Hip Priest

Lyrics

(1)

He is not appreciated.
He is not appreciated.
He is not appreciated.

Drink the long draught, Dan,
for the hip priest. (2)

I said drink the long draught, Dan,
for the hip priest!

He is not appreciated
He is not appreciated

White collar hits motorway services (3)
It's the hip priest
From the eyes he can see, they know
It's the hip priest

He is not appreciated.

It's purple psychology. (4)
Not just an old lady's.

That's hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip priest

That's hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip priest

And he's gonna make an appearance.
He's gonna make an appearance.

Was shown in a freakshow early on.
And drunk from small brown bottles since I was so long. (5)

Cause I'm a hip priest
Cause I'm a hip priest
People only need me when they're down and gone to seed.
Cause I'm a hip priest
Cause I'm a hip priest

It's appreciation half won    (6)
And they hate their allegiance to hip preacher one.
Hip Priest

I got my last clean dirty shirt outta the wardrobe (7)
I got my last clean dirty shirt outta the wardrobe
And all the good people know

That's hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip priest

All the young groups know
All the young groups know
They can imitate but I teach, because I'm a Hip Priest.
I'm as clean as a packet of chocolate Treets. (8)

One-time feast was tray o'grease, hip priest
I practise bad unafeared art 

(9)

That's hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip hip priest

And if the good people knew they would say
He is not appreciated
He is not appreciated

So drink the long draught, Dan,
for the hip priest

Notes

1. This song has variously been interpreted as a sarcastic screed about a journalist or muso and a commentary on Mark E Smith himself. Like many Fall songs, either interpretation works. It seems to be about a character type which we may plausibly conclude MES both participates in to a certain degree, and also has a bit of contempt for. A snippet of the song was included in the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs.

Paul Hanley, in Have a Bleedin Guess p. 55 (thanks to Dan):
 

The 'Hip' part of the title is a pun, referring both to the hipster-priest type that Mark casts himself as, and also as an acronym for 'hypnotic induction process', a phrase , referring to the act of putting someone under hypnosis, that Mark uses in the lyric to 'Just Step S'ways' and on the version of 'Hip Priest' captured on A Part of America Therein. This is possibly also the source of the made-up word 'Enduction' in the album's title.

For The Record submits:

"The Hypnotic Induction Profile was first outlined in Spiegel & Spiegel's "Trance and Treatment" in 1978. The 2004 edition says;
'Structured to reflect the flow of a typical evaluation and treatment session, this fascinating work focuses on how to use the authors' Hypnotic Induction Profile (a crucial 10-minute clinical assessment procedure that relates hypnotizability to personality style.'"

 

Courtesy of Reformation:

MES, from a Rock on BBC Radio I interview; 1982:
 
" It was a bit of a joke on the group cos they're all like catholics...it's meant to be a bit of  a funny song...I have an image of Johnny Cash or somebody, I don't know why...or South America."  

Zack supplies a very suggestive tidbit:

"From Wikipedia's article on Prestwich, where MES lived most of his life:

'Prestwich is possibly of Old English origin, derived from preost and wic, which translates to the priest's farm. Another possible derivation is priest's retreat.'"

Dan: (Posted by someone called David Abdy to The Mighty Fall facebook page)

From The Easter Parade by Richard Yates, page 234 (1976, first published in 1978 in the UK):
 


'Jesus, Peter. I hope you do better than that in your sermons.'

'Better than what?'

'Using phrases like “outmoded sociological concepts.” What are you — one of these “hip” priests?'

'Oh, I guess I'm fairly hip, yes. You have to be, if you're working with young people.

p222 of the linked edition, which is published by Vintage 2008. It seems to have been regularly republished over the years. p224 of the original edition, I think.

Hexen Blumenthal points out that this song owes its origin to "Hotel Me," written by Gil Evans and Miles Davis and recorded on the 1963 album The Individualism of Gil Evans. The opening drumbeat and the descending melody of the "He is not appreciated" refrain seem to come from Evans's song...

^

2. It is not clear whether "Dan" refers to anyone in particular, or is just a placeholder like "Mack" or "Bub." On the other hand, a reader suggests the following:

 'Dahn' - pronounced darn - is Yorkshire dialect for 'down'. The line is 'Drink the long draught dahn' (drink the long draught down). There is no Dan.

In MES' draft in the orange lyrics book the word is both written and typed "Dan." It is possible that this is for phonetic reasons, and the lyric means "down," but this is a bit of a leap. On the other hand, a young reader going by the name Kriss Draynepipe--clearly a punk rock pseudonym-- quite plausibly suggests, "Do you think, going with the Yorkshire suggestion, that MES is just fucking with the 'drink the long draught Darn' expression by inserting 'Dan'? You say its a bit of leap to think he means 'down'-- maybe its both the expression and his classic alteration." This seems entirely possible, and disposes me to think favorably of the Yorkshire hypothesis... The line in fact sounds something like "Drink the long draught, damn!" to me. 

Bob has suggested it may refer to Danny Baker, who championed the Fall very early on. Nick points out a couple of potentially significant phrases--in a review from ZigZag (February/March 1978, pp. 7, 8, 38) he writes "There is no anger on the band's part just a sort of dry disgust. Nothing to do with 'you should appreciate us' thinking but a sort of what is the fucking point?" and "We are managed by Kay Carroll who feels insignificant amongst those 'hypnotic merry innovators' and whose main aim is to fend off bullshitters" (see note 4 above). Maybe I'm really stretching now, but I'll add "Maybe the only thing is to appeal to your sense of cultishness (!) and say it's hip to see them before they get BIG."

Dan (our Dan, that is) points out that the phrase appears in some translations of Vergil, for instance in John Conington's 1866 translation Aeneas's father, Anchises, says to him "There are spirits to who Destiny has promised new bodies, there at the side of Lethe's water, drinking the wave of carelessness, and the long draught of oblivion."

Dan sums up: "In Greek mythology the Lethe is one of the five rivers of Hades; it is the river of forgetfulness or oblivion. To drink from its waters is to forget your past life."

 

Paul Hanley Have a Bleedin Guess p. 56:
 

'Drink the long draught Dan' has more than an echo of a line from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - 'I rose, bathed my head and face in water, drank a long draught'.

^

3. British "motorway services" are the equivalent of "rest areas" in the United States. See note 8 below. A white collar, of course, is worn by a priest.

^

4. The poem "Warning" by Jenny Joseph begins: "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple" (see More Information below for the rest).

Jenny Joseph died on January 8, 2018, a little over two weeks before MES did (thanks to Dan). She was 85, but it's unknown whether she was in the habit of wearing purple. At least, it's not known to me...

From A Part of America Therein:

"It's purple psychology leech / hypnotic induction process"

Grottyspawn points out "Hypnotic Induction Process" (and of course the first syllable of "hypnotic" makes the allusion multiply to almost fractal dimensions...or something). 

 

See note 9 below.

^

5. Why "small," when the draughts are presumably long? Zetetic suggests the bottles may have contained liquid LSD, although if you "drank" that from the bottle it'd be a long draught indeed...

Dan: If these are not ale bottles, or miniatures of some other beer or spirit, then I think it's more likely they are medicine bottles of some kind - cough mixture? - than LSD. But it could also be a reference to amyl nitrate ('poppers'), except you don't drink that - you sniff it.

I am pretty sure, however, that MES is talking about beer bottles.

