Psycho Mafia

Lyrics

(1)

Spit on the streets
Numb heads and feet
Nowhere to go
Won't let us in the shows

'Cos we talk about love
And the Psycho-Mafia
I'm talking 'bout love
And the Psycho-Mafia

No soul in the discos
No rock in the clubs
Won't let us in the pubs
And the city jars

Going on about love
And the Psycho-Mafia
I'm talking about love
And the Psycho-Mafia

Psycho-Mafia
Psycho-Mafia
'cho Mafia
'cho Mafia

Spit on the streets
Shot heads and teeth
Our eyes are red
Our brains are dead

Going on about drugs
Psycho-Mafia
I'm talking about love
Psycho-Mafia

 

 

Notes

1. In this, one of the earliest Fall songs, MES coins what could have been a name for the Fall's fan base, in the mold of "KISS Army," or "Slaytanic Wehrmacht" (which tries a little too hard, but Slayer fans were game), or "Parrotheads" (Jimmy Buffet), or "Juggalos" (Insane Clown Posse), or of course "Deadheads." To the fans' credit, they didn't go for it, and to MES's credit he probably didn't mean for the name to be used that way anyway, but it's an amusing idea. Mick Middles calls it a "tale of late night violence and terror," whereas The Story of the Fall hears a "condemnation of mental hospital staff." According to MES, courtesy of Reformation

This song started out as a tribute to a local street-gang, but on completion of the lyrics, it took on a sinister aura - an aura of oppression, a sort of subconscious manifestation of events which were happening around the author at the time. The music, strangely enough, is a sort of tribute to the new R n B bands which were the only thing happening at the time of writing, i.e. early 1976.

The street hang may have been called "Sedgley Park Psychomafia," as Danny reports: Tony Friel's short lived website included an mp3 of Psycho Mafia annotated with "Sedgley Park Psychomafia (bus stop graffiti)", suggesting the phrase was something they saw - presumably the street gang wrote it.

And, from Renegade:

Music to me was something your sisters did. My three sisters all had posters of Cliff and the Osmonds over the house. I was more into causing trouble, forming gangs and things like that. I used to have a few – Psycho Mafia, the Barry Boy gang. We’d fight other gangs. It was quite interesting; there used to be Irish gangs and Orthodox Jewish gangs. But the Psycho Mafia was a real melting pot, and I was the vice president.

Dan submits:

From New Manchester Review, #53, dated 24 March 1978 to 6 April 1978, p8, interview with MES:
 


Both Mark and Una have attended Mental Patients' Union meetings at the local hospital, and have occasionally invited patients back to the flat.

On the lyric sheet which Mark copied out he wrote: "N.B. Psycho Mafia is about chemical straitjackets":

"No soul in the discos/No rock in the clubs/Won't let us into the pubs/And the city joys/Spitting on the streets/Shot heads and teeth/Our eyes are red/Our brains are dead/'Cos we know about chemicals and the Psycho Mafia/I'm talking about electrodes and the Psycho Mafia."

The Mental Patients Union was "founded in London in 1973 to oppose psychiatric oppression.

^

Comments (25)

dannyno
  • 1. dannyno | 04/05/2014
You know what I think? I think it's "spit on the streets", not "spitting".
dannyno
  • 2. dannyno | 14/05/2014
Tony Friel's short lived website included an mp3 of Psycho Mafia annotated with "Sedgley Park Psychomafia (bus stop graffiti)", suggesting the phrase was something they saw - presumably the street gang wrote it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040216114513/http://www.atomicsoup.co.uk/MUSIC.htm
dannyno
  • 3. dannyno | 12/08/2017
"Psycho Mafia" may have been MES's gang, it seems.

MES wrote in "Renegade":


Music to me was something your sisters did. My three sisters all had posters of Cliff and the Osmonds over the house. I was more into causing trouble, forming gangs and things like that. I used to have a few – Psycho Mafia, the Barry Boy gang. We’d fight other gangs. It was quite interesting; there used to be Irish gangs and Orthodox Jewish gangs. But the Psycho Mafia was a real melting pot, and I was the vice president.
GLochin
  • 4. GLochin | 27/01/2018
It's worth noting that Mark Fisher ends up co-opting the "psycho-mafia" coinage to describe pharmaceutical corporations
"Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism: first, it reinforces capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry) and second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational 'pyscho-mafias' can peddle their dodgy drugs (we can cure you with our SSRIs)."

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005660.html
dannyno
  • 5. dannyno | 29/01/2018
Comment #4: yeah, I think the psychiatric hospital/pharmaceutical industry angle has to be part of it. Notes do mention this.
VEJ
  • 6. VEJ | 17/04/2018
Suggest : "And the city jars"

: to have a harshly unpleasant or perturbing effect on one's nerves, feelings, thoughts, etc.:
bzfgt
  • 7. bzfgt (link) | 05/07/2018
Yeah I like that it makes sense, let me listen

It sounds like it is definitely "jars" to me--cool! progress inches along

Now "numb heads and feet" sounds like it might be "don't hesitate"--ugh
dannyno
  • 8. dannyno | 24/04/2019
From New Manchester Review, #53, dated 24 March 1978 to 6 April 1978, p8, interview with MES:


Both Mark and Una have attended Mental Patients' Union meetings at the local hospital, and have occasionally invited patients back to the flat.

