Deer Park

Lyrics

(1)

I took a walk down West 11 (2)
I had to wade through 500 European punks (3)
In an off-license I rubbed up with some oiks (4)
Who threw some change on the Asian counter
And asked polite if that covered two lagers
A hospital discharge asked me where he could crash

Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It's a large type artist ranch
This is where C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark (5)
Have you been to the English Deer Park?

Spare a thought for the sleeping promo dept. (6)
They haven't had an idea in two years 
Dollars and deutchmarks keep the company on its feet
Say have you ever have a chance to meet
Fat Captain Beefheart imitators with zits? (7)
Who is the King Shag Corpse? (8)

Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It's a large type minstrel ranch
This is where C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark
Have you been to the English Deer Park?

The young blackies get screwed up the worst
They've gone over to the Hampstead house suss
In the English system they implicitly trust  (9)
See the A&R civil servants
They get a sex thrill out of a sixteenth of Moroccan
They get a sex thrill out of a sixteenth of Moroccan  (10)

Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It's a large type artist ranch
This is where C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark
Have you been to the English Deer Park?

Yes, dear chap, it hasn't changed that much
It's still a subculture art-dealer jerk-off
Yes, dear chap, it hasn't changed that much
It's still a subculture art-dealer jerk-off

Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It's a large type minstrel ranch
This is where C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark
Have you been to the English Deer Park?

Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It's a large type minstrel ranch
This is where loads of punks congregate in the dark
Have you been to the English Deer Park?

Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It's a large type minstrel ranch
This is where C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark
Have you been to the English Deer Park?

Hey tourist it wasn't quite like what you thought
Hey Manchester group what wasn't what you thought
Hey Scottish group that wasn't quite like what you thought
Hey Manchester group that wasn't what you thought
Hey Scottish group that wasn't quite like what you thought
Quite like what you thought

Hey Midlands, scooped yer, how d'you ever get the job?
Hey Manchester group from it wasn't quite like what you thought
Quite like what you thought
Guess what 
Guess guess guess...
Guess what

 

Notes

1. In medieval times deer parks were establshed by kings (and, later, other titled persons) in order to facilitate hunting and the enjoyment of nature by the nobility. Almost all the deer in Britain were at one time contained in such parks, so eating venison was considered a symbol of status (very little venison was sold, so the only people who could get it were the nobles). Norman Mailer, whom Mark E. Smith has expressed an appreciation for on at least one occasion, wrote a novel called The Deer Park (1955) about a resort town called Desert D'Or ("golden desert," a fictionalized Palm Springs) in which the upper classes behave quite badly, much like in medieval deer parks. The title, however, is thought to be a reference not to a medieval deer park but to the Parc-aux-Cerfs ("stag park") of Louis XV of France (1710-1774), a more modern version of the deer park in which the king kept a mansion where he installed various women with whom he had sexual liaisons. In a profile in the NME that came out a year or so before Hex Enduction Hour, MES listed both The Deer Park and Ritual in the Dark (see note 4) as novels he liked.

Neil remarks: "Don't overthink Deer Park, in the early 80s Deer Parks weren't uncommon, and you could visit them. I equate people gawping at deer with people going to London from the North as tourists and gawping at bohemian London, the punks and bands are the deer."

DJAsh: "MES might also have been aware that large areas of Prestwich and Whitefield were once an extensive deer park , linked to the Pilkington family. Stand Grammar school was named due to its location at Stand in Whitefield, so called as it was the location for the viewing platform used by the bigwigs to observe the deer. There is also the painting 'The Deer Park' by Michael Andrews."
 

Dan:

According to Paul Hanley, MES plays guitar on this (Have a Bleedin Guess, p.112), and he has a quote from Craig Scanlon :
 


Mark definitely showed me that guitar line...

Hanley continues:
 


Rough Trade itself was the source of much of Mark's ire in the lyric. The song, at least in part, is as concerned with recounting real events as its predecessor, 'Fortress'....While we were signed to Rough Trade, whenever we were in London we stayed at the Notting Hill Gate Hotel, which was nearby. It didn't have a bar, so Mark was often to be seen frequenting the nearby off-licenses, particularly between the hours of 3pm and 5:30pm. This is where we find him in the first verse of 'Deer Park', having successfully negotiated his way past the punk-rock tourists who regularly frequented Rough Trade's record shop.

(p.112)

Under the licensing laws of the time, pubs generally shut at 3pm, and re-opened at 5:30pm. See also "The pubs were closed/It was three o'clock" in "Futures and Pasts."

The song is introduced by "Fortress" on Hex, but in live performance they were treated as separate entities, seldom being played in successsion.  

^

2. W11 is a borough in London where Rough Trade records, a label the Fall had just left, is housed. From a 1983 interview with Paul Hanley and Karl Burns (transcribed to the Fall online forum by anonyrena):

VO#3: What is “Fortress/Deer Park?”

KARL: Two different songs. (Everyone laughs very loudly.)

KARL: (Half-laughing himself.) Listen, we’re not going to give you an answer to a question like that! I mean, fuck you! Fortress…Deer Park…I’ll give you a clue: Rough Trade, London. That’s all. We’re not saying anymore. And don’t say Karl or Paul said it.

PAUL: And BBC.

