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The Annotated Lyrics
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- Entitled
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- Fol de Rol
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- Futures and Pasts
- Garden New
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- Get a Hotel
- Get A Summer Song Goin'
- Gibbus Gibson
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- Gramme Friday
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- Gut of the Quantifier
- H.O.W.
- Haf Found Bormann
- Hands Up Billy
- Happi Song
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- Hard Life in Country
- He Pep!
- He Talks
- Hexen Definitive/Strife Knot
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- Hey! Luciani
- Hey! Marc Riley
- Hey! Student
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- Hilary
- Hip Priest
- Hit the North
- Hittite Man
- Hollow Mind
- Hostile
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- Hot Cake
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- How I Wrote Elastic Man
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- I've Been Duped
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- Janet, Johnny + James
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- Laptop Dog
- Last Commands of Xyralothep Vi
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- Lay of the Land
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- Life Just Bounces
- Light/Fireworks
- Live at the Witch Trials
- Living Too Late
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- My Condition
- My Door Is Never
- My Ex-Classmates' Kids
- My New House
- Nate Will Not Return
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- New Face in Hell
- New Facts Emerge
- New Formation Sermon
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- No Bulbs
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- No X-mas for John Quays
- Noel's Chemical Effluence
- Noise
- North West Fashion Show
- O! ZZTRRK Man
- O.F.Y.C. Showcase
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- Oh! Brother
- Ol' Gang
- Oleano
- On My Own
- One Day
- Open The Boxoctosis
- Oswald Defence Lawyer
- Over! Over!
- Overture From "I Am Curious, O
- Oxymoron
- Pacifying Joint
- Paintwork
- Papal Visit
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- Pay Your Rates
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- Perverted by Language
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- Ponto
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- Pre-MDMA Years
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- Rememberance R
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- Reprise: Jane--Prof Mick--Ey B
- Return
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- Spencer Must Die
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- Systematic Abuse
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- The Container Drivers
- The Crying Marshal
- The Joke
- The Knight, the Devil and Deat
- The League of Bald-Headed Men
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- The Man Whose Head Expanded
- The Mixer
- The N.W.R.A.
- The Past #2
- The Quartet of Doc Shanley
- The REAL Life of the Crying Ma
- The Reckoning
- The Remainderer
- The Steak Place
- The Usher
- The War Against Intelligence
- The Wright Stuff
- Theme From Error-Orrori
- Theme From Sparta F.C.
- Time Enough At Last
- To Nk Roachment: Yarbles
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- Twister
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- Unutterable
- Van Plague?
- Various Times
- Venice With The Girls
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- Way Round
- Weather Report 2
- What About Us?
- What You Need
- Where's the F***in Taxi? C**t
- Whizz Bang
- Who Makes the Nazis?
- Win Fall CD 2088 AD
- Wings
- Winter (Hostel-Maxi)
- Wise Ol' Man
- Wolf Kidult Man
- Words of Expectation
- Wrong Place, Right Time
- Xmas With Simon
- Y.F.O.C./Slippy Floor
- Yes O Yes
- You Don't Turn Me On
- You Haven't Found It Yet
- You're Not Up To Much
- Your Heart Out
- Youwanner
- Zagreb
- Zandra
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Arranged By Album
- Live at the Witch Trials
- Dragnet
- Grotesque (After the Gramme)
- Slates
- Hex Enduction Hour
- Room to Live
- Perverted by Language
- The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall
- This Nation's Saving Grace
- Bend Sinister
- The Frenz Experiment
- I Am Kurious, Oranj
- Extricate
- Shift-Work
- Code:Selfish
- The Infotainment Scan
- Middle Class Revolt
- Cerebral Caustic
- Light User Syndrome
- Levitate
- The Marshall Suite
- The Unutterable
- Are You Are Missing Winner
- The Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country on the Click)
- Fall Heads Roll
- Reformation Post TLC
- Imperial Wax Solvent
- Your Future Our Clutter
- Ersatz G.B.
- Re-Mit
- The Remainderer
- Sub-Lingual Tablet
- Wise Ol' Man
- New Facts Emerge
- 2014
- O! ZZTRRK Man
- New Facts Emerge
- Segue
- Ponto
- Smith and Mark
- Afternoon Disco
- Reece Stick
- Home /
- The Annotated Lyrics /
- English Scheme
English Scheme
Lyrics
O'er grassy dale, and lowland scene
Come see, come hear, the English Scheme.
The lower-class, want brass (2)
Bad chests, scrounge fags.
