Mess of My
Lyrics
A note of your own choice, boys and girls
Inadequate writers, methadone stubbies
You got energy vampires (2)
More hands on the tranquillisers
An unholy alliance
And jokes about faith
Oh, give me another drink!
You're as strong as your weakest link
A mess of my age
A mess of my youth
A mess of our radio
I remember the times
This was a beginning
Of a permissive new age
But it's the same old cabbage (3)
A mess of my age
A mess of my race
A mess of our, our, our, our...
The dream was about taking some terrorists out, y’know, bombs etcetera
But the targets could well be your own
There are no graves
There is an end to solutions and retribution. (4)
A mess of my age
A mess of our race
A mess of our our our our
I don't look at myself
I have no health
Take no notice of me
I probably work for a record company
A mess of our age
A mess of my taste
A mess of our nervous systems
Cowering mockers
The company money's ran out
No longer hot properties
Get back in their closets
A mess of my age
A mess of my race
Fill the rest in yourself...
Notes
1. The only studio recording of this is the Peel version, and musically it is very much in the distinctive style of the Live at the Witch Trials band. Lyrically it is a vague jeremiad, and it is unclear exactly who the narrator is, but it is at least in part the music industry in MES's sights. His shot pattern is wide, however; some live versions contain the following lines:
I dream about taking some terrorists out for a quiet drink
You know, and getting them to stick a bomb up the TV man's arse
The hedonist slide show bullshit arse.
From Marc Riley's page on the BBC 6 website:
A record you'd like played at your funeral?
Mess Of My Age perhaps... the best track I played on when I was in The Fall.
It's an odd choice for a funeral, and also for the best track with Riley (not that there's anything wrong with it)...
According to Riley, it was written by sometime bass player "Eric the Ferret."
Note that Riley calls it "Mess of My Age," the first line of the refrain. According to Dan:
"Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast" (1969/1970, inspired, of course, by Wyndham Lewis' "Blast"), p23:
'The medium is the mess age means the sensory effect of the environments created by innovations, for example the effect of writing on speech.'"
McLuhan is here punning on his most famous phrase, "The medium is the message," from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).
Public Enemy may have been inspired by the same pun when they named their 1994 album Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age.
Dan:
According to the Fall Online Gigography, MES introduced this song at the Deeply Vale Festival on 22 July 1978 with the words,
This one's about radios, videos, a signal...
JS points out that the bass line resembles "Transdance" by Night Moves (1983).
2. Sumsiadad points out that "Energy Vampires" is the name of a track on Peter Hammill's Future Now, which we know MES to have been familiar with. However, The Future Now was released in September 1978, and the phrase appears in this song at least as early as August of that year (and possibly as early as May).
Wikipedia has this to say:
"The term 'psychic vampire' was popularized in the 1960s by Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan. LaVey wrote on the topic in his book, The Satanic Bible, and claimed to have coined the term.[10] LaVey used psychic vampire to mean a spiritually or emotionally weak person who drains vital energy from other people. Adam Parfrey likewise attributed the term to LaVey in an introduction to The Devil's Notebook.
The English singer-songwriter Peter Hammill credits his erstwhile Van der Graaf Generator colleague, violinist Graham Smith, with coining the term 'energy vampires' in the 1970s in order to describe intrusive, over-zealous fans. Hammill included a song of the same name on his 1978 album The Future Now."
Dan finds that Colin Wilson, a reference point for both Hammill and MES, uses the phrase "energy vampires" in his 1967 Lovecraftesque novel Mind Parasites:
Colin Wilson, "The Mind Parasites"For more than two centuries now, the human mind has been constantly a prey to these energy vampires.
It is also used several times in Wilson's The Space Vampires.
3. Martin finds a source for this expression:
"From Hegel's Philosophy of Right (originally published 1820): 'Some, who are thought to be taking a profound view, are heard to say that everything turns upon the subject-matter, and that the form may be ignored. The business of any writer, and especially of the philosopher, is, as they say, to discover, utter, and diffuse truth and adequate conceptions. In actual practice this business usually consists in warming up and distributing on all sides the same old cabbage.'"
