Deer Park

(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

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." 

^

Deer Park: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1981