The Measures Taken

Two Types of Factory

Over the last few years two distinct and conflicting ideas about The Fall and their ethos have become clear, without ever really being recognised as contradictory. First, there's the old idea of Mark E Smith and the group as grim Northern disciplinarians, prone to reactionary statements in interviews and a disdain for students and the workshy; and another more recent take, via Mark Fisher's Memorex for the Krakens, perhaps the first essay to take The Fall as seriously as they deserve. This strain of thought concentrates on MES as, in Michael Bracewell's phrase, a 'Prophet in Prestwich', a kind of Lovecraftian psychic and seer opposing the technocratic rationalism of Factory records with a scrawl of scribbled disdain, grotesque and atavistic demonic visions, and a heavily encrypted Pulp Modernist linguistic deformation, in which Smith 'puts a block on the words'.

I'm going to suggest in this paper that this tension between an iron, workerist discipline, which can be heard in the grinding, repetitive sound, and the visionary revelations which pervade the lyrics, is best understood through the idea of management, training and structuring on the one hand and enshrining power on the other, and their relation to the factory as site of production. Specifically, via the supplanting of 19^th century work norms with the more efficient, apparently scientific system imported from the USA after the 1910s, under the influence of the theorist Frederick Wilmslow Taylor, whose 'rationalisation' paved the way for the assembly line and mass production: something usually associated with the kind of 'rational aesthetic' to which The Fall have always been hostile.

First of all it's worth examining the curious perceptions of the factory and industry in The Fall's early work. For all his professed workerism, MES' pre-Fall experience, after a time in a meat factory, was mostly as a dock clerk, outside of the site of production itself, followed by a far more valuable spell of unemployment and assiduous reading. The factory, in this state, becomes something observed, but not directly experienced – something studied and aestheticised to discover its effects. Accordingly, in Live at the Witch Trials industry features as a sinister presence, a centrifugal force sucking people in and spitting them out as Valium-addicted, psychically and physically warped. 'Industrial Estate' admonishes that the 'company air will fuck up your face', creating something new and bizarre out of it, a premonition of the 'impressions' and deformations to come. At this point however there is still a certain flailing element to The Fall's music, with the drums constantly clattering and falling about. There might not have been solos or displays of individual technique, but there was a certain sloppiness and franticness to the Fall that would soon be purged. Smith, too, was not sounding particularly enamoured by the English obsession with hard graft, blasting a nation 'tied to the puritan ethic' on the title track. However a particular industrial obsession had already crept in on the B-side of their first single, in 1978 – the importance of the 'Three Rs, Repetition, repetition, repetition'.

All Decadent Sins Shall Reap Discipline

Of course this has to be seen in the context of British Industry, and of Britain, and specifically Manchester, as the first area worldwide to comprehensively transform itself into a purely industrial, purely urban and anti-rural economy – it should be noted that Smith uses 'peasant' as an insult in 'CnCs Mithering' and elsewhere. The forcible remaking of the worker from relatively free agricultural labourer into an appendage to a machine was traced by Marx in Capital thus:

‘To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from childhood, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton…at the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity’.

This forcible simultaneous limiting and overstretching of the body's capabilities becomes a feature of the Fall's records from Dragnet onwards. The disciplines absent from the sloppy, indulgent world of rock and its derivatives are reimposed.

'Spectre Versus Rector' was cited in Memorex for the Krakens as perhaps the first truly great Fall track, the first to showcase Smith's fractured, gnostic storytelling. This is true enough, but it's also intriguing what happens to the early Fall's sound here. The song is dominated by a huge, ugly bass riff, repeating relentlessly and drawing everything (apart from Smith) into its pattern. The track resounds with dense, repetitive clatter, evoking some kind of foundry or mill, something also reinforced in the claustrophobic, noise-ridden production. Dragnet's sleeve notes, meanwhile, evoke a city more post-industrial than industrial – 'up here in the North there are no wage packet jobs for us, thank Christ.' As with sleeves at the time such as that for 'How I Wrote Elastic Man', it's the ruined factories and warehoues and their ghosts that are more redolent of the urban reality of the late 1970s than Factory's seamless new Neue Sachlichkeit. The Dragnet sleeve features an excerpt from a conversation with the local Dry-Cleaners that evokes perfectly the romantic possibilities of the dilapidated, decommissioned city:

