YMGTA #35 – Reformation Post TLC

“He keeps false, plastic women’s bosoms under his TV desk and dressing room.”

UK version

Details
Recorded: Gracielands Studio, Rochdale late 2006
Released: 12 February 2007

  • Mark E Smith – vocals
  • Rob Barbato – bass
  • Eleni Poulou – keyboards
  • Orpheo McCord – drums, vocals
  • Tim Presley – guitar
  • Dave Spurr – bass
    With:
  • Pete Greenway – guitar
  • Gary Bennett – guitar

Background
The very different line-up on Reformation Post TLC (only MES and Eleni remain from the last album) indicates that 2005-07 was yet another highly turbulent period in the group’s history…

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Sheffield, 7/10/2005, photo by generalist on the Fall Online Forum

After the release of Fall Heads Roll, the group performed extensively in the UK during the autumn, playing 22 gigs in October alone. Reading the many online reviews of the group’s performances in the back end of 2005, it’s hard to evaluate how successful this tour was, as opinions at the time were very divided, people sometimes having hugely diverse views about the same gig.

Liverpool, 8/10/2005, photo by Steve Marriner

When they were on form, (the majority of the time, it would seem) the group rattled through fast-paced and energetic versions of recent material; but a few gigs were marred by the familiar flaws – MES wandering off stage, meandering instrumental versions, truncated sets, etc. According to Dave Simpson1, Ben Pritchard found this tour ‘the most stressful ever’; Steve Trafford described an incident from the tour when Smith stole his suitcase and poured water over its contents.

Autumn 2005 also found Smith taking part in another collaboration, this time with German electronica duo Mouse On Mars. (MES had first worked with Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma on their 2004 EP Wipe That Sound, resulting in the tracks Sound City and Cut The Gain.) His work with the duo led to an album, released in 2007 under the name Von Südenfed, Tromatic Reflexxions.

In January 2006, Dave Simpson published an article in The Guardian, entitled Excuse me, weren’t you in the Fall? upon which he would expand for his book, The Fallen.

Up to this point, Smith had had a relatively harmonious relationship with the group’s online community. However, this changed in February 2006. According to this post, MES demanded ‘that the Fall Forum be taken offline immediately’ because he ‘had taken exception to one or more posts on the forum’. And so the Fall Online Forum became ‘unofficial’. There is an ‘official’ discussion site, but at the time of writing, no one has posted on it for nearly six months (this, depressingly, is the last active thread).

Lausanne, Switzerland 31/3/2006, photo by Beppe 

The fifteen gigs that the group played in the UK and Europe between January and April were generally well-received: the group played several blistering sets in which lengthy, pulverising versions of songs such as What About Us? and Blindness (see below) were a key feature. However, not for the first time, a trip to America saw the wonderful and frightening world descend into discord and chaos.

Information about the first three dates of the tour (Austin, Dallas and Tuscon) is a little sketchy, partly because the Online Forum suffered its ‘great server crash’ a few months later, which resulted in the disappearance of hundreds of posts reviewing the gigs. However, Fall News from 23 May 2006 indicates that all was not well from the first date, with the same old problems: MES messing with amps and drums, walk-offs and short sets. According to one contributor, writing about the opening gig in Austin:

‘…and in 30 minutes it was done. MES left the stage. The band played out the end of the song, the drummer took the mic and said “Mark E. Smith” and they were gone. Obviously folks expected more, but I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. I had been fairly relieved the band had shown at all.’

Steve Trafford2 suggests that the problems began as soon as the group arrived on American soil, as the stage backdrops (which MES has entrusted to the group while he travelled separately) were lost at the airport. At the third gig in Tucson, Smith reportedly ‘lunged at Birtwistle in the dressing room with a corkscrew’3.

The Pritchard / Trafford / Birtwistle line-up disintegrated following the group’s fourth date of the tour, at the Brickhouse Theatre in Phoenix (there’s a heartfelt review here). However, according to Steve Trafford4, he, Pritchard and Birtwistle had  already made their decision to leave before the gig, after an incident where Smith flicked cigarettes at and poured beer over their tour manager whilst he was driving the group between gigs.

In Renegade, MES spends seven rather unbecoming pages5 laying into the three of them with spiteful vitriol. He admits that he did ‘spill some beer over the driver’ and that he ‘did flick a bit of paper at him; because he was asleep’. His account of the Phoenix gig was that ‘one of The Talk [the support band] invaded the stage and whacked me on the side on the head with a banana’.

According to Steve Trafford6, it was a ‘hilarious farce’. The version on the gigography says this:

‘In the middle of What About Us, Justin Williams, the lead singer of tour support The Talk, jumped on stage and threw a banana peel at Mark, hitting him on the side of the face. Mark finished the line he was singing, took off and folded his jacket, and followed the culprit into the parking lot. The set continued but Mark cut it short after a few more songs.’

Ben Pritchard:

‘Mark had decided to cancel a run of shows on that tour whilst we were out there, the whole experience was really unpleasant – he wasn’t very well, he was suffering from toothache, cancelling the shows meant the support band had no more gigs with us. The venue we were playing at had just lost its liquor licence so most of the audience didn’t turn up, someone from the support band threw a banana skin at him whilst we were playing ‘What About Us?’ and it ended up with Mark chasing him around the car park. That was the last time I ever played with The Fall and the last time I ever saw Mark. We all left the next day.’

There’s also a lengthy interview with Pritchard about the break-up here.

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The new recruits (clockwise from top left), Tim Presley, Rob Barbato and Orpheo McCord – photos by Mick Cunningham

Consequently, Smith found himself with a Fall reduced to a husband/wife duo with thirteen dates on the tour remaining. But somehow, as ever, the group kept going. The new recruits (organised by Narnack) were guitarist Tim Presley and bassist Rob Barbato from LA band Darker My Love, and drummer Orpheo McCord (of On The Hill, a band about which there appears to be nothing online).

After his seven-page rant about the old group, Smith spends a couple of pages extolling (in his own peculiar way) the virtues of his 2006 recruits, whom he describes as ‘a solid bunch of lads’. McCord is ‘a complete professional’; Presley, unlike nearly all guitarists, ‘doesn’t sulk and think [he’s] the centre of the universe’; Barbato’s identified quality is that he ‘knows how to balance that drink-and-work thing’.

As can be seen from the picture of Barbato above, Smith seemed to have softened his stance on facial hair. On the 1982 New Zealand/Australia tour, the group had used beard-growing as a form of protest against his behaviour7; Ben Pritchard also described MES insisting on he and Trafford shaving. Smith’s response to this8 seems to be that Barbato was excused because his was a proper, manly beard; the others ‘couldn’t even grow proper stubble’.

‘The Dudes’ – as they came to be known – seem to have been (understandably) ropy at their first gig in San Diego. One reviewer commented:

‘The new backing band hardly had any knowledge of how the songs were played and mostly jammed out playing whatever. The pinnacle worst moment of the show came on the second song when Elena and Mark played/sang the rocking Pacifying Joint while the rest of the band strummed on Midnight In Aspen.’

They seemed to have hit their stride pretty quickly, however, as can be seen by this review of their third gig, at Los Angeles Knitting Factory. A review of their 23 May gig in LA (see video below), said:

Mountain Energei was one of the finest r’n’roll moments I’ve heard in more years than I’d like to think about: Smith in fine form, poetically ruminating extensively over dusty, shuffling drums, a dirty bass pulling like a V8 slowly gunning up the grapevine and shards of guitar dropping like a bottle but never breaking.’

Whilst this new incarnation of the group continued to churn out excellent performances, one reviewer pointed out a potentially substantial problem:

‘What the future holds for these guys is difficult to say…given that I imagine the Fall operate on a shoestring, I would think that its doubtful that they could afford to relocate to England (even if they wanted to) and equally difficult to imagine MES and Eleni relocating to California…so this incarnation of the Fall is probably going to be a short-lived one.’

The logistics of the transatlantic lineup did indeed soon cause an issue. Presley and Barbato were unable to perform at that summer’s Reading Festival because of prior commitments with Darker My Love. Dipping once more into the seemingly endless supply of musicians prepared to join The Fall at short notice, two were recruited who would turn out to be definite ‘keepers’.

Pete Greenway had been guitarist in Das Fringe (aka Pubic Fringe), who had previously supported The Fall. Bassist Dave ‘The Eagle’ Spurr had been in En-tito and MotherJohn. (The internet seems to hold little information about any of these bands, but there is a video of ‘The (mighty) Fringe’ here.)

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(Clockwise from left) Dave ‘The Eagle’ Spurr, Kieron Melling, Pete Greenway

Although originally a stand-in for Barbato, Spurr played alongside him in a two-bassist line up for the next year, before becoming The Fall’s last sole bass player. Greenway stepped aside in early September upon Presley’s return, but was back in the lineup intermittently throughout late 2006 and early 2007. From the summer of 2007 onwards (apart from a brief break for paternity leave in November 2011) he became the group’s permanent – and last – guitarist.

In October, Keiron Melling (who had played in MotherJohn with Spurr) stood in for McCord at the group’s Dublin gig. He joined the group again as part of a one-off two-drummer lineup the following month for the group’s last gig of 2006. He also turned out to be a ‘keeper’: from July 2007, he was The Fall’s sole permanent drummer.

From this point on, Greenway/Spurr/Melling (with, most of the time, Eleni) were the core of the group’s output.

Front cover

October 2006 saw the release of the group’s cover of The Monks’ Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy (see YMGTA #34).

A week after RPTLC came out, Fall Sound was released as an iTunes download. The only song from the album issued as a physical single was the title track, in April 2007. It was backed by ‘rough mixes’ of Over Over and My Door Is Never. The former makes Presley more prominent and trebly (and is arguably preferable to the album version); the latter gains an extra layer of fuzzy guitar. With typical punctuational inconsistency, Over loses its exclamation marks. There’s also a shortened edit of the lead song.

Neither Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy nor Reformation! troubled the charts at all; this would be the case with all the group’s remaining singles.

Front cover

In The Wider World…
In January, Steve Jobs announced that the first iPhone would be launched in June. The England cricket team lost the Ashes series 5-0, the first whitewash for 86 years. The final episode of Grandstand was shown on 28 January, ending nearly 50 years of Saturday afternoon sports broadcasting on the BBC.

On a very different type of TV programme, Jade Goody was evicted from Celebrity Big Brother after having made racist comments about housemate Shilpa Shetty. In another memorable TV incident, The Ordinary Boys’ singer Preston walked off the music quiz Never Mind The Buzzcocks and was replaced by a random audience member.

In the UK charts, Mika was in the middle of a five-week stay at number one with his exhaustingly flamboyant Freddie Mercury impersonation Grace Kelly. (Although, to be fair, it was still better than the stodgy landfill indie of The Kaiser Chief’s Ruby, which followed it to number one.)

At the top of the album charts, there was more dull and predictable indie-rock fare in the shape of The View’s Hats Off to the Buskers, which had succeeded the bafflingly-acclaimed cruise ship cabaret of Back To Black by Amy Winehouse.

The Fall Live In 2005-07
The group rounded off 2005 with 25 UK gigs in October and November. Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy received the first of its ten outings in Manchester on October 1, just before Fall Heads Roll‘s release.

There are several bootlegs available of the tour, the pick of which is probably the one from The Zodiac, Oxford on 23 October. The sound quality is dubious, but the group sound like they’re on blistering form, especially on a frantic eight-minute version of Open The Boxoctosis.

There were, however, a few less successful gigs. The 10 October appearance in Stoke featured a variety of walk-offs and certainly seemed to divide opinion on The Fall Online Forum. The 2 November performance at Islington’s Carling Academy also saw walk-offs, instrumental versions, etc.

Early Days of Channel Führer was played for the first time on 11 October in Middlesbrough, and played for the second and last time 13 days later in Nottingham.

The Fall played 50 dates in 2006. The 15 that they played in the first four months of the year were a mix of UK and European gigs, including Antwerp, Athens, Lausanne and Berlin.

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Wigan 18/1/2006, photo by Vvillager

There’s a bootleg of the first gig of the year, in Wigan. Although one or two fan reviews registered disappointment that it was a similar set to many of the 2005 gigs, most were blown away by how tight and powerful the group sounded; this is captured well on the recording, even though it’s only of average sound quality. As was the case in several performances from this period, the set was dominated by some extravagantly lengthy work-outs. In this case: an eight-minute Touch Sensitive, a twelve-minute Blindness and brutal, relentless What About Us? that clocks in at a whopping fifteen minutes (the group try to draw things to a conclusion at around ten, but MES is having none of it and counts them back in).

On the Fall Online Forum, Sean posted a poignant picture of MES singing Aspen from a door at the back of the stage.

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Wigan 18/1/2006, photo by Sean

The Fall opened their 26 January gig in Antwerp with The Boss, a piece of lively if inconsequential Bo Diddly-esque rock ‘n’ roll. They played it 13 more times over the next four months; the recording below appeared on the 2007 Fall Box Set.

On 10 March in Athens, Systematic Abuse was debuted; White Line Fever followed on the next night in Thessaloniki. On their return to the UK, The Fall played four nights at Croydon’s Cartoon Club. The first night was a challenging one: the group had had a difficult journey back from Greece, and were left with limited time to soundcheck; in the end they played for just over 40 minutes. The (rather muffled) bootleg recording suggests it was a pretty powerful performance, nonetheless. This gig, and the next two nights, saw the group continue to hammer out extended versions of What About Us? and Blindness.

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Croydon 15/3/2006, photo by Hanley Played a Fender P

On the last of the four Croydon gigs, on 15 March, the group opened with a new song, described by the gigography as an ‘instrumental with one line/ad lib before the GEWATF greeting: “(…) over 400 years in Athens”‘.  Reviews seem to make it clear that this wasn’t The Boss or any other known song, and the setlist (which they didn’t keep to anyway) doesn’t provide any clues. As this is the only one of the four nights of which I don’t have a recording, I can’t enlighten you any further.

