Hex Enduction Hour is the fourth studio album by the English post-punk group the Fall. Released on 8March 1982, it was built on low-fidelity production values and caustic lyrical content of their earlier recordings, and features a two-drummer lineup. Frontman Mark E. Smith established an abrasive Northern aesthetic built as part of the 20th century literary traditions of kitchen sink realism and magic realism. Smith described the album as an often-satirical but deliberate reaction to the contemporary music scene, a stand against "bland bastards like Elvis Costello and Spandau Ballet..."Smith, 113
Recording for Hex began during a 1981 three-concert visit to Iceland, where Smith was inspired both by the otherworldliness of the island's landscape and the enthusiasm of an audience unaccustomed to visiting rock groups.Ford, 104Edge, 49 The Fall recorded "Hip Priest", "Iceland" and non-album single "Look, Know" at the Hljóðriti studio in Reykjavík, and the remaining tracks in a disused cinema in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.
Its cover art was seen by many in the music industry as coarse and lacking accepted layout or typographical qualities; HMV would only shelve it back to front on their racks. The album peaked at number 71 on the UK Albums Chart and attracted the attention of several record labels.
Background and recording
By 1981, the Fall had released three critically acclaimed albums, but band leader Mark E. Smith felt the group was undervalued and poorly supported by their label Rough Trade Records, whom he regarded as "a bunch of well-meaning but inept hippies". He felt constrained by the label's ethos and worried that the Fall were in danger of becoming "just another Rough Trade band". Smith made overtures to other labels, and found kindred adventurous spirits at small emergent label Kamera Records.Erlewine, Stephen Thomas; Jeffries, David. "The Fall: Biography ". Billboard. Retrieved 8 October 2015Doran, John. "Becks Induction Hour: Mark E Smith On The LP That Nearly Ended The Fall". The Quietus, 19 February 2010. Retrieved 6 October 2015 Kamera's first release in November 1981 was the Fall's single "Lie Dream of a Casino Soul", which also featured drummer Karl Burns for the first time since Live at the Witch Trials. Burns previously substituted for Paul Hanley on a US tour when the latter was denied a visa for being too young, and upon the group's return to the UK, Smith suggested that Burns should stay on as a second drummer.
In September 1981, the Fall travelled to Reykjavík, Iceland for the first time to play three concerts, organised by Einar Örn. While there, they recorded three new songs ("Hip Priest", "Iceland" and non-album single "Look, Know") at Hljóðriti studio. The studio, normally used by local folk artists, had lava walls (according to Smith, it resembled an igloo),Smith, 114 a factor that gave it its otherworldly sound. Kamera agreed to pay costs for the rest of the recordings and hired producer Richard Mazda, who suggested that the sessions would take place in a disused cinema in Hitchin, known as Regal Sound Studio,Britton, 47 as the ambience would resemble the band's live sound. According to critic John Doran, "uncertainty around a record label seeps into the album's sound, the work of a band with a gun pressed to their heads".
Hex Enduction Hour takes influence from the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray", Captain Beefheart and the early 1970s Krautrock band Can. Smith has said that the title was intended to invoke witchcraft,Smith, 115 that he concocted the word "Enduction" to suggest the album could be a listener's induction into the Fall and that "Hex" was a reference to this being the band's sixth release. His vocals are higher in the mix than on previous Fall releases and were described in 1982 by Sounds as "emerg[ing] like a loudhailer from a fog of guitar scratch".Robertson, Sandy."Hex Enduction ". Sounds, 8 May 1982. Retrieved 4 October 2015. The songs were deliberately produced in a raw and low-fidelity approach by Smith, Grant Showbiz and Richard Mazda in a sound described at the time as a "well produced noise" that was acceptable by Fall standards.Edge, 47 Critic Mark Storace claimed he "could have done a better job on a 4-track if I was pissed out of my head".Storace, Mark. "Hex Enduction Hour". Flexipop!, March 1982 Smith responded by saying that "nowadays people just can't just shut up if they don't know what they're talking about." Elaborating on the purposely amateurish production values, Smith remarked that "it was all recorded in deliberately bad places ... deliberately simple sort of thing. Three songs were written at rehearsal and done the next time.""The Fall, Union Hall, 19 August 1982". Salient, 6 September 1982
Music and lyrics The album was the Fall's first to include Karl Burns and Paul Hanley in the band's classic two-drummer lineup. Smith intended the album's lyrics "to be like reading a really good book. You have a couple of beers, sit down and immerse yourself. None of those fuckers Elvis Costello or Spandau Ballet did that". Hex Enduction Hour was written during an unusually prolific period in his career. Many of the tracks had already been dropped from the band's live set by the time they visited Australia and New Zealand in July 1982.Stuart Coupe, 'Do you know good rock?' Sydney Sun-Herald 25 July 1982 p. 80 The earlier single "Look, Know" was recorded during the Icelandic sessions but not included on the album. This was characteristic of Smith's "never look back" approach.Irwin, 1982
