“Really? They couldn’t choose a better song than that? There are much better sociopolitically oriented 17-year-old hard rock songs that deserve to be pushed to the top of the charts! Half of them are probably by The Fatima Mansions!”
That — or something to similar effect — was what crossed my mind two months ago when I first heard about the candidates vying for the Christmas #1 single in the UK singles charts. People elsewhere in the world might have missed out on the news, but last November, a British couple started a Facebook group encouraging the British public to buy downloads of Rage Against the Machine’s repetitive and expletive-laden 1992 single “Killing in the Name” en masse in time to achieve the celebrated Christmas week #1. Riding on decidedly rockist resentment among a cross-section of the population revolted by the state of the charts, “Killing in the Name” would soon surpass its original #25 peak in 1992 and edge past The X-Factor winner Joe McElderry’s take on Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb,” outselling the latter by 50,000 votes on the week of December 20 and setting a record for the biggest download sales total for a single’s first week on the charts. The single vanished after three weeks (in its original 1992 chart run, it appeared for four) but managed to prevent another Simon Cowell-sanctioned production from maintaining its predictable annual Christmas monopoly on the top slot. (However, McElderry managed to bump up a notch a week later after the hoopla had ceased.)
Commentators have noted elsewhere the ironies in choosing a single like “Killing in the Name,” but if Facebook group administrators Jon and Tracy Morter ever decide that they are really serious about promoting a vituperative hard rock song to the top of the UK singles charts, particularly one that provides an extremely bitter counterpoint to the annual market flood of holiday schmaltz, The Fatima Mansions might be the worthiest candidate to serve such a purpose. Especially today, when the band’s oeuvre seems more scarily relevant than ever.
For some background, frontman Cathal Coughlan had already distinguished himself as a sardonic and sociopolitically-focused songwriter, a sort of Irish answer to Louis-Ferdinand Céline (sans the fascism) back in the 1980s with the deceptively gentle and ultra-melodic Microdisney. Coughlan penned songs about literal and self-imposed torture, kooks on single-minded patriotic crusades, ennui in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, mindless veneration of wealth, demystification of the lives of pop stars, the public’s disregard for anyone afflicted by venereal diseases, and whatever else he felt like hollering and leveling insults at on any given day in his booming, snarling — and initially VERY Irish — brogue.
After forming The Fatima Mansions, the eloquent but direct incisiveness of his writing peaked as the band veered between synth-heavy pop and rock (“You’re a Rose,” “Only Losers Take the Bus”), softer numbers that hearkened back to his days with Microdisney (“Bertie’s Brochures”) or ones that seemed more reminiscent of John Cale (“The Door-to-Door Inspector”), covers that either paid tribute to Scott Walker, Sandy Denny, Leonard Cohen, and Richard and Linda Thompson or alternately sounded like vicious Public Enemy pastiches (namely the R.E.M.-sampling but completely rewritten “Shiny Happy People,” their version of The Velvet Underground’s “Lady Godiva’s Operation” and a take on “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” that also hinted at Mark Stewart and The Wolfgang Press). There was also hard rock somewhat indebted to Ministry, The Young Gods, Swans, and Motörhead (“Go Home Bible Mike,” “Look What I Stole from Us, Darling,” “C^7/Breakfast With Bandog,” “Humiliate Me”). The range of their repertoire diminished as the hard rock aspect almost completely took over in a more streamlined fashion on the release of their fourth and final LP, 1994’s Lost in the Former West, but the effort featured Coughlan’s writing and vocals at their most compellingly hostile, covering about everything from disgruntled ex-spooks (“Brunceling’s Song”) to admonishing Pope John Paul II (something Coughlan never shied away from of doing, even when opening for U2 in Milan) on “Popemobile to Paraguay.”
However, let’s retreat back to 1990 and listen to “Angel’s Delight”, the schizophrenic opening track of their second album Viva Dead Ponies, which (in my valueless opinion) encapsulates the essence of the band, their contrasts and shifts in mood and musical styles — not to mention that it’s less publicized than the single of theirs I had considered writing about from that same year, the arguably superior “Blues for Ceauşescu.” Anyhow, keep in mind that this song came out two years before Body Count’s “Cop Killer.”
