Married, Two Kids

Lyrics

(1)

In 1978
Was in a hotel in Notting Hill Gate
Now in 1992
Staying in a hotel in Notting Hill Gate (2)

Abject

I'm too busy to think
Too busy to work
Just can't cut it

Married, 2 kids
Married, 2 kids

I pretend to go to work
I pretend to go to work
Got a porta-fax (3)
Aftershave like mustard (4)
Two pints of lager do me in
And The Spirit of Man
Is a pub I go in
I'm married, 2 kids
Have a peculiar goatish smell (5)
Am a long-winded article
I get livid 
Married, 2 kids
Married, 2 kids

Notes

1. This song, like "The Birmingham School of Business School," may be about Trevor Long, the Fall manager MES accused of pilfering Fall money, and unsuccessfully sued. MES hints at this,  anyway, in an interview with the NME; the journalist doesn't directly quote MES, but reports that "Mark says the guy only started conning him once he'd had two kids." On the other hand, in the same interview MES suggests that "married, two kids" is his name for a more general phenomenon: "I call it 'married, two kids.' Got married, got a mortgage, can't afford to take risks. I've seen it in the Manchester scene, groups trying to do what someone else has done because it's safer."  

From Dan, some enlightened views from MES:

Scribbled note from the sleevenotes of Code:Selfish, as far as I can decipher the words (there are insertions, which I've just accommodated straight into the text): "2 KIDZ: It is the considered opinion here that New Dads are full of crap, & it's cruel to the kids. They should butt out and leave it to their respectives."

^

2. Notting Hill Gate is in London.

^ 

3. I think this is a portable fascimile machine.   

^

4. Ten years later, "My Ex-Classmates' Kids," a song with a similar theme from Are You Are Missing Winner, contains the line "Up your nose,/ Aftershave like little twigs..."

From the interview quoted above:

"I was brought up, you see your dad in the morning and at tea-time if you're lucky...When a bloke has kids, he goes right down the fuckin' shaft. They start fiddling, they don't concentrate on their work. I come from a family of six, I never saw my dad. But these guys with their pony-tails, they're just hanging about their kids all day. It's cruel to the kids...people go on about child abuse but that's child abuse." There's more; click it and see, it's well worth it. 

^

5. From The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris: "Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia" (135). "Hip Priest" appears in the soundtrack of the famous movie version of Harris' novel.

^

 

More Information

Married, 2 Kids: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1992

Comments (9)

dannyno
  • 1. dannyno | 24/11/2013
"Peculiar goatish smell" comes from Thomas Harris' novel "Silence of the Lambs":

"Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia."
Martin
  • 2. Martin | 06/04/2016
Can we assume for once that references to hotels in Notting Hill Gate were made up by Mark E Smith and not based on his own experience, at least if the gigs played by The Fall are anything to go by? He may well have stayed in a hotel in the area at the time of the numerous performances given by the group in 1978, but in 1991, when the song was recorded (according to information on The Fall Online) The Fall had no London dates at all.

Of course, our man might have stayed in London for a different personal reason...
dannyno
  • 3. dannyno | 22/05/2016
Isn't it fairly clear that he's singing from the point of view of someone who is married with two kids, and so it's not necessarily MES who has stayed in those hotels? "I'm married, two kids", etc?
Martin
  • 4. Martin | 24/05/2016
Dan, of course you're almost certainly right, but I keep on looking for even only slightly-possible pieces of evidence to either back up or destroy my own hypotheses!
dannyno
  • 5. dannyno | 16/04/2017
Scribbled note from the sleevenotes of Code:Selfish, as far as I can decipher the words (there are insertions, which I've just accommodated straight into the text):


2 KIDZ:

It is the considered opinion here that New Dads are full of crap, & it's cruel to the kids. They should butt out and leave it to their respectives.
AAA
  • 6. AAA | 21/11/2020
The Spirit of Man - anybody know of a pub by that name?

Only know of a Legs of man in Old Trafford.

Notting Hill Gate?
dannyno
  • 7. dannyno | 25/11/2020
There's doesn't have to be a real pub of that name for the line to work.
Thop
  • 8. Thop | 28/10/2023
In 1978
Was in a hotel in Notting Hill Gate
Now in 1992
Staying in a hotel in Notting Hill Gate

The structure of this opening verse seems to partly refer to that of '1969' by The Stooges:

Now, last year I was twenty-one
I didn't have a lot of fun
And now I'm gonna be twenty-two
I say "Oh my" and a, a "Boohoo"

1969 was a Stooges song that the Fall later covered live a few times adapted to the then-year 2010.
Thop
  • 9. Thop | 28/10/2023
I've sometimes wondered if another target of this song may have been Steve Hanley. I forget the number of children S.Hanley had by the time of Code Selfish, but MES seemed to take shots at him regarding his reconciliation of parental responsibilities with Fall life.
I interpreted 'Stout Man' on Sublingual Tablet in 2014 to have been taking a swipe at Hanley as well, presumably in retaliation for him releasing the Big Midweek and performing in The Extricated with Brix.
Stout Man was incidentally itself based on a Stooges song, 'Cock in my Pocket'. On the eve of the release of Sublingual Tablet, I recall MES sent a roughly drawn cartoon to the Fall website that seemed to refer to Steve Hanley and his co-writer of 'The Big Midweek', Olivia Piekarski. In the cartoon they were introduced cryptically as Popeye and Olive Oyl, and the speech bubble for Steve had him saying he was cracking up because he hadn't seen his kids for a few days (if memory serves). Which seemed to chime with the lyric 'I'm a big fat man pushing a little pram' from Stout Man.

Add a comment

Preview