The N.W.R.A.
Lyrics
Who were chucking bricks and
Stuff through his flat window. She had a way with people like that.
He cussed us and we moved on.
'Junior Choice' played one morning.
The song was 'English Scheme.' (2)
Mine. They'd changed it and did a grand piano and turned it into a love song. How they did it I don't know.
DJs had worsened since the rising. Elaborating on nothing and praising the track
With words they could hardly pronounce, in telephone voices.
I was mad, and laughed at the same time. The West German Government
Had brought over large yellow trains on Teesside docks. (3)
In Edinburgh, I stayed on my own a few days, wandering about in the pissing rain,
Before the Queen Mother hit town.
I'm Joe Totale
The yet unborn son
The North will rise again
The North will rise again
Not in 10,000 years
Too many people cower to criminals
And government crap
The estates stick up like stacks (4)
The North will rise again
The North will rise again
The North will rise again
The North will rise again
(You are mistaken friend)
Look where you are
Look where you are
The future death of my father (5)
Shift!
Tony was a business friend
Of RT XVII (6)
And was an opportunist man
Come, come hear my story
How he set out to corrupt and destroy
This future Rising
The business friend came round today
With teeth clenched, he grabbed my neck
I threw him to the ground
His blue shirt stained red
The north will rise again.
He said you are mistaken, friend
I kicked him out of the home
Too many people cower to criminals
And that government pap
When all it takes is hard slap
But out the window burned the roads
There were men with bees on sticks (7)
The fall had made them sick
A man with butterflies on his face
His brother threw acid in his face
His tattoos were screwed
The streets of Soho did reverberate
With drunken Highland men
Revenge for Culloden dead (8)
The North had rose again
But it would turn out wrong
The North will rise again
So R. Totale dwells underground
Away from sickly blind
With ostrich head-dress
Face a mess, covered in feathers
Orange-red with blue-black lines
That draped down to his chest
Body a tentacle mess
And light blue plant-heads (9)
TV showed Sam Chippendale (10)
No conception of what he'd made
The Arndale had been razed (11)
Shop staff knocked off their ladders
Security guards hung from moving escalators
And now that is said
Tony seized the control
He built his base in Edinburgh
Had on his hotel wall
A hooded friar on a tractor (12)
He took a bluey and he called Totale (13)
Who said, "the North has rose again
But it will turn out wrong
When I was in cabaret
I vowed to defend
All of the English clergy
Though they have done wrong (14)
And the Fall has begun
This has got out of hand
I will go for foreign aid"
But he, Tony, laughed down the phone
Said "Totale go back to bed
The North has rose today
And you can stuff your aid!
And you can stuff your aid!"
Notes
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."
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.
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."
4. This line also appears in "C'n'C-S Mithering" from the same album.
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!"
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.
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:
But out the window burned the roads
This reminded me of ground workers or navies laying roads with boiling hot tarmac (asphalt) which brought me to..
QUOTE
http://chestofbooks.com/gardening-horticul...ml#.UXbUiEq-NyE
Many Scots and Irish men moved to England particularly London to find work as ground workers. They are the drunken highland men on the lash in Soho after a hard days graft.
It continues from the industrial theme of the trains on Teeside docks. Besom was still used to clean the roller in the 80's (even now?) as it was from 1901 when tarmacking was invented.
In this context the North rising again is referring to the plentiful work and good wages available for manual labourers at the time harking back to the industrial age of the empire.
However, it seems to me that the uprising described in the song is a violent conflict, and not primarily an economic boom or industrial rennaissance; furthermore, MES clearly seems to say "bees on sticks," particularly on the version from A Part of America, Therein, where there is a short but distinct pause between syllables, and there it does not sound at all like "besom" to my ears at all. In contrast to the many Fall lyrics that seem to make no sense at all, here the problem is that either construal of the words has a more or less plausible explanation; it's feast or famine, I suppose.
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.
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)
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).
11. The Arndale is a shopping center in Manchester that was completed in 1979, and hit with a bomb in 1996 (see "Powderkeg").
^
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.
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.
^
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.
More Information
Comments (112)

- 1. | 12/08/2013

- 2. | 08/07/2014

- 3. | 06/08/2014

- 4. | 06/08/2014

- 5. | 29/08/2014

- 6. | 21/09/2014

- 7. | 21/09/2014

- 8. | 19/11/2014
I vowed to defend
All of the English clergy"
Makes me think of Oliver Cromwell....