At the group’s Berlin gig on 21 April, their last before heading off to America, Over! Over! was played for the first time.

Untitled
Austin, Texas 2/5/2006, photo by patita pirata

Pritchard, Birtwistle and Trafford played on the first four gigs of the US tour. After the implosion in Phoenix, the new lineup completed the remaining thirteen dates over the next month. As mentioned above, the ‘Dudes’ soon settled in and quickly began to turn in some excellent performances. On 23 May, at one of their regular haunts, Los Angeles’ Knitting Factory, they played an outstanding (and again lengthy) rendition of Mountain Energei.

Reformation! (at this point labelled on the setlist as Formation F.D., although this may just have been a reminder of the chords) was debuted on the same night.

Scenario was debuted in Boulder on 26 May.

After their return from the US tour, The Fall played a one-off gig in Manchester on 10 June. There’s an enthusiastic review of the performance here. In August, they travelled to Norway, where they delivered a blinding set at the Oya Festival (Øyafestivalen) in Oslo.

In August, with new recruits Greenway and Spurr in the lineup, The Fall played the Reading and Leeds festival. My Door Is Never was debuted at Reading.

For the next five gigs in September, Presley and Barbato returned, but Spurr remained as part of a two-bassist lineup. On 8 September at BestivalFall Sound was played for the first time. Three days later Coach And Horses was debuted in London. Presley had to miss the next date in Cricklewood on 14 September (where The Wright Stuff received its first outing), so Greenway stood in again.

Barbato missed the second night in Cricklewood, when The Wright Stuff had its second outing:

The group’s performance at the Green Synergy Festival in Dublin on 7 October was Kieron Melling’s first appearance. Their next, in Barrow-in-Furness on the 13th, saw McCord back behind the drums and also their first performance of their Frank Zappa cover, Hungry Freaks, Daddy.

In November, The Fall returned to America for two New York dates. They finished 2006 with a performance in Manchester.

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The Fall began 2007 with a one-off gig in Malaga on 21 January, where MES sported a James Bond-style white dinner jacket. There are photos and (very positive) reviews here.

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Malaga 21/1/07, photo by Hanley Played a Fender P

After RPTLC‘s release, the group toured throughout March, playing 17 dates. On 5 March (Smith’s 50th birthday), the group debuted Insult Song and The Bad Stuff at Bilston. The two were played as a medley to open the set, something that the group did twice more that month; these were Bad Stuff‘s only live appearances, although Insult got a couple more outings on its own. The setlist shows the last song as being ‘Wolve Kidult Man‘, but accounts show that it was actually an early incarnation of 50 Year Old Man (which would make sense, given the occasion). Both the gigography page and Reformation suggest that Rob Barbato played a part in its creation; he wasn’t credited when the song was released on the group’s next album, but, this being The Fall, that doesn’t rule it out. It’s interesting to see how the group were billed that night:

Senior Twilight Stock Replacer was debuted on 10 March. On the 26th, Just Step S’Ways made an unlikely one-off comeback in Cardiff, the first time it had been played for 25 years. An apparently rather erratic performance, it also featured MES on harmonica during Systematic Abuse. On the Fall Online Forum, ocelot noted wryly that ‘Mark’s harmonica style is very close to his keyboard one’.

Holmfirth 22 March (lots more pictures here)

The group’s performance on 1 April marked (supposedly) the last ever concert in the Hammersmith Palais‘ 88-year history. (The previous night’s performance by Damon Albarn and Paul Simonon’s ‘supergroup’ The Good, the Bad & the Queen had also been billed as the venue’s final performance; in fact, the actual last gig at the Palais was by Groove Armada on 3 May.)

Front cover

The performance was released as live album/DVD, and you can find the whole thing on YouTube. It also marked a farewell (almost – they would play four more dates) to ‘The Dudes’. Supplemented by both Spurr and Greenway on this occasion, the three Americans demonstrate throughout how they were such an excellent – if all too brief – addition to the Fall Sound. Presley and Greenway complement each other perfectly; as do Barbato and Spurr. McCord’s drumming (delivered with grinning exuberance throughout) is similarly excellent.

Eleni also makes a substantial contribution to the performance, both her keyboard work and vocals adding great depth and breadth to the group’s sound. Often, she presented a slightly icy persona on stage, but here she’s full of smiles and seemingly brimming with confidence. Her delivery of The Wright Stuff here puts the album version to shame, which sounds flat and uninspiring in comparison.

Thankfully, MES also rises to the occasion. Focused, forceful and energetic throughout, he does indulge in the odd bit of knob-twiddling, but it’s good-natured mischief rather than nasty antagonism. Like the rest of the group, he seems to be having a genuinely good time.

That said, the gig wasn’t without its controversial moments. Before the encore, a tired and emotional audience member (who looks like an ageing punk in a mustard-coloured suit – it’s at 51:59 on the YouTube video) got on stage to castigate MES for not making some sort of tribute to the venue. (He can’t have been overly familiar with Smith’s career if he really expected this.) Several reports also suggest that the security got rather heavy-handed with stage invaders during the encore, although you can only catch glimpses of this in the video.  Smith’s parting remark was: ‘Thank you for allowing us in your security area… we’re off to civilisation.’

There are many excellent live recordings of Blindness. The one here is a particularly outstanding one, not just because it’s an intense, bruising and emotional assault on the senses, but also due to the plethora of golden moments in the video: Eleni hanging her handbag under her keyboard at 0:12; MES’s little keyboard frill at 0:19 (plus his longer and almost tuneful solo 6:55-8:05); his surprisingly affectionate little pat on the cheek for Rob Barbato (4:46); his handing over of the mic to the audience member (6:39) who contributes some incoherent but excellent shouting; the way he looks out, impassively and inscrutably at the audience (7:06).

And the best bit of all: 4:11-4:14, where Smith ‘conducts’ the band with impeccable timing.

The Album
There’s a certain amount of mystery, ambiguity and scope for interpretation in many of The Fall’s album titles. There’s not much of that here. Smith was clearly portraying what he saw (or what he wanted others to see) as the complete rebirth of the group. And as for the ‘TLC’ part, Steve Trafford gave his interpretation of its meaning in his interview with Dave Simpson for The Fallen:

‘”That’s us”, he says, referring to himself, Pritchard and Birtwistle. “Thieving Lying C*nts!”‘9

In an interview with Uncut, Smith said: ‘it’s Reformation Post Treacherous Lying C*nts. You follow me? Heh heh heh. No, not really – that’s what somebody said to me, though, and I think it sounded pretty good. No – TLC. It’s Tender Loving Care, isn’t it?’

UK CD booklet

The recording of the album is a slightly mysterious and convoluted story. Some tracks seem to have been recorded with Grant Showbiz before the group headed off to their ill-fated US tour. In a discussion on the Forum, it’s suggested that MES re-started the recordings in LA with the new musicians, then had to make a third attempt after those recordings were lost in the post.

There were some photos of the session with Grant Showbiz posted online at the time. Most of the links are long dead, but academichamilton on the Fall Online Forum managed to dig this one out:

In The Fallen10, Steve Trafford says that the early 2006 lineup recorded an ‘amazing’ album (16-17 tracks) that only he and Grant Showbiz possess; one that Smith never added vocals to because of the split in May 2006.

Ben Pritchard largely supports this version of events in this June 2006 interview, saying that the group had recorded ‘an album and a couple of singles’-worth of material with Showbiz at Chopper Studios in Lincolnshire (this was probably Chapel Studios). He has his own explanation for why Smith didn’t add any vocals to these recordings:

‘…he said he didn’t like any of it and wanted to get it all re-recorded which is a stunt he pulls if he hasn’t got any lyrics. If he’s got no lyrics for his songs he makes us waste studio time by re-recording stuff but it really doesn’t need re-recording.’

Grant Showbiz (who confirms that he does have a copy of the recording, which he says definitely took place in April and has guide vocals on only a couple of tracks) remembers Mark and Eleni returning to Manchester during the session and never coming back. Smith called to give the bizarre explanation that he was ‘snowed in and couldn’t make it back’.

Inevitably, Smith’s own version of events is rather different to everyone else’s. In an interview with The Independent‘s Tim Cumming in February 2007, he said:

‘We did a session in Lincolnshire in March. They had eight days in a studio and came back with 10 Eric Clapton-like tunes, and it was just like not good enough. It was flat as a pancake.’

In Renegade, he disparaged Trafford and Pritchard’s notion that there was some sort of ‘great lost album’ –

‘Ben talks about how they recorded all these great tracks in Lincolnshire, just before the tour. They recorded sh*t – a few lame incarnations of what they thought the Fall should sound like. It was like a Sunday-before-work, been-drinking-all-weekend, karaoke take on Fall Heads Roll. It had no zip to it. I’m amazed he has the audacity to even mention it… The great lost album. What a load of sh*t!’11

In the end, the released version of the album was recorded (as part of Fall Heads Roll had been) at Lisa Stansfield’s Gracielands Studio in Rochdale. The sleeve lists one Gary Bennett as providing some guitar, although nobody seems to know who he was.

UK CD booklet

In general, contemporary reviews expressed admiration for the group’s persistence in the face of adversity, and were far more positive about the album’s contents than has been the case with most retrospective evaluations. In The Guardian, Alexis Petridis’ highly perceptive review concluded with:

‘It doesn’t really sound like anything the Fall have recorded before, which bodes well for the future. As the stoic Fall fan knows, you write them off at your peril.’

Uncut identified an ‘abundantly confident Fall’. Mojo said that, ‘The Fall forge on with standards maintained and high hopes that more music of the same potency will follow.’

The Pitchfork review (4/10) was harsh but fair, and arguably more realistic:

‘The first thing to realize is that the Fall aren’t really a band in the usual sense. It’s MES & Musicians Currently in His Favour, so he and Poulou simply scraped together some guitarists and a drummer and kept going. They wound up going right into a long-scheduled studio session in L.A. as well, where they cut Reformation Post TLC. Remember a few sentences ago when I said the Fall isn’t really a band in the usual sense? Well, on this record they don’t sound like one, either. With only a few exceptions, the album is a mess, and not a very memorable one at that.’

The album reached number 78 on the UK album chart – the group’s best showing for 11 years.

The US CD version of the album omitted The Usher but included four live video recordings. It also had a different cover, one that appeared to have been designed in around 1976.

US CD Cover

The Songs
Over! Over!
The album opens with an impressively demonic cackle from Smith before the group lock onto a loose, fuzzy blues-rock groove. It’s a pretty clear lift, on this occasion from Coming Down, a 1968 song by The United States of America.

Like much of the album, there’s a strange disassociation between Smith’s vocals and the music; his voice floats around the groove that the group creates, only occasionally connecting with what they’re playing. It gives the song a spacious but strangely hollow feel.

There’s a deep, gruff, slightly comical backing vocal lurking in the background, the sort of thing that Karl Burns used to provide; here it’s supplied by Orpheo McCord.

It’s a strange song: somehow aggressive yet muted; exuberant yet reserved. It was played 53 times, right up to the group’s final performance. A looped, instrumental version of the riff was used as a tape intro on some of the 2006 American gigs.

As mentioned above, there’s a case to be made for the ‘rough mix’ from the Reformation  single being the more satisfying version.

Reformation
The title track is an exercise in stripped-back minimalism, adapting the motorik aspect of krautrock and filtering it through a heavy, blues-rock lens. The relentless metronomic fuzzed-up bass riff dominates, whilst Smith interjects with seemingly random but carefully timed barked phrases such as ‘ Black River’, ‘Fall Motel’ and ‘Cheese State’. The Annotated Fall points out that there actually is a Falls Motel in Black River Falls, Wisconsin (it’s here) and that Wisconsin produces about a quarter of the cheese consumed in the US.

It’s easy to see how it became one of the few Fall songs to be played live 100+ times. Its simplistic structure frees the group to lock onto that mammoth groove and leave Smith to contribute as, when and how he sees fit. As a result, the various bootlegs vary widely in length and in the level of Smith’s contributions. The version below (from Liverpool in 2013) is a prime example of an intense and extended approach, and also features MES including some Gary Glitter lyrics.

Fall Sound
This album, like many other Fall albums, is rather oddly sequenced. Fall Sound is undoubtedly a fine track – a snarling, defiant manifesto – but it feels very much like a variation on the preceding title track, and you have to wonder at the motivation for putting the two together.

That said, there’s an admirably driving fury about it. Once again, the group lock on tightly to a fuzzy blues-rock groove, leaving Smith scope to declaim freely and aggressively about ’80s reprobates’ and ‘laptop wankers’. It also contains one of his most notable (if bizarre) put-downs: ‘I’ve seen POWs less hysterical than you’.

Another popular live choice, it was performed 96 times; again, right up to the final gig.

White Line Fever
After three pieces of intense, confrontational aggression, the obligatory cover version makes an early, abrupt and dissatisfying entrance. The Merle Haggard original is a little predictable and plodding, but it has a great deal more spark and feeling than the dreary offering here. It’s nice to hear that the group are clearly having fun, but it’s a piece of slurred, lazy post-pub karaoke that would only just about have passed muster as an obscure b-side. It got seven live outings in early 2006 before the group (thankfully) tired of it.

Insult Song
A funk-Beefheart jam in the spirit of 70s comedy ‘roasts’ – not a phrase that you could imagine being applied to any other artist.

The group, once again, sound like they’re having fun; playing around with a loose-limbed, funky rhythm. Smith’s improvised monologue mentions Amon Düül and Beefheart, and includes references to Eleni (‘the mad Greek woman, The Hydra’), McCord (‘Orpheo, the ancient name from Greece’) and Dave Spurr (‘put a stocking over his head, and you couldn’t tell the difference’).

Although it’s not without musical interest or humour, it’s awfully self-indulgent and falls a long way short  of justifying its nearly seven minute length.

UK vinyl back cover

My Door Is Never
At which point we revert to the relentless riffery of the opening three songs. Not in itself a bad thing – the bass line reverberates thickly and menacingly throughout and there’s some nifty distorted string-bending – but, by this stage, you feel that the group have kind of done this already.