The clever ones tend to emigrate
Like your psychotic big brother, who left home
For jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome (3)
He's thick but he struck it rich, switch (4)
The commune crap, camp bop, middle class, flip-flop (5)
Guess that's why they end up in bands
He's the freak creep in us all (6)
He's the freak creep in us all
Condescends to black men
Are very nice to them
They talk of Chile while driving through Haslingden (7)
You got sixty hour weeks, and stone toilet back-gardens
Peter Cook's jokes , bad dope, (8)
Check shirts, fancy groups (9)
Point their fingers at America (10)
Down pokey quaint streets in Cambridge
Cycle our distant spastic heritage
It's a gay red, roundhead (11),
Army career, bread head
If we were smart we'd emigrate
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Notes
1. A note from the Orange Lyrics Book in MES's hand:
RE: 'English Scheme'
"This was one of the songs that started it off, in a way, both 'Slates' E.P. and 'Lie Dream of a Casino Soul'. -'English Scheme' was one of the few songs I’ve written that have sparked off genuine reactions. Boys I’d known for years on and off but never talked to would come up and proclaim its accuracy. -This prompted me to look further into England's 'class' system. -Indeed, one of the few advantages of being in an impoverished sub-art group in England is that you get to see (If eyes are Peeled) all the different stratas of society--for free."
"Sic" throughout, as near as possible, including all quotation marks.
"Scheme" is often used in England to describe a publlic assistance program...people who live in public housing are sometimes referred to as "schemies":
From Chambers' Dictionary:
sch?'mie noun (Scot sl)
A working-class youth from a council estate
3. It was common for building workers and others to go to Europe at the time as there was an economic slump and high unemployment in the UK. This was portrayed at the time in the TV series "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet."
4. At the word "switch," the subject of the lyrics changes from the "lower class" to the "middle class."
5. See also "2nd Dark Age" ("commune crapheads"). In a comment there, Mark Balance speculates that MES is thinking of Crass.
6. The orange lyrics book has "green piece," which may be some kind of pun on "Greenpeace" (which would fit the lyrics), but it does not sound like that at all.
7. Haslingden is a town in Lancashire, about 20 miles north of Manchester. Note that "Neighbourhood of Infinity" mentions "Lancastrian patronization of blacks."
8. Peter Cook was an English actor and comedian who was at one time considered, if not a radical, at least a social critic. His comedy was risque and often directed at establishment figures but he also played working class archetypes.
The stone toilet might be literal, but Huckleberry suggests that "stone toilet might be a contemptuous description of concrete, imitation stone birdbaths which were fashionable in English gardens in the 1970s & 80s, and sometimes looked a bit like toilets?"
Could be actual toilets though, Dan and Dr. X O'Skeleton point out that "traditional working class terraced houses had toilets in a brick outhouse at the back" ("garden" in England means the lawn).
9. The orange lyrics book has "lousy groups." However, "fancy" seems to be what he always sings.
10. Junkman points out that the snare drum channel enters here, before that it is just heard through other mics into which it is bleeding (I think that's the proper term, Junkman's "ambient spill" sounds really sharp though). I quote him now: "You can imagine the effect being discovered by accident, maybe the engineer noticing during a playback that the snare channel had been left muted and turning it on, and MES liking the effect. It does kick the track up a notch."
11. The Roundheads were the faction in the 17th century English Civil War that supported a constitutional monarchy, opposed to the absolutist claim of the "Cavaliers," or supporters of Charles I. More radical groups of the time, notably the Diggers and the Levellers, were also apparently associated with the Roundheads. Roundheads were "parliamentarians" and, furthermore, they were the proto-bourgeois opponents of the cross-class utpoian ideal of "Merrie England." They were driven by a presbytarian/puritanism which equated the efficient use of resourses with godliness (given that they believed the world was God-given, and thus goods and resources were not to be wasted in the manner of the aristocratic profligates). They were minimalist haters of the early Catholic baroque, and were against Christmas and theatre and decoration in churches. They were the forerunners of the Northern industrial barons who famously "knew the price of everything and the value of nothing," in Wilde's famous phrase. "Roundhead" is generally a term of abuse.
Thanks to Frere Dupont for some of the above material.
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Comments (61)
MES: "This is a loose description of the English class system."
And it's just "stone toilet" not "stone stone toilet".
John, I'm not sure about "talk up cheerly" on live versions, here it does sound like "Chile" and that fits well with the theme of the lyrics, whereas the former just sounds like a filler line.
""one day Mark comes into the rehearsal space waving a tape at us. 'Listen to this!' he says, slipping it into his portable cassette player. It's a rough recording of chirping birds with an ice cream van in the distance. 'I was getting the milk off my window ledge and I thought, "Listen. That's the sound of the lower-class English summer, is that." We need to build a song out of it. Get on with it lads! ... <snip> Marc Riley started by inverting the sound of the ice cream van into a keyboard riff and we played along, creating an ironically golly little gem. Mark seems quite please. "English Scheme!" he says. "Play it again and I'll sing."...."
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath. [...]
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
etc.
Comment #18 - sounds like Chile to me, and fits with the condescension in the previous line. This is not in fact a song that is only or primarily about proletarian drudgery at all. In fact the "lower class" appear explicitly only once, early on, and much of the rest of the songs is actually a comment on a certain kind of middle class type in bands.
"Its a gay red, roundhead"
I said ah wok-a-to-ma
I said ah hey student
I said ah hey student
I said ah hey student
etc.
i.e. it's the chorus from "Hey! Student", three years after it was dropped from the set, and thirteen years before it dropped back in again.
You can imagine the effect being discovered by accident, maybe the engineer noticing during a playback that the snare channel had been left muted and turning it on, and MES liking the effect. It does kick the track up a notch.
