A demon on the county map
The riff does not apologise for being a riff. It lurches, half surf and half factory, and Mark E. Smith enters already mid-sentence, as if the listener had turned up late to a briefing. Lucifer Over Lancashire is five minutes of northern weather with a theology problem. The devil is not in a pit. He is over a county, practical, hip, taking the hedges and the tired cheerleaders and the hottest day. Smith does not narrate so much as file a report. The band keeps the report from becoming a speech by refusing to sit still.
It was the B-side of Mr. Pharmacist, out on 1 September 1986 on Beggars Banquet, written by Smith and Steve Hanley, produced by John Leckie in the same summer the group were in Abbey Road’s Studio Two for Bend Sinister. Brix Smith on guitar, Craig Scanlon beside her, Simon Rogers, Simon Wolstencroft on drums, Hanley’s bass the spine that Smith’s voice treats as optional and cannot do without. Leckie has described takes put straight to tape, the singer allergic to the polish that would have made them sound like someone else. Smith wanted the room, not the effect. The county in the title is not a backdrop. It is the jurisdiction. A national devil would have been too grand. A local one can be checked.
The lyric piles pictures until they argue: six men under a tower, black birds in the hedges, a priest who is useless, a cock-eyed moon, the singer typing, shining, winning, a running shark. You can extract a sermon about the media, the north, the heat, and you will be both right and late. The Fall’s method is to keep the language faster than the interpretation. On the twelve-inch the track sits beside a cover of a garage song and makes the cover sound polite. Later editions and compilations tucked it back toward the album it haunted. It was never the polite track on the LP. It was the one that would not stay in the single’s shadow.
Some of the best stuff that The Fall created during my time with the band was recorded in Studio Two. Mark certainly felt it.
(Brix Smith, on the Abbey Road sessions, Abbey Road)
Brix has said that some of the best things the group made in her years were in that studio, and that Mark felt the room. You can hear a band that knows the joke and the threat are the same size. Live, Smith would worry the lyric into new shapes, the county still under the demon, the demon still not quite in focus. The 1986 cut is the photograph: Hanley’s line, the guitars a little mean, the voice a clerk of the apocalypse who has lost the form and is filling one in anyway.
What remains is the title, which is already a complete Fall song before a note is played. A cosmology shrunk to a bus route. Lucifer Over Lancashire still sounds like a heatwave with opinions, recorded by people who would rather kick a microphone than hide behind one. The devil, in this telling, does paperwork. The band makes sure the paperwork swings.