Dan points out the line in "Cowboy George" that runs:

I had two brown bottles
And a white nose as I entered
Five years of confinement

My first thought would be speed and beer...note that the bottles in "Cowboy George" are also said to be "broken."

^

6. Thus the orange lyrics book, but on Hex Enduction Hour it sounds like "It's appreciation hard won." On A Part of America, Therein, on the other hand, "half" sounds relatively clear. 

^

 

6. This probably derives from "Sunday Morning Comin' Down," written by Kris Kristofferson and recorded by Kristofferson, Ray Stevens, and, perhaps most notably, Johnny Cash: "I fumbled in my closet through my clothes/And found my cleanest dirty shirt". "Fiery Jack" also echoes Johnny Cash, for whom Mark E. Smith has expressed admiration (see note 1 for more). Also, Dom points out that R. Dean Taylor recorded the song; the Fall recorded two of his songs, "There's a Ghost in my House" and "Gotta See Jane." So I think we can conclude that MES almost certainly knows the song.

^

7. Treets are a chocolate candy similar to M&Ms, and also sold by Mars. The famous advertising slogan "Melt in your mouth, not in your hand" has been used for Treets, as well as for M&Ms, and this may explain why MES calls them "clean." On the version of 9/12/81 at Austurbaejarbio in Iceland, MES sings: "I'm as clean as a packet of Treets--M&M Treets," removing any doubt as to the reference of the lyric.

^

8. A note from Dan:

In the context of motorway services, an echo here (intentional or not) of Roy Harper's song "Watford Gap" from his 1977 album Bullinamingvase. Watford Gap being a famous, or infamous, service station. The lyrics included these lines, among other disparaging ones. You'll see why I'm quoting these in particular: "It's the Watford Gap, Watford Gap/A plate of grease and a load of crap." The owners of the service station, Blue Boar, objected. Stories vary, but either they sued or threatened to sue, or one of their directors who was also on the EMI board applied pressure. At any rate the song was dropped from the album and not restored until a 1996 re-release. The Kinks also bemoaned the food at motorway services in the 1972 song "Motorway," as Martin points out:

Motorway food is the worst in the world,
You've never eaten food like you've eaten on the motorway.
Motorway food is the worst in the world,
The coffee tastes weak and the cakes taste stale
And gasoline fumes are the worst to inhale,
Your stomach rolls over and your face turns pale.

^

9. At around this spot on some live versions, we learn of the Priest's "hypnotic induction (enduction?) process." See note 4 above.

^

More Information

Hip Priest: Fall Tracks A-Z

Warning by Jenny Joseph

 

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

 

From Dan:

From the Dutch pop/rock 'paper Muziekkrant Oor, #5, 12 March 1983, pp.8-11
 


De teksten zijn erg belangrijk, bij The Fall?

Ja, ja, ja.

Toch zijn ze soms erg moeilijk te volgen.

Ledereen mag er van mij uithalen wat hij kan, zo beIangrijk zijn ze nu ook weer niet. Bovendien is het een vorm van zelfbescherming: Ik wil niet dat mensen alles van mij weten. Daar hou ik niet van. Niet al mijn werk is persoonlijk, maar een deel ervan wel. Begrijp je wat ik wil zeggen? Ik schrijf veel objectieve dingen, zoals Lie Dream of a Casino Soul. Er zijn mensen die denken dat dat over mezelf gaat, maar dat is niet zo. Hip Priest idem dito, dat is vaak verkeerd begrepen. Het zijn gewoon sterke beelden, die mensen aan het lachen maken. Er zitten ook persoonlijke dingen in Hip Priest, vrij dualistisch. Verbazingwekkend hoeveel nummers er sindsdien zijn uitgekomen met het woordje "hip" erin.



Translation, based on translate.google.com
 


The lyrics are very important, in The Fall?

Yes Yes Yes.

However, they are sometimes very difficult to follow.

Everyone can get what he can from me, they are not that important. Moreover, it is a form of self-protection: I don't want people to know everything about me. I do not like that. Not all of my work is personal, but some of it is. Do you understand what I am saying? I write a lot of objective things, such as Lie Dream of a Casino Soul. There are people who think it is about myself, but it is not. Hip Priest ditto, that's often misunderstood. They are simply strong images that make people laugh. There are also personal things in Hip Priest, quite dualistic. Amazing how many songs have been released since then with the word "hip" in them.

Comments (116)

Paul Hopkins
  • 1. Paul Hopkins | 04/10/2014
"White collar hits motorway services". I always heard this as "wide collar"; MES, who at the time was often pictured wearing a deliberately unfashionable wide shirt collars, gets recognised by fans at the services but they're too shy to approach him. Think I floated this theory on mid 90s Fallnet and it got shot down, but I still believe it!
dannyno
  • 2. dannyno | 03/06/2015
I can't find any photos of MES wearing wide-collared shirts in 1981/1982.
dannyno
  • 3. dannyno | 18/06/2015
Correction to note 4: the poet's name is Jenny Joseph, not Jenny Jones.
Dom
  • 4. Dom | 11/08/2015
R Dean Taylor also recorded a version of Sunday Morning Coming Down which I'm sure MES must be familiar with
Zetetic
  • 5. Zetetic | 04/01/2016
Is it not "Drink the long draught Down!" ??

- Who the buggery is this Dan feller? (He's definitely saying "Down" on the live recording - that I'm personally better aquainted with)

And from the Live version (on "A Part of America Theirin"):
"It's Purple Psychology leech / Hypnotic induction process"

Also: I think the "Small Brown Bottles" refers to LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) when not in blotter form / large quantities famously comes in "Small brown bottles"
So the line "I've been drinking from small brown bottles since I was - so long" essentially means "I've been 'expanding my mind' for years (cuz he's a Hip Priest).
bzfgt
  • 6. bzfgt | 05/01/2016
The "down" thing is addressed in the notes, it is Dan both in typeface and in MES's hand in the orange book, but it could mean "down" or be a deliberate pronunciation of the latter in dialect. I feel that I addressed that adequately but this seems to come up once in a while.

You could be right about LSD but it seems like the less obvious surface reading. On the other hand, the fact that the bottles are said to be "small" is perhaps an indicator you are right, boozers usually don't brag (or moan) about the smallness of their draughts which are, in any case, said here to be "long." You may be onto something.
Edward Reno
  • 7. Edward Reno | 14/05/2016
For some reason, I thought this song was about William S. Burroughs. Someone even put together a video montage on Youtube of this song playing over images of Burroughs
Tom
  • 8. Tom | 31/05/2016
Small brown bottles could simply be any doctor-prescribed medicine bottle, cough syrup etc, as that's what it came in when I was a kid anyway (80s)
Tom
  • 9. Tom | 31/05/2016
(sorry, v dull thought I know so unlikely herein)
Bob
  • 10. Bob (link) | 11/06/2016
I have a vague recollection of the Dan in question being Danny Baker who of course "discovered" The Fall in Huddersfield in 1979. I shall go back through my records and check...
bzfgt
  • 11. bzfgt | 24/06/2016
Edward: it very well could be, but there's as yet no evidence for it.

Tom: good thought, though, thank you.

Bob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYDTaAZAQns
dannyno
  • 12. dannyno | 11/06/2017
"drink the long draught".

From Virgil, "The Aeneid", book VI


Then his father, Anchises, said: - "They are souls who are destined for Reincarnation; and now at Lethe's stream they are drinking the waters that quench man's troubles, the deep draught of oblivion.