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Play by play: We start out with a few dreamy keyboard chords and some almost-staccato bell tones before a pulsing, metronomic bass and simple drum machine pattern chime in. Cathal Coughlan enters and intones in a soft and mildly disturbing voice about necklacing (a popular means of summary execution in South Africa: putting gasoline-filled tires around the chests of men and women and setting them on fire), seemingly revering the practice and presenting the notion as if it were a gift for his “angel’s delight.” Additional synthesizer flourishes contrast the lyrical paranoia that sets in: “A holiday in a box […] for the rich man’s militia photographing my block.” The narrator comes to a decision: “Kill a cop? Why the Hell not?” The keyboards dissipate with two hits of a snare drum and a massive guitar crunch ensues as Coughlan screams, “YEEEEEEEEAH!” and follows up with a succession of outbursts: “BURN, MOTHERFUCKER, BURN!/ I’ve got a word for you: DEAD!/ I’ve got a trampoline — your fucking head!” The music mellows out again and the keyboards return with an additional Madchester acid-house piano line as Coughlan suavely seethes, “You roll down my street in your gleaming new car/ I’ve got no secrets, cash or time left to give you/ But I’ve got something else for you, my friend […] Burn the bailiff/ Come on, spill it, don’t save it.” The guitars eviscerate the keyboards again as Coughlan switches back to hollering mode: “You can have what you ask, but not in cash! […] You can put it where your mouth used to be!/ You can put it where your dick used to be! […] BLACKLIST! BLACKLIST! BLACKLIST! BLACKLIST!” A scorching solo swirls around him as he poses the question, “What do you do when words collapse/ And all that’s left is broken glass?” before resigning, “I know, I know I’m trapped!” The guitars grind a few more times before they evaporate, the original keyboard chord sequence returns and Coughlan sighs in satisfaction, “Oh, yes.” The outcome? “I’ve got a holiday in a big old box for my friend/ The famous P.C. Plod.” (For the non-Brits among us, P.C. Plod is slang for a beat cop, originating from the name of a policeman on the children’s television program Noddy.) The song begins to fade out as Coughlan warns, “You lay a hand on me, I’m gonna kill you, cop!” and satirically concludes, “Hey! Let’s all kill some cops!/ Some bailiffs! Assholes!”
Admittedly, the song would probably have to be remixed a bit were it to be re-released successfully, considering that the production and the acid-house piano line sound like products of their time. Considering what they did when they remixed 1992’s “Something Bad” for inclusion on the North American edition of 1994’s Lost in the Former West — reducing the reverb and removing some of the keyboard washes — such a result might bear similarities to this live version from the 1995 live promotional album Western Union Steakout:
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A few noticeable differences: The bell tones sound more rhythmic than they do on the album version, Cathal Coughlan sounds more like Julian Cope during the verses (although Cope would never have gone as far as to declare war on the police, considering that he once used a sample of Lenny Bruce declaring, “We have to separate the authority from the people who have the authority vested in them!”), and he provides a few more full-throated yells and some additional proclamations, such as, “Burn the bailiff, the bail bondsman, any of those fucks!” None of this would probably be the best advice to take unless you reside in some hellhole narco-state being run into the ground by a despot or a junta like Guinea or Guinea-Bissau or Equatorial Guinea. (Doesn’t it seem like in order to feature “Guinea” in your country’s name, it’s a prerequisite for a nation-state to resemble a panorama of the life of the tyrant that leads it?) But it would be a more entertaining change of pace to hear such acerbic sentiments in the upper echelons of the charts without making it into another insipid argument about rockism and popism. It could also show up Rage Against the Machine or anyone else who charts on the back of their vaguely rebellious tendencies as being less substantive and too innocuous to be a deserving spearhead for a Facebook movement in comparison.
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