- 9. | 22/12/2014
http://www.learner.org/courses/essential/life/bottlebio/butterfly/beestick.html

- 10. | 07/01/2015

- 11. | 16/05/2015

- 12. | 13/08/2015

- 13. | 25/08/2015

- 14. | 25/08/2015

- 15. | 20/12/2015
Had on his hotel wall
A hooded friar on a tractor"
Worth noting that Friar Tuck is a character in Walter Scott's novel "Waverley". Tuck is depicted in the Scott Monument in Edinburgh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Monument
If you're looking for connections between friars and Edinburgh, this would seem to be a plausible one. But a friar on a tractor? No idea.

- 16. | 23/12/2015

- 17. | 23/12/2015

- 18. | 17/08/2016


- 19. | 25/08/2016

- 20. | 08/04/2017
Had brought over large yellow trains on Teesside docks"
Berlin's underground train network has long had yellow trains...

- 21. | 14/06/2017
http://thefall.org/news/pics/80-grotesque-press.jpg
A long tale, supposedly objective. In which J. Totale describes the death of his father - a very personal thing - but necessary and to the good. R.T.XVII has a heart attack on the last note.

- 22. | 08/08/2017

- 23. | 02/09/2017

- 24. | 30/01/2018

- 25. | 01/02/2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_and_Wear_Metro_rolling_stock#Livery
Apparently the livery was actually cadmium yellow and white, based on the local bus colours. And cadmium yellow is a dark yellow that to my eyes looks more orange. So they weren't simply yellow. But it's not a stretch to think of MES making the connections

- 26. | 05/02/2018
6. "RT XVII" is later called "R. Totale." In the following lyrics to the earlier song "In My Area," we learn that Totale's first name is "Roman":
Those lyrics are from 2nd Dark Age, not In My Area.

- 27. | 06/02/2018
I vowed to defend
All of the English (Roman Catholic?) clergy"
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.
http://img.groundspeak.com/waymarking/large/073bd14a-08b2-42e4-9003-6a4f2715b046.jpg

- 28. | 08/02/2018

- 29. | 12/02/2018

- 30. | 12/02/2018
It sounds like either here, but the version from Tut's has "I've been in cabaret." But the next line is different too, although I can't make it out--"I ain't seen....today"
I think it has to go back to cabaret on balance, but it could be different here.

- 31. | 13/02/2018

- 32. | 17/02/2018

- 33. | 01/03/2018
https://www.juno.co.uk/products/the-fall-grotesque-after-the-gramme-reissue/642631-01/
"et/I vowed to defend/All of "
Mike Leigh had recently left to join a cabaret band, right?

- 34. | 10/03/2018

- 35. | 14/03/2018

- 36. | 21/03/2018

- 37. | 28/04/2018
in the mid/late 60s, everyone collected American chewing gum cards, which ran in seasons. Everyone would go bonkers about 'Mars Attacks' for a few months, then the next topic would come out and we'd all mither our mams for a few pennies to buy packs of (3 or 4?) cards with a stick of gum. the company, I somehow remember was called A & B C
anyway I digress...
in "our" childhood, one of the longest running series was a set of about 100 American Civil War cards, so all of us lads had quite an esoteric knowledge of the period (each card had a gory photo on the front and an informative paragraph on the back with historical details of battles, speeches etc).
So a lad from Prestwich would definitely possibly know a ton of useless stuff about the 1860s.
Look it up.

- 38. | 31/05/2018

- 39. | 09/07/2018
Psiman I cannot believe I didn't note that, one of those things where it didn't jump out as necessary but of course now you say it that absolutely needs to be in there.
The only thing is I thought it meant Valium, is there testimony for it being speed at the time?

- 40. | 09/07/2018

- 41. | 30/09/2018
Maybe this ties in to the "man under Ardwick Bridge under Irish patronage" in the song "Wings"?
From Wikipedia, this:
"The Jacobites [who were defeated in the Battle of Culloden] were supported and supplied by the Kingdom of France from Irish and Scots units in French service. A composite battalion of infantry ("Irish Picquets"), comprising detachments from each of the regiments of the Irish Brigade plus one squadron of Irish in the French army, served at the battle alongside the regiment of Royal Scots (Royal Écossais) raised the previous year to support the Stuart claim."
I'm not really an expert, so y'know, whatever...

