Jawbone And The Air-Rifle

 (1)

The rabbit killer left his home for the clough (2)
And said goodbye to his infertile spouse (3)
Carried air rifle and firm stock of wood
Carried night sight telescope light

A cemetery overlooked clough valley of mud
And the grave-keeper was out on his rounds
Yellow-white shirt buried in duffel coat hood (4)
Keeping edges out with mosaic color stones

Jawbone and the air rifle
Who would think they would bring harm?
Jawbone and the air rifle
One is cursed and one is borne (5)

The air rifle lets out a mis-placed shot
It smashed a chip off a valued tomb (6)
Grave-keeper tending wreath-roots said
"Explain, move into the light of the moon"

"I thought you were rabbit prey, or a loose sex criminal"

Rifleman he say "Y'see I get no kicks anymore
From wife or children four
There's been no war for forty years
And getting drunk fills me with guilt
So after eight, I prowl the hills
Eleven o'clock, I'm tired to fuck
Y'see I've been laid off work"

The grave-keeper said
"You're out of luck
And here is a jawbone caked in muck
Carries the germ of a curse
Of the Broken Brothers Pentacle Church (7)
Formed on a Scotch island
To make you a bit of a man" (8)

Jawbone and the air rifle
Who would think they would bring harm?
Jawbone and the air rifle
One is cursed and one is warm (9)

The rabbit killer did not eat for a week
And no way he can look at meat
No bottle has he anymore (10)
It could be his mangled teeth
He sees jawbones on the street
Advertisements become carnivores
And roadworkers turn into jawbones
And he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime
The villagers dance round pre-fabs (11)
And laugh through twisted mouths
Don't eat
It's disallowed
Suck on marrowbones and energy from the mainland

Jawbone and the air rifle
Who would think they would bring harm?
Jawbone and the air rifle
One is cursed and one is gone (12)

1. Dan: Paul Hanley's Have a Bleedin Guess quotes Marc Riley (125):
 

Mark said to Craig that he wanted something like 'Run Rabbit Run' to fit his lyrics. We wrote it in my bedroom.

"Run Rabbit Run" is a song by Flanagan and Allen from the World War II era. The melody can be discerned in the riff here. 

^

2. A clough is a steep-sided ravine, usually with a creek or river running through it. Huckleberry speculates: "Is the clough perhaps Prestwich Clough, and the cemetery the one next to the North Manchester Synagogue (which from the map seems to overlook the path running south from Prestwich Clough)?"

Paul Hanley finds this plausible--Have a Bleedin Guess, p.126:
 

The Annotated Fall website speculates, with some credibility, that the song is set where Prestwich Clough backs onto the North Manchester Synagogue and its adjacent cemetery.

Mark Senior comments: "If this is Prestwich Clough then the graveyard is just as likely to be the one at St Mary's church: the graveyard runs down into the Clough so they are practically the same thing at one point."

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3. This line has inspired a fair deal of analysis on the Fall online forum, as the hunter is later said to have four children. Sure, she could have become infertile after they were born, but would a man with four children really be bemoaning his wife's infertility in any case? Thus, theories have arisen that she is spiritually barren, that the children are from a previous marriage, that MES really means "frigid," that he actually says something else in putative "four" line, etc. Perhaps, however, he just wanted more children; some people do have quite a few. Or maybe he's not worried about it, but the narrator mentions it anyway, because...because...  

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4. Duffel (or "duffle") is a coarse woolen material; duffel bags were originally also made from it. According to my spies, duffel/duffle coats are common in the UK. 

^

5. On Hex Enduction Hour the song is mixed curiously, as the vocals on the chorus are very low in the mix. The Peel session foregrounds the vocals for a much poppier effect.  

Robert points out that "The main motif of this track somewhat resembles the chorus of "Run Rabbit Run", a popular WW2 song" (see note 1). Of course there is a similar theme, also.

^

6. From  Dan: 

Paul Hanley, in Have a Bleedin Guess (p.129) points out MES's economy of language in this lyric, and notes in this respect that "valued" suggests "both expense and sentimental attachment."

^

7. A Google search for "Pentacle Church" turns up a bunch of Wiccans and the like, and certainly the church in question here is not of the Christian stripe.  

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8. Huckleberry: "The subtitle of the song in the Lough Press book is "A wee tale from the Anthrax Isle," which indicates that the "Scotch island" is Gruinard (but MES might also have been thinking of The Wicker Man)." 

Gruinard Island is an uninhabited Scottish Island where Anthrax was tested by the British government during World War II. The island was contaminated for many years, until it was finally declared clean in 1990 following a campaign by a group called Dark Harvest Commando of the Scottish Citizen Army who started leaving containers of contaminated soil around where the British military would find them...

^

9. Duncan Goddard points out that this line is odd, as an air rifle does not use an explosive charge.

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10. Mike Watt: "On first view this relates back to the guy feeling guilty about getting drunk mentioned earlier... but to 'lose one's bottle' is a phrase meaning 'has no fight left' or 'is scared.'"

^

11. This maybe refers to the pre-fab homes built in Britain after the second World War to accomodate the demand for cheap housing.

From Paul Hanley:
 

There was an entire estate of pre-fab houses in Heaton Park, Prestwich, when Mark was growing up. Originally built as temporary housing at the end of the Second World War, they were still there in the seventies.

Have a Bleedin Guess, p.131, note 116 (thanks Dan)
 

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12. The air-rifle is gone, and only the cursed jawbone remains. This may suggest the hunter has died.  

Duncan Goddard comments:

The last line of each chorus...the jawbone of the title is something that's being dealt with by the grave-keeper tending the wreath-roots of the valued tomb; perhaps vandalism has exposed this bone and, to add insult to injury, the same tombstone is then struck by the stray pellet from the air-rifle.
So, the jawbone carries the curse, which now passes to our hunter, who loses his appetite and (presumably viewing it as the mechanism of his misfortune) gets rid of the weapon.

GDEdgewater:

I noticed typically Lovecraftian references in the final verse which don't seem to have been pointed out here. "And he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime" is very evocative of the discovery of the Island/City of R’lyeh, jutting out of the sea in the South Pacific from 'The Call of Cthulhu':
"... in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults...'

".. villagers dance round ... And laugh through twisted mouths" is also very evocative of a Lovecraftian bacchanal of the type seen in the aforementioned story, or by residents of Innsmouth. Lovecraft transposed to Suburban Manchester, in typical MES fashion?

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Jawbone And The Air-Rifle: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1980