The Comedy of Errors: The Fall - The Knight, The Devil and Death (13 June 1992)

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This was due to miss the cut here but while I was having a shower earlier today, I found certain elements of it running through my mind and felt that had to count for something.

The title of the song is nothing to do with The Seventh Seal but rather an early 16th Century engraving by Albrecht Durer, a German artist.  A variation of this imagery made up the cover art of the Ed’s Babe EP on which the track was taken from.

If I wanted to be a contrarian, I'd be tempted to call it one of my favourite Fall tracks because it doesn’t feature Mark E. Smith at all.  Indeed, Steve Hanley attributes authorship of the song to Craig Scanlon, just as has been done with Ed’s Babe.  Perhaps Smith’s attention was elsewhere considering that he had just recently remarried, thus leaving an opening for other members of the band to dictate things for a release.
The Knight, the Devil and Death is a typically bizarre conjoining of formal pop music structures with crazed classical dissonance.  This occurs throughout the track. From the start, the soothing guitar strum quickly finds itself battling against another guitar which sounds recently plugged into its amp and attacked by a player who seems to be accusing the instrument of burning their house down - such is the fervour with which it is attacked. And the trick is repeated again at the 45 second mark as a string section come in together in oppressive, but striking harmony. But within 10 seconds, one of the string players goes rogue and starts playing as if possessed by the Devil.  Perhaps, Satan was playing that furious guitar earlier too, while the courtly Knight displays musical virtuosity with the perfectly strummed guitar and the disciplined, almost to the point of repression, string section.
The battle between harmony and chaos even extends to the performance of the track’s narrator, Texan-born singer, Cassell Webb, who was the partner of the record’s producer, Craig Leon.  For the most part, she speaks the standard Fall gibberish in a most beguiling manner, coming across as elegantly world weary. But in the last 20 seconds of the track, she becomes progressively more unhinged, her vocal distantly shouting like Kathy from the top of the moors.  And by the end of the track, it feels as though the forces of the Devil are in the ascendant as the fuming guitar and skittish violin overwhelm everything before handing on to Death, who ultimately claims everything.

Parts of the sound of The Knight, The Devil and Death made me think of the tone that PJ Harvey later achieved on her To Bring You My Love album.  There’s something dusty, hot and slightly Mediterranean about this track and I hear elements of Harvey’s subsequent work on things like Send His Love To Me.  So it was another artist’s pick-up that led me back to this track, but I’m glad that it did, because it gave me a chance to re-evaluate a dark, sexy, taut piece of music that I had originally dismissed as a forgettable throwaway.

The Annotated Fall provides a little more breakdown.

Video courtesy of Kevin Kriel