Fortress
Lyrics
(Spare a little grease, spare a little grease...And today, here on the vitamin B glandular show...) (2)
Two hours!
With four left wing kids
I spent time in Nazi Fortress
Much discussion in room C-H-1-O-C-H-11 (3)
I did not understand why
I could not accept the fact
that I'd accepted the contract
Much discussion in this institution
Much discussion in boiled beef and carrots (4)
Room C-H-1-O-C-H-2-O-11
It was clear in the window eye
The brick outlined the blue sky
And I had to go round the gay graduates in the toilets
And Good King Harry was there fucking Jimmy Savile (5)
Much discussion in room C-H-1-O-2-H-11
Much discussion in room C-H-1-O-11 (6)
Notes
1. This song is brief on Hex Enduction Hour (1:23, depending on where you place the cut), where it serves as the intro to "Deer Park." Live, the songs were usually played separately, and "Fortress" was longer than in the studio. A possible clue to the lyrics is identified in the entry for this song on Reformation: "The first performance features MES mentioning King George (as well as Harry, as used in the released version) in the lyrics; George would continue to be a part of the lyrics for some time to come. The version played on 4 June 1981 (and there may be more) has the lines, 'I spent time in this institution / It's called Great Britain.'"
The keyboard riff at the beginning is a preset beat on the Casio VL tone keyboard; an almost identical riff is used on "The Man Whose Head Expanded." The same riff appears in "Da da da ich lieb dich nicht du liebst mich nicht aha aha aha" ("Da Da Da I Don't Love You You Don't Love Me Aha Aha Aha") by the band Trio. They were associated with Neue Deutsche Welle ("German New Wave," but reportedly they preferred to call their style Neue Deutsch Frölichkeit, or "New German Cheerfulness"--one wonders, was there old German cheerfulness?). "Da Da Da" was a number 2 hit in the UK in 1982 (thanks to nochmal in the comment section of "The Man Whose Head Expanded" for bringing all this to my attention). "Da Da Da" came out not long before the appearence of Hex Enduction Hour.
The same intro (the Casio riff and the spoken lines) also appears at the beginning of "Look, Know" on Hip Priests and Kamerads.
2. We've had some back and forth on this one. To me it sounds as written. Thehippriestess is quite certain it's "Beryl Reid," which may be correct, but I don't hear it. The orange lyrics book does not have the line at all.
Dan: "If 'grease' is right, it's probably a reference to 'greasepaint'--theatrical make-up, no doubt ubiquitous within the BBC and among those actors and other showbusiness types who plied their trade there."
3. From Craig on the Fall online forum:
| QUOTE (chachacha @ Sep 29 2005, 03:32 PM) |
| did i read that room c-h-1-0 etc referred to a room in the bbc where mr smith was treated to a forum with some crypto/proto-communists or anarcho-syndicalists and their over-interpretation of things???? |
CRAIG: [I]t was Radio One Talkabout, a bunch of left wing kids (a theatre group or somesuch I think) were invited onto the show to talk about erm the state of the nation, and they in turn had invited MES as their guest. There are tapes of it floating around, and it's a hilarious listen. After 50-odd minutes, the problem with the nation is ascertained to be, like, y'know, right, the establishment, right, and all that, it's the establishment, right, right, y'know, it's like, them.
'Much discussion in Langham House fortress.
Boiled beef and carrots' [see note 4 below; note the initials "BBC"]
From Duncan Goddard:
Paul Hanley's Have a Bleedin Guess has a quote from Craig Scanlon:
The BBC had that ridiculous door-naming thing, which is why we always got lost in Maida Vale.
(p.109)
But here's Hanley's explanation:
Mark was sufficiently vexed by the experience [of appearing on the radio programme] to pen a satisfyingly splenetic lyric which even takes umbrage at the door numbers - CH10CH11 is presumably a parody of the BBC addressing system. All rooms in Langham Hotel were prefixed LH followed by the floor and room number. Broadcasting House rooms begin BH, in Maida Vale it was MV.
(p.108)
Finally, harleyr adds:
"If anyone is wondering why he would run two numbers together in this way, it might be because rooms next to each other at BBC buildings such as TV Centre were often knocked together as one - so CH10 and CH11 next door could have been effectively one room."
5. "Good King Harry" usually refers to Henry V, who ruled England from 1413 until his death in 1422, and of whom a fictionalized version appears in Shakespeare's Henry IV parts I and II and Henry V. Jimmy Savile was a DJ and television personality for the BBC who died in 2011 and is currently the subject of numerous allegations of sexual abuse of children. It's not completely clear whether King Harry is fucking Jimmy Savile, or whether "fucking Jimmy Savile!" is an interjection; the orange lyrics book has "My fave Jimmy Savile!" (which is again ambiguous due to the punctuation!).
6. The room number is made even more mysterious by its dream-like mutability; every time it appears, it's something different. Other inexplicable, or only partly explicable, numbers or combinations of numbers and letters appear in "Eat Y'Self Fitter," "Paranoia Man in Cheap Sh*t Room," and "50 Year Old Man" (thanks to Reformation for the list).
Comments (56)
The Lough Press Fall lyrics book has it as "my fave Jimmy Savile".
In which case: Robert Hardy had played him in 1960 and David Gwillim had played him in 1979. Either of those would probably plausibly be found in the BBC, but my money is on Gwillim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_101
“ You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. ”
"Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room at Broadcasting House where he used to sit through tedious meetings."
The Talkabout programme was presumably made at the BBC's Broadcasting House (in Portland Place and Langham Place, London).
Lyrics from the version from Tut's Chicago 16 July 1981 :
"Much discussion in Langham House fortress.
