Guest Informant

Bahzhdad State Cog-Analyst  (1)
You'll never guess who informed
It was Craig and Steve
The stool pigeons, cha-cha-cha-cha... (2)
[Probably Hanley]: "Bahzhdad State Cog-Analyst" (3)
 

Guest informant, guest informant
Guest informant, guest informant
I followed the colonel to the cheap hotel,
I tapped the beds
I wired the phones as well,
Colonel Boggs Maroley was his mantle
Had not counted on
I had not counted on
Guest Informant, guest informant
 

I've been split on, I've been touted on,
I had not counted on Guest Informant

In the burning scorch of another Sunday over
The miserable Scottish hotel,
Resembled a Genesis or Marillion, 1973 LP cover (4)
All the hotel staff had been dismissed,
It was me, the Hoover, and the O. A. P.s (5)
Asked: Could he turn killer?
Thought: could I kill him?
Pondered: Or is he itinerant?
But I guess he's just a cog analyst
Guest informant, guest informant
 

Bahzhdad State Cog-Analyst
 

I could not comprehend, I could not understand
Had not counted on, I had not counted all
Guest informant, guest informant
I've been split by a first-grade moron
And I had not counted on, I had not counted on
Guest informant, guest informant
Guest informant, guest informant
I've been let down, by a first-grade moron
And I could not comprehend 
Had not counted on
Guest informant, guest informant

1. This opening line, initially chanted by Brix who is then joined by MES, has been the subject of as much debate as anything within the sphere of the Fall. The Lyrics Parade appends this note to the track:

Sean Russell advised on 14 February 1996: "I wrote to Cog Sinister with a pile of questions, one of them being what the hell Brix was saying [in "Guest Informant"]. Lucy [Rimmer] wrote back and said she asked Brix, who said the phrase was "Baghdad/Space Cog/Analyst"

The only problem is that nobody seems to say that phrase in the song; to me, it seems pretty clearly to be the inexplicably weird "Bahzhdad State Cog Analyst." "Cog" is short for "cognition," and the abbreviation is probably modeled on Philip K. Dick's coinage "precog" (Dick's word denotes knowledge of the future). "Bahzhdad" may be an alternate pronunciation of "Baghdad" (pronounced this way for a reason for which I cannot account), but nobody in the song says "Baghdad." 

More recently (2013, and again in 2018) Brix responded to a query via Twitter, writing that the lyric is "Baghdad, Stay-Cog, Analyst."

Meanwhile, dannyno has done some investigating and discovered a third account of the lyric from Brix:

However, the next time Brix was asked she was more helpful, insofar as she synthesiized two of the three options into a more comprehensive and harmonious whole:

Brix Smith @Brixsmithstart  Jan 28
I'm chanting.....,"Baghdad state-cog Analyst. Basdad stay-cog Analyst" mystery cleared!

So, two different versions, and then when pressed:

Brix Smith @Brixsmithstart  Jan 28
I varried it. I switched from one 2 the other 2 create confusion. Baghdad/Badad[sic] State/Stay  ( then ) cog analyst stayed the same every time

I'm not sure if she means "Badad," it seems more likely it's a typo for "Bazdad."

Note that on the script of Hey! Luciani, in MES's handwriting, we find "Bahzhdad  State Cog  Analyst" (see comments 41 and 44 below).

Brix says the lyric is a "direct reference to the Jetsons cartoon" (whence "Cog Sinister" also derives). "Cogswell's Cogs" is a rival company to "Spacely Sprockets," where George Jetson works. Note that this, unfortunately, does seem to add somewhat to the allure of "Space Cog," which had otherwise nearly been rendered apocryphal...

MES had the following to say about the track:

It's about hotel paranoia, about incompetent hotel staff. They're always going on about how wonderful their hotel is, but they can't even keep your room locked. I tried to pass my suspicions about hotels on to the rest of the group (laughing).

