dream debased boys

So what's with this here Disney obsession, Fall-folk?

Let's go to the horse's mouths...

[from my interviews with The Blue Orchids for Rip It Up]

SR: And what was the flipside to "The Flood" -  “Disney Boys” -  about?

Martin Bramah: “I’ve often wondered! Una wrote those lyrics.  It suggests things. It was really about drug dealers, in a way.  It seems to be about going to someone’s house and they give you something and it’s great until the effects wear off and they put you through the mangle.  It’s like the love affair with drug culture. But Una had this thing that Disney was an American Nazi creating propaganda for the American dream. But the lyrics are really about paying money for drugs and getting ripped off!” 

^^^

SR: You did ‘Disney Boys’  - that was one of your lyrics. What was that about?

Una Baines:  Well funnily enough, that was written when I had run off with that guy to Chorlton [circa her departure from The Fall], so it was written there.  It was about illusions, it was about drugs as well -  taking drugs and thinking that everything is so real when you’re taking drugs but then that’s also kind of an illusion.... My thoughts on it  -  when I got older, when I stopped getting involved in drugs, which was a conscious decision - was that drugs can only take you so far....  they show you what's possible, but you have to achieve that yourself without drugs. It can only show you the potential of what you yourself can actually develop. So it is a bit of an illusion, although it can be like an opening of the doors. So, a double edged sword.

It was also about guys and stuff -  it was about superficiality in a lot of ways, men as illusions, full of shit! 

SR: Is that where Disney comes in?

UB: Cartoon characters, yeah. 

^^^^^^^^^

(quotes on "Disney's Dream Debased" via The Fall Annotated)

"Mark got off this ride with tears in his eyes he was so frightened. This ride is a mountain, 100 ft in the air, a replica of The Matterhorn; you ride at sixty miles an hour. Ten minutes after we get off, a woman fails out of her sleigh, gets trapped and decapitated by the oncoming one. They couldn't get her out, there was fire-engines everywhere coming out of the bushes, and all these Micky Mouse characters rushing out to distract people. It took them seven hours to get the body off. Everyone was pretending nothing had happened, they were all going 'Disneyland is wonderful land'. Mark was saying, 'Whaaat??? There's a woman up there with no head on', but Micky Mouse was just laughing away. Mark thought it was like a bad trip." (Brix Smith quoted in Jamming, November 1984)

"I convinced Mark to go to Disneyland with me and my grandfather. Mark thinks he's psychic...We went on this ride called the Matterhorn...It's huge, you can see it from the freeway...it's a scary bobsled ride that goes through tunnels of the Matterhorn. We got off the ride and I swear to fucking God Mark was crying, I asked what was wrong and all he could say was that the ride was evil. I said it was ridiculous as I'd been going on it since I was eight. To calm him down I took him on the 'It's A Small World' boat ride which is the cheesiest, old-school baby ride with dolls. We're walking back from it and a rectangular shaped bush parts, and a mini-fire engine comes out, and on the back is a nurse. It drives to the Matterhorn. The whole ride gets cordoned off and people with walkie-talkies and clipboards are running everywhere, it was panic. Mark was right - something just happened on the Matterhorn. They closed the whole place down. We went home and saw the news: it was all 'death at Disneyland.' Someone had either jumped out of the Matterhorn or fell out, and was trapped and decapitated by the oncoming bobsled and it took mountain climbers, like, six hours to get the body off there. And that was Disney's Dream Debased."..."The person who died was Dolly Regene Young. Which was even more bizarre because my nickname from my grandparents was Dolly. " (Brix Smith quoted in the booklet accompanying the re-release of The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (Beggars Banquet, 2010)

Well I have to say there's something to be said for not knowing all this knowledge that internet nerds archive and annotate for our edification

The Blue Orchids's explanations are vague enough not to interfere, but the Fall one is awfully specific isn't it?

Won't be looking there again no sir

Still the way my memory's going I'll have forgotten soon enough