»Black Monk Time

(Audio of The Fall playing the Black Monk Theme)

A few months ago I saw Lucia Palacios's and Dietmar Post's bittersweet movie about the brief rise and fall of The Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback. It spun the tale of how the Monks played together while in Germany, and how their lives ravelled upon return to the States. I had first heard their music as noisily covered by The Fall on Extricate, and then on the revelatory american recordings re-issue in the '90s. Although I had heard that the Monks were GIs on a lark, I did not know the depths to which their image as a nihilist, surreal rock'n'roll combo depended on their Continental impressarios.