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Oh, the Fall. How can you not love them? Mark E Smith may have been spurred to form a band by seeing the Sex Pistols in Manchester, but you can’t imagine him pursuing any career path other than the one he’s on. (Although “career” sounds so …yuppie-ish, something MES is decidedly not. Pardon.) To paraphrase the late, great John Peel, the Fall may always be different (they’ve gone through more band members than Spinal Tap) but they’re always the same. MES’s intimidating presence is hard to live up to (to say the least), which may be why covering Fall songs is a dicey proposition. There’s the tricky diction for one thing, and the way it melds so unerringly with the angularity of the lead guitar. Thern there’s MES’s inimitable, splenetic delivery, which only the deeply foolhardy would try to imitate.

It takes a strong band to wrangle a Fall song out of the long shadow of the original. But it can be done, as Dymaxion and Terry Edwards prove here.

Dymaxion was a short-lived but fantastic NYC band whose songs had a marked Scwhitters quality of culling beauty out of junk —rarely has a retro-futuristic collage aesthetic yielded such playful, layered results. This Fall cover is from their marvelous Duophonic singles collection, “4+3=38.33.” The band does a brilliant thing here: they rework the song into a kind of 50s infomercial jingle for an alternate (possibly totalitarian) universe, taking the shambolic low-end pulse of the original and performing a most cunning feat of transubstantiation. “No cigarettes, no whiskey, no style.” intones a crisp voice, and the next thing you know, you’ve woken up on a tropical desert isle populated by smiling, blank-eyed faces, all of whom look at you with recognition but you’ve never seen them before in your life. Then you bump into Number 6 and you know something is very, very wrong…

I don’t know much about Terry Edwards other than he’s worked with Gothy divas Pinkie McClure & Lydia Lunch and improv genius Lol Coxhill; he was part of Blast First’s Disobey Club, and he was the band leader for the San Francisco premiere of the Tom Waits/Robert Wilson/William S Burroughs production The Black Rider (which featured Marianne Faithfull and Mary Margaret O’Hara in lead roles). I’m not even sure where this cover of the Fall classic “Totally Wired” came from (another bounty from the vast reaches of the internet?) but it’s become a favorite of mine. We all needed to hear the Fall tune as a dubtastic rave-up didn’t we? Surely.

The Fall, “U.S. 80s-90s”

Dymaxion, “U.S. 80s-90s”

The Fall, “Totally Wired”

Terry Edwards, “Totally Wired”

The Dymaxion collection is available from Duophonic Mail Order. You can order the Fall collections (including the excellent Rough Trade comp Totally Wired) via Other Music, the Rough Trade shops, and Twisted Village, among others. Terry Edwards CDs can be purchased via the Sartorial Records online store.

If you split the theme song to “Are You Being Served?” through a prism it might conceivably separate out into Prolapse’s “Visa for Violet & Van” on the spoonful-of-sugar-makes-the-noise-go-down side and Ladytron’s first single “Playgirl” on the other.

I must admit that I never liked the British sitcom this theme song derived from. The show was ugly and dull in that drearily 70s way —all polyester and over-emphatic, wincing attempts at humor. But the theme song —all forty-five seconds of it— evoked a halcyon time of glamour and jet-set living, a forgotten near-past that never really existed anyway. It’s done with breezy humor and a knowing wink, topped off with a soupçon of jaunty Whipped Cream and Other Delights-esque cheesiness.

Prolapse, bless ‘em, rhyme “risqué” with “stingray” on “Visa.” (Leave it to the professionals, kids.) That’s not the only reason to love this song, which first appeared on a CD accompanying Brit music mag Volume and reappeared (in slightly noisier form) on the band’s third album, The Italian Flag.Linda’s airy, slightly bored recitation of coolly playful nonsense (a metaphysical shopping list?) contrasts perfectly with Mick’s gruff, intense philosophizing. It’s held together with an irresistible lock-groove bassline and delightfully wheezy synth howls. Only Prolapse could corral such a potentiallyawry song with such effortlessness.

