on the Bury council website, as a nod to the town that inspired the song."

This all points to one of the greatest mysteries in Falldom--where the fuck does MES live? Not that we want to stalk him or take a tour his home, it's just that it comes up sometimes when discussing these lyrics. But the man seems to sometimes live in Salford, sometimes Prestwich, sometimes Bury, and sometimes "I'm not from Bury, man!" Well, as you all know by now, when one needs to know something like this, one needs to call on Dan:

"If you consider what MES says about Bury, it is clear he considers where he lives in Prestwich to be in Salford. Others would agree. However, his local authority is the metropolitan borough of Bury - Prestwich became part of Bury in the 1974 local government re-organisation . There were proposals in the early 20th century to merge Prestwich with either Salford or Manchester - but they came to nothing as far as I can tell..."

If that wasn't all confusing enough, apparently "I'm not from Bury" is precisely what most people from Bury say about themsevles. From the Manchester Evening News, via Dan:

"We asked people from Prestwich if they live in Bury or Manchester - here's what they said"
 

The town is geographically closer to Manchester city centre than Bury, reflected by the number of professionals who commute into the city, while its houses also have Manchester post codes.

However, residents pay their council tax to Bury Council and are represented in parliament by Bury South MP Christian Wakeford.
 

More than 1,000 people had their say on the matter in a poll on our Facebook page this week.
 

And 72pc of respondents said they saw themselves as living in Manchester, compared to just 28pc for Bury.

From Dan:

In the limited edition book The Future's Here to Stay by Graham Duff (2021), Duff quotes Dave Spurr:
 

"The title of 'Bury' came from the fact that we first jammed it at a studio in Bury. That's how we referred to the song from then on and Mark wrote his lyrics around that. Also I think he wanted to make clear the fact that he wasn't from Bury."

And Eleni (who is misleading on the local government geopolitics, since Prestwich joined Bury in 1974, having previously been a borough in its own right since 1939 and an urban district in its own right before that since 1894):
 

"They moved the borders, and suddenly Prestwich was part of Bury... So then, suddenly we're not in Manchester, we're in Bury. Mark wanted to make a bit of a satire of local patriotism. But it's not all tongue in cheek - there's some truth in it."

Dan points out that the 2005 Howling Hex song "Now, We're Gonna Sing" has a riff that is pretty much the same as "Bury." The album it comes from, All-Night Fox, is one of 10 "Mark E Smith Approved Albums" listed by the remaining members of the Fall (now Imperial Wax).

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2. Wolverine is one of the X-Men in the Marvel series of the same name, although that's probably not be what MES has in mind here. Otherwise, all I can say is "have a bleeding guess"...a dreaded phrase here at the Annotated Fall, and one I'm forced to resort to all too often. In any case, wolverines are a small but persistent theme for the Fall; he seems to drop one in every ten years or so to see if anyone's paying attention. In addition to "Bury," wolverines are also mentioned in the songs "Cary Grant's Wedding," "Session Musician," "Service," "Arid Al's Dream" and "Clasp Hands."  

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3. There's a pub in Bury called Automatic (thanks to DJ Ash on the Fall Forum). This could suggest that, if you are using language, it is automatic that it will mean something; this fits with the different, but complemantary, connotation of "automatic writing," which usually implies some sort of spiritual source for the written content. However, the chief idea is to write in such a way that the conscious mind is circumvented; once it's out of the way, whether the spirits, the unconscious, or even language itself writes is, I think, not a metaphsical question MES would be overly exercised about. The notion that, one way or another, language is not merely the medium but in a sense the author is arguably consonant with MES's approach to lyrics. The original, literal meaning of a lyric often appears to be treated as a jumping-off point, and MES seems to delight in permutations introduced as a song develops, or even by others who mistranscribe his words (as the lyrics books seem to attest). At times he seems to substitute words whose overt connection to their context is that they sound like the words they come to replace...this is particularly evident in song titles (for instance, "Spider" turning into "Kinder of Spine"). The press release for Hex Enduction Hour mentions, in connection with the lyrics to "Winter," something called "the 'Clang' process of speech, whereby the sufferer during speech makes sentences containing similar sounding words."

Joincey, who introduced the idea of automatic writing in the comments below, also suggests a connection with the "cut-up" writing technique most commonly associated with Brion Gysin and William S Burroughs, noting that "Bills, I got Bills" could somehow obliquely nod to Burroughs...if it does, it's too oblique to affirm with any confidence, but I suppose it's worth mentioning.

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4. In fact, a bourée is a French dance. However, Jethro Tull recorded a song called Bourée (an adaptation of Bach's Bourée in E Minor) which is an instrumental that heavily features Ian Anderson's flute (thanks to dannyno and misterrogers on the Fall Forum).

Carl says that bourrée is also a French slang term for drunk, and rightly points out that MES may or may not be aware of this...

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5. If this lyric is correct, it may refer to a company called Advanced Environmental Recycling Technologies, Inc., which manufactures building materials.

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6. This is one of those lines where one feels one must do something, if one is to remain a self-respecting annotator of Fall lyrics. I don't have much to offer here, however. Philip II of Spain was king of England from 1554 until his wife's death in 1558.  Dan mentions Philip V who, it will be remembered, was the first member of the House  of Bourbon to be king of Spain. Even more tenuously, the context of the ensuing lines ("a new way of recording...") perhaps suggests a swipe at the record company, Domino Records. "Dominus" means "Lord" in "Latin," and "Domino" sounds like it could be the Spanish equivalent...except it isn't.  Isn't that enlightening?  Unless, of course, he says the Fresh Prince...he does not.

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7. Quietus: And when you sing "a new way of recording... a chain around my neck", is that referring to the fact that you thought the album was done months before it came out but they thought it needed more work.

MES: [laughs] Yeah, but it would have been nice to have been told. I think it's just par for the course these days. It takes some people two fucking years to do an LP and it's just fucking alien to me. You worry. It ruins your flow. You get rusty.

On the Oh Brother podcast with Paul and Steve Hanley, Keiron Melling recounts how hands-on the record company was for this recording.

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8. This may just be onomatopoiea, but it may also be an allusion to Simon "DIng" Archer, the former Fall member and sometime collaborator who co-produced the album. Albtwo interprets the action here as "Mark suggests a possible change in the sound landscape, and Ding is unhappy with the idea and goes off in a huff" which is just as likely as anything else...

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9. In placing quotation marks here, I'm following nairng's interpretation, that MES said something Ding took offense to, but which MES inisisted was only said as a hypothetical. Note that a more minimalist, non-interventionist transcription would omit the quotation marks, but this, it seems to me, is also an interpretation--something has to be done, even if that something is nothing...

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10. Ben Marshall is a journalist. In 2008, he interviewed MES for Uncut magazine, and the latter landed himself in hot water with the RSPCA by proclaiming, for some reason, that he would "'happily set about an endangered red squirrel with a set of professional hedge-clippers.'

He added: 'Squirrels mean nothing to me. I killed a couple last weekend actually. They were eating my garden fence.

My sisters are animal lovers and they had been leaving food out for these squirrels. They've got rats in the bloody house now. Serves 'em right.'" Apparently, the RSPCA suspected he was referring to endangered red squirrels, and duly launched a "probe":

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11. Buy Kurious! on the Fall Forum helpfully suggests: "[M]aybe 'user recordings' are the tapes of the interview and 'manufacturing' is more about making stuff up than production, ie. 'vile manufacturing community' = journalists?"

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Bury: Fall Tracks A-Z