This is from the 1798 translation by S.W. Dyde. The German is "Wenn man nun betrachtet, wie solches Geschäft wirklich betrieben zu werden pflegt, so sieht man einesteils denselben alten Kohl immer wieder aufkochen und nach allen Seiten hin ausgeben" (so "same old cabbage"--denselben alten Kohl--is a literal translation, but "warming up" deviates a tiny bit--immer wieder aufkochen, to boil up, or reboil, again and again ).
Dan:
"According to Hans Schemann's German/English Dictionary of Idioms, 'kohl' is used in several German phrases to indicate rubbish, nonsense or boring crap (I paraphrase). So 'so ein Kohl' ("such a cabbage") means 'what a load of rubbish.' And 'aufgewärmter Kohl' means 'a boring old story' (literally, I guess, 'reheated/warmed over cabbage')."
This certainly seems related, conceptually if not historically, to the English expression "I don't chew my cabbage twice," which is better-attested than the way I first heard it as a lad, "I don't cook my cabbage twice" (when asked to repeat oneself). And this role for cabbage in our discourse is of ancient origin, as Dan has discovered:
"Crambo, earlier crambe, comes from the Latin phrase cramb? repet?ta 'cabbage reheated, re-served,' a phrase in Juvenal’s 'Seventh Satire' ('Reheated cabbage kills teachers') referring to unimaginative writing. The Latin cramb? is a borrowing from Greek krámb?, a kind of cabbage. Crambo, the rhyming game, entered English in the mid-17th century; crambe, inferior rhyme, in the early 17th." As Ramsay (1918) has it, Juvenal goes on to say "Served up again and again, the cabbage is the death of the unhappy master!" And Juvenal identifies as a Greek proverb, “Dis kramb thanatos" (twice-cooked cabbage kills us).
More from Dan:
"Cassell's Dictionary of Proverbs, by David Pickering (2001).
Entry:
cabbage twice cooked is death[b] (Greek) Some things, like cabbage, should be discarded if not consumed or otherwise dealt with at once....
Pickering quotes John Lyly, "Euphues: the anatomy of wit" (1578):
Which I must omitte, least I set before you, colewortes twice sodden.
and
[b]The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd edition 1970, rev by F.P. Wilson:
Cabbage twice cooked (sodden) is death
gives the Greek, cites Juvenal and the English language citations also cited by Pickering."
So what it all boils down to is "the same old nonsense."
4. These four lines (between the two choruses) sound like they are sung through a megaphone. Thanks to Trevor Morris for deciphering the lyrics here (for variants see the comment section below).
More Information
Comments (48)
- 1. | 16/11/2013
- 2. | 16/11/2013
Liverpool 78
"I dream about taking some terrorists out for a quiet drink, y’know, and getting them to stick a bomb up the TV man’s arse, the hedonist slide-show bullshit’s arse. Y’know, dreams, y’know, where the only solution is retribution."
Marquee ‘78
“When I was stupid, I used to dream about terrorists (laughs) and what the left-wing hot properties, no knee-caps etc., an end to solutions and retributions.
Altrincham ‘79
The dream was about taking terrorists out, y’know, dreams etc., but the targets could well be your own. There are no graves and partays, even on your holidays with Cliff Michelmore. There is an end to dream solutions and retributions.”
- 3. | 16/11/2013
Mess of my… (Live Liverpool 78)
Intro
The next number is about videos and the signal din. A note of your own choice, gentlemen.
Swedish singers
with DLT
The energy vampires
more hands on the tranquilisers.
An unholy alliance
and jokes about rape
Fog-bound roads
South African heroes.
Mess of my age
Mess of my race
Mess of our radios
I remember the times
This was the beginning
Of a permissive new age
But you’re the same old cabbage
Mess of my age
Mess of my race
Mess of our, our, our, our, our, our…
(“Megaphone bit”)
I dream about taking some terrorists out for a quiet drink, y’know, and getting them to stick a bomb up the TV man’s arse, the hedonist slide-show bullshit’s arse. Y’know, dreams, y’know, where the only solution is retribution.
I don’t look at myself
I have no health
Take no notice of me
I’d probably work for a record company
Mess of my age
Mess of my taste
Mess of our nervous systems
TV rock
No leads plugged in.
Left-wing hot properties
Get back in their closets.