'Paid back by the drycleaners, viz: how did your coat get so dirty Mr. Smith? What do you do for a living?' Answer:'I hang around old buildings for hours and get very dirty in one of those hours.'

Where Flair Is Punished

To go back for a moment to Taylor and Marx, and to the alleged qualitative differences between the painful overexertion of the English factory system and American scientific management. Taylor writes in Principles of Scientific Management that there are two particular fallacies obstructing the efficient management of labour: one, which places the accent on the naturally gifted individual and places the onus on extraordinary, voluntaristic excesses of labour – the Stakhanovite movement in the USSR is a fine example of this, straining to achieve deliberately excessive targets – and another, where the worker's belief that efficient labour will make their own jobs obsolete leads to slow, deliberately obstructive working. Restructuring of manual work was charted via the time and motion study, where the movement of the worker was charted in minute detail and then evaluated by management to decide the way in which he can produce the most in the smallest amount of time. The earlier Fall, with its relatively scrappy inefficiency can be seen as a remnant of the earlier, Victorian principles of management, where the workforce at least attempts to work to its own pace, leading to sudden sporadic increases in work and physical expenditure.

From Slates to Perverted by Language this becomes severely circumscribed by the dominance of Steve Hanley's bass riffs, which in their rumbling, metallic tone evoke the clangour of a brutally effective factory. The workers, the actual musicians, are severely disciplined if they shirk the steady tempo or, even worse, decide to express themselves: that oft-quoted 'don't start improvising, for Christ's sake' on 'Slags, Slates Etc', coming in over a ferociously disciplined and repetitive locked groove, with all the forward motion of Can, but none of their looseness or sensuality. In the 1981-83 records, Smith's lyrics get both more fantastical and more insistent on the need for pure, pared-down repetition, exhibiting much disdain for malingerers. While two years earlier the puritan ethic was disdained, now a certain ambiguous identification with a Cromwellian harshness could be found in his lyrics. Not just the threat of a 'New Puritan', but other telling references creeping in – a healthiness gained through decidedly unhealthy sources befitting a love of lager and Cash & Carries. 'Fit and Working Again' features Smith, over a steady, undemonstrative chug, declaring 'And I feel like (the boxer) Alan Minter/I just ate eight sheets of blotting paper/And I chucked out the Alka Seltzer' – shoving down industrial products to produce a pugilistic intensity.

Musicians Are the Lowest Form of Life

Taylorism is often associated with cybernetics, and the machine aesthetic that the Fall have often deliberately stood against, the synthesisers and robots of the early 80s, mocked in 'Lie Dream of A Casino Soul' and 'Look Know' as fashionable posing. But as much as it suggests, in the acclimatising to simple, repetitive, machine-like tasks, something beyond human, the Taylor system also implies something before the human. Antonio Gramsci's short study Americanism and Fordism reminds us that Taylorist management theorists, anticipating MES' description of musicians as cattle, were not particularly respectful of the human subjectivity of their workers. Gramsci cites Taylor's term for the rationalised worker - 'the trained gorilla' - as 'expressing with brutal cynicism' what he describes as

'...developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker'.

Gramsci sees this as a progressive development, eliminating the sentimentality and peasant spirituality from the working class, who will then be able to prepare for power. Taylor, meanwhile, insisted his system was fairer than the 19^th century's work norms, what he called 'the more or less open warfare which characterizes the ordinary types of management'. But in the Taylorist factory itself there would be absolutely no question about who was manager and who managed. He promised his system would not lead to unemployment, but the Fordist modes of production could only guarantee full employment briefly, although guaranteeing rather more job security than there would be in service of the Fall.

