Shoulder Pads #1 and #2

Shoulder Pads #1

All these fads
It's shoulder pads (1)

On New Year's Dawn
To my surprise
All the Macca lads stayed at home (2)
Picking antiques 
and clotheses
Cosy flecked with green bits
Main undercurrent, white spermatoze (3)

My powers
Against them, half-useless
My senses,
Alive, half 'parted   (4)

Was embarrassed but stuck with them
Walked, at shoulder, down the street, ridicule
They couldn't tell Lou Reed from Doug Yule (5)
Suppressed make romance
It was like being back at school

My powers before them resound
My powers languish in time, doom

Went populace, internal defeat
Their mob had a coup d'etat
Realize what they'd always wanted
Knew I was right all along
It wasn't then a Beatles song
Superhero in harlequin kecks (6)
Dimwit lecture half read
Cursing black singers ten years dead (7)

Was a clown in victim hat
Was shouldered and spurned

Then my powers did return.... 

Shoulder Pads #2

(fade in)

Knew I was right all along
Rock to them a Talking Heads album
Superhero in harlequin kecks
Dimwit lecture, half read

Was I victim in clown hat?
Was I nearly turned?

Then my powers did return...

Watch out fakers and cads
It's MES in shoulder pads

My powers gone
Powers, said Batman

Said a twisted chill, flashes pan
It's MES in shoulder pads

Big fit deal for mamas of fads
It's MES in shoulder pads

You'd better
Line that bottom line
Against that different plan

Holding ankles, rotten kecks
It's MES in shoulder pads

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1. Shoulder pads were a 1980s fashion trend, mostly but not exclusively among women, which was influenced by the donning of these accoutrements by Joan Collins and Linda Evans, the female stars of Dynasty (a song MES would later admit to watching in "Bill is Dead"). The pads were initially a form of "power dressing," a term which is itself an artifact of this general time period. Shoulder pads were big in the 1940s and again in the 1980s; it was more common for women to wear them, but men did too, and particularly men who wished to appear androgynous. As Noggin points out, pop stars like Paul McCartney and David Bowie took to wearing them around this time.

On the other hand, the reference may be to superhero gear, as MES refers to himself and a superhero and talks about his "powers"...(thanks to Robert for pointing this out).

Dan finds a find:

From the pilot issue of LM magazine (given away free with Crash, December 1986), dated January 1987, p.25: "Shoulder Pads is just about a lot of different people and why I think they're twats - there's two parts to the song, one on each side of the LP, but really I could have written about nine different songs on that subject. I suppose it is an odd title; it' s an American football term and I can't stand American football. It's so boring and complicated -like a sort of moronic chess."

It has been remarked (I'm glad this isn't Wikipedia with their "by whom?" as I honestly don't recall) that the main music theme of "Shoulder Pads" sounds like the horn part in the theme song from Are You Being Served, a British sit-com that aired between 1972 and 1985.  

Dan submits:

From the booklet to the 2019 Beggars Banquet reissue of Bend Sinister:
 

MARK E SMITH: People are quite surprised when they find out I'm a halfway decent sort of bloke and I do always try to be nice to anyone I come across, but sometimes you end up being taken advantage of. That's why I wrote that new song, MES in Shoulder Pads: when someone comes down on me I'll react by coming down twice as hard. [Interview with Gavin Martin, NME, 30 August 1986]

BRIX: Mark borrowed a shirt of mine that I had borrowed from my mother and it had shoulder pads in it. This struck me as hilarious - MES in shoulder pads. I just remember (sings riff) being so irritating.

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2. "Macca lads" may be "macc-a lads," macc lads or young men from Macclesfield. A British punk band called the Macc Lads, incidentally, released a song called "Alton Towers" years before the Fall did.  

Son of Always points out that this may also be an allusion to Paul McCartney (who also turns up in "I'm a Mummy"), as the Beatles are mentioned further down.

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3. Yeah, those are weird lines; maybe "picking antiques" is some kind of obscure slang for masturbation, like "choking the chicken" or something; that's why those Macc-a lads are staying home. [Thanks to guest editor Mark Prindle for this note]  

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4. I think this is the lyric, i.e. that he is saying his senses have half departed, in other words he is a little bit out of his mind. 

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5. Doug Yule replaced John Cale in the Velvet Undergound, playing bass and singing such songs as "Candy Says" and "Who Loves the Sun?" This may be inspired by the following anecdote about David Bowie. Bowie went to see the Velvet Underground in 1971, after Reed had left the band. Here is his own account of the incident, quoted at the official Bowie website:

"I was singing along with the band, stuck right there at the apron of the stage. 'Waiting For The Man', 'White Light/ White Heat', 'Heroin'...All that kind of stuff. And then after the show, I went back stage and I knocked on the door, and I said 'Is Lou Reed in? I'd love to talk to him, I'm from England, cos I'm in music too, and he's a bit of a hero to me.' This guy said 'Wait here.' And Lou comes out and we sat talking on the bench for about quarter of an hour about writing songs, and what it's like to be Lou Reed, and all that...and afterwards I was floating on a cloud, and went back to my hotel room.

"I said to this guy that I knew in New York: 'I've just seen the Velvet Underground and I got to talk with Lou Reed for fifteen minutes,' and he said, 'Yeah? Lou Reed left the band last year, I think you've been done.' I said, 'It looked like Lou Reed' and he said 'That's Doug Yule, he's the guy that took over from Lou Reed.' I thought what an impostor, wow, that's incredible. It doesn't matter really, cos I still talked to Lou Reed as far as I was concerned. Coming back to England, one of the memories I brought back with me, was all that. So I wrote Queen Bitch as a sort of homage to Lou Reed.'"

Both Yule and, at times, Bowie tell a more plausible version where Yule himself disabuses Bowie before the two part ways.

There are references to Bowie in "Mere Pseud Mag. Ed.," "Hard Life in Country," He Pep!", and "Get a Summer Song Goin'."

Also, from Dan:

"In a letter to Tony Friel (briefly online on Friel's site years ago), dated 6 October 1976, MES writes:

'The Velvet Underground EP I received on Friday is excellent/dynamite. Good drumming good playing. Distinctive Velvets atmosphere. The papers claimed it was from post third album time, with John Cale. As a fellow Velvets aff--drat forgot the spelling FAN, you will know this is the proverbial bullshit. 1968 more like-with Doug Yule.'"

Cale was already gone by the third album, replaced by Yule in 1968.

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6. "Kecks" is northern British slang for pants (i.e. what in England are called "trousers"); Harlequin kecks are checked or multicolored trousers.

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7. Without more information it is hard to determine whom this might be, as I assume MES may be rounding up or down with "ten years."  

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Shoulder Pads: Fall Tracks A-Z