KARL: BBC, Rough Trade, London. (Then in a posh accent) Notting-ham. (Back to his normal voice) Ever been there?

VO#3: No.

KARL: Then you don’t know what it’s about then.

^

3. Andy points out that "Sarnath in India (a Buddhist pilgrimage hotspot) gets it's name from a deer park, where legend has it, a stag 'King Banyan Deer' was born and grew up surrounded by 500 deer. Another legend goes that when Buddha was born it was announced to 500 holy men.
Fast forward to the 80's when MES has to wade through 500 europunks to get to the Asian counter."

If MES's mind was on this connection, he would doubtlessly have also appreciated that HP Lovecraft used the name for his story "The Doom That Came to Sarnath."

^

4. "Oik" is an English slang term for a crude and lower-class person. 

Dan: I think "Oik" is a word most associated with public [i.e. private boarding] schools - appears a lot in old books written about boarding schools, when they're talking about boys from other (non-private) local schools. I've never heard it spoken. It's a very class-laden term, and also an early-20th century term - probably in decline after the 1950s, that's my sense.

^

5. Colin Wilson, who wrote novels and non-fiction books on the occult, among other things. Ritual in the Dark is a novel about a hunt for a serial killer who is portrayed as a modern Jack the Ripper, and is largely concerned with the inner development of its protagonist, Gerard Sorme. During the composition of his first book, The Outsider, a summary of, and meditation on, Existentialist thought, Wilson lived in a tent in Hampstead Heath, a park in London that contains section that serves as a deer refuge. This is where he apparently began Ritual in the Dark; after leaving Hempstead, Wilson moved into a flat in W11.  "Have you been to English deer park?" may be a response to the question asked by the "hospital discharge," who wanted to know "where he could crash."

^

6. This may be a reference to Rough Trade.  

^

7. Dave Thomas of Pere Ubu believes this to be about him (thanks to Zack):

I am told this follows on an incident decades ago when I was visiting Rough Trade Booking. Mark E evidently came into the room and stood there. I had no idea who he was, or rather what he looked like, so I continued on with my conversation. He took it as a snub. Years later we were at a festival. I thought, "Right, I'll repair this situation." So I kept a lookout for an opportunity to be nice. Of course not knowing what he looked like I ended up in conversation with someone backstage, again "ignoring" Mark E in a remarkably parallel set of events. All you humans look so much alike...

Unfortunately this appears on the "Fall News" page without attribution.

^

8. This line has prompted endless speculation; it is often thought to refer to Ian Curtis, the late Joy Division singer, and other theories have it pointing to Elvis Presley, known as the King. "Shag" is a British slang word that means "fuck," one which has gained a certain amount of traction in the United States in the wake of the Austin Powers franchise. There is also a bird native to New Zealand called a Rough-Faced Shag which is also often referred to as a King Shag, which probably has little to do with the song, but may have planted the phrase in MES's mind.  

Dan:

Paul Hanley, in Have a Bleedin Guess, devotes a whole chapter to the "Who is the king shag corpse?" question (see pp.115-117).

On the Ian Curtis theories, he observes that on A Part of American Therein's version of Cash 'n' Carry, MES critiqued Factory records for living "off the back of a dead man."

Says Hanley,

 


No coy unanswered questions there, and it's clear Mark's contempt was reserved for the record label. It's unlikely he'd have referred to someone who'd recently died in such tragic circumstances so crassly.

Hanley concludes it is either Karl Burns or Grant Showbiz:
 


As far as I was concerned at the time, 'King Shag' was Karl Burns (for obvious reasons) and 'The King Shag Corpse' was a subsequent title Mark bestowed on Grant Showbiz. And as Grant replied when I put that particular theory to him: 'That fits with my memory. Let's face it, we were the only ones... I think they said "getting some" back in the day, as alluded to in Steve's lovely book.'

He did have one important caveat to my assigning of roles however.. 'It was the other way round.' So there you go. Karl or Grant. But definitely not Ian Curtis.

^

9, David comments:

"The 'suss' laws (stopping a suspect on suspicion of being about to commit a crime) were widely seen as heavily discriminating against young black men, and were a major cause of the inner city riots in Manchester and elsewhere in 1981. MES would have known the minor Manchester hit 'Dem a Suss (in the Moss),' (i.e., Moss Side in Manchester) by reggae band Harlem Spirit."

^

10. This could refer to racial ancestry (in the Americas during and for some time after the era of African slavery, someone with one sixteenth African blood was known as a "quintroon" or a "hexadecaroon"), but it probably refers to dope; according to Mike Watts, "An eighth refers to 1/8 of an ounce of dope. You will almost always get a better price if you buy an eighth instead of a gram. Some people will also sell half-eighths--which should really be called a 'sixteenth'--or 1.75 grams."

And according to Jules:

"[In England] at that time nobody sold grams, it was quarters, eighths and 'teenths,' as a sixteenth of an ounce was known; the reference also fits with the drugs economy of the time in the UK, there was very little 'grass' available, unlike today when the opposite applies. It was almost exclusively hash from either Morocco, Lebanon or Pakistan areas and, at least in Nottinghamshire, the bulk of the hash was Moroccan Gold and very good quality, with periodic imports of equally good quality Lebanese, although the political instability of the area soon put paid to the hashish industry in that part of the world. I don't recall ever seeing anyone buying or selling grams, though we knew the metric equivalent of Imperial weights. Most people had no access to accurate scales anyway. We used a 6" ruler, paper clips and used half, one and two pence coins to counter-balance teenth, eighth and quarters respectively."