This is as much to do with the sequencing of the album as the quality of the song. Having four such similar songs and front-loading them over the first six tracks seems rather perverse; but not that surprising given the history of Fall albums.

Live, My Door tended to have a bit more vigour than the album version. Here, it’s a little sluggish, despite Presley’s best efforts with the bluesy soloing; the blame mostly rests with MES who seems to lose interest after the first few lines. As for the lyrics, ‘The night to self with the shoulder touch / Aroma for the duvet you slept in’ is interestingly poignant, but overall it feels a little casually tossed off.

A popular live choice: 68 performances 2006-16.

Coach And Horses
Coach And Horses has a distinctly 60s vibe, but its bluesy soft-rock is more like The Doors’ Soft Parade than the group’s customary garage-punk Nuggets approach. It’s a curious little thing, swirling around in a diffident haze before exiting hastily and almost apologetically before it even reaches the two minute mark.

Smith is once again rather off-hand in his delivery, but this rather suits the song’s torpid groove. The lyrics vaguely suggest a time travel narrative (‘I looked through the 1860’s window pane’), but are too opaque and brief to extract much meaning.

On the Annotated Fall, bzfgt comments that:

‘It is typical of the wonderful but confounding Reformation Post TLC that one of the chordally most thought out, tightest (both instrumentally and compositionally), and most accessible songs on the album seems to be almost a throwaway, in terms of how short it is and how little interest MES seems to have in adding any other sections or allowing the band to explore, whereas the longest songs all consist of repetitions of a single hastily composed riff.’

The Usher
Even briefer than Coach And HorsesThe Usher is more of an interlude than an underdeveloped song. It’s not devoid of attraction: its Dr Bucks’-style list is mildly amusing (‘Cut down on rhythm machines and have more guitars and minidisks, etc.
/ Treat PR, security people, agents, etc. with the respect and, er, honour that they deserve’) and the typically Smith-esque perversity of making a list run from A-F and then go to six is a nice touch.

On a stronger album, it might have made for a perfectly enjoyable little intermission; however, here, it sits amongst too many other examples of unfinished ideas. It was never played live.

US CD booklet

The Wright Stuff
As mentioned above, the Palais version is distinctly preferable to this one. The album take has a tight little bass-heavy groove that underpins the verse well enough, and the swirling organ adds a bit of colour, but overall it all feels a little flat and stilted. It’s also at least a couple of minutes too long.

The lyric has its entertaining moments (‘Eccentric lad / He keeps false, plastic women’s bosoms under his TV desk and dressing room’). There seems to be some sort of football theme, (possibly related to Ian Wright, although of course Gazza has a stronger link with plastic breasts). The football connection is reinforced by the fact that the song is another clear ‘borrow’ – this time from Don Fardon’s Belfast Boy, a tribute to George Best.

It was played 23 times 2006-07.

Scenario
A variation on Over! Over! that takes a looser and more melancholy approach but still borrows from Coming Down. It borrows equally clearly from Beefheart’s Veteran’s Day Poppy.

It finds MES in melancholy and introspective mood, reflecting on his ‘childhood days’.  Lyrically, it references the 1920s song Pal Of My Cradle Days. There are several mentions of wearing poppies on TV, which might refer to the growing concerns regarding ‘poppy fascism‘ at the time. The ‘Chindits‘ referred to (at 1:03) were special operations units that fought in Burma during WW2. In an interview, MES said that the lyric had partly been inspired by a friend giving him some poems written by his father, who had served in one of the units.

The song itself is less interesting than the story behind the lyrics. It’s not without its positive features: Spurr and/or Barbato churn out an admirably chunky bass line, and Presley contributes some nicely understated bluesy meanderings. However, there’s something peculiarly stale and lifeless about the sound and there’s a lack of connection between the music and Smith’s unfocused ramble. It was played live 17 times 2006-09, before making a one-off return in 2012.

US CD back cover

Das Boat
In the interview with The Independent mentioned above, Smith said of Das Boat:

‘It just got out of hand, that track… That’s me and Elena. I was going to take it off, but people love it.’

Pretty much all Fall tracks (with the possible exceptions of Tragic Days, Outro (see below) and Taxi) have at least a few admirers. You won’t, however, easily find many who will defend this ten minute slab of noodling electronics – whatever MES might say.

For the first and final time in their career, the group actually manage to sound like Pink Floyd. Not only that, they manage to sound like two different eras of Waters, Gilmour, et al. The portentous opening pulses with oscillating synth and delay/reverb-heavy rock guitar hero soloing that would be right at home on the Floyd’s multi-million selling mid-70s albums. The rest of the track features a variety of random tapping and childish voices that recall the whimsical and silly interludes of Pink Floyd circa 1969-70.

Not without the odd moment of mild interest/amusement, it’s still another piece of overlong self-indulgence. Unsurprisingly, never attempted on stage.

The Bad Stuff
Begins like a reprise of Das Boat, with the same synth oscillation and similarly Floyd-esque guitar. This time, it’s accompanied by studio chatter (some of The Dudes, by the sound of the accents) plus some piping shrieks in the background. After a minute or so, a rather nifty, tight little new wave riff (you could imagine The Jam playing it) kicks in; this then dissolves into a more urgent and punkish rhythm which rattles along promisingly enough for another minute before the whole thing stops dead. It’s like a 21st century update of Putta Block.

On another album, The Bad Stuff might have made for a mildly diverting interlude; here though, RPTLC is by this stage sounding like just a series of incomplete ideas with the odd fully-formed song thrown in. It was played live three times in 2007 as the coda to Insult Song (see above).

Systematic Abuse
Whilst The Bad Stuff crams several underdeveloped ideas into a brief timescale, Systematic Abuse takes the opposite approach, stretching a single idea to nearly the same length as Das Boat.

Another song that’s underpinned by that distinctive, thick and gritty bass sound, it hammers along in a relentless, heads-down blues-rock fashion. It’s more focused than some of the other riff-driven tracks on the album, although evidence suggests that it made more sense live. It certainly meets the “3 Rs” criteria, and, in its unforgiving krautrock drive, just about gets away with its extravagant length. Smith’s vocal, although again a little rambling, is more closely anchored to the music than it is on many RPTLC tracks.

As Reformation quite rightly points out, Barbato, Presley and McCord’s writing credits are a bit of an anomaly. Systematic Abuse was debuted live two months before they even joined the group; listening to the bootleg from Croydon 14 March shows that the song was already fully-formed at that point. It would go on to have a relatively long shelf-life: 53 performances 2006-15.

Outro
A single note repeated in batches of three for 36 seconds. According to the strange world of Fall credits, this required the song-writing skills of five people.

Overall Verdict
It’s hard not to see Reformation Post TLC as a disappointment. The Real New Fall LP and Fall Heads Roll had signalled a renaissance in the group’s fortunes; not the commercial success of the late 80s/early 90s, perhaps, but the first few years of the 21st century had seen the group back on the radar of people who cared about innovative and interesting music. And this, of course, had been strengthened by the acclaim for the Peel Sessions Box Set.

RPTLC feels like a step backwards; a retreat into the inconsistency and wilfully perverse decisions that bedevilled some of their work in the 90s. Once again, the album is unnecessarily long, clearly not having enough strong material to justify its hour plus length. Even where there are stronger songs, they are undermined by overlap and overuse: Over!Fall SoundReformation! and My Door are decent songs, but there’s a distinct air of recycling about them. There is an also an excess of underdeveloped sketches; a couple of which might have added a bit of intrigue to the album, but too many make the whole thing disjointed and underwhelming.

As is the case with every Fall album, it’s not without its high points: the title track’s bloody-minded relentlessness; the exuberant defiance of Fall Sound; the intriguing melancholy of Scenario; even the quirky little groove of Coach And Horses. However, even if you have to admire Smith’s tenacity at getting yet another album out despite the circumstances, overall the album sounds rushed, self-indulgent and simply not thought through properly.

The production doesn’t help. It has an especially curious sound, somehow feeling simultaneously flat and thin but also over-produced and glossy. On several tracks, Smith’s vocals are peculiarly dissociated from the music, like he delivered them without ever hearing the music.

Ultimately, the most frustrating thing about Reformation Post TLC is that a great lineup never got the chance to record a studio album that did them justice. Let’s just be thankful for Last Night At The Palais.

My “Version”
Notable that it just squeaks in over the 35 minute minimum…

Side 1Fall Sound / Reformation! / Coach and Horses / Over Over (Rough Mix)  / Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy (20:40)

Side 2: My Door Is Never / Scenario / The Usher / Systematic Abuse (17:06)

Rankings
Whilst not without its attractions, RPTLC is one of those albums where individual tracks in isolation sometimes work well, but it really doesn’t hang together as a coherent piece of work.

  1. This Nation’s Saving Grace
  2. Perverted By Language
  3. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of
  4. Hex Enduction Hour
  5. The Real New Fall LP Formerly ‘Country On The Click’
  6. Levitate
  7. Slates
  8. Grotesque
  9. The Unutterable
  10. Fall Heads Roll
  11. The Marshall Suite
  12. Cerebral Caustic
  13. I Am Kurious Oranj
  14. Room To Live
  15. The Infotainment Scan
  16. Extricate
  17. Bend Sinister
  18. Dragnet
  19. The Light User Syndrome
  20. Are You Are Missing Winner
  21. Middle Class Revolt
  22. Code: Selfish
  23. Shift-Work
  24. Live At The Witch Trials
  25. Reformation Post TLC
  26. The Frenz Experiment

Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy is a bit of an underrated little gem. Part of the long history of The Fall taking an obscure 60s garage track and thrashing the living daylights out of it, it’s an exemplary example of this aspect of the group’s back catalogue. Reformation! does not, perhaps, represent the height of the group’s creativity; but it does see them whack the hell out of a great riff.

  1. Theme From Sparta F.C. #2
  2. Living Too Late
  3. Jerusalem/Big New Prinz
  4. Kicker Conspiracy
  5. The Man Whose Head Expanded
  6. How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
  7. Totally Wired
  8. Free Range
  9. Behind The Counter
  10. Marquis Cha-Cha
  11. Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul
  12. The Chiselers
  13. Touch Sensitive
  14. (We Wish You) A Protein Christmas
  15. Reformation! 
  16. Cab It Up
  17. Cruiser’s Creek
  18. Hey! Luciani
  19. F-‘Oldin’ Money
  20. Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy
  21. I Can Hear The Grass Grow
  22. Mr. Pharmacist
  23. Couldn’t Get Ahead/Rollin’ Dany
  24. Look, Know
  25. The Fall vs 2003
  26. Telephone Thing
  27. There’s A Ghost In My House
  28. Victoria
  29. Hit The North
  30. Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!
  31. Rowche Rumble
  32. Fiery Jack
  33. Masquerade
  34. Ed’s Babe
  35. High Tension Line
  36. 15 Ways
  37. It’s The New Thing
  38. White Lightning
  39. Popcorn Double Feature
  40. Why Are People Grudgeful?
  41. Oh! Brother
  42. Rude (All The Time)
  43. Rude (All The Time) EP

Last Night At The Palais isn’t completely perfect: Hungry Freaks plods a little, and White Lightning comes close to veering into cliché in places. But these are minor quibbles. Smith and his excellent musicians completely gelled, producing a series of exuberant, joyful and blistering performances; and a bit of chaos and controversy thrown in to boot – what more could you possibly want?

  1. Last Night At The Palais
  2. Live To Air In Melbourne ’82
  3. In A Hole
  4. A Part Of America Therein, 1981
  5. 2G+2
  6. Live In San Francisco
  7. In The City…
  8. Nottingham ’92
  9. The Legendary Chaos Tape / Live In London 1980
  10. Totale’s Turns
  11. The Idiot Joy Show
  12. Live In Cambridge 1988
  13. I Am As Pure As Oranj
  14. Touch Sensitive… Bootleg Box Set
  15. Creative Distortion
  16. Live 1993 – Batschkapp, Frankfurt
  17. Live 1981 – Jimmy’s Music Club – New Orleans
  18. Live 1977
  19. The Twenty Seven Points
  20. Interim
  21. Seminal Live
  22. Live At The Knitting Factory – New York – 9 April 2004
  23. Live 1998 12th August Astoria 2 London
  24. Live Various Years
  25. Live At The Phoenix Festival
  26. Live In Zagreb
  27. 15 Ways To Leave Your Man – Live
  28. Austurbaejarbio
  29. BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert
  30. Live At The Knitting Factory – L.A. – 14 November 2001
  31. Live At The Garage – London – 20 April 2002
  32. Live 2001 – TJ’s Newport
  33. Live 3rd May 1982 Band On The Wall Manchester
  34. Live 1980 – Cedar Ballroom Birmingham
  35. Live From The Vaults – Alter Banhof, Hof, Germany
  36. Live From The Vaults – Glasgow 1981
  37. Live From The Vaults – Oldham 1978
  38. Live At The ATP Festival – 28 April 2002
  39. Liverpool 78
  40. Live From The Vaults – Los Angeles 1979
  41. Live From The Vaults – Retford 1979
  42. Live At Deeply Vale
  43. Yarbles

References

1-2The Fallen, p290

3-4The Fallen, p291

5Renegade, pp1-7

6The Fallen, p291

7The Big Midweek, pp140-148

8Renegade, p9

9-10The Fallen, p289

11Renegade, p6

 

 

YMGTA #34 – The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004

“As for the irreplaceable Peel, these discs say more about the man’s broadcasting ethos than a thousand broadsheet obituaries.”

