Carry Bag Man

Thanks TommyD, see my comment #2.

JCC link is dead. Damn, I wish I'd known how to archive them years ago...

It's not dead, I don't think, it's just you've got the URL as this: "http://annotatedfall.doomby.com/pages/the-annotated-lyrics/%20http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=106%20"

And it need to just be this: "http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=106%20"

I've archived it for you. Link: http://web.archive.org/web/20180224091918/http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=106%20

bzfgt, comment #8: it's not a dead link. The link is mangled.

You've got http://annotatedfall.doomby.com/pages/the-annotated-lyrics/%20http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=106%20, but of course it should just be: http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=106%20

I created an archive link for you:

http://web.archive.org/web/20180224091918/http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=106%20

Another angle, which upends current theories:

From Lindsay Reade's The Life of Ian Curtis: Torn Apart (Reade was Tony Wilson's first wife):

The full story of the Leigh Festival disaster belongs elsewhere but for Ian Curtis, performing to a scant gathering in the open air next to a defunct colliery, it was arguably the most ludicrous gig he had undertaken since Bowden Vale youth club.

Backstage on the final day, Curtis was nose deep in a book. Distractions singer Mike Finney enquired as to the nature of this tome, and it turned out to be Jean Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason, the first volume of Sartre's claimed trilogy, Les Chenims de la Liberte (The Roads to Freedom).

This was extremely hip reading matter of the time and as liberal arts philosophy goes, quite an accessible and enjoyable read. Unknowingly, Curtis had started a trend here insofar as his habit of carrying esoteric reading matter around in a plastic bag - initially a Manchester joke of the time - would soon be copied by a number of supporting bands. Arthur Kadmon of Ludus would never be seen without his 'hip bag', more often than not containing the works of Camus, Mailer or Fowles. Mark E. Smith even lampooned the trend in the song 'Carry Bag Man."

I would just observe that Reade may be off beam here. Carry Bag Man was first performed in January 1988, and Curtis died in 1980. Ludus split up in 1984. The Leigh Festival was August 1979. So if this song is a comment on the trend, it would be commenting on a trend which Reade is saying started nearly a decade before, which strikes me as implausible. And in the notes, MES is on record as saying the song is about carrier bags of drugs. However, MES was known for using carrier bags himself, and it is interesting to have the information that carrier bags were not just an MES thing.

The Le Guin essay (about which there's nothing in that Wikipedia entry that I can find) was collected in 1989, at least. Any idea when it was written/delivered?

I'm not persuaded by the Curtis story.

I don't see why he couldn't be commenting on a trend that started the decade before if it was still a trend--are you now claiming that MES didn't comment on trends that hadn't started more or less contemporaneously with the writing of the song? There's a car in "Athlete Cured"...automobiles were invented in the 19th Century...you get the idea.

I know MES seems to us to be a master of caustic omniscience who couldn't possibly have missed a carrier bag trend in the late 70s, but on reflection isn't it possible he didn't know about the trend until the late 80s, even if he would have huffily refused to even acknowledge its existence had he known how stale it was by the time he sat down to write the Frenz material?

Surely you've noticed how perplexed I am by your methodological razor, one of these days maybe you'll expound the theory behind it to my greater satisfaction?

Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be much reason to take this theory seriously. The Carrier Bag Theme is overdetermined as it is, I'm not sure we need to cram anything else in...unless of course there was some sort of corroboration that this is indeed what MES was up to. It just seems like someone connecting the dots in a way any commenter here could, and if someone posited this in the comments I'd say it's worth considering, and I'll keep an eye out for corroboration. I don't see anything extra to recommend this except the fact, thin under the circumstances, that the woman who came up with it published it in a book...on the other hand, it is indeed worth considering and we should indeed keep an eye cocked for some sort of corroboration. If she's right, you'd think the trend of others copying the carrier bag move--not necessarily MES mind you, but just some other people besides Curtis and Kadmon doing it, or even some confirmation that Kadmon's bag habit is related to Curtis's, which would strengthen it a little--might pop up, and that would get my attention.

There are some strong subliminal persuaders in this account--Sartre was pals with Camus who the Fall got their name from, and Kadmon worked with the Fall. I don't want to note it simply because it's the kind of thing that would seem more persuasive than it should were I to put it in a note. It's like when someone's first biographer tells a story without any citation, and no one knows where she got it from, and then subsequent biographers cite that, and you see the story and a little footnote number at the end and think "Oh, well that happened I guess."

On the other hand I think this comment is the sort of thing people have in mind when they say we are "overthinking" things...

Well, since your comment is basically a paraphrase of my last comment, you're overthinking it! Nyah, nyah!

I hasten to add that "overthinking" is a compliment around here--of course.

"I don't make waves, I hide bags in graves"

Sounds kind of like a rap lyric for some reason

It's possible but it seems kind of generic, it could be any number of things if it's a specific place, couldn't it?

Comment #19.

See my comment #2.

"Croft" is a generic name, at least in Lancashire/Greater Manchester dialect or slang - i.e. lots of places would have a patch of land that would have been referred to locally as "the croft". In the song, I think it is a particular "croft" the narrator has in mind, but there's no clues as to where it is in the lyric. The place identified in the notes that is now a housing estate is a plausible candidate, but we don't really know.

There is no reason to think that Johnny Marr's "croft" is the same "croft" as the "croft" in this lyric. Which doesn't mean it isn't, but you'd need to have some further evidence. But Marr lived in Ardwick Green, which is south Manchester and Salford is to the west and Prestwich/Bury to the north, so there is good reason to think it's not the same place, if we assume MES is likely to be writing about places closer to home.

Marr's family lived at 19 Brierley Avenue, off Higher Ardwick (the street was subsequently demolished). That's only about about a mile away from the location of Ardwick Bridge, but the arches he talks about seeing from his house are not where the Fenian Arch was.

A couple of corrections to Palmer Eldritch, comment #26.

The gig with Dick Dale at the Royal Festival Hall was on 22 September 2000 (not on Peel's birthday, which was the previous month, but billed as "Peel Sessions Live"), which of course means the group consisted of MES, Julia Nagle, Tom Head, Adam Helal and Neville Wilding.

The "dudes" were recruited during the US tour several years later, after subsequent line-up Ben Pritchard, Spencer Birtwistle and Steve Trafford abandoned the tour. The Americans' first performance being San Diego on 9 May 2006.