- 42. | 07/10/2018

- 43. | 31/01/2019

- 44. | 24/02/2019
On NWRA / NWA - maybe Mr Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry had this company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway_Corporation
BBC must have loved Star Trek - most original episodes have been broadcast 9 times each , 70s-00s - or so says BBC Genome. Most Dr Who episodes where shown once and many were the erased...

- 45. | 13/04/2019
Annotatin' my lyrics? Have a bleedin' guess!
I ran out of gas after that

- 46. | 21/04/2019

- 47. | 15/05/2019

- 48. | 20/05/2019

- 49. | 20/05/2019

- 50. | 28/06/2019

- 51. | 11/01/2020

- 52. | 19/01/2020

- 53. | 27/01/2020

- 54. | 29/01/2020
And there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_of_the_North
There's a 1978 book by Jeremy Rifkin and Randy Barber entitled The North Will Rise Again: pensions, politics and power in the 1980s, published by Beacon Press. See https://www.foet.org/books/the-north-will-rise-again-pensions-politics-and-power-in-the-1980s/
I don't suggest MES necessarily read the book, but the title phrase is clearly culturally salient in various ways. Intended or not, the phrase carries a lot of baggage for a listener.

- 55. | 01/02/2020


- 57. | 07/02/2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Arndale
The final phase of the building was completed in 1979, the year before the debut of this song.

- 58. | 13/02/2020
Then there's this line:
She had a way with people like that.
This has never had any attention. Largely because there's no other information to do anything else with it, I suppose. But it is surely significant that here we have an anonymous female character who is accompanying the narrator. She is not mentioned again. I speculate it's a cypher for Kay Carroll, or a Kay Carroll type.
Any other ideas?

- 59. | 04/03/2020
'Chucking Brix and stuff'

- 60. | 14/03/2020

- 61. | 08/04/2020
Not in 10,000 years" - this lyric is repeated once, like the lines right before it: Joe Totale saying (?) "The North will rise again / The North will rise again"
"When all it takes is a hard slap" - sounds like an MES filler "ah" but in the spot you would expect an article

- 62. | 10/04/2020

- 63. | 16/05/2020
“When it happened we walked through all the estates, from Manchester right to Newcastle.
In Darlington, helped a large man on his own chase off some kids
Who were chucking bricks and
Stuff through his flat window. She had a way with people like that.
He cussed us and we moved on.
'Junior Choice' played one morning.
The song was 'English Scheme.'
Mine. They'd changed it and did a grand piano and turned it into a love song. How they did it I don't know.
DJs had worsened since the rising. Elaborating on nothing and praising the track
With words they could hardly pronounce, in telephone voices.
I was mad, and laughed at the same time. The West German Government
Had brought over large yellow trains on Teesside docks.
In Edinburgh, I stayed on my own a few days, wandering about in the pissing rain,
Before the Queen Mother hit town”
It was certainly pretty wet in Edinburgh at the time:
https://weatherspark.com/h/m/147761/1980/7/Historical-Weather-in-July-1980-at-Edinburgh-Airport-United-Kingdom#Figures-Temperaturen
And as the next Fall gig was a month away, MES would have had time to linger in Edinburgh.
However, I haven’t been able to find out if the Queen Mother was in town.
A month later, at Deeply Dale, the lyrics included both Newcastle and Edinburgh.
(Unfortunately, The Fall never played in Darlington.)