Opening track "The Classical" acts as a statement of intent similar to that in "Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow" from the Fall's debut album Live at the Witch Trials. Whereas on the earlier song Smith described himself as "Northern white crap that talks back", in the opening lines of Hex Enduction Hour he complains that the fact that contemporary music lacks culture is his "brag", observing that a "taste for bullshit reveals a lust for a home of office" and references "obligatory niggers", before accusingly shouting "Hey there, fuckface, hey there, fuckface".Edge, 50 Pavement released a cover of the track in the late 1990s; Smith later dismissed them as mere Fall copyists.Herrington, Tony. "Mancunian Candidate". The Wire, September 1996 "Jawbone and the Air Rifle" depicts a nightmarish folklore tale of a poacher (described as a "rabbit killer") bored by a decades-old marriage who escapes by roaming the local countryside at night hunting prey. One night the protagonist "lets out a misplaced shot", which draws the Hex of the "Broken Brothers Pentacle Church". The song's main focal point is toward the end when the lyrics detail a series of semi-religious, semi-pagan horrific and repeating hallucinations.Forde 103–104
"Hip Priest" was recorded in Iceland in a single take,Irwin, Colin. "The Decline and Fall in Iceland ". Melody Maker, 26 September 1981. Retrieved 8 October 2015 and is one of Smith's most personal songs, apparently written in bemusement following a recent rise in the band's popularity. The track has been compared to dub but in its Northern bleakness "it had been invented in a drizzly motorway rather than in recording studios in Jamaica."Goddard; Halligan, 142 "Hip Priest" was re-recorded in 1988 in a glam rock style as "Big New Prinz" for the album I Am Kurious Oranj. An excerpt of "Hip Priest" was used in 1991 in the climactic end scene of Jonathan Demme's film The Silence of the Lambs.Beck, 78
"Fortress/Deer Park" starts with a Casio VL-1 rhythm preset, the same as used by Trio on the 1982 hit single "Da Da Da".Goddard; Halligan, 97 Its lyrics form a broad and jaundiced look at English culture and subcultures in the early 1980s. It mentions "Good King Harry was there, fucking Jimmy Savile" while the lines "I took a walk down W11; I had to walk through 500 European punks" are a dry put-down of the fashion-oriented in Notting Hill.Edge, 53
"Winter" is split into two parts, broken by a fade out and fade in: "Winter (Hostel-Maxi)" closes Side1 of the record and "Winter 2" opens Side 2. It was described by Smith in early press releases as "concerning an insane child who is taken over by a spirit from the mind of a cooped-up alcoholic". During the intro of "Winter (Hostel-Maxi)", the narrator describes waiting, hung over, in the early afternoon for the pubs to open.Edge, 52 The remainder of the song consists of descriptions of and encounters with a dry-out house, a cleaning lady (the mother of the "insane child"), a feminist with anti-nicotine and anti-nuclear stickers on her car (an Austin Maxi) and a "half-wit" child. After that, the lyrics move towards magic realism and ad-libbed inscrutability: "The mad kid had four lights: the average is two point-five-lights; the mediocre is two lights".
"Who Makes the Nazis" concludes that Nazis are born of "intellectual halfwits".Reynolds, 196 The track contains a number of sounds played through a dictaphone, a device that was to feature heavily in later Fall albums, most notably This Nation's Saving Grace.Goddard; Halligan, 104
"Iceland" was improvisedCook, Richard. "Hex Enduction Hour ". NME, 13 March 1982. Retrieved 4 October 2015 in a single take.Kay, George. "The Fall of Slick, Mark E. Smith's Enduction Hour ". Rip It Up, September 1982. Retrieved 4 October 2015 Smith was taken by a country that he described in 2008 as still inaccessible and "totally unlike what it is now. Beer was against the law. You could only drink shit like pints of peach schnapps". It consists of a two-note piano figure and a banjo part, over which Smith played a tape recording he had made of the wind howling outside his bedroom window.Edge, 45 According to guitarist Marc Riley, "He [Smith] just said he needed a tune, something Dylanish, and we knocked around on the piano in the studio and came up with that. But we hadn't heard the words until he suddenly did them." The line "Fall down flat in the Cafe aisle without a glance from the clientele" describes an incident that had happened to Smith that morning. He had tripped in a nearby cafe and fallen across several tables. He was surprised by the lack of response from the other customers, who seemed to have dismissed him as just another drunk.Edge, 44
The closing track, "And This Day", originally lasted about 25 minutes, but was edited down to ten minutes to fit the album's length; it still remains one of the Fall's longest studio songs.
Cover art Hex Enduction Hour'''s all-white cover is lined with pen marks and scribbles and was described by music critic Robertson as "meticulously shoddy". It consists of a series of pen scribbles laid down by Smith. The markings are mostly random rhetorical phrases and sentence fragments added by Smith and include wording such as "Lie-Dream 80% of 10% OR 6% over no less than 1/4 = ??????",McCormick, Neil. "Hex Enduction Hour ". Hot Press, 1982. Retrieved 4 October 2015 "Hail Sainsbury's!", "CHUMMY LIFESTYLE", "HAVE A BLEEDIN GUESS"Ford, 103 and "CIGS. SMOKED HERE". In an interview with Sounds that summer, Smith mentioned that he liked artwork to reflect the album content and that his graphic choices reflected his attitude to music. He mentioned how he was drawn to cheap and misspelled posters, amateur layouts of local papers and printed cash and carry signs with "inverted commas where you don't need them".
The album art was seen by many within the music industry as coarse and lacking accepted layout or typographical qualities. HMV would only shelve the sleeve back to front on their racking shelves.