Front cover

Released: 25 April 2005 on Castle, a label of Sanctuary Records Group – 6 CD box set

Introduction
When Mark E Smith died in January 2018, there were several things that were trotted out ad nauseam in the obituaries: ‘granny on bongos’, hiring and firing, drink and drugs, difficult curmudgeon, and so on. Nearly all of them also mentioned Smith and The Fall’s link to John Peel. Two quotations in particular were deployed frequently: ‘always different, always the same’ and ‘a band by which in our house all others are judged’ (the latter appears on the back cover of Simon Ford’s book, Hip Priest.) In addition, this famous speech that gave this blog its very title got a few mentions:

The Fall recorded more Peel sessions than any other artist – although as The Wedding Present did 13 and his side project Cinerama 11, David Gedge might claim a tie with some justification. (Should you be interested, the nearest other rivals were Ivor Cutler with 22, Loudon Wainwright III with 16, Michael Chapman, Half Man Half Biscuit, Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band and Vivian Stanshall with 12 and Thin Lizzy and Billy Bragg, who both recorded 11.)

It wasn’t just the volume of sessions; the group also dominated the Festive 50:

F50

But it went beyond even that. Beside the sessions and the Festive 50, the group were a seemingly constant presence on Peel’s show. So much so that someone was able to compile nearly three minutes of Peel just saying, ‘The Fall’.

As discussed in YMGTA #33, however, Smith and Peel were not close friends. In fact, although MES said some complimentary things about Peel, he was keen to point out that he didn’t owe his career to him, and was occasionally  a little dismissive about his influence.

Front cover

The box set was not the first time that The Fall’s Peel session tracks had been officially released. 1987’s The Peel Sessions EP consisted of the second session from December 1978. The 1993 EP Kimble contained five tracks selected from 1981-92 Peel appearances. The compilation album The Peel Sessions (compiled by Steve Hanley) was released in 1999 (see YMGTA #32). The double CD compilation, Words of Expectation had come out in 2003. In addition, by the time of the box set’s release, several reissues of the group’s early albums had already included some of the related session tracks. What the box set had going for it, however, was its comprehensiveness. (The group did, however, also record sessions for other radio shows – see ‘Other Radio Sessions’ below.)

Front cover

The release was met with universally positive reviews. The Daily Mirror, once again dipping their toe into the world of Fall criticism, said:

‘This 6CD set is a lavish, head-spinning portrait of the most undervalued band in Britain. The Fall’s searing rock drive, twisted pop magic and spellbinding strangeness has never wavered. This is confirmation of Mark E Smith as Britrock’s great anti-hero. Astonishing stuff.’

Pitchfork gave it 9.3/10, calling it a ‘sprawling, amazing release’ and ‘the definitive look at the Fall’s career to date’. Rolling Stone called it ‘six CDs of peerless clang and harangue’. In Uncut, Simon Goddard had this to say:

‘…you couldn’t ask for a more fitting tribute to the man, or the object of his affection, than this monolithic compendium of all 24 sessions The Fall recorded for his programme between May 1978 and August 2004.

…when The Fall were on form, Peel caught them at their very best… it’s hard to imagine a more satisfying or comprehensive career overview than this.

As for the irreplaceable Peel, these discs say more about the man’s broadcasting ethos than a thousand broadsheet obituaries.’

Despite these glowing tributes, once again positive reviews didn’t lead to huge sales (although it must be remembered that this was a relatively expensive box set). It reached number 139 on its first release; number 97 when it was reissued in 2013.

Fall Peel Session Facts
• The group recorded 97 tracks for Peel, of which 95 were broadcast ‘normally’ as part of a session: Job Search was played separately 19 days after session #24; Whizz Bang (recorded for session #13) was not broadcast.

• The total duration of The Fall’s Peel session tracks was 7 hours, five minutes and 37 seconds. The average length of the sessions (as broadcast) was 17:26

• The longest sessions were:

  • Session #6 (31:29)
  • Session #24 (24:08)
  • Session #9 (20:51)

• The shortest sessions were:

  • Session #1 (10:36)
  • Session #18 (10:48)
  • Session #13 (12:07)

• The biggest gap between sessions was 4 years, 4 months – between session #22 (18/10/98) and session #23 (19/2/03); the second largest was 1 year, 10 months – between session #2 (27/11/78) and session #3 (16/9/80).

• The smallest gap between sessions was 4 months – between session #8 (14/5/85) and session #9 (29/9/85); the second smallest was 5 months – between session #1 (30/5/78) and session #2 (27/11/78).

• The average gap between sessions was 14 months.

• 30 different people appeared on a Fall Peel session at least once:

  • 24 – MES
  • 21 – Steve Hanley
  • 16 – Craig Scanlon
  • 11 -Simon Wolstencroft
  • 10 – Karl Burns
  • 9 – Brix E Smith
  • 5 – Paul Hanley
  • 4 – Marc Riley / Dave Bush / Julia Nagle / Simon Rogers
  • 3 – Martin Bramah
  • 2 – Yvonne Pawlett / Marcia Schofield / Kenny Brady / Lucy Rimmer / Ben Pritchard / Jim Watts / Eleni Poulou
  • 1 – Steve Davis / Dave Tucker / John Rolleson / Neville Wilding / Karen Leatham / Tom Head / Speth Hughes / Dave Milner / Steve Trafford / Spencer Birtwistle / Ed Blaney

• Sessions 15-17 were the only ones where the line-up was the same for three consecutive sessions (MES / Scanlon / S.Hanley / Bush / Wolstencroft). There were only two other occasions where the line-up remained the same for two sessions in a row: sessions 8-9 (MES / Brix / Scanlon / S.Hanley /Rogers / Burns) and sessions 10-11 (MES / Brix / Scanlon / S.Hanley / Rogers / Wolstencroft).

• The first seven sessions featured a different line-up each time, as did the last seven sessions.

• Although he was the group’s bass player from 1998-2001, Adam Helal never played on a Peel session. Neither did Tommy Crooks.

Image result for the fall peel sessions box set booklet

Disc 1 – Sessions 1-4, 1978-1981
Session 1
• Recorded: 30 May 1978
• Broadcast: 15 June 1978
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Martin Bramah – guitar, bass, backing vocals; Yvonne Pawlett – keyboards; Karl Burns – drums; Steve Davis – congas

Futures And Pasts / Mother-Sister / Rebellious Jukebox / Industrial Estate

The group’s first session came about as a result of Peel’s producer John Walters having been impressed by their performance in Croydon in May 1978. Bass player Eric ‘The Ferret’ McGann resigned over conga player Steve Davis’ Hawaiian shirt, leaving Martin Bramah to contribute both bass and guitar.

What’s striking about the session is the group’s level of casual confidence, especially considering that they’d only played around 30 gigs at this point and had only done one studio recording session six months earlier.

There’s still a sense that they haven’t quite found their unique voice yet – Rebellious Jukebox is a rousing tune, but follows the general pattern of contemporary punk/new wave songs; Industrial Estate teeters on the edge of a bog-standard Jilted John approach – but overall it’s still an impressively sharp debut.

Session 2 
• Recorded: 27 November 1978
• Broadcast: 6 December 1978
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Martin Bramah – guitar, bass, backing vocals; Yvonne Pawlett – keyboards; Marc Riley – bass; Karl Burns – drums

Put Away / Mess Of My / No Xmas For John Quays / Like To Blow

Most of the session sees the group ploughing the same furrow as the first one. No Xmas  and Like To Blow in particular are still largely following contemporary punk tropes.

Mess Of My, however, sees the group expanding their horizons impressively, the break-down at 1:25 being almost prog-like in tone.

One thing that does differentiate the songs from the first two sessions from most contemporary punk is Yvonne Pawlett’s keyboards. She adds a layer of off-kilter melody that prevents the group from descending too far into anything overly generic.

Session 3
• Recorded: 16 September 1980
• Broadcast: 24 September 1980
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Marc Riley – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Paul Hanley – drums

Container Drivers / Jawbone And The Air-Rifle / New Puritan / New Face In Hell

One of the great things about this box set is how well it captures the narrative of the group’s development. My Fall listening habits over the last couple of years have been shaped by the format of The Fall In Fives and this blog; as a result, it had been a long time since I’d listened to the tracks on the box set in order. And so, it was quite startling when Container Drivers burst into life.

The whole session is a revelation. Suddenly, everything has just somehow clicked; there’s now a unique, almost indefinable Fall sound. I say almost indefinable because it’s not the case that the group have simply found a signature style and locked onto it – there’s great variety here: the frantic, rickety rockabilly of Drivers; the wonky shuffle of New Face In Hell; the driving, angular Jawbone.

The most astonishing track, however, is New Puritan. Paul Hanley’s drumming is sparse, taut and powerful; his brother lays down a rock solid foundation; but musically it’s Scanlon’s guitar that’s especially outstanding – frenzied, lacerating chords that provide the perfect foil for MES’s imperious ranting. And by now, we’ve reached the stage where the words, the ideas simply pour from Smith. (It’s worth the time to read through the 5000 or so words analysing the lyrics here.) A ‘righteous maelstrom’ indeed; its seven minutes are exhilarating and almost exhausting in their intensity.

What’s almost as astonishing is the fact that the track was never ‘properly’ recorded other than here. The version on Totale’s Turns (released four months before this session) is an interesting curiosity, but it’s little more than a scratchy home-demo doodle. New Puritan was only played live seven times. Its debut (at the Rainbow Theatre, London on 11 May 1980) is captured on the bootleg I Am Romeo Romantic: it’s closer to the Peel version, but much briefer and sadly rather poorly recorded. The Peel version (along with Container Drivers) was first officially released in 1983 on the Kicker Conspiracy double 7″ single.

Session #3 was Craig Scanlon and the Hanley brothers’ first experience of recording for the BBC. Steve Hanley described recording at Maida Vale (compared to the likes of Rochdale’s Cargo Studios) as ‘like being rescued from a poxy wooden raft by an elegant ocean-going liner’1. The tight, sharp performance of Jawbone is put into context by his revelation that, ‘we’ve never played [it] all the way through without messing it up’2.

Marc Riley also has a story to tell about the session:

‘We recorded the first track, made a right old racket, as we did, went in to start listening back to it, make sure we were happy with it, and I turned round to look at the producer [John Sparrow], and his pipe had gone out. This is the truth, his pipe had gone out, and he was asleep.’3

Session 4
• Recorded: 24 March 1981
• Broadcast: 31 March 1981
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Marc Riley – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass;  Paul Hanley – drums; Dave Tucker – clarinet

Middlemass / Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul / Hip Priest / C’n’C-Hassle Schmuck

The group returned to the BBC a month after Slates had been recorded. Middlemass (one word at this point) and Lie Dream (recorded for the group’s seventh single a few months later) are both largely similar in structure to their official releases, but have a more crisp and clear sound. With the latter song, Dave Tucker’s clarinet enjoys much more prominence than Richard Mazda’s sax did on the single.

The group didn’t often return to old songs in their Peel sessions, but here they revisit C’n’C-S Mithering from Grotesque, this time bolting on a hilarious adaptation of Coast To Coast’s version of the old rock ‘n’ roll number The Hucklebuck (which was in the charts at the time). The group sound like they’re having a whale of a time in the second half of the track. (It’s also worth reading The Annotated Fall‘s entry on the song, if only for bzfgt’s startling vehemence regarding Coast To Coast’s bit of nostalgic chart fluff.)

Possibly more interesting, however, is Hip Priest’s first recorded appearance. The song had been played for the first time a week before the session at Leeds University, a gig that was filmed and released in 2003 as part of the DVD Perverted By Language/Bis + Live At Leeds (an expanded reissue of the 1983 video Perverted By Language Bis). The performance is on YouTube – Hip Priest is at 3:25).

According to Steve Hanley4, the song was first conceived at the soundcheck for the Leeds gig. The session version is impressive, but a little haphazard, overlong and lacking the tight, malevolent focus of the take on Hex.

Hanley also had this to say:

‘”Hip Priest” has developed enough to require nine minutes of recording, by which time everyone is thoroughly aware of just how unappreciated the Hip Priest is.

It brings our total session time to five minutes more than the usual fifteen-minute allocation. But nothing’s edited, Peel plays the lot and loves it. I get the feeling that if we played a twenty-minute song he’d broadcast that.’5

Disc 2 – Sessions 5-7, 1981-1984
Session 5
• Recorded: 26 August 1981
• Broadcast: 15 September 1981
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Marc Riley – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Paul Hanley – drums

Deer Park / Look, Know / Winter / Who Makes The Nazis?

Recorded shortly after the group’s return from their lengthy summer tour of the US, the session saw Paul Hanley re-established behind the drum kit after Karl Burns had filled in in America. Much to Steve Hanley’s excitement6, the producer was Dale Griffin, ex-drummer of Mott The Hoople.

The session saw the group knocking into shape several of the songs that would be recorded over the next few months for HexDeer Park is driving and forceful, although falls slightly short of the breathtaking ferocity of the album version. Look, Know swings along happily (although Steve Hanley makes an uncharacteristic error at 3:17).

The highlight of the set is a towering version of Winter. Whilst ever so slightly hesitant in comparison to the album take, it’s still mesmerising and has the advantage of not being annoyingly cut in two.

Who Makes The Nazis? is more primitive and basic than the Hex version, and gallops along at a much faster tempo. It features Steve Hanley on plastic toy guitar and backing vocals:

‘I’m handed a sheet of paper with some bizarre backing vocals… The lyrics are the usual obscure poetics, so I’ve no idea if I’m being set up. I have to say some weird stuff about hate, love, soap and enemies.7

Session 6
• Recorded: 21 March 1983
• Broadcast: 23 March 1983
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Paul Hanley – drums; Karl Burns – drums

Smile / Garden / Hexen Definitive-Strife Knot / Eat Y’self Fitter

Session #6 sees the group developing songs that would appear on Perverted By Language (tracks from Room To Live having bypassed the Peel experience). Although PBL wouldn’t be released for another six months, all four songs are already pretty much in the form that they would take on the album. This wasn’t that surprising with Hexen and Garden, both of which had already been played live several times; Fitter and Smile, however, weren’t debuted in concert until the day after the session.

