This paper presents findings from the initial stages of interdisciplinary research which focuses on the discourse/s present in the lyrics of the Fall, and, in particular, in the linguistic characteristics of Mark E. Smith’s ouevre. As West (2019: 4) points out, the language-based elements of how song lyrics work as pieces of text, and their integral role in the “whole multimodal experience” of a song, has been largely absent in the otherwise thriving field of research that explores the social and political contexts of popular music. Linguistic analysis of lyrics is gaining momentum (ibid.) with linguistic analysis on corpora of lyrics such as the Giessen Bonn Corpus of Popular Music (GBoP; Kreyer & Mukharjee 2007), focusing on themes of the sociological and anthropological work from a linguistic perspective, e.g. Kreyer’s (2015) work on representations of gender in the GBoP. The aim of the present study is to build on work that focuses on salient and recurrent contextual themes within (and beyond) the lyrics of popular songs, whether more generally (e.g. Murphey 1992; Tlili 2016), or with a focus on a close interpretation of a specific instance of the output of a particular artist e.g. Power, Dillane & Devereux’s (2012) analysis of Interesting Drug by Morrissey, or Morini’s (2013) of Running up that Hill (Kate Bush). We do this by blending macro-level, thematic analysis of the lyrics, and a bottom-up corpus-based analysis. In order to sample from the prolific output of the Fall, we compiled a corpus of lyrics from the first and last five studio albums recorded, using as a basis the lyrics available online from the site, The Annotated Fall (http://annotatedfall.doomby.com). The complementary perspectives generated allow for a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic construction of identity and place in the lyrics of Mark E. Smith.