Mess of my age
Mess of my race
(off mic) Guilty social workers.
This version of the lyrics was performed, with different intros and some slight variations (sub. “radio man” & “TV pop man” in the so-called “megaphone bit”) through the early part of 1978. The first version with the Peel Session lyrics that I’ve heard is at Prestwich Hospital on Nov 25th 1978 (2 days before the Peel recording) & it’s then performed in that style in all the other live versions that I’ve heard (again with some interesting variations in the “megaphone bit”).
- 4. | 29/11/2013
Thank you!!!!! You have saved the day, and come up with some good variants...
- 5. | 29/11/2013
- 6. | 19/06/2014
- 7. | 24/06/2014
- 8. | 14/11/2014
Also, at the same time as "youth" there's a backing vocal of (I think) one word which I can't identify. I'm on the Peel session version, by the way.
- 9. | 19/09/2015
"Some, who are thought to be taking a profound view, are heard to say that everything turns upon the subject-matter, and that the form may be ignored. The business of any writer, and especially of the philosopher, is, as they say, to discover, utter, and diffuse truth and adequate conceptions. In actual practice this business usually consists in warming up and distributing on all sides the same old cabbage"
(No idea who the translator is, sorry).
- 10. | 30/01/2016
- 11. | 12/03/2016
Hammill: ... He used to be in touch with me and send me the vinyl as it came out, but I haven't heard from him for a while. He suggested that we did something - the area of sound that he was particularly interested in was The Future Now [1978] which is a particularly difficult area to recreate.
- 12. | 19/03/2016
- 13. | 19/03/2016
- 14. | 19/03/2016
- 15. | 09/03/2017
I do not know if this is a literal translation or calque, or whether this is an English idiom that is no longer well-known enough to be on the internet, but eventually I'll figure it out.
Here is the original German:
Wenn man nun betrachtet, wie solches Geschäft wirklich betrieben zu werden pflegt, so sieht man einesteils denselben alten Kohl immer wieder aufkochen und nach allen Seiten hin ausgeben
So "same old cabbage" / "denselben alten Kohl" is right there in Hegel. However, it seems "same old cabbage" is a literal translation.
According to Hans Schemann's "German/English Dictionary of Idioms", "kohl" is used in several German phrases to indicate rubbish, nonsense or boring crap (I paraphrase). So "so ein Kohl" means "what a load of rubbish". And "aufgewärmter Kohl" means "a boring old story" (literally, I guess, "reheated/warmed over cabbage")
And where Hegel has "den selben alten Kohl immer wieder aufkochen" , which translates literally as something like "the same old reboiled cabbage" or "the same old cabbage, boiled again and again", Schemann's dictionary has the pretty close "(den) alten Kohl (wieder) aufgewärmen", which is says means "to dredge up the past" or "drag up an old story".
- 16. | 09/03/2017
There's an Irvine Welsh book titled "Reheated Cabbage", which is an anthology of republished stories (apart from one new one).
The ultimate origin of all this seems to be Juvenal's "Seventh Satire" [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satires_(Juvenal)], which includes the phrase "crambē repetīta", which translates literally from Latin as "cabbage repeated".
According to http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/2017/01/13/crambo:
Crambo, earlier crambe, comes from the Latin phrase crambē repetīta “cabbage reheated, re-served,” a phrase in Juvenal’s “Seventh Satire” (“Reheated cabbage kills teachers”) referring to unimaginative writing. The Latin crambē is a borrowing from Greek krámbē, a kind of cabbage. Crambo, the rhyming game, entered English in the mid-17th century; crambe, inferior rhyme, in the early 17th.
In Ramsay's 1918 translation of Juvenal http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_07.htm, the line is rendered as:
Served up again and again, the cabbage is the death of the unhappy master!
- 17. | 09/03/2017
occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros.
- 18. | 09/03/2017
According to Bartleby http://www.bartleby.com/81/4291.html:
Crambe bis Cocta [“cabbage boiled twice”].
A subject hacked out. Juvenal says, “Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros” (vii. 155), alluding to the Greek proverb “Dis kramb thanatos.”
So we can push the origin back before Juvenal.
"Dis kramb thanatos" is "Cabbage served twice is death", or "repetition is tedious" (not a very Fall sentiment!)