On the other hand, note this verse begins with a reference to the "young blackies," so this doesn't seem 100% certain.

The Peel version has "The young rastas get screwed up the worst." 

^

Comments (67)

Jeff
  • 1. Jeff | 12/09/2013
Zoogz Rift was another, more directly-indebted "fat Captain Beefheart imitator" (and Ayn Rand fan) whose 1979 album was dedicated to Don Van Vliet.
martin
  • 2. martin | 27/03/2014
With reference to a recent question on The Fall Online, the line about "the King Shag Corpse" seems to have been first used in the song during the performance at Sheffield Polytechnic on 4 September 1981. At the same gig we have the first mentions of West 11 and of the thrill of a sixteenth of Moroccan, suggesting that some rewriting on MES's part took place between the mid-July of that year (the end of the US tour) and the subsequent tour of England.
dannyno
  • 3. dannyno | 28/03/2014
Thanks for that, Martin.
dannyno
  • 4. dannyno | 28/03/2014
Interesting to see mention of Zoogz Rift - does seem more likely than Pere Ubu as a Beefheart reference. And there's a connection with "Blind Man's Penis", which is a record noted in this article: http://thequietus.com/articles/08568-the-fall-mark-e-smith-record-collection.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoogz_Rift
Martin
  • 5. Martin | 17/10/2014
Some words from the song ("Have you been to the English deer park?...i waded through 500 European punks...") first appeared (as far as my collection of recordings allows me to tell) during a performance of C'n'C,,,in Rotterdam on 9 May 1981, some 16 days before the official live debut of the song.
marc balance
  • 6. marc balance | 28/11/2014
..surely whole paragraph is about rough trade. there were rough trade departments in the us and in germany (dollars&deutschmarks). rough trade uk's serious financial troubles started around 1981. and pere ubu reference makes even more sense, since mayo thompson, who was a member of pere ubu '80-'82 (recorded two albums with them, both on rough trade), worked for rough trade uk. he was also brought in by geoff travis for co-production on 'fiery jack' and 'grotesque', which wasn't appreciated by mark e smith. (read neil taylors 'an intimate history of rough trade', it's all in there..).
russell richardson
  • 7. russell richardson | 20/10/2015
Yes, on that last point - I'd def. think it was a reference to Mayo Thompson, who was at that time part of Red Crayola, relocated to London, and dabbling in a lot of production work for Rough Trade. I don't think there were any fireworks, but The Fall made it known quite clearly that they could produce their own records, thank you very much.
Nairn Gordon
  • 8. Nairn Gordon | 05/12/2015
Deutschmarks is mis-spelt
Dollars & deutschmarks reminds me of the deutschmarks or dollars line from private dancer by tina turner - but i dunno which was first.
Also, according to the Steve Coogan film The Look Of Love, Soho was once Henry VIII's hunting ground, or deer park...but i dunno if soho is anywhere near w11.
bzfgt
  • 9. bzfgt | 06/12/2015
Thanks, Nairn, and welcome to the scene over here! (You are the Nairn from the FOF, right?)

"Private Dancer" was a couple years later...
dannyno
  • 10. dannyno | 09/08/2016
"Who is the king shag corpse".

On the FOF, someone made the wise observation that MES may not himself know who the king shag corpse is - it is, after all, asked as a question. Maybe it was graffiti, or something.
bzfgt
  • 11. bzfgt | 25/08/2016
Right, and he'd like that it's the ultimate white whale of lyric-chasing fans, whether he knows the answer or not...
PaulG
  • 12. PaulG | 04/09/2016
As this seems to be aimed at Rough Trade in large parts then the 'Scottish Group' could well be Orange Juice.

In 1981 Rough Trade paid for the recording of their first album 'You can't Hide Your Love Forever' but the band sold the album to, and signed for, Polydor.

(source 'Simply Thrilled - The Preposterous Story of Postcard Records' by Simon Goddard)
AndyG
  • 13. AndyG | 30/10/2016
Sarnath in India(buhddist pilgrimage hotspot) gets it's name from a deer park, where legend has it, a stag "King Banyan Deer" was born and grew up surrounded by 500 deer. Another legend goes that when Buhdda was born it was announced to 500 holy men.
Fast forward to the 80's when MES has to wade through 500 europunks to get to the Asian counter.
dannyno
  • 14. dannyno | 18/01/2017
Nobody has ever followed up Karl Burn's reference to Nottingham, I guess because we think we've got a London location for the Deer Park which fits the facts - Colin Wilson, Rough Trade and all that. And it does seem safe enough and everything fits. And it is Karl Burns speaking, so, you know.

But perhaps we should take it seriously for the sake of argument. In which case an alternative candidate for the Deer Park might be as a reference to Wollaton Park: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollaton_Park. In which case the lodge might be Lenton Lodge: http://www.lentontimes.co.uk/images/gallery/derby_road/derby_rd_listener_26.htm,

But there seems little reason why MES would talk about things so local about Nottingham, and as noted these references don't seem to fit the rest of the facts. Lenton Lodge doesn't seem to have been used by artists. We can shoehorn Nottingham in, but at the cost of doing serious violence to other references in the song. At least we've thought about it.
dannyno
  • 15. dannyno | 18/01/2017
Ha ha! What lodge!!?!? There is no lodge! I'm going nuts!
dannyno
  • 16. dannyno | 18/01/2017
Let's see if I can redeem myself.

