The Comedy of Errors: The Fall - Deer Park [Live] (9 May 1992)

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“Good evening, we are The Fall!”

Recorded in Houston and released as part of The Fall’s compilation album of performances from their 1981 tour of America, this is, for me, the superior version of Deer Park.  It was re-recorded the following year and paired with Fortress on the Hex Enduction Hour album.  That version saw Mark E. Smith encourage his band mates to play without adhering to a time signature, possibly influenced by the recordings of Frank Zappa that, Steve Hanley claims, Smith insisted on playing to the rest of the group as they drove vast distances across the USA.  Hanley also claimed that Deer Park had been kicking around for some time before they recorded it.  The fact that the group knew the piece so well can only have helped them when it came to deconstructing it in the studio.  Personally, I think it was a wasted effort when compared to the tighter, relentlessly, piledriving live version of Deer Park that The Fall played around the States.

Built around Craig Scanlon’s helicoptering, chain-link guitar riff and Marc Riley’s electro-shock, drone-like keyboard, this version of Deer Park sets Smith’s safari through independent record companies against some of the tropes of the early 80s music scene.  References to “five hundred foreign punks” and “oiks” in an off-licence recall the days when labels looked to Europe to try and keep the spirit of 1977 burning to increasingly diminishing returns - not to mention those who were trying to do the same thing in London - as a reaction to New Romantic artifice, Post-punk detachment or even the literate poetics of The Fall themselves.  For the likes of Rough Trade Records, a label that Smith wanted to get away from by this point in the band’s life, it’s a question of what sells and where it can be sold:

Illeagal chaos in a fifty grand office.
Dollars and deutschmarks keep the company on its feet.

Smith always maintained that he knew the record business as well as anyone.  Despite the drunken-poet-savant personality that people associate with him, he was in many respects, a businessman as well as a musician.  He was savvy about how the business worked and organised enough to keep The Fall running through nearly 40 years of chaos and self-inflicted injuries.  In this context, Deer Park shows Smith’s early understanding of the complexities of the music industry and acts as a “How-to” guide for bands coming into that world about things to be aware of and things to avoid.  With the closing questions to “Manchester groups” and “Scottish groups”, we are left wondering whether Smith had passed on such advice only to see it ignored - to their cost.

And yet for all that hard-headed business know-how, there remains beneath the barked gruffness of the refrain, “Have you been to the English deer park?” something wistful about the follow-up line, “It’s a large type artist ranch”.  A sanctuary for artists to escape to possibly?  Because there’s only so many business meetings that an artistic grafter from Prestwich should have to attend in any one week.

The Annotated Fall offer a more comprehensive breakdown of Fortress/Deer Park.

Video courtesy of The Fall - Topic

All lyrics quoted in the post are copyright to Mark E. Smith, Marc Riley and Karl Burns.