Now, that's the C. Day Lewis translation (first published 1952). But other translations have "the long draught of oblivion". Or "draught of long oblivion".

In Greek mythology the Lethe is one of the five rivers of Hades; it is the river of forgetfulness or oblivion. To drink from its waters is to forget your past life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Lethe_in_popular_culture

Relevant? I have no idea, as usual, but it's a new angle.

Dan
Dr X O'Skeleton
  • 13. Dr X O'Skeleton | 15/07/2017
"White collar hits motorway services... it's the hip priest"
There is an obvious point here about the white collars worn by priests, but "white collar" also denotes office worker as opposed to "blue collar" manual workers in the UK. We talk about "white collar" trade unions, e.g. in the civil service. The line almost suggests a newspaper headline, a motorway service station has been disrupted by a trade dispute with a white collar union.
dannyno
  • 14. dannyno | 15/07/2017
Comment #13. That's interesting. I think "hits" in the lyric has usually been taken in the sense of "reach a place". But "hits" can indeed also mean "inflict a blow upon", and that could include industrial action. But the context I think still suggests the former rather than the latter.
dannyno
  • 15. dannyno | 16/07/2017
One day I'm going to do an analysis of colours in Fall lyrics.

But just to note how colour is used in this song:

"white collar"

"purple psychology"

"small brown bottles"
dannyno
  • 16. dannyno | 16/07/2017
"small brown bottles"

If these are not ale bottles, or miniatures of some other beer or spirit, then I think it's more likely they are medicine bottles of some kind - cough mixture? - than LSD. But it could also be a reference to amyl nitrate ('poppers'), except you don't drink that - you sniff it.
dannyno
  • 17. dannyno | 16/07/2017
Just to note the structure of the song. It's kind of obvious, but also therefore the kind of thing that gets missed.

So the first section is the narrator introducing the Hip Priest (i.e. here he is in his clerical collar pulling up at the motorway services), the second section is the Hip Priest speaking, and then the final verses are the original narrator summing up - "there you are, that was the Hip Priest".

It seems evident that the Hip Priest is a character, and not MES himself. However, it's also evident that MES saw something of himself in the character, and his audience certainly did, singing "he is not appreciated" back at him for years.
dannyno
  • 18. dannyno | 17/07/2017
Cowboy George:


I had two brown bottles
And a white nose as I entered
Five years of confinement
bzfgt
  • 19. bzfgt (link) | 22/07/2017
I read "hits" as Dan does but I don't think Dr. X is denying that this is the primary connotation here.
bzfgt
  • 20. bzfgt (link) | 22/07/2017
I do not think LSD either, nothing in "small brown bottles," in fact, connotes that to me. But I was being democratic, and in that spirit I added your rejoinder.
bzfgt
  • 21. bzfgt (link) | 22/07/2017
I certainly do not think the narrator is straightforwardly MES, but I think we could say that about any Fall song, really; even "Crap Rap" on closer inspection seems to be a character although at first blush it might seem like the singer talking straight to you. As for the "not appreciated" stuff, he does indeed drape himself in it at shows, but 1. even there he can be seen as adorning a kind of mask, and 2. I wonder if there is sort of an "Okie From Muskogee" effect, as I would call it (the latter song being apparently written as a joke, but whe audience adopted it as a rallying cry Merle Haggard went along with it...)
Zack
  • 22. Zack | 29/07/2017
Maybe this has been patently obvious to some FFs for decades, but it just occurred to me that the title of Hip Priest and Kamerads is probably a tip of the hat to "Hot Smoke and Sassafras," a 1969 nugget by Texas longhairs The Bubble Puppy.
dannyno
  • 23. dannyno | 05/08/2017
Zack, comment #22. I'm afraid I'm baffled by that - there doesn't seem to be any connection at all. "Kamerads" is of course German for "comrades", it's a military reference.
Zack
  • 24. Zack | 06/08/2017
Dannyno, the two phrases rhyme, they have the same cadence and they both start with "H." It's as plain as day to me. Please don't tell me this is "English Scheme = Slough" all over again.
dannyno
  • 25. dannyno | 07/08/2017
Er, but "Sassafras" doesn't rhyme with "Kamerads".
Zack
  • 26. Zack | 07/08/2017
It does if you say it with a Midwestern (US) accent.
Zack
  • 27. Zack | 08/08/2017
And how do you know for certain how "Kamerads" is pronounced in this context? It's a play on both "comrades" and Kamera Records, which I have always pronounced just like "camera."
dannyno
  • 28. dannyno | 08/08/2017
Mmm. But "you don't know how it's pronounced" is a substantially weaker claim than "it rhymes" .
bzfgt
  • 29. bzfgt (link) | 16/09/2017
Zack, I'm terribly sorry but to me this seems like "English Scheme=Slough" all over again. Isn't it far more likely "Green Eggs and Ham?" I mean, "Kamerads" has three syllables, and Ham is practically pork, the "other white meat," the first two being chicken and turkey, so three syllables=3, etc...
bzfgt
  • 30. bzfgt (link) | 16/09/2017
"Camera" sounds like "sassafras"? But that ruins the three syllables, I think almost everyone says "camera" with at most 2.5 syllables..

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying there's no real evidence.
dannyno
  • 31. dannyno | 20/09/2017
"One-time feast was tray o'grease"

In the context of motorway services, an echo here (intentional or not) of Roy Harper's song "Watford Gap" from his 1977 album Bullinamingvase.

Watford Gap being a famous, or infamous, service station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watford_Gap_service_station.

The lyrics included these lines, among other disparaging ones. You'll see why I'm quoting these in particular:


It's the Watford Gap, Watford Gap
A plate of grease and a load of crap


The owners of the service station, Blue Boar, objected. Stories vary, but either they sued or threatened to sue, or one of their directors who was also on the EMI board applied pressure. At any rate the song was dropped from the album and not restored until a 1996 re-release.
Martin
  • 32. Martin | 10/10/2017
Going off at a tangent here, but Ray Davies of The Kinks was nailing the horrors of motorway service station food back in 1972, in the song Motorway:

"Motorway food is the worst in the world,
You've never eaten food like you've eaten on the motorway.
Motorway food is the worst in the world,
The coffee tastes weak and the cakes taste stale
And gasoline fumes are the worst to inhale,
Your stomach rolls over and your face turns pale."
Sprague Dawley
  • 33. Sprague Dawley | 01/11/2017
"Drink the long draught, Daaaan,"

I could have SWORN he said "Trip the long draught"
grottyspawn
  • 34. grottyspawn | 20/12/2017
Might be a coincidence, but 'hypnotic induction process' = h. i. p.
bzfgt
  • 35. bzfgt (link) | 23/12/2017
I think that is in fact noteworthy, grottyspawn...
dannyno
  • 36. dannyno | 20/01/2018

It's purple psychology.
Not just an old lady's.


Jenny Joseph died on 8th January 2018:



Jenny Joseph reading her poem, "Warning":

[url=https://youtu.be/8cACbzanitg]https://youtu.be/8cACbzanitg
dannyno
  • 37. dannyno | 20/01/2018
Mangled the urls there.

