Weather Report 2

(1)

Hello, how are you today?

I thought the vitamins would change my life
I walk down the city streets
I see weather reports

(It's like an ice rink)

Made a very, very, very big mistake
Nobody has called me sir in my entire life
You gave me the best years of my life   

I look to the right then the left
The whirlpools cascade over my face
And I watched
"Murder, She Wrote"
At least five times
The cast deserved to die (3)
The whirlpools go wider and wider
Of words spoken

And you gave me the best years of my life
You gave me the best years of my life

Weather report
It's like an ice rink
Limescale (4)
In a Mediterranean retarded...
Mediterranean, it is not
Three days a week
(?) my TV

I miss my family in Oxford (5)
That's why I hope to get to back
That's what I'm looking at
That's what I'm looking forward to
That's the way it goes
That's the way it goes

You gave me the best years of my life
You gave me the best years of my life
The whirlpools get wider and wider
The whirlpools get wider and wider
Nobody has ever called me sir in my entire life
Nobody has ever called me sir in my entire life
The whirlpools cascade over the smoking tent

But then anathema
Gave up Tuesday
Chino hyphen lap (6)
Cheap crispy guitar
Nobody has called me...
Nobody has...
The medium
The whirlpools cascade
Over widening, widening, widening

Never mind Jackson
What about Saxon's
Recording of lost London
You don't deserve rock 'n' roll (7)

SaveSave

1. From a Quietus interview with MES (via Reformation):

Cumming: Is "Weather Report 2" a personal song?

MES: Yes it is. It’s one of the later ones. It is actually the last song recorded. It’s fitting that it’s the last song on the LP. It wasn’t meant to be like that actually. It’s a lot of people’s favourite as far as I can work out. If I’d have had my way, actually, I would have had it more instrumental. The only reason there’s a lot of vocals on there is the way we recorded it, it was quite difficult. We did that in Salford with Ding [Archer] in his studio. So it’s like you’ve got to do it very quick. The idea of it was to co-op an acoustic track with a machine track. Then I reversed it. Then Ding said, "If it’s going to work –" I was going to sing bits and bobs over it, just joining it up – and he said, "You can’t do that because we need a vocal level". So a lot of that is getting levels. They are the lyrics for it, but the middle bits – they’ve come out very well, and the end bits, I would’ve chopped them out, but they work out very well. It’s good that I didn’t have too much of a say in the matter! [Laughter]

This album in general seems to have medical and mortality themes running throughout. It now appears that MES had first received a cancer diagnosis around this time. Dan reports:
 

Eleni was quoted in "The Indelible Mark", by Simon Goddard, Q magazine, May 2018, p.44:


 

In early 2009, just as Poulou and the newly shipshape Fall F.C. of Greenway, Melling and Spurr were about to start work on their second album together, Smith was diagnosed with kidney cancer. In spite of his cult status as the post-punk Alex Higgins who likely bled Holsten Pils and chewed Marlboro butts for gum, Poulou maintains his specific illness was "non-lifestyle related". Smith was nevertheless "failed by the NHS", she claims, instead seeking medical attention in Germany were an infected kidney and surrounding tissue was successfully removed. "And he was fine", says Poulou. "He didn't need any chemo and he was five years clear. But he didn't want to tell anybody because he didn't want to be 'poor me'. He went right from the hospital and continued recording in a wheelchair. Mark was so, so strong."

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2.  Some  of  the commenters below have brought up the song by Kevin Johnson, and covered by Mac Davis, "Rock and Roll  (I  Gave You the  Best  Years of My Life."  An obvious, but not necessarily correct, thought would be that this line is addressed to MES's then-wife  and  Fall keyboard player Eleni Poulou.  It is not (ever, in fact) clear  that MES is singing in his own voice,  so to speak; on the other hand, in  a  song that  seems to confront mortality, it would be equally hard to insist that he does not identify with the narrator, and the song does have a sort of confessional tone. The best course is to keep all of this in mind.

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3. "Murder, She Wrote" was a mystery drama that aired from 1984 to 1996. It appealed mostly to older audiences, and star Angela Lansbury was 70 by the time the show went off the air. The song is in some ways a reflection on aging, and "Murder, She Wrote" may be seen as a relatively placid entertainment for someone getting on in years, which produces a violent reaction in the singer. However, Lansbury should surely be given a reprieve on the basis of, at the very least, her performance in Gaslight.  

^

4. Limescale is a chalky white deposit left by hard water in pipes, hot water heaters and kettles.  

^

5. Oxford is in Southern England, and as far as I know MES does not have family there. This may be a fictional element, but there are various streets and roads named Oxford in Greater Manchester.  

Aubrey: "Wanting to get back to his family in Oxford--he'd rather be watching Morse (set in Oxford) than Murder, She Wrote. Maybe."

^

6. There's a song called "Chino" on the same album.

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7. Dannyno IDs this line (from the comments below):

"Michael Jackson died on 25 June 2009. Sky Saxon (formerly of MES-faves The Seeds) died on the exact same day. Guess who got the coverage?"

Again from Reformation:

Cumming: It’s a haunting end to that song, that last intake of breath. 

MES: That’s right, that’s not meant to be there. [Pause, then quietly] Bit strange, isn’t it.

Cumming: Is that the process of fortunate accidents, chance operations?

MES: Very much so, yeah. On that one definitely. It’s a sound experiment, with things about whirlpools and esoteric lyrics over it, and it turned into that. I’m very pleased with it. 

Thop comments:

"[Sky Saxon's 2005 album] Transparency was recorded live at the Dirty Water Club, a regular night of garage rock music in London. The club's last night was 19 June 2009, within the same week as Saxon and Jackson's deaths. I wonder if 'lost' could be a kind of reference to the club closing, had MES been a fan of it."

MES mentions Saxon in at least one live version of "Repetition."

See also note 2.

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Weather Report 2: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 2010