Day 20: A kink in The Fall.

Here's a jaunty one for a Sunday night! A Kinks cover, which is glorious just for the faithful version, obviously MES nodding towards his musical roots once more, but he actually SINGS on it. I'd love to have heard him attempt this more, not sure what he'd sound like now (the grumbly man of Your Future Our Clutter sounds a million miles away from this admirable attempt at singing).



Song: Victoria
Album: The Frenz Experiment
Year: 1988

The video is great, MES dressed as what I presume is Napoleon and Brix has some crazy hair here, the kind of style you used to see in big framed photos in salons in the 80s/90s. The plot I have no idea about, a cake that's set on fire, Brix being fitted into a corset, a footballer who seems to have contracted a ballet-like condition meaning he can't kick the ball. All filmed really well for a Fall video, they are usually palpably cheap and rough-shod, but this looks great (I presume because of the popularity of the album The Frenz Experiment and the fact they were getting singles in the charts at the time).

The song itself, well you can't fault The Kinks, a band who not only penned lovely pop ditties like this cover proves, but also released off-the-wall madness like The Kinks Are The Village Preservation Society which is so quintessentially English, I'm not surprised MES is a fan.

I always wonder which band The Fall will cover next, there could be some fantastic ones.

The lyrics in this one are worthy of mention, full of jingoism, the lines about being 'poor but free' and the fact that 'Victoria loved them all' is a great little nod to old Queen Vic, but the slight eccentricity of the subject matter is buried under the 60s jangle of it all, something I feel MES does with a lot of his material, it's almost as if someone in his head is saying "Bloody hell Mark, these lyrics are a bit morbid, I hope you've got a chirpy melody to go over this..." see songs like I'm Going To Spain or The League Of Bald Headed Men for proof.