‘Hex Enduction Hour’: Mark E Smith and The Fall’s full foray into magic realism
The words of Mark E Smith were hard to decipher at the best of times. His famously monotone Mancunian drawl often came out garbled, and the fact that he spent a lot of his time intoxicated probably didn’t help, but there was always a sense of intrigue in the things he had to say.
Throughout his time as leader of the seminal post-punk band The Fall, Smith weaved magic in his lyrics, and his surreal ability to weave a story was present on all of their records as one of the sole recurring hallmarks of their output. His acidic tongue wasn’t always a blessing for him, as his numerous rows and cutting of ties with band members were well documented, but while he might not have minced his words off stage, on record, you could be sure that he’d make everything seem cryptic and shrouded in mystique.
The band’s discography might well have been vast, but there’s one record within it that stands out as being the finest example of Smith’s craft as a wordsmith. Their fourth album, Hex Enduction Hour, is one of many masterpieces that the Fall would release in a career that spanned five decades, but its lyrical themes were far more bizarre than anything else they’d released prior and isn’t touched by anything after.
Sure, there’s a particularly queasy line in the opening track ‘The Classical’, but aside from that, Smith’s exploration of folklore and far-off places on the album is unbound. The words to ‘Jawbone and the Rifle’ read almost like a Grimm fairytale, telling the story of a huntsman who goes out to kill rabbits who seemingly succumbs to a grisly fate. The imagery of “jawbones on the street” is vivid, to say the least, as are the “visions of islands heavily covered in slime”, and every line is memorable for the pictures they paint.
It’s hard to believe that the same person is three songs later telling a story of how “at an off-licence, I rubbed up with some oiks”, but that goes to show the variety on display in Smith’s weaving of stories. He can one minute be deep into a fantasy world and the next minute be depicting the grittiness of city life. While his home of the North comes up in his lyrics often, he travels to various other places over the course of the album, with the aforementioned line being taken from ‘Deer Park’, which is set in London.
Not only does Smith spend a less than enjoyable time in the capital, but the song ‘Iceland’ chronicles the time the band spent recording in the country, with even more fantastical and almost hallucinatory lines about green goblins cropping up. The track creeps along in an uneasy fashion, and the scenes he creates to go along with the sinister piano and bass make it one of the most peculiar cuts from the record.
There’s plenty of other strange encounters with the surreal on the album and throughout the rest of Mark E Smith’s work, but so much of Hex Enduction Hour is filled with demented non-sequiturs that always confound the listener. Whether he’s ranting about the Nazis or Hovis adverts, you can be sure there’s something odd going on in the lyrics to this record.
