The N.W.R.A.

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1. "North Will Rise Again." This is a rich and baffling song, but it seems to be about an insurrection in the north of Britain, initially spearheaded by "R. Totale" and subsequently co-opted by slimy businessman "Tony."

From "K-Punk" (Mark Fisher):

"But it is the other long track, ‘N.W.R.A.’, that is the masterpiece. All of the LP’s themes coalesce in this track, a tale of cultural political intrigue that plays like some improbable mulching of T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, H. G. Wells, Dick, Lovecraft and Le Carre. It is the story of Roman Totale, a psychic and former cabaret performer whose body is covered in tentacles. It is often said that Roman Totale is one of Smith’s ‘alter-egos’; in fact, Smith is in the same relationship to Totale as Lovecraft was to someone like Randolph Carter. Totale is a character rather than a persona. Needless to say, he is not a character in the ‘well-rounded’ Forsterian sense so much as a carrier of mythos, an inter-textual linkage between Pulp fragments.

The inter-textual methodology is crucial to pulp modernism. If pulp modernism first of all asserts the author-function over the creative-expressive subject, it secondly asserts a fictional system against the author-God. By producing a fictional plane of consistency across different texts, the pulp modernist becomes a conduit through which a world can emerge. Once again, Lovecraft is the exemplar here: his tales and novellas could in the end no longer be apprehended as discrete texts but as part-objects forming a mythos-space which other writers could also explore and extend.

The form of ‘N.W.R.A.’ is as alien to organic wholeness as is Totale’s abominable tentacular body. It is a grotesque concoction, a collage of pieces that do not belong together. The model is the novella rather than the tale, and the story is told episodically, from multiple points of views, using a heteroglossic riot of styles and tones (comic, journalistic, satirical, novelistic): like ‘Call of Cthulhu’ re-written by the Joyce of Ulysses and compressed into ten minutes.

From what we can glean, Totale is at the centre of a plot – infiltrated and betrayed from the start – which aims at restoring the North to glory (perhaps to its Victorian moment of economic and industrial supremacy; perhaps to some more ancient pre-eminence, perhaps to a greatness that will eclipse anything that has come before). More than a matter of regional railing against the capital, in Smith’s vision the North comes to stand for everything suppressed by urbane good taste: the esoteric, the anomalous, the vulgar sublime, that is to say, the Weird and the Grotesque itself. Totale, festooned in the incongruous Grotesque costume of ‘ostrich head-dress … feathers/orange-red with blue-black lines/…and light blue plant-heads’, is the would-be Faery King of this Weird Revolt who ends up its maimed Fisher King, abandoned like a pulp modernist Miss Havisham amongst the relics of a carnival that will never happen, a drooling totem of a defeated tilt at Social Realism, the visionary leader reduced, as the psychotropics fade and the fervour cools, to being a washed-up cabaret artiste once again."

(K-punk)

Ian F:

"The title of this song is not The North Will Rise Again. It's The NWRA as an allusion, I've always assumed anyway, to the IRA - The North West Republican Army. The Irishness inherent in north-western music (Scanlon, Hanley, Lennon, McCartney, Marr, Morrissey, etc) well documented, of course. A lot to unpack in that choice of title, and not a subject I'm aware of Smith returning to again. But there it is."

J Temperance points out the consonance with the common southern post-Civil War American slogan, "The South Will Rise Again."

And Dan reports there is a 1978 book (about America) by Jeremy Rifkin and Randy Barber entitled The North Will Rise Again: Pensions, Politics and Power in the 1980s. The title of the book is clearly a play on "The South Will Rise Again."

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2. "Junior Choice," originally titled "Children's Favourites," was a BBC radio program that played requests from "children of all ages." The show aired, in one form or another, from 1954 to 1984.  

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3. Dan points out that Berlin's U-Bahn (subway) system indeed has, and has long had, yellow trains; Ryan adds, "the Tyne and Wear Metro, which opened in 1980, has and did have yellow stock. According to Wikipedia, the trains were based on ones used in Germany."

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4. This line also appears in "C'n'C-S Mithering" from the same album.

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5. The temporality of this section is, probably intentionally, very hard to follow. The speaker, Joe Totale, has not yet been born, and he is speaking of the future death of his father, R. Totale XVII. The younger Totale seems to drop out of the narrative at the point where Smith says "shift!"