How about this for some echoes of the song: http://www.londonfictions.com/colin-wilson-ritual-in-the-dark.html


Ritual had begun life in 1949, when Wilson was just 17, as an unpublished short story: ‘Symphonic Variations’. After completion, he decided to turn it into a full-length novel. It was this that his friend, and fellow would-be novelist, Laura Del Rivo — whose own London novel, set in Notting Hill, The Furnished Room (republished by Five Leaves in 2011), heavily influenced by Ritual, was published in 1961 and filmed by Michael Winner in 1963 as West 11 — recalls seeing in manuscript in the Northumberland Avenue café where they first met in 1952...
dannyno
  • 17. dannyno | 04/03/2017
As noted above, the line about the English Deer Park first saw the light of day on 9 May in Rotterdam, during C'n'C.

Just flying a kite, in Rotterdam is Het Park, which was designed in the English landscape style. But I don't know if it has deer.
Zack
  • 18. Zack | 16/03/2017
There is an alleged quote (uncited, I'm afraid) from Pere Ubu's David Thomas stating that he was told ("by whom?") that he is at least one of the FCBIWZs: http://thefall.org/news/000326.html

"I am told this follows on an incident decades ago when I was visiting Rough Trade Booking. Mark E evidently came into the room and stood there. I had no idea who he was, or rather what he looked like, so I continued on with my conversation. He took it as a snub. Years later we were at a festival. I thought, "Right, I'll repair this situation." So I kept a lookout for an opportunity to be nice. Of course not knowing what he looked like I ended up in conversation with someone backstage, again "ignoring" Mark E in a remarkably parallel set of events. All you humans look so much alike..."

Besides the musical and vocal similarities, Thomas seems to have borrowed his stage mannerisms wholesale from Don Van Vliet, and former Magic Band member Eric Drew Feldman played in Pere Ubu from 1989 to 1992.
dannyno
  • 19. dannyno | 16/03/2017
I've never seen that quote from David Thomas before. It's plausible, isn't it? But we don't know where the quote comes from, and we don't know the status of Thomas's informant.
dannyno
  • 20. dannyno | 16/03/2017
I don't hear musical similarities between Beefheart and Pere Ubu or Thomas solo, really. Beefheart is an influence of course (https://www.elsewhere.co.nz/absoluteelsewhere/371/pere-ubus-david-thomas-interviewed-1999-fools-rush-out/)
Lloyd
  • 21. Lloyd | 19/03/2017
The "Nottingham" reference in the interview is surely a mistaken reference to Notting Hill is it not, home of Rough Trade?
dannyno
  • 22. dannyno | 19/03/2017
Lloyd: haha, now you say that, it's obviously got to be Notting Hill! Still, it was an enjoyable waste of time to search all of Nottingham for potential relevance.
bzfgt
  • 23. bzfgt (link) | 23/03/2017
There's so much shit on Fall News that, if we pored over the whole thing, we could probably all retire when we were done.
bzfgt
  • 24. bzfgt (link) | 23/03/2017
Yeah it is often noted that Thomas sounds just like Beefheart but I do not hear it either, even a little bit.
Mike Watts
  • 25. Mike Watts | 12/11/2017
'They get a sex thrill out of a sixteenth of Moroccan'

An eighth refers to 1/8 of an ounce of dope. You will almost always get a better price if you buy an eighth instead of a gram. Some people will also sell half-eighths, which should really be called a sixteenth, it’s 1.75 grams.
kip saunders
  • 26. kip saunders | 30/01/2018
Hello!

1. I'd always assumed the 'king shag corpse' was another Savile reference, alluding to another of his supposed sexual preferences.

2. Is it possible KB said 'Notting Hill' rather than 'Nottingham', Notting Hill being the area in which Rough Trade is/was located?
dannyno
  • 27. dannyno | 01/02/2018
comment #26: I'm not sure Savile's proclivities were widely known in 1981, although Paul Gambaccini has claimed that he was aware of rumours "in the 80s". The link you're made between "Good King Harry shagging Jimmy Savile" and "King Shag Corpse" is ingenious and funny, but I'm not sure it fits in the context of this song. Which isn't to say it wouldn't be put there anyway. When you say "always assumed", how long is "always"?

I think KB was punning on Nottingham/Notting Hill. "-ham" is a widely used geographical suffix, and I think he's just playing with it, a la Tottenham etc
ryan
  • 28. ryan | 02/02/2018
My theory is that MES is combining a few West London parks into one, presumably after a day spent wandering around. I think the 'large type artist ranch' is Holland Park, which is in W11 and originally served as the grounds for Holland House. 'The house became noted as a glittering social, literary and political centre' in the 19th century, according to Wikipedia. A little further east is Kensington Gardens and immediately to its east is Hyde Park, which originally were one big hunting ground for Henry VIII.
kip saunders
  • 29. kip saunders | 21/02/2018
Comment #27. By 'always' I mean since I first heard the song (probably about a decade ago). Rumours about Savile's alleged necrophilia have been doing the rounds for years (and made an appearance in an Irvine Welsh short story whose name escapes me). To clarify, I interpret 'king shag corpse' as 'king of the corpse shaggers', but who knows.
dannyno
  • 30. dannyno | 23/02/2018
OK, so "always" is from about 2008. Savile died in 2011 and the allegations went public after that but were rumoured long before that. John Lydon referred to "seediness" in a 1978 interview (edited out of broadcast at the time).