Taylor and his disciples set themselves the task of obliterating the imagination and the fantastic. Smith's aim, meanwhile, would be to eliminate the desire for initiative and display on the part of musicians, a group which tend, at least outside of classical music, to think of themselves as creatives, rather than cogs in a machine. Accordingly, the turnover of personnel becomes enormous. But while The Fall efface formal individualism, songs are far more ambiguous about the process of being subjected to the will of the machine and the manager. 'Fiery Jack' depicts a character whose repetitive job leaves him able to 'think think think' and 'burn burn burn', with no outlet - the wasting of human intelligence under the factory system, slackjawed, living on pies, drunk for three decades. Yet this isn't a moralistic expression of sociological concern so much as admiration for and identification with the speeding, simmering resentment that drives Jack.

Although it's never a good idea to impart a definitive authorial voice to any Fall song, there's a definite undercurrent in several songs from the 1980-83 period that discipline and puritanism have done something awful to the psyche of the English. Frequently this is ascribed to the survival of a peasant residue, as on the atavistic horrors of Grotesque and the anti-rock mocking of how 'all the English groups act like peasants with free milk'. Elsewhere though, this seems more a factory product, the consequence of clod-hopping utilitarianism in a drudge nation, a nation of no imagination'. 'Kicker Conspiracy' transfers this to sport, detailing how by the early 80s English football had become a grim slog, in which any individual talent is effaced for an amateurish, brutal limitation of possibilities, a place 'where flair is punished' and a dullard boardroom/managerial class replace the likes of George Best with interchangeable thugs. In The Fall meanwhile, there was always one person allowed to demonstrate flair, with Smith's indisciplined, fragmented, oblique and far from utilitarian textual/verbal collages roaming into the places which the rigours of the music blocked off. The masterful 'Wings' for instance, encapsulates this tension: a tragic, hypnotic story of flight and time travel is soundtracked by martial thumping and Craig Scanlon's bleak, scraping guitars.

This Hideous Replica

In the live version of 'Cash and Carry', Smith improvises that

'Even in Manchester, there's two types of factory there. One makes men old corpses. They stumble round like rust dogs. One lives off old dying men. One lives off the back of a dead man. You know which Factory I mean. You know.'

before declaring that in contrast to this shabbiness, ' I can see, I have dreams'. Factory Records and its protagonists have been comprehensively claimed by museum culture, with all the biopics, exhibitions and retrospectives that entails, and has even been cited as central to the 'regeneration' or gentrification of the city. The Fall have yet to be fully claimed by this history, and haven't been reduced to cliché quite yet. However, as Mark Fisher also writes in The Place I Made The Purchase No Longer Exists, the nearest thing to that claiming has been the NME caricature of Smith as grim foreman and pub bore, something to which MES willingly plays up. Perhaps, for all the flashes of brilliance – including the elliptical catalogues of televisual horror and boredom in Imperial Wax Solvent - discipline in the later Fall becomes nearer again to 19^th century production than the iron consistency of the Taylor system, in that sheer hard output supplants precision, especially in Smith's wilful drinking away of his own gifts as a writer, if not as bandleader or 'singer'. Occasionally, it's as if the intention was to turn himself into one of the industrial drudges he once satirised. Smith's ghosted autobiography quotes Carlyle's aphorism 'produce, produce, produce, what else are you here for', although often what is produced often seems less important than the mere act of production itself. Nevertheless, in the Fall's best work, the factory and production features as an utterly central but extremely ambiguous motif. It warped a people, warps minds as much as bodies. Accordingly, rather than being in conflict with the weird and fantastical, this system of discipline and drudgery inadvertently produces the weirdness itself.

posted by owen hatherley  # 4:48 PM