I'm Telling You Now And I'm Telling You This

'Life can be an onward, downward chip'.

Some music from The Fall for Friday. Gut Of The Quantifier is from 1985's magnificent This Nation's Saving Grace, an album Mark E Smith reckoned was one of their best (or at least he said that in an interview once). The Fall line up in 1985 was Mark, Brix and Craig Scanlon on guitar, Steve Hanley on bass, Karl Burns on drums and Simon Rogers on keys. This incarnation of the band were tight as you like. Gut Of The Quantifier shows this group could cook up killer riffs (Hanley's bass riff on the song below is immense and the guitars are wired and exhilarating), could get a proper groove on and wrote music that borrowed and stole but sounded unique. You can trace the outlines of various older songs in Gut Of The Quantifier- Junior Walker, The Doors and Lipps Inc for three, all pulped together with a semblance of James Brown. Over this amped up garage band rock MES delivers one of his finest sermons. Some excerpts follow which I won't attempt to annotate or comment on-

'I'm not saying they're really thick
But all the groups who've hit it big
Make the Kane Gang look like
an Einstein chip'

'Here are your wedding pictures
They are black'

'They take from the medium poor to
give to the needy poor
Via the government poor
Give it to the poor poor
They're knocking on my door'

'Who are the riff-makers.
Who are they really?
How old are the stars really?
Half-wit philanthropist, cosy charity gig'

Gut Of The Quantifier

'I'm telling you now
and I'm telling you this,
Life can be a downward chip'