The Irvine Welsh story you're thinking of is Lorraine Goes To Livingston, which appeared in the Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance collection, published 1996. Irvine says he was well aware of the rumours at the time, despite having no connections to any people or institutions with which Savile was involved - so the rumours were well circulated.

But I haven't seen anything yet to suggest necrophilia rumours were in circulation as early as the writing of this song, or any concrete indication that the line would refer to them if they were.
bzfgt
  • 31. bzfgt (link) | 24/02/2018
Wait, there were actual necrophilia rumors about this Savile guy? Really?

Good thought with "king corpse shagger," maybe; I never thought of that, honestly.
dannyno
  • 32. dannyno | 04/03/2018
Comment #31: oh yes, there are necrophilia allegations. But there's no evidence they were in wide circulation contemporary to this lyric, and I don't really see how "king shag corpse" refers to Savile anyway. I mean, an allegation like that and "King"? Really?

See: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/26/savile-bodies-sex-acts-corpses-glass-eyes-mortuary

All the various reports on Savile are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/nhs-and-department-of-health-investigations-into-jimmy-savile, in case anyone wants to root through them.
dannyno
  • 33. dannyno | 07/03/2018
There's a comment from journalist Gavin Martin on one of the Fall FB groups:

One of the first drinks I had after coming to London out with NME ers in 1980 I was told by one “we know what’s going on we know Jimmy Savile goes into the morgue at Stoke Mandeville and interferes with corpses”.


Which obviously would suggest that the rumours were widely known in certain circles of which MES could have been aware. I still don't think "king shag corpse" sounds remotely like a Savile reference, and thematically it doesn't seem to fit in the lyric at all, but your mileage my vary.

Accusations of necrophilia seem to centre around a hospital in Leeds and Stoke Mandeville.

The Stoke Mandeville reports on Savile (there are dozens of reports from various institutions) are here: http://www.speakingoutinvestigation.com/reports.htm

The main report (http://www.speakingoutinvestigation.com/Downloads/Speaking%20out%20investigation/2902210_Investigation%20into%20the%20Association%20of%20Jimmy%20Savile%20with%20Stoke%20Mandeville%20Hospital.pdf confirms that Savile did have unrestricted access to the mortuary at Stoke Mandeville and records two witnesses stating they had heard the necrophilia rumours. It was not possible to investigate further due to the passage of time.
Huckleberry
  • 34. Huckleberry | 09/03/2018
Note 8. Could "King Shag Corpse" be something to do with Jonathan King, then an important record producer but later convicted of paedophile offences? One of his recording aliases was Shag.
Huckleberry
  • 35. Huckleberry | 09/03/2018
#34. Just to add, if that is what MES was referring to, I don't know where "corpse" comes in.
bzfgt
  • 36. bzfgt (link) | 17/03/2018
Yeah all intriguing, nothing solid though...
jules
  • 37. jules | 18/06/2018
Note 9. This is about dope, almost certainly in my mind, at that time nobody sold grams, it was quarters, eighths and "teenths", as a sixteenth of an ounce was known, the reference also fits with the drugs economy of the time in the UK, there was very little "grass" available, unlike today when the opposite applies, it was almost exclusively hash from either Morocco, Lebanon or Pakistan areas and, at least in Nottinghamshire, the bulk of the hash was Moroccan Gold and very good quality, with periodic imports of equally good quality Lebanese, although the political instability of the area soon put paid to the hashish industry in that part of the world. I don't recall ever seeing anyone buying or selling grams, though we knew the metric equivalent of Imperial weights. Most people had no access to accurate scales anyway. We used a 6" ruler, paper clips and used half, one and two pence coins to counter-balance teenth, eighth and quarters respectively.
Neil
  • 38. Neil | 06/09/2018
Don't overthink Deer Park, in the early 80s Deer Parks weren't uncommon, and you could visit them, I equate people gawping at deer with people going to London from the North as tourists and gawping at bohemian London, the punks and bands are the deer
David
  • 39. David | 29/09/2018
"The young blackies get screwed up the worst
They've gone over to the Hampstead house suss
In the English system they implicitly trust"

The "suss" laws (stopping a suspect on suspicion of being about to commit a crime) were widely seen as heavily discriminating against young black men, and were a major cause of the inner city riots in Manchester and elsewhere in 1981 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sus_law). MES would have known the minor Manchester hit "Dem a sus in the Moss" (ie Moss Side in Manchester) by reggae band Harlem Spirit.
bzfgt
  • 40. bzfgt (link) | 13/10/2018
Neil: that seems right, it certainly fits with the lyrics. If anything I was underthinking it, though...