Link the BBC obituary: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42700952

Link to Jenny Joseph reading "Warning":

https://youtu.be/8cACbzanitg
Nairng
  • 38. Nairng | 24/01/2018
I know it says "half-won" in the orange lyrics book, but they're not always reliable. Iit sounds more like "hard-won" to me, esp on A Part of America Therein, which is a more predictable and expected phrase. I think there's a lyric about sth being "hard-won" on the Unutterable LP somewhere. Could it be that, along with the down/Dan debate, and wrt plastic/ elastic man, MES plays with and deliberatelt confuses expected & similar sounding words & lyrics?

Also if treets is a brand name, should it not be capitalised? (Pedants' corner)
bzfgt
  • 39. bzfgt (link) | 04/02/2018
Definitely right about Treets. I'm checking half/hard now...I can hear a little 'f' at the end of the word, I'm really not sure though because if he enunciates 'hard' on the other that's noteworthy at least.

Ah, I just listened to APOAT and to me it sounds clear he says "half-won" there, much clearer than on Hex in fact.
Nick
  • 40. Nick | 11/02/2018
Is there not something in Bob’s comment at 11?
Here is Danny Baker’s ZigZag review from 1978:- ZigZag, complete with mentions of being ‘appreciated’ and ‘hypnotic’.
Dan = Danny Baker (at least tangentially).
dannyno
  • 41. dannyno | 12/02/2018
Comment #40 All "Dan" does in the song is drink long draughts, or get instructed to do so. So while it could refer to Danny Baker, we don't currently have any reason to think it does.

Also, at times like this I traditionally point out gaps of timing, and in this case Hip Priest was first performed in March 1981, and the ZigZag review was published in February/March 1978, 3 years before.

Mind you, it's very much an open and interesting question how far the lyric should be taken to be self-referential or an objective portrayal of the motorway-services priest character. When reworked later into Big New Priest/New Big Prinz, the double-meaning is much clearer (it does also serve a non-autobiographical function in the Curious Orange 'narrative', of course) and when performed live there was no doubt of the intention. But here, is MES identifying himself with the Hip Priest, or does he incorporate aspects of himself, or reactions/reviews, into the character portrait? Or bits of both?
dannyno
  • 42. dannyno | 12/02/2018
I touched on this is comment #17, I see.
bzfgt
  • 43. bzfgt (link) | 17/02/2018
I listened to this today and the first two times it sounds to me like "Drink the long draught, dam" (or "damn"). The third time I can hear both 'm' and 'n'. Does anyone hear this? It's weird to hear it differently at this late date but I swears I did.
bzfgt
  • 44. bzfgt (link) | 17/02/2018
Also today it seemed very clear he says "hard won."
bzfgt
  • 45. bzfgt (link) | 17/02/2018
Good point, and good finds, Nick. Bob, PLEASE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYDTaAZAQns
Pinkpapaver
  • 46. Pinkpapaver | 21/02/2018
This is a long shot. Very long shot, but use of the word treet may bear some relation to a retreat. The young supposed hip priests would always be the ones leading the retreats for the Catholic youth. I cannot explain further. Nothing to do with the lyrics but thems the sweets I used to get after mass on a Sunday in the early 80s....
And the kids would run these fellas a bit ragged, coz they were so hip and cool and not the old austere priests off the altar.
One of the hip priest brigade gave me a penance of washing up after hearing my confessions.... That was the last time I let one of them near my supposed sins... Far easier to kneel and say a few Hail Mary's.
I know another one who a few years back on meeting my dog said "bring her in. Let her off." so I did, she had a great time in gods house did the dog, running all around the altar part.
They must still be a phenomenon, and you can see it in their eyes these strange hip priests. Full of the holy spirit handling hip flasks.
Zack
  • 47. Zack | 24/02/2018
From Wikipedia's article on Prestwich, where MES lived most of his life:

"Prestwich is possibly of Old English origin, derived from preost and wic, which translates to the priest's farm.[2] Another possible derivation is priest's retreat."
bzfgt
  • 48. bzfgt (link) | 24/02/2018
Yes, Pinkpapaver, that is wonderful, and the perfect kind of thing for the comments section where we can unleash our imaginations and associate a bit more freely. It is now on the record!
Paul90020
  • 49. Paul90020 (link) | 07/04/2018
At the risk of trying to out-pedant the pedants, surely the lyrics should show 9 "hip"s in a row, not 8!
bzfgt
  • 50. bzfgt (link) | 07/04/2018
Good call, Paul.
bzfgt
  • 51. bzfgt (link) | 07/04/2018
I bet I inherited 8 from the Lyrics Parade, but to whom much is given, more shall be given...

I also didn't think "hip priest" needs to be capitalized but now that I've changed it I feel like maybe it was better that way...oh well, I'm not going to change them all back right now, anyway.

What do you think, Dear Readers---capitalize "Hip Priest" where it appears in the text, or no?
dannyno
  • 52. dannyno | 06/05/2018
It's just an adjective and a noun, not a name or title. I vote against capitalising it.
Jack
  • 53. Jack | 10/09/2018
I always associated small brown bottles with Barley Wine, a very strong beer (12%?) that was popular with alcoholics back then and came so bottled. (I'm from Yorkshire). I note on the Peel Session he says he drank from them since he was 10. But cough medicine bottles makes even more sense.

Btw, the Hip Priests and Kamerads album was made up of tracks released on the Kamera label.
Hexen Blumenthal
  • 54. Hexen Blumenthal | 22/11/2018
The musical origin of this is "Hotel Me" by Gil Evans. It sounds like someone has played that Evans/Davis composition to a band a few times and said "learn it".

Also priests have white collars baby.
bzfgt
  • 55. bzfgt (link) | 01/12/2018
"priests have white collars baby"

I can't believe I never mentioned this, I guess it seemed too obvious...checking into "Hotel Me"
bzfgt
  • 56. bzfgt (link) | 01/12/2018
The opening drumbeat of "Hotel Me" is definitely noteworthy here, that's a good find

EDIT

OK, more than the drumbeat....this is a huge find, HB!
dannyno
  • 57. dannyno | 01/12/2018
"white collar" - see comment #13 by Dr X O'Skeleton from last year!
bzfgt
  • 58. bzfgt (link) | 22/12/2018
Huh, in context I always took it to be a priest's collar, why would white collar workers strike a motorway services establishment? Like the accountants or something?
Richard
  • 59. Richard (link) | 23/03/2019
"And drunk from small brown bottles since I was so long."

Do you not think that "since I was so long" is just a play on the common idiom "since I was so high" -- i.e. meaning since I was small, since I was a child, or (if you're from Yorkshire) "since I were nobbut a lad" -- just exchanging one dimension for another?
dannyno
  • 60. dannyno | 13/04/2019
Comment #59, that's what I always thought, yes.
dannyno
  • 61. dannyno | 13/04/2019
Comment #58 - no, I agree with you (see my subsequent replies to comment #13. I was just pointing out that the priests collar point had been previously aired.
bzfgt
  • 62. bzfgt (link) | 04/05/2019
#53--that's how I always heard it and I imagine most people (and we see Dan too does)

#61--that's a relief, I mean it isn't called "Hip Accountant" (duh! no such thing)
bzfgt
  • 63. bzfgt (link) | 04/05/2019
Oh I see I meant "never mentioned it" in your actual notes. It didn't strike me as in doubt enough to need a note, I guess...I mean, ultimately every word could have a note. Sometimes people weigh in to say "X means Y." It's not a dictionary! Not that this is that, I mean Hexen's comment is fair enough.
Rema999
  • 64. Rema999 | 14/07/2019
I don’t know if somebody already noticed this, but regarding the “purple psychology” bit, it’s interesting to notice that purple is one of the liturgical colors worn by catholic priests. Purple is usually worn during Lent, the Sacrament of the sick, All Souls’ Day, Requiem masses and offices of the dead.