- 19. | 09/03/2017
http://biblehub.com/library/basil/basil_letters_and_select_works/letter_clxxxvi_to_antipater_the.htm
I am told that you have recovered your failing appetite by pickled cabbage. Formerly I used to dislike it, both on account of the proverb
... the proverb being the Greek one...
Dan
- 20. | 09/03/2017
Entry:
cabbage twice cooked is death[b] (Greek) Some things, like cabbage, should be discarded if not consumed or otherwise dealt with at once....
Pickering quotes John Lyly, "Euphues: the anatomy of wit" (1578):
Which I must omitte, least I set before you, colewortes twice sodden.
and
[b]The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd edition 1970, rev by F.P. Wilson:
Cabbage twice cooked (sodden) is death
gives the Greek, cites Juvenal and the English language citations also cited by Pickering.
- 21. | 09/03/2017
- 22. | 10/03/2017
The Renaissance era Italian Politian (Angelo Ambrogini, aka Poliziano) identifies in his "Miscellanea" that Juvenal's cabbage phrase draws on the Greek proverb "δὶς χρὰμβη θὰνατος", which proverb is mentioned by Suidas (author of the Suda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suda).
I'm done here!
- 23. | 10/03/2017
- 24. | 19/03/2017
- 25. | 19/03/2017
- 26. | 19/03/2017
- 27. | 19/03/2017
- 28. | 20/03/2017
and the entry in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Ddi%2Fs
- 29. | 23/03/2017
- 30. | 08/04/2017
Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast" (1969/1970, inspired, of course, by Wyndham Lewis' "Blast"), p23:
The medium is the mess age
Context:
"The medium is the mess age means the sensory effect of the environments created by innovations, for example the effect of writing on speech".
- 31. | 31/01/2018
Inadequate factors. Methadone slobbies.
It's true that methadone comes in a bottle resembling a stubbie, but it also makes - if we're being harsh, as Smith is - slobs of those who either use or abuse it. Like heroin, it will make them fall asleep, or what is called going on the nod. This is part of its appeal to those who enjoy that feeling, or are addicted to it.
Smith is scornful of those who like downers, as he prefers the reverse feeling of stimulants, or uppers. In some interview he says that he's tried heroin and didn't like it, and that we'd find out what the feeling of being on it is like when we're elderly anyway. He's inferring there a picture of someone who may have lost their faculties through age and spends their time zoned out, either through mental problems or medication. To Smith, that is to act or appear a slob, one of the consequences of the downer experience he has no time for.
I can't see the value in remarking about the shape or size of a methadone bottle though. It doesn't match Smith's well known taste for speed or the rate with which he sings about it. Contrasting the effects of someone with a taste for heavy downers as opposed to others like him who enjoy speed or other uppers is another way for him to promote the latter by putting down the former, and the picture I get from my understanding of the lyric. This also holds up well with the inadequacy of whether it's writers/factors as comes immediately before. It's a negative line, and the shape or size of a bottle has nothing to do with it - the inadequacy of a slob out of it on methadone does.
As for the energy vampire line, Smith has said somewhere that he stole that from Yvonne Pawlett. He overheard her describing the other members of the group as such, and was rightly impressed with it. The energy vampires are The Fall themselves, who are greedy for tranquillisers. There's no doubt this is accurate, as it's from the horse's mouth. However, it does throw my hearing of the methadone slobbies line, as the tranquillisers they have a taste for are downers, not uppers. So, I surmise that they're happy to take anything.
- 32. | 12/02/2018
- 33. | 24/01/2020
Has been pointed out recently that The Fall were playing this song (at least from May '78) before The Future Now was released (which was September). The "energy vampires" line is in the version on the Liverpool 78 live release, and that dates to August. So unless we can show that the song was discussed or could have been heard before the album came out, the use of the phrase looks more like a coincidence. Should probably be acknowledged.
- 34. | 25/01/2020
It's not an original phrase to Hammill either, right now I'm thinking Aleister Crowley who at least used the idea, if not the wording, but I'll do a little digging.
- 35. | 25/01/2020
Wikipedia has more, see new note.