David: thank you, good stuff.
jensotto
  • 41. jensotto | 10/02/2019
Huckleberry: "King Shag" could be J.King aka Shag and the dates to look up in BBC Genome could be "Loop di Love" on TOTP ... Don't know about the Corpse though.

BTW: Blowfly is also part of some of these "lyrical universes", but not necessarily The MES one. "Fresh Juice" from 1983 found its way into the minds of some friends - I thought it was Eddie Murphy back then. Jello Biafra paid tribute to him (Too fat to f.. vs too drunk...)
dannyno
  • 42. dannyno | 12/07/2019
Note 4, on "Oik"

Oik" is an English slang term for a crude and lower-class person. According to a reader, "Oi music was a punk offshoot,


I think "Oik" is a word most associated with public [i.e. private boarding] schools - appears a lot in old books written about boarding schools, when they're talking about boys from other (non-private) local schools. I've never heard it spoken. It's a very class-laden term, and also an early-20th century term - probably in decline after the 1950s, that's my sense.

Google Books' ngram viewer supports this somewhat:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=oik&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Coik%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Coik%3B%2Cc0

I don't think there's any connection between the word "oik" and the word "oi", except coincidentally. I think "oi" derives more from the attitude of that style of music. And sometimes "oi!" was a repeated refrain in some songs.
DJAsh
  • 43. DJAsh | 27/07/2019
MES might also have been aware that large areas of Prestwich and Whitefield were once an extensive deer park , linked to the Pilkington family. Stand Grammar school was named due to its location at Stand in Whitefield, so called as it was the location for the viewing platform used by the big wigs to observe the deer.

http://prestwich.org.uk/history/places/philips.html
DJAsh
  • 44. DJAsh | 27/07/2019
There is also this painting, Deer Park by Michael Andrews

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/andrews-the-deer-park-t01897
Dicky Flower
  • 45. Dicky Flower | 13/10/2019
"In an off-license I rubbed up with some oiks,
Who threw some change on the Asian counter
And asked polite if that covered two lagers"

While it is a nice idea that MES might have been referencing Sarnath in India, isn't the "Asian counter" just the counter of an off licence with an Asian proprietor?
bzfgt
  • 46. bzfgt (link) | 19/10/2019
Yes, I would assume so, hence Andy's "fast forward 800 years"
duncan goddard
  • 47. duncan goddard | 05/11/2019
"king shag corpse" always makes me think of the birthday party; it's the sort of imagery that cave & co were into at the time. I didn't know, until reading hanley p(drums)'s account of HIH that the fdall & the birthday party had shared bills a couple of times.
just a thought...
bzfgt
  • 48. bzfgt (link) | 09/11/2019
So he does not clear that up in the book! False advertising!
dannyno
  • 49. dannyno | 27/12/2019
According to Paul Hanley, MES plays guitar on this (Have a Bleedin Guess, p.112), and he has a quote from Craig Scanlon :


Mark definitely showed me that guitar line...

(p.111)

Paul Hanley continues:


Rough Trade itself was the source of much of Mark's ire in the lyric. The song, at least in part, is as concerned with recounting real events as its predecessor, 'Fortress'...
<snip>
While we were signed to Rough Trade, whenever we were in London we stayed at the Notting Hill Gate Hotel, which was nearby. It didn't have a bar, so Mark was often to be seen frequenting the nearby off-licenses, particularly between the hours of 3pm and 5:30pm. This is where we find him in the first verse of 'Deer Park', having successfully negotiated his way past the punk-rock tourists who regularly frequented Rough Trade's record shop.

(p.112)

Under the licensing laws of the time, pubs generally shut at 3pm, and re-opened at 5:30pm. See also "The pubs were closed /
It was three o'clock" in Futures and Pasts
dannyno
  • 50. dannyno | 27/12/2019
Paul Hanley, in Have a Bleedin Guess, devotes a whole chapter to the "Who is the king shag corpse?" question (see pp.115-117).

On the Ian Curtis theories, he observes that on A Part of American Therein's version of Cash 'n' Carry, MES critiqued Factory records for living "off the back of a dead man."

Says Hanley,


No coy unanswered questions there, and it's clear Mark's contempt was reserved for the record label. It's unlikely he'd have referred to someone who'd recently died in such tragic circumstances so crassly.


Which is right, I think. There are other examples of MES making adjustments for such matters - from the Gulf War to the Bataclan massacre. He did seem to have had scruples in relation to people who had recently died, probably better examples I might dig out at some point.

And the answer? Well, the book has been out for a while now (but buy it, it's very good!), so:


As far as I was concerned at the time, 'King Shag' was Karl Burns (for obvious reasons) and 'The King Shag Corpse' was a subsequent title Mark bestowed on Grant Showbiz. And as Grant replied when I put that particular theory to him: 'That fits with my memory. Let's face it, we were the only ones... I think they said "getting some" back in the day, as alluded to in Steve's lovely book.'

He did have one important caveat to my assigning of roles however.. 'It was the other way round.' So there you go. Karl or Grant. But definitely not Ian Curtis.
dannyno
  • 51. dannyno | 18/10/2020
Tim Burgess has been running Twitter "listening parties". On 17th October 2020 there was one for Hex Enduction Hour.