I'm not sure what that means--it's the chorus when they did not play it?
Anyway I hear "Walk some more" at least some times on MCR but "woka-to-ma" on other versions...
hadn't revisited this page for a while, but I think the 'stone toilet back gardens' is quite literal
Haslingden was used by my parents (along with Todmorden) to denote the utter backwardness of some Manchester suburbs, real dark ages stuff
and even into the 60s, some of the terraced housing will have had communal toilets out back (not one per house, even, and certainly not indoors. No hot water, either, as in the house where I grew up in the early 60s.
thus 'Chile' makes perfect sense, as the intellos would be wringing their hands about post -Allende poverty, while blissfully whizzing through industrial villages that hadn't changed since the 1840s.
see much later on in a few songs 'Hebden Bridge' which was / is a bona fide abandoned (or severely underpopulated) village just over the border in Yorkshire that was settled by smart media types from London in and around the late 70s.
some of the folk were very nice, of course, but the snobby incomers also trod on a lot of persons' sensibilities.
this was long before the BBC decamped to Salford keys (quays) which at that time 79-84 were sump oil pools of deserted masonry, lone pubs like the last tooth in a drunkard's mouth.
Can someone say something definitive about this? If it is the word for housing I can't believe no one has submitted that until now...so I want to make sure what I say is correct
"Schemie" seems to be Scottish slang (I've not come across it, despite the types of building it references being common, or formerly common, where I live) for an inhabitant of a "housing scheme", specifically the modernist council-owned (or at any rate originally built as public housing) blocks of flats such as those exemplified by for example Martello Court, Muirhouse, Edinburgh:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martello_Court
https://canmore.org.uk/site/151230/edinburgh-muirhouse-view-martello-court
Although it's not a word I've heard where I live, it's not impossible "schemie" might have been used elsewhere than Scotland, and perhaps even Salford/Manchester. But most of the documented use is Scottish.
As I say, I don't know if "scheme" was used in Manchester/Salford for council housing estates (particularly of the big tower block type), perhaps someone local will tell us. I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
An echo here of a comment by James Callaghan in 1974. He was foreign secretary at the time, but was later to become prime minister.
From When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the seventies, by Andy Beckett.
I don't know how widely known this comment was in 1979/1980, and therefore whether it could have been something MES had in mind. Certainly Barbara Castle was recorded referring to it later in 1980, but I haven't found anything earlier.
But the mood is the same.
Right you are. Can hear it now.
'I said water, I said H20, I said H20,I said H20, I said H20'
I never knew what this meant.
It’s a fabulous song.
I would add:
"scheme" is another word for a con or scam. This suggests English people on the make, a recurrent MES theme, I think. So everybody trying to escape England through whatever means, contrasted with the traditional bucolic merrie England. It's a song about how the image of something is nothing like the reality.
Always heard "Chile" in the Haslingdon line – it’s funny and fits in with a song of contrasts.
Also, the genius of "the clever ones... he’s thick" around the note 4 "switch"/
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
...
So I piped with merry chear,
...
So I piped, he wept to hear.
(I’m probably reaching here).
https://www.allenovery.com/en-gb/global/news-and-insights/publications/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-english-scheme-of-arrangement
Class composition
Under an English scheme, creditors must be divided into classes, depending on their rights and interests. One class schemes are often desirable as they reduce the prospect of minority blocking stakes. However, it is often the case that different creditors are treated slightly differently (albeit for good commercial reasons) and so the question arises as to when those differences are sufficient to result in separate classes.
The clever ones come over here.
Geographical correctness! Imagine if all lyrics were subject to that.
"If we was smart we'd emigrate"
Also, it would be a typically Smithsonian way of putting it.
Several of the group were gay or bisexual, which, along with other spying cases of that era, such as that of John Vassall, led to an unfortunate association of their 'treachery' with their sexuality in the public's mind. This was a time, should it be necessary to remind, when homosexual sex was still a crime in Britain, which made gay men an easy target for blackmail—and which made discretion and secrecy a necessary part of how they had to live their lives.
The scandal rumbled on throughout the post-war era, with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean the first of the group to defect to the Soviet Union, followed by Kim Philby (the 'third man') in 1963. Around the same time, the other two members of the group, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, confessed, but their involvement was kept a secret.
However, around the time The Fall wrote and recorded English Theme, the scandal had erupted anew, as it was in late 1979 that Blunt's involvement, until then kept hushed, finally came to light. As well as being a member of MI5, Blunt was a widely respected art historian, and, as Keeper of the Queen's art collection, was as close to the establishment as it was possible to get.
The scandal caused something of an identity crisis within the British class system, and was thus ripe as a reference point for the 'upper class' section of MES's English Scheme. Of course, it was also the stuff of multiple books, movies, and tv series - Netflix's The Crown most recently devoting an episode to the Blunt exposé.
Something I've just thought of. MES was, I believe, a fan of MC5 and on the second MC5 album there is a (excellent) track called, "The American Ruse", I wonder if MES was paying homage to that song with the title, "English Scheme"? Just a thought!