See here for reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgical_colours

That said, I believe the other interpretation, referring to the poem, it’s sure the best.
bzfgt
  • 65. bzfgt (link) | 09/08/2019
Yes, and purple is said to be the color of royalty or something, isn't it?
Hexen Blumenthal
  • 66. Hexen Blumenthal | 05/09/2019
Another tip re Hotel Me which I have just relistened to. Try following what the piano is playing and see if anything sounds familiar.
bzfgt
  • 67. bzfgt (link) | 07/09/2019
I have it on, some bits sound kind of like the vocal line but some not at all, I'm not sure if I'm hearing what I'm meant to
Hexen Blumenthal
  • 68. Hexen Blumenthal | 10/09/2019
Yeah that's what I thought some kinda like vocal line......
egg
  • 69. egg | 30/09/2019
Just some random thoughts.

Of all the comments on this page, only #46 takes the title at face value. That is, the song is about a priest who is hip: trendy and attempting to appeal to young people.

Starting from that, you can interpret quite a lot of the lyrics as depicting a hip priest who (at least from MES's point of view) leads a dull and soulless life. He eats grease at motorway cafes (if you want to be super pretentious, there is a eucharistic element to "one-time feast was tray o'grease"), has run out of clean shirts, and while he tries to appeal to the youth, he feels unappreciated (the kids barely tolerate him or resent him). He is probably also a drunkard. Beyond that, either the hip priest or MES himself doubts his religious message: it is or has become a tacky pop psychology. ("Purple psychology" reminded me of something, and after some thought I worked out that it was those post-'60s cults that make people wear clothes of one colour. Turns out the members of the Bhagwan Shree Ragneesh cult mostly wore orange or red though.)

Of course the character of the hip priest may have similarities to MES himself, but I feel that one aim of the song is to describe the priest himself and not some analogous person. I was also reminded (see my comments on "Hostile") of the "Sheffieldism" of the Nine O'Clock Service, but while MES had met the "hip priest" of that movement by the time this was written, the NOS hadn't actually begun.
bzfgt
  • 70. bzfgt (link) | 06/10/2019
Excellent comments, egg, I think there's a lot to recommend that line of interpretation.
dannyno
  • 71. dannyno | 27/12/2019
Paul Hanley, in Have a Bleedin Guess, appears to confirm the acronymic meaning of "HIP":

The 'Hip' part of the title is a pun, referring both to the hipster-priest type that Mark casts himself as, and also as an acronym for 'hypnotic induction process', a phrase , referring to the act of putting someone under hypnosis, that Mark uses in the lyric to 'Just Step S'ways' and on the version of 'Hip Priest' captured on A Part of America Therein. This is possibly also the source of the made-up word 'Enduction' in the album's title.
dannyno
  • 72. dannyno | 27/12/2019
, sorry that's from p.55 of Have a Bleedin Guess.
dannyno
  • 73. dannyno | 27/12/2019
Paul Hanley again:

'Drink the long draught Dan' has more than an echo of a line from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - 'I rose, bathed my head and face in water, drank a long draught'.


(Have a Bleeding Guess (p.56).

For my part, I wonder if Brontë is not also referencing Virgil :-)
dannyno
  • 74. dannyno | 14/05/2020
(Posted by someone called David Abdy to The Mighty Fall facebook page)

From The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (1976, first published in 1978 in the UK):


'Jesus, Peter. I hope you do better than that in your sermons.'

'Better than what?'

'Using phrases like “outmoded sociological concepts.” What are you — one of these “hip” priests?'

'Oh, I guess I'm fairly hip, yes. You have to be, if you're working with young people.


Google Books link

p222 of the linked edition, which is published by Vintage 2008. It seems to have been regularly republished over the years. p224 of the original edition, I think.
Jim
  • 75. Jim | 16/05/2020
I always assumed it was about John Paul II.
dannyno
  • 76. dannyno | 16/05/2020
Comment #75. Doesn't seem any textual reason to think so.

For cast iron references see Papal Visit and Hey! Luciani.
bzfgt
  • 77. bzfgt (link) | 14/06/2020
Yeah those Google Books links never seem to work for me here
dannyno
  • 78. dannyno | 14/06/2020
comment #77.

Various editions of The Easter Parade are also in the Internet Archive, so maybe link to that?

https://archive.org/search.php?query=easter%20parade%20yates

You might need an archive.org account.

But let's try a link:

https://archive.org/details/easterparade00yate/page/234/mode/2up?q=better+than+what%3F
dannyno
  • 79. dannyno | 14/06/2020
From the Dutch pop/rock 'paper Muziekkrant Oor, #5, 12 March 1983, pp.8-11


De teksten zijn erg belangrijk, bij The Fall?

Ja, ja, ja.

Toch zijn ze soms erg moeilijk te volgen.

Ledereen mag er van mij uithalen wat hij kan, zo beIangrijk zijn ze nu ook weer niet. Bovendien is het een vorm van zelfbescherming: Ik wil niet dat mensen alles van mij weten. Daar hou ik niet van. Niet al mijn werk is persoonlijk, maar een deel ervan wel. Begrijp je wat ik wil zeggen? Ik schrijf veel objectieve dingen, zoals Lie Dream of a Casino Soul. Er zijn mensen die denken dat dat over mezelf gaat, maar dat is niet zo. Hip Priest idem dito, dat is vaak verkeerd begrepen. Het zijn gewoon sterke beelden, die mensen aan het lachen maken. Er zitten ook persoonlijke dingen in Hip Priest, vrij dualistisch. Verbazingwekkend hoeveel nummers er sindsdien zijn uitgekomen met het woordje "hip" erin.


Translation, based on translate.google.com


The lyrics are very important, in The Fall?

Yes Yes Yes.

However, they are sometimes very difficult to follow.

Everyone can get what he can from me, they are not that important. Moreover, it is a form of self-protection: I don't want people to know everything about me. I do not like that. Not all of my work is personal, but some of it is. Do you understand what I am saying? I write a lot of objective things, such as Lie Dream of a Casino Soul. There are people who think it is about myself, but it is not. Hip Priest ditto, that's often misunderstood. They are simply strong images that make people laugh. There are also personal things in Hip Priest, quite dualistic. Amazing how many songs have been released since then with the word "hip" in them.
dannyno
  • 80. dannyno | 22/08/2020
Note 1, on origins of "Prestwich" ;

http://dannyno.org.uk/fall/pics/prestwich/presthistcover.jpg

http://dannyno.org.uk/fall/pics/prestwich/presthist1.jpg

Note also probably coincidental "lay of the land" phrase!
dannyno
  • 81. dannyno | 21/09/2020
Some missing words after this line


One-time feast was tray o'grease, hip priest


MES whispers the line, but this is what follows:


I practise bad unfeared art


Same line can be heard on the Peel session version.
dannyno
  • 82. dannyno | 21/09/2020
Sorry, typo, it's this:


I practise bad unafeared art
Des Oc
  • 83. Des Oc | 16/10/2020
Can't think of many song with hip in them around that time.