It included this exchange, which doesn't add anything to the info in Paul's book, but reiterates it:

https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_477.html

https://twitter.com/hanleyPa/status/1317545917701005312


@hanleyPa: 'Who is the King Shag Corpse?' any ideas @zombat? {zombat is Grant Showbiz}

@zombat: It was always a toss up between me or Karl I thought ?
dannyno
  • 52. dannyno | 18/10/2020
Tim Burgess has been running Twitter "listening parties". On 17th October 2020 there was one for Hex Enduction Hour.

Archived:
https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_477.html

This comment from Paul Hanley is relevant to this song:


Mark really vented his spleen on 'Deer Park' – mainly at Rough Trade, but he was contemptuous of Notting Hill in its entirety. I bet he loved the film.


https://twitter.com/hanleyPa/status/1317546169271083008
dannyno
  • 53. dannyno | 14/01/2021
Following up on my comment #30.

A recording of Lydon referring to the rumours about Savile in an unbroadcast segment of a 1978 interview is played here during an interview with Piers Morgan:



Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/24/john-lydon-says-he-was-banned-from-bbc-over-jimmy-savile-comments
dannyno
  • 54. dannyno | 29/05/2021
I watched West 11 (1963), directed by Michael Winner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_11).

At one point, one of the characters says, "Let's take a walk". This amused me.
HenryP
  • 55. HenryP | 01/06/2021
Just listened again to the Peel version, it sounds to me like "the young rastas get screwed up the worst", which makes more sense to me as an alternative, much more likely to have been victims of sus than the more generic "rascals"...
bzfgt
  • 56. bzfgt (link) | 05/06/2021
Makes way more sense, HenryP. And it sounds like it, changed.
Phil maff
  • 57. Phil maff | 31/01/2022
Very interesting. What was obscured in the more recent BBC Prado scandal was the role of BBC Manchester...with lots of old family favourites....Stuart Hall ,Tie me todget down Harris,Eddie Waring of its a knock out and Jimmy . It was common chatter in Salford amongst early teen-agers...circa1976 that Jimmy was a nonce. I remember standing with mates at the Traffic lights next to the Rialto and Broughton baths when an open top red jaguar e type drove by . My freind shouted dirty puff at him. He could not hear and so waved back sing thinking it was a fan. My mate then went on about kiddy fiddling Jimmy. I vaguely knew he lived in Salford and my mate said he lived with his mum diagonally across from the Rialto. Yeah,put in charge of Broadmoor without a medical certificate.check out Jimmy Saville and the ninth circle.
Drugs....you know your getting old when everyone's in grammes not teenths. They did live off dead bodies ,and artistically imho so did new order. It was the best thing to happen to them not musically but financially ,never rated em much after Ian . There's a feeling with deer park which triggers leave the capital in my head...
We were really suss about peado's,a few of us were ex Rose hill Remand Centre boys in the care system and knew what being raped meant.
Manchester was that rotten with Peado shit at the time that Ronald Hall deputy director of social services was also busy bumming boys on his way to hell. BBC Manchester was a big national hub for it. GMP helped cover it up. Hip new preist always reminds me of Jimmy ,the queen's head lodge magician..........check the record etc.....
joincey
  • 58. joincey | 04/02/2022
i don't think anyone here has mentioned ( forgive me if i missed it - ) but there is a 'Deerpark Road' in Whalley Range , suburb of south manchester.
Hexen Blumenthal
  • 59. Hexen Blumenthal | 05/11/2022
There is a Lee and Herring skit of the mid 90s where both dress as Savile and talk about the London Marathon. This was on BBC 2 as the marathon was on BBC 1
One of them says something like "first dibs in the ambulance if someone dies"

Also Jerry Sadowitz was always ranting about JS being nonce
dannyno
  • 60. dannyno | 14/11/2022
Comment #59:

Richard Herring comments here: https://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/25/10/2012/index.html


People certainly did know about the rumours of Savile spending the night in the mortuary, but dismissed them as nonsense and almost certainly correctly. Because even if the rumours are true there is no way that anyone could really know they were. It is by its very nature a crime without witnesses


The Lee and Herring episode in question wasn't "mid 90s", but April 1999:



Dan
HP Mayo
  • 61. HP Mayo | 27/12/2022
With regards to Karl Burns quote, I think it’s definitely the journalist mishearing him and it’s Notting Hill but, if he was actually saying, Nottingham then, at most, it’s a slight dig at them not being properly Northern and that’s about as much as I can read into. Places like Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Staffordshire are these strange border counties that sometimes get placed along with the North proper on account of their accents but are very much Midlands territory. People from that area often refer to themselves as Northern too. If a proper Northerner like Karl Burns has heard this, he’s probably pointed out how they pronounce ‘Nottingham.’ Us Lancastrians pronounce it ‘Not-ingum’ and, to be fair, I think most people from there also pronounce it that way but, in this imagined scenario, I can see this person saying they’re Northern and then saying they’re from ‘Notting-ham’ when questioned whereabouts in the North they’re from will have really irked him. As I say though, I think he did say ‘Notting Hill’ and the journalist didn’t understand his accent.
HP Mayo
  • 62. HP Mayo | 27/12/2022
On the subject of Jimmy Savile and whether MES was aware of rumours about him, there is an interview out there from around 1998 with him, Peter Hook and Paul Heaton. I’m paraphrasing but in the interview MES goes on a tirade about DJs and parts of it were redacted. However, it ends with ‘I like Jimmy Savile.’ I think this on thefall.net so should be easy to find. Anyway, at the bottom of the interview it has the redacted bit which preceded the part about Savile and it’s along the lines of ‘everyone knows DJs are child benders.’ So yeah, I think MES was very much aware of the rumours. I can also back up the part about locals in Salford having an inkling. I used to work with a lady who delivered papers to the flat he lived in when she was young. He used to invite her in to look at his collection of gonks. She was very adamant nothing happened to her but he was known as a complete weirdo and to be avoided. I think, like so many predators, he probably did this to have a trail of ‘non-victims’ who he could call back to as a way to prove his innocence if it ever got to that. Unfortunately it didn’t and we know the rest.
For the Record
  • 63. For the Record | 12/11/2023
Hey, Midlands scooped yer is I think Hey Midlands school twerp. C Wilson was from Leicester, possible link. Also the Capt. Beefheart imitators are bad rather than fat, I hear
david rathbone
  • 64. david rathbone (link) | 29/11/2023
Mark's question is "have you been to the English Deer Park?"
i.e. to the English version of what Norman Mailer describes in his novel The Deer Park (1955)

