Fantastic Life: The 20 Greatest Fall Songs In No Order Whatsoever. No.16 - Auto-Tech Pilot
For this listener, it’s still a bit odd to consider how 1986 is considered by many to be beginning of a decline of sorts. Each single was charting higher than the next and “Bend Sinister” put the in the Top 40 of the UK Album Chart for the first time. Considered now, it’s easier to see than it has been for a while. Much of “Bend Sinister” and its surrounding singles was a return to the shadows. Having stood proudly in broad daylight on “This Nation’s Saving Grace”, there is, in a way, a retreat of sorts in evidence as the group move towards the audibly crepuscular. But “retreat” is the wrong word as this implies avoidance as opposed to pursuance. In amongst the pop covers and brightly hewn 7″ a-sides, Smith and Co. were exploring dark corners. One of the darkest, most prescient and very very best was found on the 12″ of “Mr Pharmacist” and on cassette and CD formats of “Bend Sinister”. I’ve argued for this before - and much of what’s below will be familiar to anyone who read the Forgotten Frenz series - but I can’t leave it out because “Auto-Tech Pilot” is one of the very best Fall songs ever.
Built around a descending 4 note bassline from Steve Hanley, the song arrives in a musical stealth attack, the group coming creeping over the horizon - the tension is palpable and is created by a single note guitar twang lulling away at the back and the slow arrival on all sides of various eerie clanks, bleeps and plucks, odd unplaceable noises and burbling computer sounds, likely the product of some of the machines that Simon Rogers was wont to bring to Fall sessions (see also - his sampling keyboard, without which “Shoulder Pads” would never have existed). A distant piano line arrives, also likely to be Rogers - it feels like distant bells when set against such a dark, dank sound picture. The overall effect of these ever building intrusions is that Hanley is being staked out then ganged up on, as if the group are trying to overwhelm him, throw him off-course. At 1m 33s, they almost succeed but Hanley out manoeuvers the bastards, shifts gear, accelerates and gets the fuck out of there. Wolstencroft is first on his tail, hammering away at his kick drum and Smith makes a superbly timed entrance, his delivery staccato and panicky, his lyric darkly predictive. Indeed, his suggestion that “this computer thing is getting out of hand” has proved one of his most prescient lyrics. The song’s thrust appears to foresee a future in which technology has become overly dominant and what happens the night some/all of that technology fails and pilot-less aircraft start to fall from the sky; sound effects are used to reinforce this, starting low in the mix at 2m 17s and at their most prominent at 3m 14s. Given that Smith has left the building at a time in which we are to expect driverless cars on our roads any month now, the song now has an extra chill. Brix is unusually quiet; she doesn’t appear vocally and only after what seems to be a sharp edit at 2m 42s is there any guitar which I would identify with her style - a harmonised riff sitting nicely to the front and side of the bassline. There are a few minor fluffs to indicate that the song was completed quickly but given how much has emerged about The Fall’s recording strategy during this period, it would be wrong to infer that it was rushed or intended for b-side status - “R. O. D.“ and, in particular, “Gross Chapel/British Grenadiers” also have mistakes that were let through.
Shortly before Smith’s death, in a what-to-expect round-up, Beggars Banquet’s catalogue arm, The Arkive, confirmed that work was finally in genuine progress on a remastered and expanded “Bend Sinister”. It is unclear if and when this will emerge but I hope it does - as, more than any discussions about whether or not certain songs play at the right speed, it will be a superb opportunity to finally given “Auto Tech Pilot” its due as one of The Fall’s most grippingly tense and thoroughly idiosyncratic creations.