The session also sees yet another line-up change: Riley had left the group three months earlier, and this set sees the debut of the first two-drummer line-up. The Burns-Hanley duo don’t have quite the impact that they would on the album version of Smile (or indeed the group’s remarkable national TV debut); the session version brims with aggression and Scanlon attacks the song with zest, but both Smith and Steve Hanley are rather buried in the mix. The two drummers are deployed to much greater effect on Fitter, which is jagged and raucous; it’s just a shame that the backing vocals (a key component of the song) seem to have been recorded from a neighbouring building.

Garden, however is an absolute peach, better even than the sublime album version; the drums have more oomph, there’s an edgy harshness to Scanlon’s guitar, and the whole thing is impressively forceful and direct. It’s a similar story with an excellent Hexen.

Session 7
• Recorded: 12 December 1983
• Broadcast: 3 January 1984
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar, vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Paul Hanley – drums; Karl Burns – drums

Pat Trip Dispenser / 2 x 4 / Words Of Expectation / C.R.E.E.P.

Session #7 saw Brix’s first Peel appearance. She makes her presence felt with airy backing vocals on Pat; her contribution to 2 x 4 is a little more forceful. The former is a little hesitant in comparison to the version that appeared on the C.R.E.E.P. single; it hasn’t yet developed the swirling riff that would make the later take such a compelling little gem. 2 x 4 is more successful – satisfyingly jagged and energetic.

Her influence can be most clearly heard in C.R.E.E.P., which is less drippy than the single version, but still rather twee and sugary.

The undoubted highlight of the set, however, is Words Of Expectation. It seems completely divorced from the rest of the session, harking back to the sound of the beginning of the decade.

It’s a lengthy, repetitive beast in the vein of Garden or Winter. Steve Hanley underpins the deep undulating groove with a heavy, metronomic bass line (featuring the occasional flourish) whilst MES gives himself free rein to expound on a range of random thoughts: ‘the roof of my mouth sticks to the tip of my tongue’; ‘if we carry on like this we’re gonna end up like King Crimson’. It appeared on Kimble, but, confusingly, not on the Peel sessions compilation that bears its name.

Disc 3 – Sessions 8-11, 1985-1987
Session 8
• Recorded: 14 May 1985
• Broadcast: 3 June 1985
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar, vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Simon Rogers – guitar, keyboards; Karl Burns – drums

Cruiser’s Creek / Couldn’t Get Ahead / Spoilt Victorian Child / Gut Of The Quantifier

Recorded four months before the release of This Nation’s Saving Grace, session #8 marked Steve Hanley’s return after his paternity leave.

There’s a thumpingly robust version of Cruiser’s Creek, although it’s at least a minute longer than it needs to be. Couldn’t Get Ahead fizzes with energy and is distinctly preferable to the version that appeared on the 1985 single.

Spoilt Victorian Child is similarly raw and assertive, although possibly lacks the depth of the album version. Gut Of The Quantifier also feels a little thin in comparison to the TNSG version in places, but still bristles with aggression.

Session 9
• Recorded: 29 September 1985
• Broadcast: 7 October 1985
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar, vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Simon Rogers – guitar, keyboards; Karl Burns – drums

L.A. / The Man Whose Head Expanded / What You Need / Faust Banana

Recorded a week after the release of This Nation’s Saving Grace, session #9 sees the group (featuring the same lineup as the previous session for the first time) looking to the past, present and future. The two TSNG tracks both have a sharper and brighter sound than their album equivalents; What You Need does feel a little hurried and incoherent in places though. L.A., of course, benefits from the hilarious ‘Lloyd Cole’ introduction. In both cases, both versions are well worth owning, although my personal preference is (just about) for the darker, murkier album versions.

It’s unclear why the group decided to revisit a two year old single track, but this version of The Man Whose Head Expanded ups the tempo, has a driving, relentless energy and features some fine megaphone work from MES. Taken in isolation, it’s a stormer; but it doesn’t quite have the subtlety, variety and texture of the single version.

The most interesting track from the session is Faust Banana, which would appear a year later on Bend Sinister as Dktr. Faustus; it would be played live for the first time four days after this session was recorded. Whilst the session version has a slight air of ‘work in progress’ about it (especially the oddly random xylophone work towards the end), it’s more fluent than the slightly stilted album version.

Session 10
• Recorded: 29 June 1986
• Broadcast: 9 July 1986
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar, vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Simon Rogers – guitar, keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

Hot Aftershave Bop / R.O.D. / Gross Chapel-GB Grenadiers / U.S. 80s-90s

Session #10 sees the first appearance of ‘Funky Si’, whose first gig with the group had been three weeks earlier following Karl Burns’ second departure from The Fall (after the spring US tour). It contained three songs from Bend Sinister, plus the b-side of Living Too Late, all of which had already been recorded earlier that year.

The outstandingly dark and brooding Gross Chapel-GB Grenadiers – which had been played live for the first time around three weeks earlier – is not vastly different from the album version. This is also true of R.O.D. and U.S. 80s-90s (although the latter gains a slightly irritating crashing percussion effect in places). All three of these session tracks have a better, fuller sound than the rather ‘flat’ sound of the original Bend Sinister (something that was addressed successfully by the album’s 2019 reissue).

Hot Aftershave Bop had been debuted four months earlier and had been played live 17 times by this point. It was released (on the Living Too Late single) a week after the session was recorded . Like the other three tracks, it’s not hugely different here, although the session version is hampered slightly by a rather 80s drum sound.

Session 11
• Recorded: 28 April 1987
• Broadcast: 11 May 1987
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar, vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Simon Rogers – guitar, keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

Athlete Cured / Australians In Europe / Twister / Guest Informant

For only the second time, the lineup was the same as the previous session. It came at the height of the group’s commercial success: There’s A Ghost In My House, released the day before the session was recorded, reached number 30, the pinnacle of The Fall’s chart performance.

Athlete Cured (their unashamed Spinal Tap rip-off) has a fuller sound here, especially in regard to Steve Hanley’s throbbingly fuzzy bass line. It also adds some effects that make you feel like you’re being strafed by laser gun-toting alien stormtroopers

Australians In Europe was released six months later on some versions of the Hit The North single. The version here is not vastly different.

Compared to the album version, Guest Informant is a little cleaner and spacious in its production; the organ sound floating around is a positive addition and there’s some excellently fizzy, fuzzed-up guitar towards the end. The version of Twister (which appeared in January 1988 on the Victoria single) is the pick of the bunch here, adding an impressive level of demented mania to the song.

Disc 4 – Sessions 12-15, 1988-1992
Session 12
• Recorded: 25 October 1988
• Broadcast: 31 October 1988
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar, vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Marcia Schofield – keyboards, vocals; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

Deadbeat Descendant / Cab It Up / Squid Lord / Kurious Oranj

The group’s twelfth session was recorded shortly after the end of their run of performances of I Am Curious, Orange at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Cab It Up and Kurious Oranj, the two tracks that were included on the I Am Kurious Oranj album (released the day before the session was recorded) had both been in the group’s set since March and May respectively, and both had clocked up quite a few performances already (54 and 29 respectively).

Kurious Oranj here is broadly similar to the album version, but is marred slightly in places by an unpleasantly shrill and intrusive keyboard sound. Cab It Up (without its exclamation mark at this point), however, is the highlight of this set. Although the album take is energetic enough, this version adds another layer of fizz and vigour. Scanlon is on particularly fine form, really letting loose with the frantic, slashing chords in a thrilling finale.

Deadbeat Descendant had been in the live set since June, and had also had a fair few outings by this stage (26). It was recorded in early 1989 for the Cab It Up single, by which time it hadn’t altered dramatically (apart from ‘dead’ and ‘beat’ now being two separate words).

Squid Lord was also re-recorded in early 1989, appearing on Seminal Live as Squid Law. It wouldn’t be played live until December 1988, and was only performed seven times over the next month. This version is slightly brasher and faster than on the album, but both are decent versions of a rather underrated little gem.

Session 13
• Recorded: 17 December 1989
• Broadcast: 1 January 1990
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Martin Bramah – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Marcia Schofield – keyboards, vocals; Simon Wolstencroft – drums; Kenny Brady – fiddle

Chicago Now / Black Monk Theme / Hilary / Whizz Bang (never broadcast)

The first session for six years not to feature Brix, session #13 also saw the temporary return of Martin Bramah, last seen on session #2 back in 1978. In addition, Kenny Brady added violin in the first of his pair of session appearances.

It focused mainly on songs recently recorded for Extricate, which was released a month after the session was broadcast. Hilary (which had been played live for only the second time the night before the session was recorded) is more uptempo than the album version, which suits it, and overall is brighter and punchier. The same is also true of Chicago, although the Art of Noise-style synth stabs detract a little from its sinister menace.

Black Monk Theme is a substantial improvement on the Extricate version. Like Hilary, a faster tempo sits well with the track; in addition, Smith’s vocals have more bite and Brady’s fiddle is a little more expansive and expressive. Not for the first time, the group borrow the Glitter Band’s famous drum pattern and do so to great effect, Funky Si adding an insistent, thumping rumble to the track. The only downside is that the keyboards suffer from the same problem as the backing vocals on Eat Y’self Fitter (see above), appearing to have been recorded in an adjacent studio.

The box set also saw the first ever release of Whizz Bang, which wasn’t broadcast because it contained a profanity (see video below at 1:23). An alternative version of the song, Butterflies 4 Brains, was a b-side on the Popcorn Double Feature single and was played half a dozen times in the spring of 1990. The Butterflies version is a dreamy, woozy piece of psychedelia; Whizz Bang is a bit more aggressive, more varied in tempo and features a prominent violin part from Brady that gives a bit of edge to the track. There’s also a spot of banjo lurking in the background that adds some interesting texture to what is yet another of those hidden gems in the group’s back catalogue.

Session 14
• Recorded: 5 March 1991
• Broadcast: 23 March 1991
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Simon Wolstencroft – drums; Kenny Brady – fiddle

The War Against Intelligence / Idiot Joy Showland / A Lot Of Wind / The Mixer

Following Bramah and Schofield’s dismissal in the summer of 1990, session #14 saw The Fall as a slimmed-down four-piece, augmented once again by Kenny Brady’s violin. All four tracks recorded would appear on Shift-Work, released a month after the session.

Idiot Joy Showland was the only one that had been played live at this point: it had been performed nine times during the previous December. Here, it’s much more aggressive than the album version and Steve Hanley’s bass is admirably loud and gnarly.

The other three tracks wouldn’t appear on a setlist for another couple of months – they all received their debut in Frankfurt on the 23 May. The War Against Intelligence isn’t notably different from the album version. Like Idiot Joy ShowlandA Lot Of Wind sees Steve Hanley turn his amp up and try to inject a bit of vigour into the song; even he (ably and enthusiastically abetted by Brady), however, can’t really rescue a thin and mundane idea. It also doesn’t warrant the five and a half minutes it takes up.

The Mixer is a very different beast without Dave Bush’s contributions. Once again, Hanley’s booming bass drives the song, which is played at a rapid, unforgiving pace; some nice use of megaphone-MES as well.

Session 15
• Recorded: 19 January 1992
• Broadcast: 15 February 1992
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Dave Bush – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

Free Range / Kimble / Immortality / Return

By the time the group returned to the BBC, ten months later, they had expanded to a five-piece outfit, Dave Bush now installed as the full-time keyboard player. (He had contributed to Shift-Work, but only had a ‘with’ credit.)

The four musicians had spent much of the previous autumn in Bush’s home studio, and not surprisingly his influence on the Fall’s sound (a not insignificant factor throughout the early 90s) can clearly be heard on both Free Range and Immortality here.

Free Range is arguably the track that best captures the merger between the group’s traditional virtues and Bush’s electronics. It had been debuted the previous August (Bush’s first live performance with the group) and would go on to be one of the most played Fall songs. The session version is admirably robust, but doesn’t quite match the ferocity of the single and album versions that would be released two months later.

Immortality wouldn’t be played live for another couple of months (you can hear its first outing on Nottingham ’92) and seems to have been a song that Smith tired of rapidly, judging by his comments during its first performance and the fact that it was only played twice more. Whilst still a little sluggish, the session has a bit more body to it than the album take, achieved largely through a beefier bass sound.

The final Code: Selfish track, Return, at least spares us the plinky Casio keyboard percussion effects of the album version, Wolstencroft providing some much livelier percussion. But even though MES sounds a little more engaged here, it doesn’t really elevate it much beyond a somewhat uninspired plod.

Front cover

The session also contains a bit of an oddityKimble appeared on record in 1993 as the title track of a rather random Peel sessions compilation EP. It wasn’t played live until 1997, when it got a couple of outings (described by Reformation as ‘either a piece of genius or complete rubbish’) at the group’s two nights at Jilly’s Rockworld in Manchester.

A (very loose) cover of a Trojan reggae tune by Lee Perry (under the name The Creators), it features a snippet of Sinister Waltz – plus what sounds like someone clearing away last night’s wine glasses – before ambling into four minutes of vaguely entertaining but meandering and aimless reggae. Doesn’t sound like a lot of thought went into it.

Disc 5 – Sessions 16-20
Session 16
• Recorded: 28 February 1993
• Broadcast: 13 March 1993
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Dave Bush – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

Ladybird (Green Grass) / Strychnine / Service / Paranoia Man In Cheap Sh*t Room

For only the third occasion, the same line-up returned to Maida Vale to record the next session. Despite the relative stability regarding personnel, it was still – as ever- a turbulent time for the group, having recently been dropped by Phonogram and forced to relocate to Permanent.

Three of the four songs recorded had been debuted on stage towards the end of 1992, although they had only had eleven appearances between them. Service wouldn’t be played until May, and only stayed on the setlist for a brief period of time. The version here is even more soporific than the torpid one on the album.

Strychnine (a cover of a 1965 track by The Sonics – also covered in 1980 by The Cramps) is far more successful. It’s a heads-down, no-nonsense slice of dynamic garage-punk, although it falls a little short of the blistering original. The group never made another studio recording of the song – this is the version that featured on the 2006 reissue of The Infotainment Scan, as well as the Backdrop and 13 Killers compilations.

