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Roman Totale's Death Song

by Martin & Bell

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about

This is where it all began, really, for the Martin & Bell creative partnership. I’d already made an album and was in the subsequent (CONSEQUENT?) recovering from heart incident stage of life, when the news came of Mark E Smith’s death. It hit me quite hard and I immediately felt incensed and called into action, really, when Krishnan Guru-Murthy on his Channel 4 News obituary referred to Smith as “a tragic figure”. I like Krish, and he’s a top journalist but, come on, Smith’s life had been a great victory for self-made working class culture. I’ll be listening to his tunes long after Krish has given up on the news reporting.

Anyway, I had skin in the game, Alternative Ulster, the original fanzine what I published as a Bangor (Co. Down) school kid in 1977 brought The Fall to the Harp Bar and MES was a sometime contributor to the rag. Last time I ever saw him was in the dressing room of the Hammersmith Palais after The Fall played what was meant to be the last gig there.
Photographer Kevin Cummins and I had been trying to track him down to finish an interview for Kevin’s poetically, Dobie Gray, titled Manchester photo book Looking For ALight In The Pouring Rain. Finally we had Mark in the same room, albeit with a crowd of well wishers. He shuffled over to the refreshments table, picked up a bunch of keys from under the crisps, sidled out the door and sniggering loudly locked us all inside. Goodnight sweet Prince.

So I sent Martin these words almost as soon as Mark died and by the time I was attending Smith’s funeral and wake in Manchester, the recording was already out and about.
What word slinger WOULDN'T want to work with a mercurial music mind like that?

lyrics

ROMAN TOTALE'S DEATH SONG

A sudden zoom back to that hotel room,

Tanked up talking jive. It’s 1985,

Just outside Rotterdam with the fall man.

He was our guide to getting pie-eyed and totally fried

As we broke on through to the other side.

Last summer, I thought about him and I just cried.

And then today, they said that Mark had gone and died.

Krishnan told the news of Smithy stuck in tragic blues
 With no way to lose his drinking shoes
 Or his speeding views.

But it’s a sure bet that not everything is set by
 Blokes on the news,
the bourgeoise crews
 who stumble and sweat over the prole art threat.

Because scorched on the ground is the 

Mighty, mighty sound that got into you all and that was The Fall.

It’s left right here. That much is clear.
 Or maybe event tangled.
Because a lot of his words, well, they came out mangled.

But it was all there. The Pope growing a pair.
 Lovecraft in his lair.

Getting drug sick with Philip K Dick.

Spinning the latest scam with the Edinburgh man.

He made a whole new fable just as soon as he was able

Out of Kraut rock and things.
 Like a bat without wings.

A blister on the strings.
Synths sounding broken
As something fearful was awoken
 In a swamp of the mind,
set to leave it all behind.

Going speeding on a train, clean out of his brain,

Burning the psychedelic flame like

Blake meeting Rigsby in the back of a van,

Buzzing on a can with a line of snort and this or that cohort.

This was a man with a crazy art plan

Both before and after the ban.

A new place in hell was one he knew so well,
 Getting off its face, this nation’s saving grace.

There was plays and books, all screwy-eyed broken looks,

From agony that looked dental

As he engaged in something mental.

Like a character out of Milton or a thing that was wilting

This demon boss touted the cost and paradise lost.

It didn’t need updating,

Dancing in the light like a cut price Satan.

King without crown. Kentucky death going down.

Gun out for hire. Leonard’s bird on the wire.

Flying close to the fire Lucifer over Lancashire.

His cardboard cut-outs of a city riven

Collage the way we were living.

The book you were given as you went towards the door.

He had ideas galore,
 Saw strange things in the woods,

Relived Angus Wilson’s Anglo Saxon attitudes.

Interned spirits were set free.

He wasn’t looking to agree.

Took much more than the Mick, an addled autodidactic.

Back in 79 at the Harp,
 nostrils were scorched with something sharp.
 There was repetition in the music
 and he was never going to loose it, yeah.

Down through the days of the Lion and the Bear,
 Performing in a wheelchair

So we got more than our share of a blitzed-out soul

Heading his kicker conspiracy goal.

The echoes of cracked laughter,
 the smell of the morning after.

There were seven sorts of ruin in the magic he was doing.

The bell took it’s toll for Danny on a role,

Gene Vincent in leather relentless as northern weather,

Bitter like beer and anything else that’s in here.

Fighting through the sham making rainbows out of jam,

Doing more than most folks can

With their time here on this earth.

Driven by the dearth and the paucity of thought

About how truths are brought and sold,

Never doing what he was told.

Mining primitive gold in a Mancunian island state

Where it’s all marked up on the slate mate.

credits

released March 1, 2018
Gavin Martin - Words, Martin Bell - Music

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about

The Headstrong Mining Company Plymouth, UK

The Headstrong Mining Company is the latest incarnation of the creative partnership of Multi-Instrumentalist Martin Bell ( Ex. The Wonder Stuff) and Spoken Word Artist / Music Critic Gavin Martin (NME, Daily Mirror). The dashing pair also go under the names "Martin & Bell", as well as "Bell and the Irishman. ... more

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