Track of the Week: The Chameleons: Don't Fall (1983)

'In his autumn before the Winter comes man's last mad surge of youth.' 'What on earth are you talking about?'

We shall perhaps never know, as that enigmatic sample which opens The Chameleons' 'Don't Fall' and, as it is the first track, their debut album 'Script of the Bridge', was taken from the band randomly recording voices off television. It makes quite a striking start for the song though, especially when followed by a viscious ascending guitar riff and Mark Burgess bellowing 'Don't faaaaaall!', buried deep in the mix. The Chameleons were combining Joy Division-style doom-mongering with Echo and The Bunnymen's widescreen melodicism years before Interpol cottoned onto the idea. But guitarists Reg Smithies' and Dave Fielding's unorthodox guitar tunings and layered atmospheric playing gave the band a sound that was all their own. And that sound is certainly in full force on this song - the guitars take centre stage, creating an ominous fog in which it's hard to hear Burgess' Curtis-meets-Cope croon, but you get the impression from the way he spits out the words that he's quite upset. The words that manage to make themselves heard above all this do litttle to disperse this impression - 'How did I come to be drowning in this mess, this fucking mess!'. In the context of the song, it makes sense to have the vocals burried under the oppressively gloomy guitars - Burgess sounds like he is literally being swallowed up by the noise, his desperation clear. The chorus has him succumbing to paranoia or worse - 'Seeing faces where there shouldn't be faces'. Up the end of the second chorus, the song is simply indie-mopiness par excellance - impressive but a little overwhelming. Then, as the second chorus finishes, Burgess sings 'Don't fall,' and everything drops away, leaving just the guitar playing quietly, subtley, shorn of its shroud of doom. Which allows us to hear Mark clearly as he sings 'I know your back's against the wall / But this roaring silence / Will not devour us all'. And so the song has been changed from a morbid celebration of doom to a rallying cry for hard times. The drums, bass and guitars re-enter, but now you notice the major chords, and a soaring, melodic guitar line leads us out, as looped vocals repeat the chorus and the coda in a round, creating a feel of almost nursery rhyme calm. Until they too disappear, and we are left with just that crystalline guitar part. And you realise things might end up alright.
It's very easy these days to cast The Chameleons as the missing link between Joy Division and Interpol, whom they sound uncannily like. This song in particular reminds me very much of Interpol's 'Obstacle 1'; both songs have a very similar shift in tone half way through. Though that of course does both bands an injustice - Interpol's strong Television influence - prominent on 'Obstacle 1' - and their compositional skill lift them out of the realms of pastiche (in other words: I like them). The Chameleons, in many ways, chose their timing horribly badly. As they appeared on the scene, post-punk was dying and New Romanticism was about to spectacularly wear itself out. Their next release, the woefully titled 'What Does Anything Mean? Basically', was perhaps a textbook example of 'Difficult Second Album Syndrome', and after that, it was too late - as rap's star rose, rock music entered one of it's most infertile slumps (Smiths and Felt excluded) until the Madchester scene arose in 1989, and The Chameleons pretty much just gave up. A pity, as had they appeared on the scene earlier they might just have been Echo and The Bunnymen. As it is, they remain one of the era's most under-rated bands.