- 64. | 16/05/2020
Note that in 1980 the Queen Mother turned 80, and so is likely to have been doing a birthday tour thing (birthday 4th August).
I had a look at the Court Circular in The Times for the few days following the gig mentioned on 29th June.
in the issue of Wednesday 2 July 1980 (p17), various events attended by various royalty including the Queen are reported as having taken place the previous day (Tuesday 1 July). The Queen Mother, though, was in London at a dinner at Senate House, University of London, marking the silver jubilee of her chancellorship of the University.
Under "Today's engagements" are listed Edinburgh engagements by the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Wales, and this:
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother attends garden party, Palace of Holyroodhouse.
Turning then to The Times of 3 July 1980 (Court Circular, p.16), I find this report of the previous day (still lots of Edinburgh activity from the Queen etc):
The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh gave an Afternoon Party in the garden of the Palace of Holyroodhouse in honour of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's 80th birthday.
and
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother arrived at Royal Air Force Turnhouse this morning in an aircraft of The Queen's Flight and drove to the Palace of Holyroodhouse.
In the "Today's engagements" column is this:
The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret attend musical tribute to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother by the bands of regiments of Scotland, Holyrood Park.
So there we go, the lines
In Edinburgh, I stayed on my own a few days, wandering about in the pissing rain,
Before the Queen Mother hit town
can be linked to real-world events that MES would have observed. Following The Fall gig in Edinburgh on Sunday 29th June, MES could indeed have spent a couple of days wandering Edinburgh before the Queen Mother hit town on Wednesday 2nd July.
I can't believe we've not checked this before!

- 65. | 16/05/2020

- 66. | 16/05/2020
Founded as a monastery in 1128 at the end of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, the Palace of Holyroodhouse has a close association with the History of Scotland. Today, the Palace is a close focus for national celebrations and events in Scotland, most notably The Queen's ‘Holyrood Week’, which usually runs from the end of June to the beginning of July every year.

- 67. | 17/05/2020
Some photos here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/tyne/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8897000/8897970.stmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/local/tyne/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8897000/8897970.stm

- 69. | 17/05/2020
http://www.urbantransportgroup.org/system/files/general-docs/Nexus%20-%20Meet%20your%20Metro.pdf

- 70. | 17/05/2020
The Tyne and Wear Metrocars are a fleet of light rail vehicles manufactured by Metro-Cammell for the Tyne and Wear Metro in North East England between 1975 and 1981.
The design of the Metrocars was partly derived from that of the German Stadtbahnwagen B. However, they were built by Metro-Cammell in Birmingham

- 71. | 17/05/2020

- 72. | 17/05/2020
Just taking the dates noted by Martin.
On the day The Fall played Newcastle (28th June 1980), Junior Choice was broadcast at 8am on Radio 1. The listing in The Guardian says "Tony Blackburn with Junior Choice." It seems to have been a Saturday/Sunday show, so if we think there might be any real-world content to the lyric (which does seem unlikely) then the shows on 28th and 29th June would likely be the ones to focus on first.
Blackburn was new to the show, having taken over from Ed Stewart earlier in 1980.



- 73. | 17/05/2020
https://www.radiorewind.co.uk/sounds/ed_stewart_guy_fawkes_96kbs.mp3
The theme tune at that time was Morningtown Ride by Stan Butcher.

- 74. | 17/05/2020
Mine. They'd changed it and did a grand piano and turned it into a love song. How they did it I don't know."
I can't find the relevant section on TFO but did "English Scheme" resemble another contemporary song?

- 75. | 17/05/2020
Of course, the assumption that any real-world reference would be to that weekend is just a starting point. And the implied "someone is ripping off my song" theme may be imaginative rather than something that actually happened (and MES may have thought it even if it wasn't true...), so it will likely all be completely pointless anyway. But hey.

- 76. | 17/05/2020
Thing is, "Junior Choice" was a requests show, so it might not have been a particularly contemporary song!

- 77. | 17/05/2020
Like the West German government bringing over yellow trains, when apparently the Metro trains were manufactured in Birmingham, this could be another case where a real-world inspiration is adapted in the writing of the text.
The entry here for English Scheme records that "Marc Riley started by inverting the sound of the ice cream van into a keyboard riff and we played along, creating an ironically golly little gem." (according to Steve Hanley in The Big Midweek).
Plenty of scope there for accidental resemblance to a children's song also based around an ice cream van tune, or unconscious borrowing.

- 78. | 17/05/2020

- 79. | 17/05/2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensleeves
Might be worth exploring that and others....
There is a slight snatch of what sounds like the recording at the beginning of English Scheme, but I can't make enough of it out.