MADNESS - BLUE SKINNED BEAST, NOV - 1982

'Three cheers to the blue skinned beast hip hip hip hip
To the blue skinned beast hip hip'
dannyno
  • 84. 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

Paul Hanley asked:


Is 'Dan' @prodnose? It's a theory


@prodnose being Danny Baker.

No response from Baker.

https://twitter.com/hanleyPa/status/1317543149556871170
Jnels
  • 85. Jnels | 13/02/2021
Is it possible that “hip hip hip hip...” is him drunkenly hiccuping?
SRH
  • 86. SRH | 19/02/2021
"It's purple psychology
Not just an old lady's"

There is the well known psychedelic song 'Granny Takes a Trip' by The Purple Gang, who were from the Stockport area, and named after a notorious mob in 1920s Detroit, mentioned by Elvis in 'Jailhouse Rock' as the "whole rhythm section" . The band dressed like gangsters - Pete Boyd was their producer and John Peel was a fan. The song caused a fair bit of controversy because of the word "trip" and was banned by the Beeb. It didn't help that the singer, Pete Walker, was nicknamed Lucifer - he was in a coven, "The Witches of Alderley Edge", led by some old Crowley disciples who supposedly pranced naked around some local stone circle in the woods. The band had a lot of bad luck and at one time guitarist Joe Beard - who went to the same school as Ian Curtis, the King's School, Macclesfield - requested an exorcism from a priest (a hip one presumably) from Austria, who was a fan of theirs. See his autobiography Taking the Purple - The Extraordinary Story of The Purple Gang - Granny Takes a Trip… and All That.

Actually the group took the song's name from a Kings Road boutique, and it is about an old lady going to Hollywood once a year for the movie auditions.

"She always turns up, but she's always turned down".

It's in a very American sounding jug band style, but with the kazoo featuring prominently, possibly an influence on The Fall as in, for example, 'New Face in Hell' - what goes on?

A better bet for Fall fans for a song from a Stockport based '60s band (originally from Liverpool) would be Wimple Winch's famed 'Save My Soul'. The group also had its share of bad luck as the club above which they lived and were the house band for, The Sinking Ship, burned down with all their equipment in it. Perhaps rival Pete Walker was doing a jig in the woods again!
SRH
  • 87. SRH | 19/02/2021
Above-mentioned producer should of course be Joe, not Pete Boyd - Pete Walker, Joe Beard, Joe Boyd - ugh! That's my membership of the UFO club rescinded.
Evan Boyer
  • 88. Evan Boyer | 28/03/2021
In response to Richard's comment (#59):
I'm not sure the "changing one dimension for the other" thing is merely arbitrary, though. It might be reaching, but maybe he says "since I was so long" because the hip priest is more often lying down than standing up, i.e., bedridden/slothlike from a young age? this would fit in with the idea that the "small brown bottles" are some kind of prescription medicine.
For the Record
  • 89. For the Record | 16/06/2021
The Hypnotic Induction Profile was first outlined in Spiegel & Spiegel's "Trance and Treatment" in 1978. The 2004 edition says;
"Structured to reflect the flow of a typical evaluation and treatment session, this fascinating work focuses on how to use the authors' Hypnotic Induction Profile (a crucial 10-minute clinical assessment procedure that relates hypnotizability to personality style"
The '78 edition with its pleasingly Arvo Part-ishly named authors could have been in Smith's orbit, or the assessment test referenced elsewhere.
dannyno
  • 90. dannyno | 20/06/2021
The 1978 edition of Trance and Treatment is in the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/trancetreatmentc00spie
dannyno
  • 91. dannyno | 20/06/2021
But it should be noted that while "hypnotic induction profile" was the invention of the Spiegels, the actual phrase used by MES and noted by Paul Hanley is "hypnotic induction process", which can be traced back at least as far as the 1950s.

"Hypnotic induction" on its own appears at least from the 19th century.
dannyno
  • 92. dannyno | 30/06/2021
Note 6: there is evidence that R. Dean Taylor may be the proximate source of the line, although there's no reason why the other artists could not be.

This is because Taylor's 1970 album (only of only two he seems to have released), I Think, Therefore I Am, contains not only his cover of Sunday Morning Coming Down, but also Gotta See Jane and Indiana Wants Me. The Fall's cover of the former incorporates a lyrical quote from the latter.

The album also includes the track Woman Alive, which is quoted in the Fall's song Shift-Work.

Link to Discogs

Of course, we don't know if MES did actually have the album. He may just have had or been familiar with Taylor's singles. But that all these sources (if not There's a Ghost in My House) were on the same album seems not insignificant.
bzfgt
  • 93. bzfgt (link) | 02/07/2021
Shit, you're right, Dan...P Hanley is correct that that is a common phrase, it even has a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotic_induction

I was going to add your comment to FTR's, but decided instead to remove that one, since the H.I. Profile isn't really that noteworthy on reflection---except as something to keep in mind, in case some reason to suspect a connection presents itself to us.
bzfgt
  • 94. bzfgt (link) | 02/07/2021
I agree that there is evidence there, but we also know he was into Johnny Cash, and his version is very well known, so I think the note as it stands pretty much captures the current state of our knowledge of this.
dannyno
  • 95. dannyno | 02/07/2021
From Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control (1978) (p.75), later a likely lyrical source for Riddler!:


That statement was the tip of a vast iceberg of mind-control research using drugs as an aid to hypnotic induction.
Joanna Newman
  • 96. Joanna Newman | 02/09/2021
Hip Priest is one of my very favorite Fall songs. I often wondered who Dan is. Then today, listening to some old Hank Williams recordings, I heard his rendition of an old Hillbilly/Western song Cool Water (written by Bob Nolan in 1936, lyrics pasted below). It's about a man and his friend (or possibly horse) in a desert searching for water. And that other person/creature is named Dan. Hearing this song immediately made me think "that's MES's Dan!" The song references the devil tempting Dan (producing mirages I think), which overlaps with Hip Priest's religious overtones. The Hank Williams version of the song is mesmerising and well worth a listen.

Cool Water

All day I've faced the barren waste
With out the taste of water... cool, water
Ole Dan and I, with throats burned dry
And souls that cry
For water... cool, clear water

The nights are cool and I'm a fool
Each star's a pool of water... cool, clear water
And with the dawn I'll wake and yawn
And carry on
To water... cool, clear water

The shadows sway and seem to say
Tonight we pray for water.... cool, clear water
And way up there He'll hear our prayer
And show us where
There's water... cool, clear water

Keep a-movin' Dan. Don't you listen to him Dan
He's the devil, not a man
He spreads the burnin' sand with water
Say Dan can't you see that big green tree
Where the water's runnin' free
It's waiting there for you and me
And water.... cool, clear water

Dan's feet are sore he's yearnin' for
Just one thing more than water.... cool, clear water
Like me I guess he'd like to rest
Where there's no quest
For water... cool, clear water
dannyno
  • 97. dannyno | 29/09/2021
Joanna Newman, comment #96

