First post, year zero?

I'm going to start this blog in earnest, basically, I'm going to listen to a song by incredible British band The Fall, every day until my heart bursts. Somewhat of a selfish folly, but also to look back at a band (or should that be 'group'?) who have relentlessly released album after album, with to my mind, hardly any strays in quality. I may end up hating them thoroughly very soon, but I see this as worthwhile. Let's see what I can conjure up from the depths. For now, I'm going to use youtube videos so you can listen to the song as well as read about it, seems sensible.

Seeing as I've named the blog after the song, I'll start with the titular 'British People In Hot Weather'.



Song: British People In Hot Weather
Album: Extricate
Year: 1990

Quite frankly, one of the best songs on this particular album, Mark sounds bored as well as amused, a sound hard to replicate. In my mind, this is a skewed soundtrack to lads' 18-30 holidays, the keyboard stabs bring to mind terrible bars in Benidorm, Faliraki and the like, Pina Coladas by the swimming pool and so forth. The word 'cheeky' comes to mind, it's a rare glimpse of the Fall in a playful mood, a good song to start with.

Like in so many songs by The Fall, there seems to be so much more going on in the lyrics than you first notice, on first listen, it could be just an amusing look at lobster-red comical Brits at the beach, the line "His armpit hairs are sprouting/serpentine" and Mark's pronounced rolling of the tongue still makes me laugh on multiple listens. However there are lines creeping in there that are just baffling (but then this is Mark E Smith) "I'm heading straight for the car/if that's how you feel, let's go". I can just imagine someone uttering this line to a partner, sweating and panting after a day roasting in the sun, getting irritable to the point of explosion.

I think there's a cheeky reference to Stoke-On-Trent in there somewhere, something I've always loved about Smith's lyrics, adding obscure place names to songs, it's almost like he has a map peppered with pins on his wall somewhere, one day, there'll be no map left, just a mass of multi-coloured plastic pin heads, fantastic.