The cast of Mailer's The Deer Park are Hollywood movie moguls, directors, actresses, and their spouses, pimps and dealers in a fictional desert resort town about an hour from LA. The title 'The Deer Park' is a metaphor for the way in which the movie business uses people in general and women in particular, beautiful creatures kept for entertainment purposes and sacrificed at will -- the mentality which led to the whole Harvey Weinstien and the #MeToo movement situation. Not only actresses, but writers too (let alone the prostitutes themselves) are used and discarded by men whose romantic self-narrative engineers a clear conscience for themselves, as they cheat, lie, and exploit their way through life. This is not about outrageous celebrity behaviour at parties. It is about a culture of normalized ruthlessness and deluded male fantasies at the roots of "showbiz," all of which masquerades as "art" in the 'deer park.'

This decadent world is observed by the narrator, Sergius O'Shaughnessy, ex-USAF fighter pilot turned post-war writer whose life as an orphan has prepared him for his role of existential obsever of the cruel, vacuous, absurd, petty, tragic lives of hollywood. Turning his back in disgust, Sergius eventually leaves for a stint in Mexico where he trains as a bullfighter, then moves to New York City where he opens a bull-fighting school on the Lower East Side (see p.366 - this is I think the inspiration behind the name of Gerard Cosloy's Matador Records, to whom the Fall were signed for a time in the 90s).

So the central image of this song is that Notting Hill (W 11) is a "large type artist ranch"; a district with a bohemian past and artistic pretensions heading in the direction of gentrification, where the culture industry has a hip image (Rought Trade) but a grim underbelly (Jimmy Saville).

The other book referenced is Colin WIlson's Ritual In The Dark. Set in fifties London. it is the story of a meeting and brief but compelling friendship btween the protagonist Gerard Sorme, and the stranger Austin Nunne, who turns out to be a (spoiler alert) sexually perverse sadistic serial killer. I do believe Austin Nunne is "King Shag Corpse,"

Between them, these two books of existentialist fiction encapsulate what London represented to Mark E Smith: a facade of creativity behind which hide people who haven't had an idea in two years; a sordid world of closetted perversions and sadistic cruelty wearing a mask of benificence where artists are a commodity and banality is the product: "It's still a subculture art-dealer jerk-off." But like both Sergius O'Shaughnessy and Gerard Sorme (or rather, like both Norman Mailer and Colin WIlson), Mark E Smith was an outsider looking askance at the so-called centre of culture, yet creating a work of lasting significance out of that very experience of alienation.
dannyno
  • 65. dannyno | 07/12/2023
David Rathbone, comment #64. I enjoy this amplification of themes.

Just to point out that Paul Hanley has identified (in his book on Hex) that the "King Shag Corpse" is probably Grant Showbiz. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't also other associations.
Ken
  • 66. Ken | 30/12/2023
Comments 6 and 7 above suggest Mayo Thompson for the "Beefheart imitators with zits" and Paul Hanley confirms Karl Burns or Grant Showbiz as the King Shag Corpse. So, in a verse about Rough Trade, the last three lines could be reduced to Mayo Thompson and Grant Showbiz, who both get production credits for recording parts of Grotesque in Street Level Studio on Ladbroke Grove in W11 and originally set up by Grant Showbiz. (And of course when Deer Park was written Grotesque was The Fall’s last 12” album on Rough Trade, released the year before.)

That all seems to add up, but rather than who, what is the King Shag Corpse? I get the shag = sex reference but I don’t really see how “corpse” works in that context so here’s an alternative theory, with absolutely no evidence to support it. Shag can also mean loose tobacco, which has been known to be rolled with other substances to create a relaxing smoke. Could a Shag Corpse therefore be someone who is catatonic on dope, and the King Shag Corpse be read accordingly as the person who smokes the most dope or gets the most stoned?

That could still be Grant Showbiz: I hope I’m not libelling him but from what I’ve read he was a pretty laid back guy who enjoyed a smoke! It would also support the suggestion that Moroccan is hash because it creates a kind of “substances symmetry” across the three main verses: lager in the first; shag in the second; Moroccan in the third.
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