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6. "RT XVII" is later called "R. Totale." In the following lyrics to the earlier song "2nd Dark Age," we learn that Totale's first name is "Roman":

I am Roman Totale XVII
the bastard offspring
of Charles I and the Great God Pan. 

As for "Tony," according to gedge:

"I always imagined that 'buisiness friend' was based on Tony Wilson (co-founder of Factory Records and manager of the Manchester nightclub The Hacienda). I don't know if Wilson and Smith had any kind of relationship, but the confident and condescending tone of the character in the song does remind me of Wilson.
 

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7. The Lyrics Parade has "besom sticks," with the following note: "A besom is a long handled broom with the head made out of pieces of twig lashed together." However, after close listening and much discussion on the Fall online forum, I have concluded that it is "bees on sticks," which is the lyric reproduced in the second Fall lyric book from Lough Press. The heraldic emblem most closely associated with Manchester is a worker bee, which appears on the city's coat of arms, as well as on the University's sealand on the logos of various businesses associated with Manchester (including Boddington ale); thus, "bees on sticks" could refer to a flag or banner, or possibly a cudgel with the city's symbol affixed or emblazoned upon it. At the forum, the besom's most eloquent defender is Grudge Natch, who gives us the following, admirably plausible, explanation:

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8. The Battle of Culloden was the final conflict in the Second Jacobite Rising, an attempt to put the Catholic Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie," also known as "The Young Pretender") on the throne of England and Scotland. At Culloden, Charles' forces were defeated by the armies of the Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland (also known as "Stinking Billy"). This episode also figures in the lyrics of "Backdrop," which is in many ways a sequel to this song.  

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9. Again from K-Punk (see note 1): "Although Grotesque is an enigma, its title gives clues. Otherwise incomprehensible references to 'huckleberry masks', 'a man with butterflies on his face' and Totale's 'ostrich headress' and 'light blue plant-heads' begin to make sense when you recognize that, in Parrinder's description, the grotesque originally referred to 'human and animal shapes intermingled with foliage, flowers, and fruits in fantastic designs which bore no relationship to the logical categories of classical art'.

Grotesque, then, would be another moment in the endlessly repeating struggle between a Pulp Underground (the scandalous grottoes) and the Official culture, what Philip K Dick called 'the Black Iron Prison'. Dick's intuition was that 'the Empire had never ended', and that history was shaped by an ongoing occult(ed) conflict between Rome and Gnostic forces. 'Specter versus Rector' ('I've waited since Caesar for this') had rendered this clash in a harsh Murnau black and white ; on Grotesque the struggle is painted in colours as florid as those used on the album’s garish sleeve (the work of Smith's sister)."

(K-punk) 

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10. Sam Chippendale was a real estate agent who put up the Arndale Centres, the first big shopping malls in Britain. Dan points out that the largest of these was in Manchester, and was completed in 1979 (the year before this song debuted). 

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11. The Arndale is a shopping center in Manchester that was completed in 1979, and hit with a bomb in 1996 (see "Powderkeg").

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12. Dan makes the Scotland connection: "Worth noting that Friar Tuck is a character in Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe. Tuck is depicted in the Scott Monument in Edinburgh." The tractor is a little more intractable, so to speak. 

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13. "Bluey" seems to be most commonly used to refer to a blue Valium pill, but in the 1970s and 80s in England it was more likely to refer to amphetamine sulphate or a mixture of amphetamines and barbiturates. 

Randolph Carter writes:

"Taking a bluey is gonna be a French Blue - drinamyl - which is made from dexamphetamine (Dexy's Midnight Runners - their name being a reference to midnight raids on Chemist shops to steal Dexamphetamine and the subsequent all night Mod and Northern Soul dance parties) and amylobarbitone. Very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, also know as Purple Hearts. See the song Cut My Hair by The Who in Quadrophenia where Jimmy sings of his mum finding his 'box of blues'. MES was a total speed freak all his adult life."

Dan submits thiis entry from the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor. Vol 1, Routledge, 2006:

Drinamyl seems to me by far the most likely of those options.

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14. Dan: 

Ripon, N Yorks UK Blue Plaque reads:
The Rising of the North
In November 1569, hundreds of rebels assembled in this Market Place with the aim of re-establishing Catholic worship in the North. They swiftly captured Barnard Castle on the River Tees and widely reinstated the Mass, but by January the rebellion had failed and great numbers had been hanged here and elsewhere as traitors.

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The N.W.R.A.: Fall Tracts A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1980