Pendle, possessed pumps and the post-punk prophet of Prestwich
The A666 links the northern mill towns of Bolton and Blackburn. Because of the biblical associations of 666 and the unusually high number of traffic accidents, this stretch of road is known as ‘The Devil’s Highway’. Reported sightings of a ghostly figure limping along the side of the highway has been blamed for a number of incidents. This part of Lancashire is steeped in superstition and devil-lore. The Devil's Footprints and the Devil's Apronful are geological features near Pendle Hill, a place synonymous with witchcraft. In 1612 nine women and two men from the area, were convicted of murder by witchcraft in one of the most notorious and well-documented witch-trials of 17th-century England.Another feature of Lancastrian folklore is the Boggart. This phenomenon covers a range of solitary supernatural beings such as ghosts, shape-changers, fairies and sprytes. "Lucy Over Lancashire" is a sixteen-minute track by English contemporary sound artist Paul Rooney, released in 2007 as a single-sided, red vinyl, twelve-inch single. This sound-art project combines experimental dub reggae with a spoken-word, first-person account of Lucy – a spryte of the air – a disembodied spectral being who, according to the story, was inhabiting a pair of trainers, suspended from a telephone cable over a bus stop on the A666 near Darwen before being compelled to haunt the grooves of the red vinyl record.
Lucy’s stream of consciousness monologue, voiced in an unrelenting, deadpan, Lancastrian dialect, details the Devils on-going apocalyptic masterplan as explained to her by the evil and shadowy figure ‘Alan’. This diabolical plot links the Pendle witches with the ‘dark satanic mills’ of Lancashire’s industrial revolution, the slave trade, cotton production and the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation. Among the cast of characters included in Lucy’s cockeyed conspiracy is Mark E Smith (1957 – 2018) the lyricist and absurd shamanic font-man of cult Manchester post-punk band – The Fall.
"Lucy Over Lancashire" is a reference to “Lucifer Over Lancashire”, the flip-side of The Fall’s 1986 single "Mr. Pharmacist". Like many of the Fall’s recordings from this period in their long history, the lyrics are enigmatically open to interpretation but make oblique reference to the arcane and bleak rural folk-horror landscape of Northern Britain and of Lancashire demonism in particular. The band’s name is derived from the title of Albert Camus’s 1956, philosophical novel which details the ‘fall’ from grace, of a wealthy and respected Parisian lawyer. The narrative evokes the secular concepts of the fall of man, purgatory and the dark influence of heaven’s fallen angel.
The sound of early-era Fall – before their scrubbed-up, nineties flirtations with pop-chart success – is a jumble of droning, discordant guitar distortion over a primitive back-beat and muscular bass-rumble melody. Their looping song structures built on a stoic adherence to the three R’s – repetition, repetition, repetition. This sonic alliance of chaos and discipline, offering a hypnotic backdrop to Smith’s distinctive adenoidal, Mancunian, over-enunciated-eh, chant-narration-eh. His caustic, misanthropic personality, cultivated in interviews and live performances, looming sullenly over the music like a jarring and malevolent spectre.
A working-class autodidact, Mark E Smith eschewed cosmopolitan intellectualism and reveled in his ‘white crap’ distain for patronising liberal humanism. He poured scorn on any request to explain, justify or confirm the meaning of the band’s songs. Fans and critics alike are left to sift through a jumbled bricolage of grimy refences to English working-class life, sardonic humour and crude atavism. Early album and song titles such as “Live at the Witch Trials” (1979), “A Figure Walks” & “Spectre Vs. Rector” (1979), “City Hobgoblins” (1980), “New Face In Hell” (1980), “Hex Education Hour” (1982), provide the most obvious insight into the band’s on-going fascination with the spooky, weird and uncanny.
According to his legend, the young Mark E Smith was an avid reader of the ghost stories of the Victorian scholar M. R. James (1862 – 1936). These tales abandoned the traditional mores of the gothic ghost story and helped to establish many of the protocols of modern horror. Rather than the stately ghosts of his predecessors, James’s ghouls are often lumpen, hairy, hellish nyktomorphs, more daemon than ghost. It’s precisely this type of vengeful, restless creature who stalks the twilight world of The Fall’s mutant landscape.
The temporal nature of hauntings which allows the past and future to infect the present is central to Mark E Smith’s ‘prophet of Prestwich’ mythology and his supposed psychic abilities. According to the accounts of those close to him, Smith experienced both precognitive visions of the future and visitations from the tragic past. “Futures and Pasts” (1979), is an early example of the band’s deployment of the hauntological. In “Psykick Dancehall” the opening track of “Dragnet” (1979), M E Smith assumes the role of the medium at his own seance, “Is there anybody there?” – “Yeah” is his own disembodied response from beyond the grave.