Boiled beef and carrots "
Conway Paton, in "The Pseud Mag" iss 2, Feb/Mar 2005, p.19, dates the show as follows:
"Fortress recounts a BBC1 radio roundtable that Mark took part in with 4 outspoken left-wing students. Broadcast on 6 April 1981, Mark managed to get in a couple of sentences during the hour-long programme. Listening to it, you can easily see Mark wondering why on earth he ever accepted the contract."
But the BBC Radio 1 schedule for 6 April 1981 was as follows:
7am: Mike Read
9am: Simon Bates
11am: Andy Peebles
12:30pm: Newsbeat
12
2:30pm: Steve Wright
4:30pm: Peter Powell
7pm: Stayin Alive [health advice programme]
8pm: Richard Skinner
10am: John Peel
So what roundtable?
However there was a programme on 7 April 1981 at 7pm called "talkabout". So perhaps it was that.
A couple of days later The Fall were playing gigs in Europe.
Dan
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langham_Hotel,_London
I could see the BBC using it for "youth" type discussion programmes.
Anyway, the point is that the venue may well have been Langham House not Broadcasting House.
Dan
Recorded at Studio S2 Sub-basement, , BROADCASTING HOUSE !
Song had been out of the setlist for a while, so presumably was revived in order to be played in the building that had helped inspire it ?
http://www.discogs.com/Siouxsie-And-The-Banshees-At-The-BBC/release/1800195
There were definitely studios in there, therefore.
http://www.cure-concerts.de/fm-tv/ft_1981-01-07.php
See also references to Langham in this history of Peel Sessions:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qdsfrYAu-x8C&lpg=PA72&ots=wuCIVXKRIS&dq=%22radio%201%22%20langham%20studios&pg=PA78#v=onepage&q=langham&f=false
First, see this press release for Slates:
http://www.visi.com/fall/gigography/slatesdates.pdf
Which contains this line:
"The hip priest approach, aired first on an April Peel session recorded in the Nazi fortress..."
The Peel Session version of Hip Priest was actually recorded and transmitted in March 1981, but April is close enough.
Details of the session are here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/sessions/1980s/1981/Mar24thefall/
Which clearly says that the studio used was "Langham 1"
QED.
Dan
"...the greyer B-1 Glandel area"
I've been googling various sites to see direct connections between vitamin B1 and various glandular disorders and will report back if anything conclusive comes up.
Maybe I'm stating the obvious, it's always been obvious to me, but CH10H11 is a mangled reference to the chemical composition of disaccharide sugars (including table sugar): C12H22O11.
Anybody who sat through chemistry lessons in the 70s was exposed to the formula C12H22O11 + H2SO4 → 12C + 11H2O
http://youtu.be/AP6rTJi59NM
--
This site has the most annoyingly incomprehensible captcha system ever.
Now, if I do wind up changing it, do you have any more of an explanation? What is the connection between Beryl Reid and Mike Read?
However, in the NME dated 11 April 1981, T-Zers column, p.59, I read the following:
Magazines dates aren't always the date of publication, however on internal evidence "Next Tuesday" must mean Tuesday 14th April 1981.
So there you go. Nailed. Would be nice to find a listing as additional confirmation, but still.
7 March 85 Hammersmith Odeon, London:
MES: "I spent time in BBC fortress"
http://z1.invisionfree.com/thefall/index.php?showtopic=8935&view=findpost&p=22586321
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-1
Dan, is that a quote from the broadcast?
Deer Park: Louis XV kept his mistresses at a Parc-aux-Cerf, so this may be an off-site extension of the LGS activities. Notting Hill is not only Rough Trade, but the start of Virgin Records & Tapes. As for C.Wilson: Victor Golloncz published early Orwell.
Rutland Weekend Television has an early piece "Star of the sexy movies": The "policeman by day" says "Evenin' All" hinting at Dixon of Dock Green staff ...
Q.E.D.
If "grease" is right, it's probably a reference to "greasepaint" - theatrical make-up no doubt ubiquitous within the BBC and among those actors and other showbusiness types who plied their trade there.
The brick outlined the blue sky"
Reminds me of the lyrics to Iggy Pop's The Passenger.
I've been at meetings in the langham myself, with BBC people, but I can't remember if there were numbers on the doors. hanley suggests that 'CH' may have been a parody of the BBC's use of 'BHxxx' for room numbering in broadcasting house across the road from the langham, & 'MVxxx' at maida vale where the band recorded many peel sessions.
Paul Hanley's Have a Bleedin Guess has a quote from Craig Scanlon too:
(p.109)
But here's Paul Hanley's explanation:
(p.108)
Note he says "presumably" - he doesn't know for certain. But it's good enough for me.
Note 3 contains a reference to itself!
It took me twenty minutes to escape the recursion.
If anyone is wondering why he would run two numbers together in this way, it might be because rooms next to each other at BBC buildings such as TV Centre were often knocked together as one - so CH10 and CH11 next door could have been effectively one room.
It's terrible.
https://youtu.be/mip6ECd9Jl0
I don't think this has anything to do with either this lyric or the BBC=boiled beef and carrots thing, in relation to which I think boiled beef and carrots is the kind of unexciting standard British dish that was destined to become shorthand for an institution like the BBC.
Terry Christian does mention a Radio 1 (not TV) show called "B15". But he's wrong. There was no such show.
What's he's misremembering there is the Radio programme mentioned in the notes and comments: Talkabout
It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that B15 is what "vitamin B glandular show" refers to, but MES appeared on Talkabout. Perhaps Terry Christian is confusing the two points.