- 36. | 25/01/2020
- 37. | 31/01/2020
We know MES was a reader of Wilson, but so was Hammill. The song Faculty X, for example, off his 1979 album pH7, is a reference to the works of Wilson:
Colin Wilson, "The Occult" (1971)Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it — fragmentary and uncertain though it is — that distinguishes man from all other animals
Source:
see also: [url=https://colinwilsononline.com/faculty-x-2/]https://colinwilsononline.com/faculty-x-2/
Peter Hammill"Faculty X" takes Colin Wilson's work as its basis.
Source: http://sofasound.com/phcds/ph7cd.htm
Wilson uses the phrase "energy vampires" in his 1967 Lovecraft-esque novel Mind Parasites:
Colin Wilson, "The Mind Parasites"For more than two centuries now, the human mind has been constantly a prey to these energy vampires.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_Parasites
However, as is already noted here, Hammill actually attributes "energy vampires" to Graham Smith. Maybe Smith got it from Wilson too.
Anyway, they're all breathing the same cultural air.
- 38. | 01/06/2020
"I didn't see Mark and Martin interact at all in this period so I never really got to the bottom of Mark's reason for axing him, although he did once say to me, '...that Martin, he's like a vampire. He sucks all the energy out of you just by standing next to you.'"
- 39. | 09/08/2020
This one's about radios, videos, a signal...
- 40. | 09/01/2021
Here in this song, but also in Muzorewi's Daughter. Mess of My is the earlier song, of course.
This is the line in context in Muzorewi's Daughter:
Left wing hot properties
Out of the closets and sheet
Compare that with the line in context here:
Cowering mockers
The company money's ran out
No longer hot properties
Get back in their closets
- 41. | 11/02/2021
- 42. | 11/02/2021
This was a beginning
Of a permissive new age
But it's the same old cabbage"
I've just spotted a beautifully relevant usage of "same old cabbage" in the wild.
It appears in Daniel Dylan Wray's interview with Robert Lloyd of the Nightingales/Prefects from the Guardian, 3 Feb 2021 (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/feb/03/the-jarvis-cocker-that-never-happened-40-years-of-robert-lloyds-the-nightingales [Archive]
Lloyd’s frustration set in a year earlier playing on the Clash’s White Riot tour, where disappointment and animosity quickly flourished. “It was the same old fucking cabbage,” recalls Lloyd. “Everyone wanting to be pop stars. In my stupid teenage mind I thought it was more revolutionary. I’m glad I got disillusioned so quickly so I didn’t waste my time thinking I was in a movement that didn’t exist.”
Maybe Lloyd even said as much in a contemporary interview that MES read!
- 43. | 17/02/2021
Since The Future Now had not been released when The Fall debuted this song, I reckon The Space Vampires (1976) is the likely source of the phrase. Do we need one? Maybe not, and nor is it a phrase confined to one author, but we cannot ignore its use by a significant influence on MES.
- 44. | 01/05/2021
- 45. | 08/05/2021
- 46. | 24/11/2021
There's maybe an element of Smith's articulation of the initial /r/ sound in both words [said the ex-TEFL teacher] in terms of the way people, particularly those across the pond, are hearing it. The way Hemingway represented the standard non-rhotic English /r/ sound as 'teddible' comes to mind.
2021 me isn't convinced that Smith would use the word 'faith' in that [rather prissy-sounding] way, or that 'jokes about faith, in the sense of religion, would be seen by Smith as something distasteful. 2021 me still thinks the company money referred to is record company money.
- 47. | 06/06/2022
MESS OF MY: (excerpt)
'A signal din
A mess of my age/mess of my face/mess of our radios (DLT)
I remember the times/this was the beginning/Permissive new
Age/The same old cabbage.
A mess of my age/mess of my taste (LSD)/Mess of our nervous
systems.
TV Rock/No leads plugged in/left-wing hot properties/Get
back in the closets.'
DLT is likely a reference to Radio 1 DJ Dave Lee Travis.
- 48. | 28/12/2022
Of a permissive new age
I wonder if this phrase may, in part, refer to The Velvet Underground's song "New Age."
“The dream was about taking some terrorists out, y’know, bombs etc. but the targets could well be your own. There are no graves. There is an end to nuisance and retribution.”