Well, The Annotated Fall is currently accessible again, through The Internet Archive. It was gratifying to read that they weren’t able to put forward any evidence that I was barking up the wrong tree with my take on what Service was about. Indeed, their own article on it saw them get as close as I’ve ever read on that site to saying, “We haven’t a clue what any of this is about.”
However, on Ladybird (Green Grass), the opening track of The Infotainment Scan, they and some of their contributors have been in accord with some of my opinions about the track. The title suggests a nursery rhyme, perhaps attaching itself to the 18th Century American rhyme Ladybird, Ladybird Fly Away Home, which implores the titular ladybird to fly back to its burning home to try and rescue its children. But the main focus of the song appears to be about the Bosnian War, which had just passed its 1 year anniversary when this programme was broadcast.
The references are both overt:
Green grass was purple black and speckled all around.
Round the ring, this Croat town
The gas was obnoxious
and more subtle, especially with the ongoing mentions of Pomerania - a region in the Baltic Sea, which splits between Germany and Poland. The European version of Ladybird, Ladybird Fly Away Home replaces the burning home with something far more apocalyptic:
Cockchafer fly
Father is at war
Mother is in Pomerania
Pomerania is burnt down
Cockchafer fly
The war in question is the Thirty Years’ War which raged through Central Europe from 1618 to 1648. Of more recent relevance to The Fall would have been parallels between the war in Bosnia and Second World War atrocities such as the Wawer Massacre over Christmas 1939, which took place in the Polish side of Pomerania. To read about that makes The Fall lounging around in SS uniforms when recording a video for High Tension Line seem even more reprehensible. But, two years on from that, a European war was now being beamed directly into our homes. The Fall also had a seat in the bleachers to witness the spectacle of war while they toured Europe during the autumn of 1992. While touring in Greece, Mark E. Smith claimed that the band could see jets carrying out bombing raids on the former Yugoslavia, though how the band were able to see that from Greece, given that Albania sits between Greece and the Slavic countries was never elaborated on. In interviews ahead of the release of The Infotainment Scan, Smith talked about his belief that Europe had become dangerously unstable after the end of the Cold War, and he considered Government cuts to the armed forces and the coal mines to be acts of outright negligence.
The war motif continues into the performance of the track with the opening burst of reversed hi-hat beats sounding like a salvo of missiles being unleashed, while Simon Wolstencroft’s drumming maintains the barrage of rockets landing and explosions detonating all the way through. Perhaps, most heart-rending of all are the lyrics in which Smith implores the ladybird to take flight and concentrate, not on repelling the enemy, but on getting themselves to safety, away from a home which has nothing to offer them now that their family have all been killed. The message seems to be that it’s not too late for the ladybird, but will they ever return?
Video courtesy of Glaullian.
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