Ladytron’s “Playgirl” evokes a suffocating world of hermetically-sealed femininity —the laugh that trills through the song is brittle; the protagonist “sleeps [her] way out of [her] hometown;” she “choke[s] on cigarettes” to mark time. It’s as heartbreaking in its way as Roxy Music’s excoriating “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” (although less noirishly psychosexual), concisely outlining a life that’s almost over before it’s even begun. The fact that the song is also ridiculously catchy rescues it from mawkishness.

Photograph by Madame Yevonde, circa 1938.

Much of Prolapse’s oeuvre is out-of-print. Try Amazon, Ebay, or your local purveyor of fine used CDs. Ladytron’s first album, 604, is readily available.

”Are You Being Served?” Theme

Prolapse, “Visa for Violet & Van (Volume Version)”

Ladytron, “Playgirl”

A little over a week ago I went to Kid Congo Powers’ record release party at Tonic in NYC. I’d tried my damnedest to talk myself out of going (NYC being a bit of a trek and all) but the lineup just kept getting better and better and I couldn’t in good conscience stay away. The show didn’t disappoint, touching on just about every facet of Kid’s long and storied career. (The video for “Hit the North” (-uh!) didn’t get an airing, but that was just about the only glaring omission.) The Sassiest Boy in America (aka Ian Svenonius) DJed. The NYC version of Congo Norvell reunited for a one-off; Kid’s new band the Pink Monkeybirds played a loose-limbed, delightfully louche set; Julee Cruise, Kid, and Markus Schmickler (Pluramon) formed a pick-up band; and Thalia Zedek joined Kid in a Gun Club medley to mark the tenth anniversary of Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s death.

The following day I went to see The Downtown Show. The most delightful discovery of the show (besides the pieces by Spalding Gray-era Wooster Group) was a short video performance art piece byAnn Magnuson. I got to wondering what she’s been up to. Turns out she’s recording an album in LA with Kristian Hoffman —who, coincidentally, was in the LA version of Kid Congo’s former band Congo Norvell. It should be ready by late spring or early summer.

This week I also finally saw The Nomi Song. I’d heard Nomi’s music here and there —I still remember being stunned into silence by his performance of “Total Eclipse” on Urgh! A Music War, which I saw as an impressionable pre-teen. I was slack-jawed with amazement. (Although not as slack-jawed as I was at my first viewing of Lux Interior —whoa!) The documentary itself was fascinating, and ultimately quite heartbreaking —presenting a portrait of a man who was kind, gentle, and painfully, painfully alone. It’s all there in his sad, expressionless Nomi face, with its poignant moue of surprise and its sharp angles. The human softness and expressiveness at war with the cold, angular outward appearance. And you hear it all in his incredible, soaring voice. Brimming over with emotion, it is almost inhuman in its distillation of heartbreak into such crystal-clear, beautiful notes.

I hadn’t realized until watching the film that Hoffman had also been Nomi’s primary songwriter. Hoffman —who started proto-New Wave band the Mumps with high school classmate Lance Loud (An American Family) and has gone on to collaborate with a roster of musicians as diverse as Nomi, Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Dave Davies, Rufus Wainwright, and the aforementioned Kid Congo— started his career writing literate, wry, lush pop songs at a time when wryness was not valued overly much (unless it was delivered via the alien visage of Nomi, a case of novelty trumping archness).

Hoffman was heavily involved in the Downtown scene, including the “New Wave Vaudeville” series that marked Nomi’s stunning début. So was Ann Magnuson, and in the early 80s the two collaborated with Robert Mache (who’d played in Hoffman’s lounge act the Swinging Madisons) to form Bleaker Street Incident —a loving parody of bleeding-heart folk-rock long before A Mighty Wind. The band was a proving ground for the mix of hallucinatory lunacy and incisive parody that Magnuson would later use to great effect with Bongwater (Exhibit A: The Power of Pussy’s nine-minute magnum opus, “Folk Song”). Hooray for unhinged, improvisatory rants —no-one does them better than Magnuson.

***

The Gun Club, “Ghost on the Highway” (from Fire of Love)

Klaus Nomi, “Mon Coeur”

the Bleaker Street Incident, “Trigger Happy”

For more on the Bleaker Street Incident, look no further than Kristian Hoffman’s homepage. (You can find updates on the collaboration with Ann Magnuson there too.)