The Fall perform the opening song from their final album for Beggars Banquet, the dance number Dead Beat Descendant.
“Here’s a dance that is pure hell,” sings Mark E Smith (though the word “sing” as always an approximation with the front man of The Fall. “Enter at your peril.”
A lot of Smith’s lyrics are surreal ramblings that don’t stand up to scrutiny away from the ramshackle music around them. But this one’s an exception.
It’s also the only Fall song I can think of that advises the listener to perform a dance: “Take five dead beat steps” instructs us. “Do a stroll. Act like you’ve just got out of jail: you must be repellant. Dance dead beat descendant.”
I’ve never tried it myself and it’s worth noticing that Smith himself makes no attempt to follow his own advice in this video.
Instead he continues, deadpan, with his choreographed instructions. “Turn left, shout, and come back here,” he counsels. “Then hot-tail it right out of there.”
My favourite part comes at the end: “Make out your head is in a bell and you’ve got a man on your trail,” he encourages us. “And you are descendent of a vicious criminal.”
Oh how we miss the words and music of post-punk’s poet laureate, though you could profitably spend the rest of your life playing and replaying The Fall’s 31 studio albums, EPs, singles and dozens of live collections.
This was (and is) the first track from a new bonus-packed reissue of their 1989 half-studio/half-live album Seminal Live – their last one from their 1984-89 Beggars Banquet period – the era that brought us some of their best albums including Bend Sinister, This Nation’s Saving Grace, The Frenz Experiment and I Am Kurious Oranj.
Seminal Live was the last Fall album to feature Brix Smith before her return in 1995 – the rest of the band is Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley, Simon Wolstencroft and Marcia Schofield – and is often regarded as a throwaway effort fulfilling their contractual obligation to Beggars.
Keyboard player Marcia Schofield called it “the worst piece of shit I have ever worked on – talk about exhausted and out of ideas.”
It’s true there are some dreadful tracks: the unlistenable Mollusc In Tyrol, a home recording on which Smith recites the title over a tinnily monotonous background tape, takes his iconoclasm too far and a cover of Lonnie Irving’s 1960 country song Pinball Machine is a tough listen.
But this opening tune, Dead Beat Descendant, stands up alongside much of The Fall’s better work for me. And the rest certainly conforms to Smith’s lifelong ambition to irritate as much as entertain.