- 80. | 14/06/2020

- 81. | 14/06/2020

- 82. | 14/06/2020
Je schreef een song getiteld: The N.W.R.A., The North Will Rise Again.
Een paar maanden later braken de rellen in Liverpool en andere noordelijke steden uit. Een profetisch nummer. Mensen dachten dat het een grapje was. De mentaliteit van de jeugd is een centraal thema in dat nummer. De aanstichter van alles wordt door zijn zoon uitgelachen en aangeklaagd. Als het voorbij is wordt de vader in een kelder gestopt.
Rough translation with help from translate.google.com
You wrote a song entitled: The N.W.R.A., The North Will Rise Again.
A few months later, riots broke out in Liverpool and other northern cities. A prophetic number. People thought it was a joke. The mentality of the youth is a central theme in that song. The instigator of everything is laughed at and denounced [indicted?] by his son. When it is over, the father is locked [terminated? shut up?] in a cellar.

- 83. | 14/08/2020
By the by, Danny - #54: I shall be deploying ‘culturally salient’ extensively in polite conversation for the next few weeks

- 84. | 24/09/2020
Just wanted to observe that although in comment #82 MES, as usual, frames the song as in some way prophetic of the riots that took place in 1981 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_England_riots), the lyrics were written after the watershed riot in Bristol earlier in 1980.
See the wikipedia page on the St Pauls, Bristol riots of 2nd April 1980:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_St_Pauls_riot
Riot footage (no sound):
A TV documentary broadcast 10th April 1980:

- 85. | 24/09/2020
[youtube]https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/the-southmead-riots-2/[/youtube]
Didn't fit the media narrative, perhaps.

- 86. | 24/09/2020

- 87. | 24/09/2020

- 88. | 27/09/2020

- 89. | 27/09/2020

- 90. | 24/10/2020
https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/besom
(I lean towards "bees on sticks", just thought a proper reference for the alternative would be useful)

- 91. | 12/11/2020
My weird contribution to this discussion is this: In "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain (written 1876), there is a scene in which a boy named Ben Rogers is pretending to be a steamboat (page 18-19 of the Modern Library edition):
"He was boat and captain and engine bells combined, so he had to imagine himself standing on his own hurricane-deck giving the orders and executing them [...] 'Set her back on the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow! ch-chow-wow! Chow!' His right hand, meantime, describing stately circles—for it was representing a forty-foot wheel. 'Let her go back on the labboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow-ch-chow-chow!' The left hand began to describe circles."
The similarity of this "Chow! ch-chow-wow! Chow!" to the "Ch-chow! CHOW!" that MES is constantly yelping in The NWRA is quite odd. Is MES embracing the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain?!?!
I prefer the "Part of America Therein" recording of the NWRA, btw, which has many wonderful narrative details (as well as many wonderful yelpings of "Ch-chow-Chow!!!")
Although I can't imagine any reason why The Adventures of Tom Sawyer would have any connection to MES writing The NWRA, there's a certain hint of an American "southern" element, perhaps evocative to MES of the US Civil War, and there's also the fact that the character Huckleberry Finn first appears in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (a few years before Huck would star in his own Twain novel), and there's that "crap about the Huckleberry masks" in the MES lyrics for "In the Park" elsewhere on Grotesque, though that seems like an especially tenuous connection (since the "Huckleberry masks" are probably more likely to be Huckleberry Hound masks rather than Huckleberry Finn masks).
I don't know!!!!
By the way, I always hear it as:
I told Totale, the yet unborn son, "the North will rise again, not in ten thousand years..."
NOT "I'm Joe Totale".
I think "I told Totale" makes a LOT more sense, because there's a phone conversation going on. "Joe" makes no sense. Think of it like this:
I told Totale (the yet-unborn son): "the north will rise again? Not in 10,000 years! Too many people cowards and criminals."

- 92. | 14/11/2020
I'm hoping you're the Jeffrey Lewis, that would be lovely.
Anyway, not sure why you think "I'm Joe Totale" makes no sense. It makes perfect sense.
Joe Totale, in the Totale mythos, is in indeed Roman Totale's son. He appears in sleevenotes etc post-Roman's death. Indeed, the lyric tells us who Joe is.
What would make no sense is that someone is having a telephone conversation with Roman's unborn son. You can't have telephone conversations with someone who hasn't been born, can you? The telephone conversation happens at the end of the lyric and is between Tony and Roman.

- 93. | 14/11/2020

- 94. | 15/12/2020

- 95. | 02/01/2021
To be fair, unbornsters can't really narrate songs either, can they?