I used to make a connection to the original Gene Vincent Rollin' Danny, but I like yours better. Doesn't have to be intended by MES to work, of course.
Ian Copestick
  • 98. Ian Copestick | 03/10/2021
I always took " White collar hits motorway services to mean a white collar worker, e.g. a travelling salesman rather than a priest's collar.
Joanna Newman
  • 99. Joanna Newman | 11/10/2021
Thanks Danny. Thinking about this a little more, I wonder whether MES's Hip Priest is indeed intended to represent the Devil. If MES was using Cool Water as the origin of Dan, this would follow directly. "Drink a long draft Dan" sneeringly, whilst there's only burning sand, and the Hip Priest, well "he's the devil, not a man".
dannyno
  • 100. dannyno | 17/10/2021
Comment #98: Indeed, but the song is called "Hip Priest"? And the line is, "White collar hits motorway services, it's the hip priest". So that "white collar" means dog collar seems pretty clear really.
dannyno
  • 101. dannyno | 17/10/2021
Joanna Newman, comment #99. Does the hip priest seem portrayed as satanic to you? Doesn't to me, especially given there's some of MES in the character.
Joanna Newman
  • 102. Joanna Newman | 18/10/2021
dannyno, comment #101

Hi Danny, when I first heard the song I thought of the hip priest as a sort of maverick holy man, but not in any way evil. However, if it is the case that MES is borrowing the Dan reference from Cool Water (which he may well have heard given his early love of US music from the 50's and 60's), then on rereading the lyrics you can see it is plausible that actually the hip priest is in fact an evil force (not that I think of MES that way as a person - I think he was a courageous and uniquely talented singer/poet whose aim was ultimately one of good by holding up a mirror to society). Examples from the lyrics to back up this interpretation are: i) "people only need me when they're down or gone to seed" (people in this unfortunate position can reach out for "good" but sadly they may also be dragged down more, and one might think of this as the work of the devil), ii) "I got my last clean dirty shirt outta the wardrobe" (this line always confused me, but it makes sense if his shirt is literally clean (laundered), but dirty because of him wearing it for his dirty work), iii) "I'm as clean as a packet of Chocolate Treats" (i.e. not clean! - maybe, in inimitable MES style, he's spelling it out for us in a metaphor), iv) "One-time feast was tray o'grease, hip priest I practise bad unafeared art" (again, this is pretty direct if MES is portraying the hip priest as evil - a feast that is dirty and not nourishing, and practicing the dark arts), and finally v) "and if the good people knew they would say he is not appreciated" (so, in the interpretation of the hip priest being evil this line has a very different interpretation to the one I had before, namely, "if the good people knew" [meaning because he is evil the good people are unaware of him], he would not be "appreciated", meaning would not be liked or tolerated, rather than not be given his due regard). So, I think it's a possible interpretation of the hip priest as a devil or demon, but again I never thought that at all until making the connection to the evil presence trying to convince Dan to drink water from the burning sands in Cool Water.
dannyno
  • 103. dannyno | 22/10/2021
Personally I don't buy it, but I applaud a new interpretation!
Joanna Newman
  • 104. Joanna Newman | 23/10/2021
Thanks Danny - it is only an interpretation as you say, and MES would have been amused no doubt.
A person
  • 105. A person | 29/10/2021
The "hip hip" bit reminds me of part of the bizarre speeches in Fall Out, the final episode of the 1960s series The Prisoner. There's a section that references the song "Dem Bones" at length, and the lyrics are quoted and riffed on extensively. At one point a character repeats the word "hip" three times, to which a crowd responds "hooray". I have no idea if MES had seen this episode, but if so, it might have been floating around in his subconscious and if so, what it adds, if anything, to this song.
A person
  • 106. A person | 29/10/2021
^

I meant to say that I have no idea what it adds, if anything, to this song!
john
  • 107. john | 26/11/2021
Always thought 'Dan' in HP was used as a generic catholic given name (similar to 'Tim' or 'Paddy').
dannyno
  • 108. dannyno | 05/12/2021
Comment #105, "a person". We know MES watched The Prisoner, so it's not unreasonable to presume he saw "Fall Out". But "hip hip hooray" is a common thing, isn't it.

Comment #107, "john". Why did you think that? Is "Dan" a generic Catholic name? Not to my knowledge, anyway.
Phil maff
  • 109. Phil maff | 31/01/2022
I always had this down as s cryptic one. From Curious Orange I get a hidden critic of royalty...the purple historically reserved for royals ,due traditionally because as it dye it was expensive and the poor were not allowed to wear it.i am more visually influenced by the stage performance. Dan is short for Daniel.
Love the track but....it's always seem s to point at Jimmy Saville ,being the grand Magus of the Royal lodge which is how he got away with crimes...clunk click every trip and ..this is the age of the train......head of broadmoor.uks top high security mental hospital prison for the criminally insame with no medical qualifications ! He literally got away with murder ssss.
The stage show with the ballet guy shows the cripple in crutches coming alive. Orange ...house of orange. Coming from a Scottish military perspective myself ,it really points at the corruption if royal power......bottles like barely wine...early acid LSD came in ampoules ,brown is used for medications to stop deterioration from sunlight....early acid LSD ampoules had to have the glass broken at the top.
The white collars may refer to the essence of the preist who pollutes shirts with his touch ,most preists and masons are nonces ......to me this is Jimmy......check the record check the guys track record.... probably only Tony Blackburn ( nonce) and Terry Wigan had a longer career as a BBC DJ..
Stevie23
  • 110. Stevie23 | 14/05/2022
"Small brown bottles." - Just a thought : Methadone comes in small brown bottles in the UK. It has for years. Also, continental beer comes in small brown bottles too.
HP Mayo
  • 111. HP Mayo | 18/11/2022
To my Lancastrian ears, I’m certain that it is ‘down’ and not Dan. In Lancashire dialects the ‘ow’ mutates into an ‘ah’ sound when spoken in a sentence. It’s common in Lancashire pubs to hear the phrase ‘get it down you’ meaning finish your pint which actually sounds like ‘gerrit dahn ya.’ Draught is what people of Mark’s era call lager (his drink of choice) which is why I’m sure it is down as it fits contextually. Basically he’s saying sup up your lager in his honour.
dannyno
  • 112. dannyno | 26/11/2022
"hip, hip, hip etc"

See also Prince Buster, "Skahara":

Po
  • 113. Po | 22/02/2023
Small brown bottles , its probs methadone and Will S Burroughs plays a de frocked priest in the film drugstore cowboy but named Tom? Just a thought .
bladee
  • 114. bladee | 13/05/2023
Reading through earlier years' comments. You consider yourselves readers of poetry and yet howl at the suggestion that "Hip Priest and Kamerads" rhymes with "Hot Smoke and Sassafras"?

My interpretation of the comp title was that "Hip Priest" was designated the title track and "Kamerads" were the other, supporting tracks also originally released on Kamera records, hence "Kamerads." I don't think that it's a total stretch to suggest that the title is also phrased as a cheeky reference to the Bubble Puppy record, given the identical scansion and vowel placement (even if not a perfect rhyme). Or it could be complete coincidence.
Alex
  • 115. Alex | 02/06/2023
That run of 9 hip-s should only have 8.
david rathbone
  • 116. david rathbone | 29/11/2023


"As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words." This sounds like an NME journalist writing about MES in the '80s, but it's actually taken from an essay called “Born 1930: The Unlost Generation” by Caroline Bird in Harper’s Bazaar from February 1957, as cited by Norman Mailer at the start of his 1957 essay "The White Negro: Supeficial Reflections on the Hipster." This essay was the follow up to his novel The Deer Park from 1955, discussing the "philosophy of Hip," which had permeated The Deer Park.