Like Free Range, Paranoia Man strikes a careful balance between the rock/electronic elements; its intense urgency is no less effective than the album version. In the box set’s booklet, Daryl Easlea suggests that it samples the acid house track Stakker Humanoid.

The pick of the bunch, however, is Ladybird (Green Grass). Outstanding though the The Infotainment Scan‘s opener is, this rougher-edged, ‘scuffed-up’ version just about pips it. There’s an excellent and intricately detailed review of this version here that’s well worth reading whilst you listen.

Session 17
• Recorded: 2 December 1993
• Broadcast: 12 January 1994
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Dave Bush – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

M5 / Behind The Counter / Reckoning / Hey! Student

Unprecedentedly, session #17 saw the third successive BBC recording by the same line-up. Karl Burns had rejoined the group for its May 1993 UK tour, and would also play on 1994’s Middle Class Revolt, but his temporary dismissal for on-tour misdemeanours in America during August meant that he wasn’t present for this session.

Middle Class Revolt was a distinctly patchy LP, and the first two tracks of this session are a distinct improvement on the album versions. Behind The Counter has more grit and vigour about it, and contains some extravagantly distorted bass from Mr Hanley in the closing section. (The video below is the Peel version and not ‘live’ as it’s confusingly titled.)

M5 is also superior to M5#1, its album equivalent. Heavier on the keyboards, it also features a much more distinct guitar part and rugged bass line and has greater vitality overall. In addition, Smith’s vocal has far more clarity and energy. (Once again, the video has a misleading title.)

The session, however, is a game of two halves. Hey! Student, whilst it has a certain rickety charm, has – unusually for The Fall – an air of ‘look back’ about it, not least as it’s a retread of a song that dates back to 1977. This version does, however, contain the notable and somewhat disturbing line about ‘masturbating with your Shaun Ryder face’.

On Middle Class Revolt, The Reckoning (which is without its definite article here) is a perfectly decent melancholy and bittersweet track. The session version is disappointing: lacklustre and sluggish.

 

Session 18
• Recorded: 20 November 1994
• Broadcast: 17 December 1994
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Dave Bush – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums; Karl Burns – drums; Lucy Rimmer – vocals

Glam Racket-Star / Jingle Bell Rock / Hark The Herald Angels Sing / Numb At The Lodge

This session saw Brix’s first appearance at Maida Vale since 1988, and the return of a two-drummer line-up – last seen on session #7 in 1983. It was also one of the briefest sessions, falling just short of the eleven minute mark.

It found The Fall in festive mood, recording two Christmas-related songs. Sadly, neither of the Yuletide-related tunes are especially successful. Their version of Jingle Bell Rock (a 1957 hit for Bobby Helms) is rather a shambles, although at least, at 70 seconds, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Steve Hanley’s entertaining account of the recording makes clear why it sounds as it does.

Hark The Herald Angels Sing actually starts off well enough, with a laid-back REM/ Teenage Fanclub-ish strum and Smith’s entertainingly terse delivery. But the chorus (sung by Lucy Rimmer in deliberately over the top operatic style), although hilarious the first couple of times you hear it, is enough to set anyone’s teeth on edge.

Thankfully, the other two tracks are much better. In one of the rare occasions where the group revisited an old song (although in this case it was less than two years old) they recorded an exuberant stomp through Glam Racket, which on this occasion included Brix’s ‘Star’ section. The extra lyrics on this version, which had appeared in the group’s shows since Brix’s return in the summer of 1994, are a not-even-thinly-disguised swipe at Smith’s egotism (possibly her retaliation for Bad News Girl). Whether MES didn’t realise or didn’t care is unclear. What is certain, though, is that Brix’s vehement vocals (although she ducks out of saying ‘f*ck’ at 2:06) make for an excellent version.

Numb At The Lodge (which would become Feeling Numb on Cerebral Caustic) is a spirited, poppy thrash. Its ragged energy makes it slightly preferable to the album version.

Session 19
• Recorded: 7 December 1995
• Broadcast: 22 December 1995
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Julia Nagle – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums; Karl Burns – drums; Lucy Rimmer – vocals

He Pep! / Oleano / Chilinist / The City Never Sleeps

Session #19 saw the group yet again in turmoil. Craig Scanlon was sacked in the autumn of 1995, and Dave Bush was sacked and replaced by Julia Nagle. Smith, by his own admission, was hitting the whisky hard at this point. And yet, in typical fashion, the group still managed to record an intriguing and inventive, if flawed session.

He Pep! is introduced by the ‘interlude’ that would form the opening of Chilinism on The Light User Syndrome before launching into a crunchy and forceful assault, with both MES and (especially) Brix making aggressive contributions. It’s a mess, but an intense and powerful one.

Oleano is less frantic than the album version, but doesn’t lack in intensity.  It develops a thick, grinding guitar figure in the second half, and Brix’s scream at 2:04 is impressively startling. Again, it’s raw and ragged; perhaps indicative of the group’s state of mind at the time.

Chilinist – one of the multitude of versions of The Chiselers that the group recorded at the time – perhaps lacks some of the complexities and nuances of some of the other studio versions, but in some ways it’s rewarding to hear a more straightforward rendition of a song that the group, frankly, messed around with a little too much.

No offence to Lucy Rimmer, who is clearly a decent enough vocalist, but The City Never Sleeps is frankly one of the worst things (if not the worst thing) that the group ever recorded. The original was a wet, saccharine piece of 60s kitsch already, but the group manage to transform into something even worse – unspeakably bad, like a Chumbawamba b-side.

Session 20
• Recorded: 30 June 1996
• Broadcast: 18 August 1996
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Julia Nagle – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums; Karl Burns – drums

D.I.Y. Meat / Spinetrak / Spencer / Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones

Brix’s final session appearance. It was recorded shortly before the group’s disastrous UK tour, which saw – amongst many other things – Brix quit for good and the infamous Worthing gig which some consider The Fall’s worst ever. On many occasions throughout their career the group would somehow conjure some of their best music out of times of great adversity; sadly, this wasn’t the case here.

It’s a disjointed and underwhelming set. D.I.Y. Meat is thin-sounding; Spinetrak is spirited enough, but Brix’s panting is uncomfortably high in the mix; the cover of Beefheart’s Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones is not without its unhinged charm, but overall is an under-rehearsed, self-indulgent mess. Spencer bears little resemblance to Levitate‘s Spencer Must Die, and at this point is little more than a lazy,  half-formed idea with a horribly flatulent synth. Not the group’s finest hour.

Disc 6 – Sessions 21-24
Session 21
• Recorded: 3 February 1998
• Broadcast: 3 March 1998
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Steve Hanley – bass; Julia Nagle – keyboards, guitar; Karl Burns – drums; John Rolleson – backing vocals.

Calendar / Touch Sensitive / Masquerade / Jungle Rock

It would be over two and a half years before The Fall would return to the BBC for Peel session #21 – the third biggest gap between sessions. Since their previous visit, the group had not only lost Brix, but also one of their two drummers, Simon Wolstencroft having quit during the recording of Levitate. According to the box set’s credits (and thefall.org) Tommy Crooks – who had joined the group on guitar in the summer of 1997 and wouldn’t leave until April 1998 – didn’t appear on this session, although it’s not entirely clear why.

Calendar (co-written by Damon Gough, aka Badly Drawn Boy) is a bit sketchy and vague compared to the excellent (and much briefer) version that appeared on the Masquerade single, released the week after this session was recorded. (Snippets of that version appear here, just after the two-minute mark). It’s still the highlight of another under-par set.

Masquerade itself had been on the setlist for nearly 18 months and had been played live 24 times by this point. It’s a more lengthy and laid-back version than the album take, meandering on for quite a bit longer than it needs to. There’s also a bizarrely clumsy edit at 2:27.

Jungle Rock is also necessarily lengthy – almost exactly twice as long as the album version. More importantly, a shrill and piercing synth makes it a difficult listen. Julia Nagle at times appears to be dismantling her guitar rather than playing it. The opening thirty seconds are interesting, at least: an ominous, lumbering introduction where the group appear to be impersonating Slint.

Touch Sensitive features backing vocals from John Rolleson, the group’s tour manager at the time. The song wouldn’t get its live debut for another couple of months, but would go on to be one The Fall’s most-played live tracks. At this point, it sounds distinctly sloppy and under-rehearsed.

John Rolleson and Steve Hanley, New York March 1998 (photo by Dean Walcott)

Session 22
• Recorded: 18 October 1998
• Broadcast: 4 November 1998
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Julia Nagle – keyboards, guitar; Neville Wilding – guitar; Karen Leatham – bass, keyboards; Tom Head – drums; Speth Hughes – special effects

Bound Soul One / Antidotes / Shake-Off / This Perfect Day

It’s perhaps surprising that this session even took place, given that it came only six months after the group’s total meltdown in New York. It featured (apart from Julia Nagle) a completely new line-up: Leatham and Head had been recruited in August and had only performed live twice at this point; Wilding had only just joined, playing his first gig three days after the session was recorded. Elspeth (‘Speth’) Hughes was a studio engineer who produced some audio collages that the group used as intro tapes for gigs at the time.

Given the line-up’s very limited experience of playing together, plus as the fact that the material was very new (only This Perfect Day had been played live by this point, and that only twice), it would be only reasonable to expect the session to be on the rough and ready side. But it’s more than rough and ready: it’s a turgid, shambolic mess.

Bound Soul One sounds like the group only learned the song that afternoon. MES, drenched in reverb, provides a slurred, incoherent drawl; Leatham throws in some Aladdin Sane style free-jazz piano; Wilding determinedly ploughs on with the choppy chords. It sounds like none of them can hear each other.

On The Marshall Suite, (Jung Nev’s) Antidotes was an impressively sweeping and dramatic wave of industrial noise. Here, Antidotes verges on the unlistenable. Most of it consists of Head toiling away at his (admittedly not too bad) John Bonham impression whilst Smith attempts to recreate the sound of drilling equipment by trying to swallow the microphone whole.

Their cover of The Saints’ excellent 1977 singleThis Perfect Day, is a little more effective. Smith attacks the lyric with considerable gusto, Wilding contributes some aggressive, distorted guitar work and Head hammers along forcefully. Leatham seems to be making it up as she goes along though, and the whole thing sounds very much like a first rehearsal.

Shake-Off (which wouldn’t be debuted live for another couple of months) also sounds very much like a work in progress. Clocking in at just 104 seconds, it’s raw and simplistic, lacking the intricate layers of the majestic album version; but you can just about hear the origins of a truly great song.

Session 23
• Recorded: 19 February 2003
• Broadcast: 13 March 2003
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Ben Pritchard – guitar, backing vocals; Jim Watts – bass, backing vocals; Dave Milner – drums, backing vocals; Eleanor Poulou – keyboards, backing vocals

Theme from Sparta F.C. / Contraflow / Grooving With Mr Bloe-Green-Eyed Loco Man / Mere Pseud Mag Ed.

Nearly four and a half years elapsed before The Fall recorded session #23, by far the largest gap between sessions. Not surprisingly, it saw only Smith remain from the previous line-up. The group were going through a relatively settled period at the time (although ‘relatively settled’ for The Fall is always a relative term), and this is reflected in a strong, focused set of songs. For the first time in several sessions, the group sound like they’re actually enjoying themselves.

Pritchard kicks things off with a fierce and fuzzy intro to Sparta. The group rip through the song with fizzing energy, and it doesn’t fall far short of the exemplary single version.

Contraflow – which wouldn’t get its live debut for another three months – is impressively tight and focused for a new song, even if MES seems to be improvising a little (albeit with enthusiasm) with its structure towards the end. Dave Milner provides some excellent backing vocals. It doesn’t have quite the manic energy of the album version, but again, it’s not far off.

Grooving With Mr Bloe is a cover of an instrumental 1969 one-hit wonder by Wind, and forms a nifty little introduction to Green-Eyed Loco Man, supported by random interjections from Smith and others. (Although Reformation suggests that this was never played live, it was – Lisbon 29 September 2003 being an example.) Green-Eyed Loco Man itself doesn’t have the multi-layered sound of the album version, but its directness (largely carried by Ben Pritchard’s fuzzed-up guitar) is equally satisfying.

To finish off, the group make one of their occasional revisits to an old tune – 21 (!) years old in this case. Mere Pseud Mag Ed. had returned to the setlist six months earlier after a five-year absence, and the group make a fine job of it here. It’s loud, aggressive and full of f*ck-you attitude; Pritchard, Watts and Milner thrash it out with tight exuberance and Smith snarls and sneers out the vocal like he’s 25 again. Top notch. (It’s at 14:07 in the video below.)

Session 24
• Recorded: 4 August 2004
• Broadcast: 12 August 2004 (Job Search broadcast on 31 August 2004)
• Mark E Smith – vocals; Ben Pritchard – guitar; Jim Watts – guitar, bass; Steve Trafford – bass; Spencer Birtwistle – drums; Eleanor Poulou – keyboards; Ed Blaney – guitar, vocals

Clasp Hands / Blindness / What About Us? / Wrong Place, Right Time-I Can Hear The Grass Grow

The final Peel session was recorded 18 months after the penultimate one. It saw Steve Trafford, Spencer Birtwistle and Ed Blaney make their sole appearances and was recorded three weeks before Peel’s death.

Clasp Hands is vibrant and up-tempo; includes an Elves/I Wanna Be Your Dog interlude that was cut from the album version. Blindness is simply magnificent: a little more sparse than the album version but equally awesome; and has Smith ever delivered anything more perfectly than ‘the neck…’ to ‘…plastic’ (2:29-2:46)?

What About Us? is also a little less dense than the album version, but is still pleasingly forceful and direct. There’s another blast from the past: Wrong Place, Right Time (which was 16 years old and had recently seen its first live appearance for eleven years) belies its age; the group take it on with vibrant enthusiasm (listen to Smith’s exuberant ‘shout!’ at 1:54). The segue into I Can Hear The Grass Grow is remarkably subtle by Fall standards, featuring a post-rock style spoken-word sample and bed of feedback. 