- 96. | 02/01/2021
To be fair, unbornsters can't really narrate songs either, can they?
The unborn community is not generally known for that, no, that's true.
It's not entirely clear in the lyric, with its tangled timeline and multiple perspectives and shifts of speaker, but when Joe Totale describes himself as "as yet unborn" and looks forward to "the future death" of his father, is he not looking back to a time before he was born - perhaps he's been listening to his father's death bed stories?

- 97. | 07/01/2021

- 98. | 08/01/2021
There are already smatterings of mysticism and surrealism throughout the song. Maybe Sham Chippendale is a "hideous replica" of Sam Chippendale? Just spitballing here.

- 99. | 15/01/2021
Will you tell us about your writing, for instance 'The North Will Rise Again' from 'Grotesque' what's it about?
"Well firstly it's a story, there's a case point for breaking down that sort of stuff where you can make an extreme statement and it can mean exactly the opposite or it can be an objective statement.
'The North Will Rise Again' it's like the South will rise again and we're all Rebs. That would be really good if a Rockabilly band from the South did a big story about how this Reb got involved with somebody else, which is like Country and Western is really, it's all stories isn't it?
"But as I've said, 'The North Will Rise Again' is a story, there's bits about the Arndale Centre and the 'Totale' mythology engrained into it which fits in with that Lovecraftian thing."

- 100. | 15/01/2021
"I don't want to give too much of that away, because I think that's part of the attraction, but anyway I killed him off. But the rap on the back of the 'Fiery Jack' sleeve is the manuscript that Roman Totale left, he was born in Lancashire and fled to Wales which all fits in with the Arthur Machen influence, it does fit in with Lovecraft's; 'Cthulhu' Mythos too. It's just dead strongly influenced.
"R. Totale he was an ex cabaret artist and an underground being. He's got tentacles that's why he had to go underground, it's like his face started leaking, I've always imagined him as some sort of a Big Youth character cursed with this mystical insight."
With R. Totale killed off does this mean his son Joe will be taking over as The Fall's mouthpiece?
"Joe is sort of half way in there. We'd don't know whether to carry on with him or not, because a lot of the new stuff we're doing is very hard hitting, realistic, class orientated stuff..."

- 101. | 15/01/2021
... this fantasy thing happened in the music scene where it's all escapism and of course I reacted to that which is where Joe Totale, R. Totale's tough son who's an M.I.5 agent comes in. 'The North Will Rise Again' is just like Joe narrating how his dad came to a bad end because he was still naive enough to believe in people.

- 102. | 13/02/2021

- 103. | 15/02/2021

- 104. | 17/04/2021

- 105. | 17/04/2021

- 106. | 29/04/2021
This seems like it could possibly be an echo of that 1970 quote by 'Rhodesia's' Ian Smith in 1970, to the effect that he didn't believe in black majority rule in 'Rhodesia', ever, "not in a thousand years".
This song debuted on 28 June 1980. Just a few weeks previously, on 18th April 1980, Rhodesia became the Republic of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, following elections in February under the Lancaster House Agreement.
Given MES' and Kay Carroll's apparent interest in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (see Muzorewa's Daughter), it's not unlikely the irony of the phrase might have appealed.
On 17th April 1980, BBC 2 showed a documentary with the title Never in a Thousand Years, in which David Jessel interviewed white Zimbabweans/Rhodesians (and not to be confused with a different documentary from December 1980 with the title ... Not in a Thousand Years).

- 107. | 29/04/2021

- 108. | 18/06/2021
So Mark claimed that another song was a rip-off of English Scheme (before it had even been released) and also that the NWRA predicted the urban riots. Even history had its notebook out! Reminds me of a quote from the Beatles Anthology - 'the group were so in tune with the spirit of the 60s that it sometimes seemed they were conducting events' (terrible paraphrase, but it was something like that).

- 109. | 03/07/2021

- 110. | 03/07/2021
If not Greensleeves, then some other common ice cream van tune would do.

- 111. | 09/10/2021
https://www.flickr.com/photos/misterworthington/13999418307

- 112. | 03/06/2022
A man with butterflies on his face
His brother threw acid in his face
His track shoes were screwed
I'm pretty sure it's 'tattoos' not 'track shoes', the butterflies on his face (tattooed) getting screwed up by the acid. I also remember Bernard Sumner commenting/quoting on how hilarious he thought this lyric was in an interview long ago.
Great site!