On the lyric sheet which Mark copied out he wrote: "N.B. Psycho Mafia is about chemical straitjackets":

"No soul in the discos/No rock in the clubs/Won't let us into the pubs/And the city joys/Spitting on the streets/Shot heads and teeth/Our eyes are red/Our brains are dead/'Cos we know about chemicals and the Psycho Mafia/I'm talking about electrodes and the Psycho Mafia."
dannyno
  • 9. dannyno | 24/04/2019
So that's "city joys". But is that what is sung on record? Might not be, and either MES's written version departs from it, or the writer has misread it. Or it might be right. Need to listen again!
dannyno
  • 10. dannyno | 24/04/2019
After all, this NMR text includes lines not found above anyway.
dannyno
  • 11. dannyno | 05/05/2019
Some information about the origins of the Mental Patients' Union:

https://www.manchesterusersnetwork.org.uk/2017/03/29/mental-patients-union-1973/
[archive]
GLochin
  • 12. GLochin | 18/07/2020
"Mental hospitals/They put electrodes in your brain/And you're never the same/You don't dig repetition/You don't love repetition"

^this is the plot of "Psycho Mafia" & it seems possible that the reason there are "no soul in the disco/no rock in the clubs" is because the patients have had their ear for repetition robbed from them
dannyno
  • 13. dannyno | 24/09/2020
Spotted on social media, the bassline to this song resembles the bassline of Amon Düül II's Kronwinkl 12, from their 1972 album, Carnival in Babylon.



Listen from about 3:10.
bzfgt
  • 14. bzfgt (link) | 27/09/2020
Hmm it does but not decisively I don't think..this seems like one of those things where I put that, and then we wind up with 37 comments each with a different song it resembles...
dannyno
  • 15. dannyno | 28/01/2022
The Psychic Mafia is a 1976 book by M. Lamar Keene, a Canadian spiritualist, in which he confesses to being a charlatan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Lamar_Keene

Dan
Johnny
  • 16. Johnny | 01/02/2022
Guardian today has a write up about M Lamar Keene and his book The Psychic Mafia
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/feb/01/m-lamar-keene-fake-psychic-florida
DP Mcnulty
  • 17. DP Mcnulty | 01/02/2022
M. Lamar Keen "Psychic Mafia" indeed.
I think a few of us read today's Guardian and had the same thought !
Kate Laity
  • 18. Kate Laity (link) | 01/03/2022
I'm wondering if MES might have read this 1976 exposé/autobiography Psychic Mafia which certainly seems a topic likely to interest him. Not that it might have had much influence on the lyrics but maybe the title or gang name. Interesting book.
the27points
  • 19. the27points | 03/03/2022
Came to this page to mention the BBC Sounds podcast "Fake Psychic" which talks about Lamar Keene's 1976 book, Psychic Mafia, but I see many have got here before me. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0bk74xd
dannyno
  • 20. dannyno | 06/06/2022
Both Mick Middles' review of the 13 November 1977 Band on the Wall gig, Manchester ("No hip-ocrisy, no Clash registers", Trick, #2, December 1977, p.16.) and Ian Wood's review of the same gig published in Sounds, 3 December 1977, p.44, refer to the song as "Psycho Mania" (Middles) / "Psychomania" (Wood).

However, we know from the "Outsiders" set list posted briefly by Friel and dated 25 Jan 1977, that it was titled "Psycho Mafia" there.

See: http://thefall.org/gigography/gig77.html

http://thefall.org/gigography/image/1977-01-25_lettertoFriel-withsongtitles.jpg
dannyno
  • 21. dannyno | 03/07/2022
From "Between Innocence & Forbidden Knowledge... comes The Fall", interview with the group by Ian Penman in NME 19 August 1978, p.7:


MIND YOU... Buzzcocks, they sound more and more like The Tremoloes or Herman's Hermits to this critic. But what of The Fall's EP? Three tracks, very rough, plain -- "Psycho Mafia", "Bingo Masters Breakout", and "Repetition". Live favourites, I believe. "Psycho Mafia" particularly seems to have been promoted to something approaching 'anthem' status:

"Spittin' on the streets/Shot heads and teeth/Our eyes are red/Our brains are dead/'Cos we know about drugs/And the psycho mafia."

Mark: "It's about... y'know... the psycho mafia, which is a chemical mafia - the way mental hospitals are run, that whole thing..."
Una Baines
  • 22. Una Baines | 03/09/2022
I think it's ' the city joys'
dannyno
  • 23. dannyno | 27/12/2022
Sounds like "city joys" on the 4 December 1978 recording from Bolton Institute of Technology, disc 10 of the Cherry Red 1970s box set.
Mark Oliver
  • 24. Mark Oliver | 26/08/2023
On the street gang theme, in 1972, 'The Godfather' made a big impression on the UK's young thugs about town and many gangs adopted the suffixes 'Mafia' and 'Family', to unintentionally comic effect- in North Staffs, 'The Hanley Family' and 'Madeley Mafia' spring to mind. However, the tearaways of impoverished Smallthorne must have had their tongues in cheek when they decide to embrace their scruffiness in dubbing themselves 'Smallthorne Clampetts'.
Alex
  • 25. Alex | 16/02/2024
I don't hear "'cause we talk about love" at all, at least on the studio version. Clearly "could never love".

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