Grass itself is solid enough, if a little leaden in comparison to the album version. It features some surprisingly tuneful backing vocals from (presumably) Ed Blaney.

The group recorded a fifth track, Job Search, that was pressed as a one-off acetate and presented to John Peel for his 65th birthday. It’s an odd and incoherent lo-fi ramble, but its strangeness makes for a wholly appropriate conclusion to the group’s contributions to Peel’s show. Peel’s comments at either end of the video below are really rather touching – they’re a fine and fitting way to round things off.

Other Radio Sessions / Broadcasts
As well as the 24 Peel sessions, the group recorded several other radio broadcasts. Their commercially successful period in the late 80s / early 90s in particular saw them branch out into sessions for more mainstream Radio 1 shows, such as those of David Jensen, Janice Long and Mark Goodier. Many of these sessions feature on the bootleg On The Wireless – The Non Peel Radio Sessions (there’s a lengthy blog post about it here, although most of it is spent discussing the Brownies gig).

Part of the group’s 17 May 1981 performance at Groningen in The Netherlands was broadcast on Dutch radio, and this recording has popped up on bootlegs in various guises (it includes an eight-minute version of Fantastic Life that’s very rough and dodgily-recorded but is well worth a listen). Their August 1982 gig in Melbourne (captured on the 1998 release Live To Air In Melbourne ’82) was broadcast live on Australian radio. There were several more live radio broadcasts of this type in the 80s and 90s, which are included in the list below.

[This bit was distinctly tricky to compile, but I think it’s as accurate as it can be – please feel free to message me if you think there are any errors/omissions.]

David Jensen session

• Recorded 19 February 1984, first broadcast 1 March 1984 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Brix/Scanlon/S.Hanley/P.Hanley/Burns

Lay Of The Land / God Box / Oh! Brother / C.R.E.E.P.

The group’s first ‘mainstream’ radio session was for David ‘Kid’ Jensen. Jensen hosted Radio 1’s evening show between 1981 and 1984 and was a close friend of John Peel – the duo presented Top Of The Pops together on several occasions.

The session is quite low-key by The Fall’s standards (Brother and C.R.E.E.P. are particularly light and poppy; Lay Of The Land is relatively restrained) but this was still challenging stuff by the standards of early 80s prime time British radio. (The video below has the date wrong.)

Saturday Live session

• Broadcast live to air 29 August 1984 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Brix/Scanlon/S.Hanley/P.Hanley/Burns

Copped It / Elves / Fortress – Marquis Cha-Cha

If the group had put on their ‘pop’ face for Kid Jensen, they were distinctly more aggressive in this performance. There’s a fine, grinding version of Copped It and grimy, scuzzy take on Elves. Most interestingly, a sparse but forceful Fortress segues surprisingly into a sprightly Marquis Cha-Cha.

Janice Long session 1

• Recorded 9 September 1984, first broadcast 17 September 1984 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Brix/Scanlon/S.Hanley/P.Hanley/Burns

Stephen Song / No Bulbs / Draygo’s Guilt / Slang King

Janice Long took over the Radio 1 evening slot from David Jensen in 1984. Another Radio 1 DJ who struck up a close friendship with John Peel, she and Peel were also often to be found presenting TOTP together.

Image result for janice long john peel

Once again, the group are relatively restrained in their approach, perhaps because of the early evening audience. But they still produce four taut and focused (if rather ‘clean’) versions of TWAFWOTF tracks. Steve Hanley makes Slang King a particularly funky affair.

Janice Long session 2

• Recorded 13 May 1987, first broadcast 19 May 1987 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Brix/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Schofield(?)/Wolstencroft

Frenz / Get A Hotel / There’s A Ghost In My House / Haf Found Bormann

The group returned to Long’s show three years later. Frenz finds Brix rather overdoing the sugary backing vocals, and there’s some rather clunky electronic percussion. The version of Get A Hotel, however, is a bit leaner and energetic than the album version (even if someone’s guitar is a little out of tune). There’s also a sharp, uptempo take on There’s A Ghost In My House that’s amongst the group’s best performances of the song. Haf Found Bormann is, as ever, a bit mad. Hard to believe that it was actually broadcast on early evening Radio 1.

Both thefall.org and Dave Thompson (p176) suggest that Simon Rogers played keyboards on this session, but it was probably Marcia Schofield. The session was recorded in the afternoon of the 13th May, and the group played the Astoria that night. Although the video of this gig doesn’t have the greatest picture quality, Schofield was clearly on keyboards that night – see, for example, 1:18 on the video – which makes it a little unlikely that Rogers alone played keyboards on the session. (Many thanks to thehippriestess for her help with the info on this one.)

In Concert

• Recorded 19 May 1987, first broadcast 25 May 1987 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Brix/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Wolstencroft/Schofield(?)

Australians in Europe / Shoulder Pads / There’s a Ghost in My House / Hey! Luciani / Terry Waite Sez / Fiery Jack / Lucifer over Lancashire

The  recording of The Fall’s Nottingham Rock City gig from May 1987 (which was released as a live album in 1993) was broadcast on Radio 1. It’s an adequate but rather limp and flat recording.

Front cover

Once again, there’s some confusion over the line-up here. The discography page for the live album on thefall,org says that Brix played ‘guitar/keyboards’; the cover simply says ‘Brix E Smith (keyboard)’. It’s highly unlikely, however, that Schofield didn’t play keyboards on this recording.

Piccadilly Radio session

• Recording date unknown, first broadcast 25 February 1988
• Smith/Brix/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Schofield/Wolstencroft

In These Times / Carry Bag Man / Cab It Up / Oswald Defence Lawyer

Not a great deal seems to be known about this session. There are fairly unremarkable trundles through three songs from The Frenz Experiment, plus a curiously lethargic Cab It Up .

John Peel’s 50th Birthday Party

• Recorded 29 August 1989, first broadcast 30 August 1989 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Bramah/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Schofield/Wolstencroft

Mere Pseud Mag Ed / I’m Frank / Arms Control Poseur / Fiery Jack / Race with the Devil / Carry Bag Man / Mr. Pharmacist

The Fall, along with The Wedding Present and The House Of Love, played at the Subterrania in London as part of Peel’s 50th birthday celebrations. The only officially released track for this performance was their Gene Vincent cover Race with the Devil, which eventually appeared on Backdrop in 2001 and the 2013 EP The Remainderer.

The rest of the set (available on bootleg) sounds a little shambolic and sluggish, although the latter factor might be partially due to the rather mediocre quality of the recording. Dave Thompson (p177) suggests that Kenny Brady played on this performance, although this seems unlikely, especially as the recording contains no (audible) violin.

Norwich Sound City 92

• Broadcast live to air, 21 April 1992 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Bush/Wolstencroft

And Therein / Blood Outta Stone / Time Enough at Last / Free Range / Idiot Joy Showland / Gentlemen’s Agreement / Edinburgh Man

Broadcast as part of Mark Goodier’s show.

Sheffield Sound City 1993
• Broadcast live to air, 7 April 1993 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Bush/Wolstencroft

Why Are People Grudgeful / Ladybird (Green Grass) / Glam-Racket / Free Range / I’m Going to Spain / The League of Bald-Headed Men / Lost in Music

Another live broadcast by Mark Goodier. The discography on thefall.org suggests that an early version of It’s A Curse might have been played as an introduction.

Mark Goodier session

• Recorded 1 May 1993, first broadcast 17 May 1993 on BBC Radio 1
• Smith/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Bush/Wolstencroft

Glam Racket / War / 15 Ways / A Past Gone Mad

Mark Goodier hosted Radio 1’s evening show in the early 90s. Unlike David Jensen and Janice Long, he didn’t have a close relationship with John Peel, although Peel was his inspiration for becoming a DJ.

The session consists of four perfectly decent if not especially remarkable versions of InfotainmentMiddle Class revolt songs.

Manchester Roadhouse 1993

• Recorded December 8 1993, first broadcast 29 April 1994 on Radio 1
• Smith/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Bush/Wolstencroft

M5 / Ladybird (Green Grass) / Behind the Counter / I’m Going to Spain / The League of Bald-Headed Men / War / I’m Frank / A Past Gone Mad / Glam Racket / Lost in Music / Strychnine / Cab Driver / Return / Free Range

Not a lot I can tell you, other than it was played on Peel’s show. There’s a brief account of the gig here.

Phoenix Festival 1995

• Broadcast and recorded 14 July 1995 on Radio 1
• Smith/Brix/Scanlon/S.Hanley/Bush/Wolstencroft/Burns

Pearl City / Behind the Counter / Free Range / Don’t Call Me Darling / The Chiselers / Feeling Numb / Idiot Joy Showland / Edinburgh Man / Glam Racket

The group’s set at 1995’s Phoenix Festival (or part of it at least) was broadcast on Peel’s Radio 1 show on the same day as the group’s performance. It wasn’t, however, a live-to-air affair: several songs from the setlist were missing (including Rainmaster‘s only performance), and the group’s position on the bill (fifth, between Van Morrison and The Wedding Present) can’t have matched with the 10pm start of Peel’s Friday show at the time. Plus, as the video below shows, the group played in daylight.

The broadcast was released as a live album in 2003, which was reviewed in YMGTA #25.

Roskilde Backstage Danish Radio

• Recorded 27 June 1996, broadcast date unknown
• Smith/Brix/S.Hanley/Nagle/Wolstencroft/Burns

Spinetrak / U.S. 80s-90s / 15 Ways / U.S. 80s-90s (“No Fun At All Mix”)

The Fall played Denmark’s Roskilde festival in the summer of 1996: a not entirely happy visit, as it involved Smith’s rather unfortunate encounter with UK hip-hop group The Brotherhood (see YMGTA #27). This rather excitable review felt that the festival had ‘one of the most incredible lineups in music festival history… god damned bananas. No other festival even came close’. To be fair, it was an impressively large and diverse set of acts; you have to squint to see The Fall on the poster, so I’ve circled it –

Rosk

This radio recording, however, doesn’t feature the group’s festival set. According to both thefall.org’s gigography and Reformation, it was a ‘ live session performed for Danish Radio in the backstage area of the Roskilde festival’. It’s not clear when (or even if) it was broadcast on Danish radio, but a good quality recording of it emerged a few years later.

There’s a brisk version of 15 Ways, enlivened by added vocals from Brix. Spinetrak sees the vocals way too high in the mix and the guitar virtually inaudible; oddly, it finds Smith quoting Kid Creole and the Coconuts. US 80s-90s is pleasingly sharp; the ‘No Fun At All Mix’ (the title possibly inspired by The Sex Pistol’s appearance at the festival, which saw them walk off after being bombarded with bottles) just takes the same recording and rather pointlessly throws in a few half-hearted ‘swooshing’ effects.

Phoenix Festival 1996
• Recorded and broadcast, 21 July 1996 on Radio 1
• Smith/Brix/S.Hanley/Nagle/Wolstencroft/Burns

He Pep / U.S. 80’s-90’s / The Chiselers / 15 Ways / Pearl City / Powder Keg / Behind the Counter

The group found themselves on the same bill as The Sex Pistols once more at the 1996 Phoenix Festival. It was broadcast on Peel’s show on the same day as the performance, but again wasn’t ‘live to air’, this being only a selection from the group’s set.

Four songs from the performance were included on Live At The Phoenix Festival (see above).

Robert Elms session

• Broadcast live to air on BBC’s GLR 15 April 1999
• Smith/Wilding/Leatham/Helal/Head

Antidotes / F-‘Oldin’ Money

Another session about which little seems to be known.

Either on the same day or the day before (the gigography and Reformation say the former; the discography and the cover [see above] of the 2011 reissue of The Marshall Suite say the latter), the group performed a raucous eight-song set – swathed in reverb and distortion – at an afternoon gig sponsored by radio station XFM. Not really a radio session as such, although it is described as such on some bootlegs.

Mixing It session

• Recorded 13 October 2005, first broadcast 10 February 2006 on BBC Radio 3
• Smith/PritchardTrafford/Birtwistle/Poulou

Higgle-dy-Piggle-dy / Assume / Midnight In Aspen / Pacifying Joint

Six months after the release of The Complete Peel Sessions, the group made its first BBC Radio 3 appearance, on the experimental music show Mixing It. They played three tracks from Fall Heads Roll, including a short and snappy Pacifying Joint and a sparse, tender Midnight In Aspen. The latter concludes with a brief Smith monologue ‘Maybe next Saturday when he can shoot / As he (?) descend into the mall / The frogs never told me this, he said / Neither did the group’.

They also played a cover of Higgle-dy-Piggle-dy by The Monks (who they’d previously covered on Middle Class Revolt and Extricate). This track would appear on a 2006 Monks tribute album called Silver Monk Time (the Discogs page of which suggests the unlikely line-up of: MES – vocals and guitar, Birtwistle – drums, Eleni – synthesizer, organ, bass). It was also released on a limited edition 7″ single, backed by the slightly deranged Monk Time by Alec Empire ft. Gary Burger.

An interview with MES was recorded at the same time and broadcast – in two parts – between songs (you can hear the whole thing at the end of the video below). In it, Smith goes over some well-worn topics – his dislike of musicians, his love of The Monks, how the group was actually ‘democratic’ – as well as explaining (sort of) the lyrics to the three FHR tracks. In addition, he reveals that he believes that the place where monks live is a ‘coven’.

Mike Joyce Coalition Chart Show

• Recorded and broadcast 17 June 2010 on East Village Radio
• Smith/Greenway/Spurr/Melling/Poulou

Mexico Wax Solvent 1 / Over! Over! / Hungry Freaks Daddy / Mexico Wax Solvent 2

Five years after their penultimate radio session, the group recorded four songs for ex-Smiths drummer Joyce’s show on internet station East Village Radio. The songs will be covered properly when I get to the Your Future Our Clutter post, but in the meantime you can hear the session here.

