Hotel Bloedel

(1)

Brix: And it's painless
Sitting in Subterranea (2)
Ancient reference
To Mesopotamia

And it's quiet again
Hidden fragments, surface now
Repetitious history
One more time for the record  

MES: 2013 Vicksburg Confederate graves (3)
Are uncovered, throwing new light on
This 19th century conflict, sparking off a repeat
These southern spectres were disease ridden, dusty, organic
And psychic
 

Brix: Rebellious mistakes
Occur again
Everything moving
In a circular fashion

And it's quiet again
Hidden fragments, surface now
Repetitious history
One more time for the record
 

Our words return in patterns
Our minds encapsulating time
 

MES: Gregoror, satiated walking thru' capitol
Stumbles on two thousand dead Thai monks in SS uniforms (4)
Then fled to Hotel Bloedel, outside Nuremberg
A long way south, to a reasonable smell of death (5)
 

Brix: And it's quiet again
Hidden figments, surface now
Repetitious history
One more time for the record

1. This is based on a song Brix wrote in her days in Banda Dratsing called "Everything for the Record." The titular hotel is probably the Hotel Grüner Baum Gasthof Blödel in Nuremberg. Here are the original lyrics as printed in Brix's lyrics collection Babble-On (thanks to Dan):

And it's painless
Sitting in Subterranea
Ancient reference to Mesopotamia

And it's quiet again
Hidden figments, surface now
Repetition history
One more time for the record

Rebellious mistakes
Occur again
Everything moving
In a circular fashion

And it's quiet again
Hidden figments, surface now
Repetition history
One more time for the record

Our words return in pattern
Our minds encapsulating time

And it's quiet again
Hidden figments surface now
Repetition history
One more time for the record
One more time for the record

This should indicate which lyrics above were written by Brix; note that there are only slight variations ("figments" rather than PBL's "fragments," and "repetition" has become on PBL "repetitious," and the original lyrics have "pattern" where the recorded version has the plural "patterns"). 

Our correspondent Mark has the lowdown:

"From the Paintwork book: 'The name Brix Smith appeared on the credits of "Hotel Bloedel," a song she had co-written in southern Germany after spending an unforgettable night in a Nuremburg hotel. Mark E Smith remembered how their room had been filled with "this choking smell - you'd have sworn there'd been a murder there." Brix agreed. "And at six in the morning there were ghastly screams. I was sure the place was haunted. Mark lit cigarettes and put them all around the room to fight off the horrible smell. When it got light we looked out of the window and saw an old woman coming across the courtyard carrying a sack of blood into the hotel..." It transpired they had checked in next door to an abattoir.'

See note 4 below...

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2.  Subterranea is a broad geological term which refers to a variety of underground structures, including caves, of course, and underground rivers and lava chutes, but also man-made structures such as catacombs, tunnels and tombs. Interestingly, "Subterranea" is also the name, in various Marvel comics, of an underground network of sites where fictional beings called, appropriately, "Subterraneans" dwell (it seems obvious to me that these Subterraneans do not so much live as dwell, do you not think?). Mole Man (or "Moleman") is a supervillain who first appeared in Fantastic Four and who hails from Subterranea. He began as a human, before falling in a big hole and being blinded by a huge pile of diamonds, or something (a little heavy-handed, but that's what we love about it). He went native, like Mistah Kurtz, and cultivated a race of followers who became known as the Moloids. The Deviants also lived down there, at one time. It goes on like that.

Brix quotes the line in The Rise, the Fall and the Rise as part of the original Banda Dratsing lyric. She also mentions that her grandfather and his brother owned a hotel they bought from "the man who owned Marvel comics"; otherwise, I'm not sure if she read comics, or if she just picked up the word from the straight world...

^

3. The Orange Lyrics book, and hence the Lyrics Parade, has "Phillipsburg" (spelling corrected), which would have to be a reference to Phillipsburg, New Jersey, whose cemetaries hold over 300 Civil War dead. It sounds more like Vicksburg, though, and that makes more sense, since Vicksburg, Mississippi was the scene of major fighting during the Civil War.

In a 1981 NME feature called "A Portait of the Artist as a Consumer," MES lists among books he has read The Civil War Handbook by William H. Price. From page 14 of that book: "The largest Civil War cemetery is Vicksburg, where 16,000 soldiers rest; only 3,896 are known" (thanks to dannyno).

Dan mentions the song "Vicksburg Blues," by Little Brother Montgomery, which probably has nothing to do with anything. A sample lyric:

I got the Vicksburg Blues and I sing 'em and ache everywhere I go
I got the Vicksburg Blues and I sing 'em and ache where I go
And the reason I sing 'em is my baby didn't want me know more  

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4. Japan occupied Thailand from 1941-1945. However, this is more likely a garbled reference to a legend about Tibetan monks living in Germany during the war; the Nazis sent a scientific expedition to Tibet in 1938, and various works of pseudo-history have repeated a legend that Tibetan monks subsequently traveled to Germany to assist the Nazis with their occult powers, charging them with magically altering the weather to assist the German invasion of the USSR. In the pseudo-historical book about the occult The Morning of the Magicians, which contains, among other things, an account of occult tendencies in the NSDAP that is of dubious veracity, it is reported that a Tibetan monk nicknamed "The Man With The Green Gloves" lived in Berlin and headed a group called "The Society of Green Men," which was in consultation with Hitler about a secret underground city ("Agarthi") from which Buddhist adepts ruled the planet. Interestingly, the authors themselves seem to have openly acknowledged that their book is fanciful, but this hasn't stopped some of its claims from being perpetuated. From the book (quoted here):

In Berlin there was a Tibetan monk, nicknamed “the man with the green gloves,” who had correctly foretold in the Press, on three occasions, the number of Hitlerian deputies elected to the Reichstag, and who was regularly visited by Hitler. He was said by the Initiates to possess the keys to the kingdom of Agarthi … It was in 1926 that a small Hindu and Tibetan colony settled in Berlin and Munich. When the Russians entered Berlin, they found among the corpses a thousand volunteers for death in German uniform without any papers or badges, of Himalayan origin. As soon as the [Nazi] movement began to acquire extensive funds, it organised a number of expeditions to Tibet, which succeeded one another practically without interruption until 1943. 

MES very well may haveThe Morning of the Magicians; he has professed a taste for crackpot pseudo-history in general (although he doesn't seem to take it too seriously), and the book was quite popular. 

Martin:

In a piece which MES wrote for the "Alternative Ulster" fanzine in early 1979, there's a kind of prototype of this line: "Did you know? That when the Russians took Berlin in '45 they found 2000 hari-karied Buddhist monks in German uniforms?" 

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5. As befits a ghost story, the best interpretation of this line comes from a mysterious source. A poster named "countrygent 58" visited the Fall online forum one dark night and left the following remarks. He has never appeared on the forum before, and he was never heard from again:

Somehow i seem to know the story of the origins of this song, thought can't remember who or what told me. 

It is a ghost story inspired by a stay at a "real" hotel outside Nuremberg by MES and BES. They entered the hotel room very late at night to find there was an unpleasent smell in the air. MES freaked out thinking the room was haunted so they lit candles to try and fight both the spectres and the smell. In the morning they awoke to find the source of the smell was more prosaic; there was a slaughterhouse right behind the hotel. 

That i assume is the meaning of "reasonable smell of death". 

This is essentially the story that has been told about it by Brix, if we need a more prosaic source.

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Hotel Bloedel: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1983