Whomever the State Cog/Stay-Cog Analyst is, s/he is the subject of the vague suggestion of intrigue that serves as the song's narrative. 

marvell78 comments on the Fall online forum:

I would like to think that the sound of the word is deliberately muddled to maximise its suggestiveness. it is clearly baghdad on the fourth line. i played it at different speeds and each speed still gives you the hard g sound on the fourth line. but not on the others

from my own limited studio experience, people habitually fuck about with lyrics as the takes accumulate. and sometimes it ends with an ok for the fuzzier versions because at that stage everybody is hearing and singing different things (out of boredom, out of a sense of fun and out of that state of mind you get into where you really want to open up the lyrics as the takes go on). and the opportunities this provides for the singers and the listeners to expand on the original line (whatever it might have been) is too good to miss

in the discussion of this song, i often get the impression that people think it may originally have been baghdad space cog analyst, and that this has been eroded. that may well be the case, but there is the alternative: that there was no orignal line as such and that the line was jammed/improvised and began to approach baghdad space cog analyst. so, what you have isnt the line 'degrading' from sense into 'nonsense' but the line coming into being (if you know what i mean lol). and that , as a consequence, it never quite settles, never having really existed in any particular form anyway 

personally, i would prefer to see the uncertainty as a deliberate and creative act. anybody old enough to remember those magazines that printed song lyrics must remember the heartbreak when you discovered that the lines you thought were there weren't there at all. better to have gone on with your own uncertain but more productive misreadings.

Guest Informant is a name of hotel visitor guides, such as this one. Thanks to Ted for pointing this out, and for having a blog called "Stone Cold Pimpin'."

Dan submits the following:

From Steve Hanley's The Big Midweek (p232), in relation to the Hey Luciani play: " we play 'Guest Informant', transformed by the loose storyline of the play into a song about someone disclosing classified information, whereas it started life as an anecdote about new drummer Si. In the throes of a drunken stupor, Nick Cave and Mark Smith decided to join the rock and roll masses by chucking the TV out of a hotel window. But it being a German rock and roll hotel, the TV had been chained down, so they chucked Si's duvet out of the window instead. They didn't account for Si grassing them up when the receptionist tried to bill him for it the following morning, leaving Mark to foot the bill."

See the comments below for more intriguing speculation!

The rhythm of the vocals in the chanted refrain, whatever the words may be, is the same as in the title phrase/refrain of the Kinks song "Give the People What They Want." It seems to me that there must be other, and older, antecedents, as it seems like a natural or even almost obvious rhythm, but I cannot think of any.

Reader Max Williams says "Bazdad" seems to first appear in the promotional video for Perverted by Language (available on Youtube, and see below):

"The segment in question is after the video for Eat Y'Self Fitter, and is a poem called 'The Confidence of Henry Glasspants.' It starts: 'Good evening. I am a Sudan-Arab agent, in the pay of Bazdad.' I always assumed this was some kind of play on Baghdad, even though it's not in the Sudan. I don't know if the poem was written by MES, I always assumed it was written by the person reading it (whose name escapes me). Either way, it may have entered MES's lexicon as the sort of repeated in-joke reference of which he seemed quite fond."

Alan Pillay is the reader of the poem (thanks Dan), and s/he says "Mark E Smith" at the end, so it appears to be by MES.

See comment #56 below.

^

2. "Stool pigeons cha-cha-cha" is taken from the 1982 hit "Stool Pigeon" by Kid Creole and the Coconuts. 

^

3. This is enunciated clearly, slowly, and a capella, and nowhere is it more clear that the sounds are "Bazdad State Cog Analyst."  

^

4. Of these two progressive or "art rock" bands, only Genesis was active in 1973, when they released Selling England By the Pound. The cover can be seen here, and you can make of it what you will, but there's probably no reason to think MES is being particularly precise when he says "1973." Below, G-man points out that the back cover of Genesis's 1972 album Foxtrot does include an image of a hotel in the background of the beach scene...

...but Martin rebuketh us:

"It may be worth bearing in mind that in live performances MES also referred to such disparate acts as Steve Winwood, Supertramp, Joan Baez, Van Halen and Stevie Wonder. Also, in many of these gigs it's not the hotel itself which resembles this record covers, but the hotel back garden." 

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5. In England a vacuum cleaner is called a "Hoover," after the company that pioneered their widespread dissemination. Antoine points out that this could also be an allusion to J. Edgar Hoover, but Martin counters: "In some live versions, MES says "hydraulic hoover", which might seem to rule out the J. Edgar Hoover theory suggested above." It might seem that way indeed, Martin! On the other hand, semantic drift is not unknown in a Fall song...

O.A.P.s are "Old Age Pensioners," i.e. retired folk are the only ones who stay in the hotel during the day time.  

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Guest Informant: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1987