Written by: Mark E Smith, Brix Smith
Studio releases:
- The Light User Syndrome
- Oxymoron (alternate version)
A weighty, but at the same time highly listenable track telling the jumbled/surrealistic tale of gangsters. The alternate version on Oxymoron is a more echoey affair, featuring MES repeating “hostile” over and over again while Brix Smith da-das the main riff. There appear to be some other sampled voices present on the track, particularly near the end.
It was voted no. 16 in John Peel’s Festive Fifty in 1996.
The following first appeared in Reformation Post TPM no. 3 (Autumn 2008) , as part of a series entitled
Gladys Winthorpe’s Emporium Of Particularly Underacknowledged Fall Compositions:
Smith, M. E.: vox
Smith, B. E.: guitar, vox
Hanley, S: bass
Burns Babe, K K: guitar?
Wolstencroft, S: drums
Nagle, J: keyboards
“Hostile” appears on “The Light User Syndrome” and continues the strong opening vein of the album after such songs as “Das Vultur Ans Ein Nutter-Wain” and “He Pep!”.
It’s a unique Fall song in many ways, especially the atmosphere, which is quite unlike anything else encountered anywhere within the group’s immense back catalogue. It’s equal parts paranoia, tension, suspense and shadow.
The song starts lazily with a couple of looped samples which run throughout – rolling drums to the right and rhythmic breathing on the left[1]. Then the band join in with the introduction at 0.03: Doc Shanley’s immediately identifiable bass (mixed quite quietly, as it seems to be throughout the album as a whole), Simon’s drums, marking time, and a couple of fuzz-toned guitars. My best guess is that they are played by Brix and Karl; the left one provides “texture” with some seemingly random playing whilst the other plays a simple three-note riff.
The main body of the song then follows which alternates between two different sections: “verse” and “chorus”, if you like. The verse itself is made up of two parts – the first (e.g. 0.29 – 0.51) is similar to the instrumentation of the introduction but with the addition of a simple drum pattern (bass-two-snare-four), two-note bass riff and Brix’s “Ahhhh” backing vocals. The second (e.g. 0.51 – 1.04) finds all the instruments stopping in unison, more or less, and the music continuing pretty much on the strength of the two endlessly chugging samples alone with the addition of a third sample – a choir maintaining a constant “Ahhhh”, mixed rather quietly and sitting middle-left [2].
The chorus is slightly more dynamic compared to the stop-start of the verse although the slightly sluggish tempo of the previous is maintained throughout. Whilst the drum pattern continues unaltered and the bass plays another two-note riff (different to the one featured in the verse), stabbing keyboards are introduced in the right channel. Here Brix, bathed in reverb, provides the “hook” of the song, her “dah-dah-dah-dah” backing vocals which exotically gyrate throughout this section.
Micro-Listening(tm) students may have spotted any number of additional audio details: the right guitar tapping in time to the drum sample during the introduction (0.00 – 0.11), an extra keyboard or fuzz guitar line mixed very low in the centre during the first part of the verse (best heard at 1.57), drumstick clicks (2.45) and other noises (2.51), a tap on a tambourine on the “four” beat during some verses and choruses (such as at 0.41 or 3.13), an immensely reverbed drum roll by Simon (1.03 [3]) and the rapid fade-out of the reverb on Brix’s voice at the end (3.58). There’s also a possible edit at 2.54 where Doc Shanley’s bass seems to be truncated rather abruptly.
As part of a unique song, MES’s vocals are similarly unconventional. Adopting an unusual spoken word approach, rather than singing, he seems to be a lot lower in the mix than he usually is; less “up front” and in charge of proceedings than we usually expect in Fall songs. There also seems to be some kind of effect or distortion upon his voice in the early stages to give it a slightly “trebly” sound [4]. In his book, Simon Ford seems to think that the lyrics concern a story about gangsters and although that particular word is actually used within the lyrics, I’m not entirely convinced by this (not that I have any better suggestions). If nothing else, there’s a certain shady feel to them which is exactly matched by the accompanying music.
Notes:
1. This breathing is developed further by Brix in “Spinetrak”, a few tracks further on.
2. I’m assuming it’s a sample and not the rest of the band providing backing vocals!
3. Perhaps added after the rest of the backing track had been laid down.
4. Compare the tone of his voice at, say, 0.55 to its more natural tone at 2.08.
The Track Record 