Mailer analyzes the hipster as a "white negro," a cultural phenomenon arising out of a collective post-traumatic shock of the second world war: "the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years." The Hipster acknowledges his cultural debt to black Americans through black music and it's slang: the intersection of the pre-war blues, jazz, be bop and swing that gave birth to rock'n'roll in the post-war period. Shallow thinkers could rest with a racist villifaction of the Germans and the Japanese in the wake of WWII, but Mailer speaks to those deeper thinkers, like MES, who could see beyond this racist response: "For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation, and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?"

This internalization of the collective guilt of humanity for its inhumanity to man gave rise to the existentialist philosophies of the 50s, and Norman Mailer was the leading existentialist voice in post-war America, just as Colin Wilson was the leading exitentialist voice in the UK. The influence of this philosophy is seen clearest in three Fall somgs, Deer Park, Hip Priest and Underground Medecin. Norman Mailer connects the essence of hip to three factors: a love of black American music, a post-traumatic psycopathy in the wake of WWII which leads to an attempt to modify the nervous system, and a mystical anti-atheism which has nothing to do with organized religion, but imbues the hipster's life with a paranoid magical realism paired with a droll cynicism concerning society's traditional religious knowledge claims. The hipster is hip to the fakery of the square priests and cultural conformists of every stripe. He is, in short, a hip priest, like the fictional character brainstormed on pages 188-189 of The Deer Park: "Munshin said 'I see a terriffic scene where the principal or the head monk or whatever they call him at a priest school ... calls in [the hero] ... and tells the kid that it's no go ... Scholastically, the kid's got everything. He's tops in Church History, in Holy Water, in Bingo Management, he's an A plus in Confessional Psychology, but he doesn't have the heart of a priest'."

Key to the Hip attitude is the psycopathology of everyday post-war life in the West. "The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed."

This new marginal subculture was born out of a newfound respect for the historical hardships of the American negro, embracing rebelion, but cynical of 'causes.' Mailer continues: "It is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War ... No wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico City, this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-à-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk ... So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro."

This new hybrid creature was a kind of existentialist: "To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself—one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary [but not Camus - DR.]) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the 'purpose'—whatever the purpose may be—but a life which is directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a life unless one’s emotions provide their profound conviction ... The mystic can accept the atheist’s description of his weakness, he can agree that his mysticism was a response to despair ... And yet his argument is that he, the mystic, is the one finally who has chosen to live with death, and so death is his experience and not the atheist’s, and the atheist by eschewing the limitless dimensions of profound despair has rendered himself incapable to judge the experience. The real argument which the mystic must always advance is the very intensity of his private vision—his argument depends from the vision precisely because what was felt in the vision is so extraordinary that no rational argument, no hypotheses of ‘oceanic feelings” and certainly no skeptical reductions can explain away what has become for him the reality more real than the reality of closely reasoned logic. His inner experience of the possibilities within death is his logic. So, too, for the existentialist. And the psychopath."

So Hip is not only musical, but also cultural, psychological and religious as well: "It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into death ... It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath, a man interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed. By this premise the hipster is a psychopath, and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath for he possesses the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher, that absorption in the recessive nuances of one’s own motive which is so alien to the unreasoning drive of the psychopath."

This distinguishes Mailer's 'Hip' from Kerouac's 'Beat,' for the Hip are a bohemian elite, not a cohort of drop-outs: "Having converted his unconscious experience into much conscious knowledge, the hipster has shifted the focus of his desire from immediate gratification toward that wider passion for future power which is the mark of civilized man. Yet with an irreducible difference. For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man. If there are ten million Americans who are more or less psychopathic (and the figure is most modest) there are probably not more than one hundred thousand men and women who consciously see themselves as hipsters, but their importance is that they are an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel."

For Mailer this psychopathy is essentially healthy and different to the sickness of psychosis: "Many people with a psychoanalytical orientation often confuse the psychopath with the psychotic. Yet the terms are polar. The psychotic is legally insane, the psychopath is not; the psychotic is almost always incapable of discharging in physical acts the rage of his frustration, while the psychopath at his extreme is virtually as incapable of restraining his violence. The psychotic lives in so misty a world that what is happening at each moment of his life is not very real to him whereas the psychopath seldom knows any reality greater than the face, the voice, the being of the particular people among whom he may find himself at any moment... The psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over ... Not every psychopath is an extreme case, and the condition of psychopathy is present in a host of people including many politicians, professional soldiers, newspaper columnists, entertainers, artists, jazz musicians, call-girls, promiscuous homosexuals and half the executives of Hollywood, television, and advertising, it can be seen that there are aspects of psychopathy which already exert considerable cultural influence."

This becomes crucial for MES as the refrain introducing Underground Medecin emphasises: "Your nervous system, your nervous system ..." Mailer makes the point explicit: "what characterizes almost every psychopath and part-psychopath is that they are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves. Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu ... In thus giving expression to the buried infant in himself, he can lessen the tension of those infantile desires and so free himself to remake a bit of his nervous system."

This new church of Hip is an epidose in the history of mysticism just as much as the history of music, or of post-war culture in the West. "What makes Hip a special language is that it cannot really be taught—if one shares none of the experiences of elation and exhaustion which it is equipped to describe, then it seems merely arch or vulgar or irritating. It is a pictorial language, but pictorial like non-objective art, imbued with the dialectic of small but intense change, a language for the microcosm, in this case, man, for it takes the immediate experiences of any passing man and magnifies the dynamic of his movements, not specifically but abstractly so that he is seen more as a vector in a network of forces than as a static character in a crystallized field. (Which, latter, is the practical view of the snob.) For example, there is real difficulty in trying to find a Hip substitute for “stubborn.” The best possibility I can come up with is: “That cat will never come off his groove, dad.” But groove implies movement, narrow movement but motion nonetheless. There is really no way to describe someone who does not move at all. Even a creep does move—if at a pace exasperatingly more slow than the pace of the cool cats." CREEP vs Fiery Jack, you might say.

If Mr Pharmacist is the obscure bishop of this myticism, then his currency is energy itself: "Like children, hipsters are fighting for the sweet, and their language is a set of subtle indications of their success or failure in the competition for pleasure. Unstated but obvious is the social sense that there is not nearly enough sweet for everyone. And so the sweet goes only to the victor, the best, the most, the man who knows the most about how to find his energy and how not to lose it. The emphasis is on energy because the psychopath and the hipster are nothing without it, since they do not have the protection of a position or a class to rely on when they have overextended themselves. So the language of Hip is a language of energy, how it is found, how it is lost."

The Hip priest with his energy thus steps sideways around the prudery of the celibate square priest through a dynamic confluence of music and mating precipitated into a new slang of which he is king: "Therefore one finds words like 'go', and 'make it', and 'with it', and 'swing': 'Go' with its sense that after hours or days or months. or years of monotony, boredom, and depression one has finally had one’s chance, one has amassed enough energy to meet an exciting opportunity with all one’s present talents for the 'flip' (up or down) and so one is ready to 'go', ready to 'amble. Movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis comes, whether of love or violence, he can make it, he can win, he can release a little more energy for himself since he hates himself a little less, he can make a little better nervous systern, make it a little more possible to go again, to go faster next time ... To be 'with it' is to have grace, is to be closer to the secrets of that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you can hear it, for you are then nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of his body, that trapped, mutilated and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is It, who is energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga’s prana, the Reichian’s orgone, Lawrence’s “blood,” Hemingway’s “good,” the Shavian life-force; “It”; God; not the God of the churches hut the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm."

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