Conclusion
Simon Goddard’s comment above – ‘when The Fall were on form, Peel caught them at their very best… it’s hard to imagine a more satisfying or comprehensive career overview than this’ – is impossible for any sane and rational person to argue with.

It’s not that they were always ‘on form’, of course: the box set captures several low points in amongst all the highs. But that, in many ways, is the beauty of it. What it does do – incredibly well – is capture the undulating, random, inconsistent and complex narrative of the group’s history. Listening to it from start to finish is a rewarding, frustrating, baffling, inspiring and thought-provoking journey through a unique story.

The great leap forward of 1980; the ebb and flow of Brix’s contributions; the rise and fall of Dave Bush’s electronic influence; the descents into intoxicated sloppiness; the proudly disdainful renaissances… all are captured here – and in a way that no book, article or blog can possibly hope to capture fully on their own. Understanding the context of this 26 year story adds immeasurably to your appreciation, of course, but it’s this seven hours of music that does the real, meaningful talking.

With regard to the clichéd hypothetical situation of having to rescue one album from a house fire or choosing one release with which to be stranded on a desert island, it has to be (leaving personalised mix-CDs aside) this one. And I say this as someone for whom two out of three absolute favourite tracks (Dr Bucks’ Letter and Paintwork) don’t feature.

An immense, fascinating and inspiring collection. Find yourself a spare seven hours and listen to one of the greatest musical stories ever told.

My Compilation
I decided early on that I wouldn’t rank the sessions. Tempting though it is to do so (and I know some readers might be a little disappointed at not having a list to argue with), it felt like a really artificial exercise that would miss the point of the collection. (I know that the rankings are always a fundamentally pointless activity really, but they’re even more so here.) There was also no way I was going to attempt a 45-minute ‘best of’.

What I did decide to do was to bend the usual  rules and compile a double CD compilation featuring one track from each session.

CD1 [58:48]
Futures And Pasts [15/6/78]
Mess Of My [6/12/78]
New Puritan [24/9/80]
C’n’C – Hassle Schmuck [31/3/81]
Winter [15/9/81]
Garden [23/3/83]
Words Of Expectation [3/1/84]
Couldn’t Get Ahead [3/6/85]
Faust Banana [7/10/85]
Gross Chapel – GB Grenadiers [9/7/86]

CD2 [54:45]
Twister [19/5/87]
Cab It Up [31/10/88]
Black Monk Theme [01/01/90]
Idiot Joy Showland [23/03/91]
Free Range [15/02/92]
Ladybird (Green Grass) [13/03/93]
Behind The Counter [12/01/94]
Glam Racket – Star [17/12/94]
He Pep! [22/12/95]
Spinetrak [18/08/96]
Calendar [03/03/98]
Shake-Off [04/11/98]
Theme From Sparta F.C. [13/03/03]
Blindness [12/08/04]

 

References

1The Big Midweek, p86

2The Big Midweek, p87

3Radio 4 interview 1999, quoted in Ford p85

4The Big Midweek, p91

5The Big Midweek, p92

6The Big Midweek, pp111-112

7The Big Midweek, p112

 

 

 

YMGTA #33 – Fall Heads Roll

“99% of non-smokers die.”

UK version

Details
Recorded: Gigantic Studios, New York, January 2005; Gracielands Studio, Rochdale mid-2005
Released: 3 October 2005

  • Mark E Smith – vocals
  • Ben Pritchard – guitar
  • Steve Trafford – bass, vocals, guitar
  • Spencer Birtwistle – drums
  • Eleni Poulou – keyboards, vocals
    With:
  • Simon “Ding” Archer – banjo (Clasp Hands), bass (Youwanner), vocals (Trust In Me)
  • Billy Pavone / Kenny Cummings / Phil Schuster – vocals (Trust In Me)

Background
Early in 2004, MES managed to injure himself again. This time it wasn’t at a rockabilly festival: after a gig in Newcastle on 26 February, ‘in the early morning hours… Mark slipped on the icy pavement and broke his thigh bone. A woman tried to help him up but they both slipped and fell; this time Mark’s hip was fractured.’

This resulted in the group cancelling several gigs. When the tour restarted, Smith played a couple of dates in a wheelchair, on crutches, or sat at a table (see Live section below).

New York, 8/4/04 Photo by Dean Walcott

In April, Steve Trafford joined the group on bass. According to his interview with Dave Simpson, he was invited into The Fall via a conversation with Ben Pritchard in a Manchester pub toilet: ‘The next thing I knew, I was touring America’1. He played a couple of UK gigs alongside Simon Archer before ‘Ding’ was ‘loaned out’ to PJ Harvey’s band. Although this was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, Archer’s future involvement with The Fall was only on the production/engineering side of things (although he did make a few guest appearances in March 2008).

During the summer of 2004, Dave Milner left the group. His account in The Fallen2 suggests several reasons: issues with his partner, a foot problem that interfered with his ability to play, plus his frustration with the management style of Ed Blaney (who was, at this point, back in the ‘inner circle’). Spencer Birtwistle returned to the fold to replace him. Jim Watts also re-joined the group, playing throughout the second half of 2004.

Front cover

The Fall’s only single of 2004 was released on 28 June. As outlined in the last postTheme From Sparta F.C. #2 is easily the best version of the song. It reached number 66 in the singles chart.

On 4 August 2004, the group recorded their 24th and final Peel session. Broadcast on the 12th, it comprised Clasp Hands / Blindness / What About Us? / Wrong Place, Right Time / I Can Hear The Grass Grow. They also recorded Job Search, an odd little lo-fi ramble that was pressed as a one-off 7″ (with Half Man Half Biscuit on the other side) and presented to John Peel for his 65th birthday. It wasn’t broadcast as part of the original session, but was played on Peel’s show a couple of weeks later.

CD

In September, The Fall released a one-song promo CD in advance of the album Interim (see below). Blind Man (very different from the version of Blindness that appeared on Interim) is a slow, intense and menacing version of the song. You can hear it on this collection of all the studio versions of the track.

Related image

John Peel died on 25 October. His unfinished memoir, Margrave of the Marshes, was completed by his wife Sheila. In her half of the book, she described the part that Smith and the group played in their lives.

‘As if further proof were needed of the esteem in which John held The Fall, it should be remembered that he kept all their records separate from the rest of his collection. Tens of thousands of albums are squeezed onto John’s shelves. But only The Fall have their own special VIP enclosure, away from the hubbub, like religious artefacts with voodoo properties.

There was simply no other band that excited him quite so much. He once said, in a documentary made by the BBC to mark his sixtieth birthday, that he didn’t want to die yet because there would be another Fall album out soon; we even chose that comment to play at John’s funeral. What I can’t quite come to terms with now is that there will be Fall records that John will never hear.’3

Smith took part in an interview, alongside Michael Bradley of The Undertones, on BBC’s Newsnight as part of a feature about Peel’s death. (The interview is at 5:02.) Smith was a little acerbic in places (‘Am I allowed to speak now?’) and some thought he was rather dismissive of his group’s greatest champion (‘We never were friends or anything like that’), but he was much warmer (by his standards) about Peel than the interview’s reputation suggests. Smith admitted that he ‘probably looked mad’ but claimed this was because he couldn’t hear himself properly4.

Newsnight
MES on Newsnight, October 2005

Smith is occasionally a little dismissive of Peel in Renegade: ‘We never depended on John Peel for our livelihood. I don’t put my career down to him.’5 In fact, he even suggests that being a ‘Peel group’ was a ‘limitation’ for the group. He does, however, also say that ‘it’s a shame that he’s not around any more. He was a one-off.’

In Margrave, Sheila echoes MES’s comments about he and Peel not actually being friends:

‘The strange thing is that John and Mark never exchanged more than a few words over the years. Their friendship involved little more than a mumbled greeting and an occasional punch on the shoulder or squeeze of the arm.’

Smith was undoubtedly a difficult man to strike up a friendship with anyway, but it’s likely that Peel kept his distance after his chastening experience of his friendship with Marc Bolan. Sheila does say, however, that MES often wrote to Peel (signing his letters ‘Your mate Mark’) and that Smith was ‘very kind and considerate’ to her when he died.

Front cover

On 1 November 2004, The Fall released Interim, a curious mix of – as it says on the cover – ‘rehearsals + live’. The album’s title (it was originally to have been called Cocked – a word MES deploys in the early version of What About Us? included here) pointed to it being a stopgap release, as the group were not releasing a ‘proper’ album that year.

Like Seminal Live, it’s a mix of studio and live tracks, but’s a very different beast to that largely ‘straight’ studio-side/live-side affair. It has more in common with The Twenty-Seven Points‘ experimental interlude approach, given its spliced-up, scatter-gun randomness. It has the feel of a home-made, almost avant-garde mix tape.

There are several wilfully odd re-spellings/re-wordings of titles, such as Green-Eyed Snorkel, Spoilt Victorian Childe and Boxoctosis Alarum; the last of these presumably re-titled because of the smoke alarm that goes off in the studio at 1:24.

Interim sleeve: ‘Comments will be ignored.’

Green-Eyed Snorkel opens with a ropy live recording from York on 12 July before transitioning (with seemingly deliberate clumsiness) into the demo version Iodeo. There’s a rather limp, faint version of Sparta entitled Sparta FC No:3 (it does, to be fair, contain a great intro from Smith – ‘Good evening, I am Mark E Smith. We start tonight with the theme from Sparta FC, a film yet to made by the great director Xyralothep, your true God’); also a frustratingly sluggish take on Wrong Place, Right Time (truncated to Wrong Place).

I’m Ronney The Oney is a potentially interesting little riff that meanders along for a minute and a half before abruptly disappearing. The highlight of the album, however, is the alternative take of Mod Mock Goth, a sharper, brighter, more concise and coherent version than that on the Protein Christmas single.

Critics, possibly still basking in the unexpected excellence of Real New, were surprisingly kind to Interim. In The Sunday Times, Stewart Lee called it ‘inexplicably cohesive… Smith’s fearsomely focused narratives and majestically brutal accompaniment [are] an accurate document of Britain’s greatest band at work.’ Vox felt that ‘golden greats such as ‘Wrong Place Right Time’ and ‘Mere Pseud Mag Ed’ haven’t aged one jot [and] the new tracks are simply breathtaking.’

Pitchfork, who gave the album 5.8/10, were a little more realistic, calling it ‘a haphazard jumble… no one that I know of needs a disc like this… it further muddies The Fall’s already confusing and (to a newcomer) somewhat monolithic discography.’

In December 2004, Jim Watts made his final exit from the group, saying:

‘Well for anyone who is interested I have left the Fall. Again. Not amazingly acrimonious. Usual reasons. Sick of the whole credits/royalties charade. No creative control whatsoever. Finding out that apparently Dave Milner wrote Boxoctosis. And sick of the hassle over the f*cking intro CDs.

A shame though as I have really enjoyed playing gigs and recording with this line up which I feel is easily the best I have been involved with. The next record looks like it will be excellent too. It just won’t involve me.’

The group’s first release of 2005 was the Rude (All The Time) EP in February. The title song had been released back in August 2001 (see YMGTA #30), but, oddly didn’t even appear on the EP, apparently at Smith’s request.

‘Mix 15’ of Distilled Mug Art is not noticeably different from the 2G+2 version; ‘Mix 4’ of My Ex Classmates Kids is a little sharper and crisper than the one on the album; ‘Mix 5’ of I Wake Up In The City omits the TV programme sample; ‘Mix 17’ of Taxi – it’s hard to imagine that anyone ever actually mixed this track at all – is just as execrable as the original.

The 6-CD box set, The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004, was released in April 2005. YMGTA #34 will cover this in detail.

Front cover

In May 2005, The Fall made an unlikely appearance on long-running TV music show Later… With Jools Holland. Reputedly, Smith insisted in advance that the host would ‘not play f*cking boogie-woogie piano over any of his songs’. (Sources vary on the actual wording, but the message was evidently clear, as Holland – who often added incongruous tinkling over his guests’ performances – was nowhere to be seen when The Fall were playing. This story might be a little lost on non-UK readers, but trust me, it’s hilarious.)

After a taut and focused version of Pacifying Joint / I Can Hear The Grass Grow (featuring a surprisingly smooth transition between the two songs) the group belt out a cracking version of Blindness, with MES sporting an intriguing ‘one-leather-glove’ look.

According to popbitch (quoted on Fall News and not, admittedly, the most reliable of sources), Smith ‘delayed filming several times by wandering in and out of shot, calling Robert Plant c*nty and just generally behaving like what he is The Last Great Englishman… Robert Plant turned up in a bullet-proof limo, the Fall were transported by Salford Van Hire’.

On the 26 September, The Fall released the single I Can Hear The Grass Grow. Backed with Clasp Hands, it only managed number 104 in the charts.

The US version of the single contained a ‘slow version’ of I Can Hear The Grass Grow plus Bo Doodak, an alternate version of Bo Demmick. The latter ramps up the reverb and distortion a little; the former just sounds the group have all taken Mogadon.

US single

‘In The Wider World…
The week before the album’s release, controversial drawings of Muhammad printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten sparked outrage and violent riots by Muslims around the world.  The Conservative Party begin voting on a new leader following the resignation of Michael Howard, who stepped down after being defeated at the general election in May.

In the music charts (which had included downloads since April), The Pussycat Dolls had the number one single with Don’t Cha. In the album charts, David Gray was at number one with Life in Slow Motion, a selection of mid-paced, soporific ballads. He was shortly to be replaced by the even more dreary Piece By Piece by Katie Melua.

The Fall Live In 2003-05
Following Real New‘s release, The Fall played nine UK dates in December 2003: there are several – largely very positive – reviews here. On the first night in Nottingham, Mod Mock Goth was debuted, and the group played their cover of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ Walk Like A Man (which would be adapted as Breaking The Rules) for the first time. Middle Mass received its first outing for 19 years, and would be played regularly for the next six months.

Carling Academy, London 8/12/03 Photo by Nick Gibbons

2004 was the busiest year gig-wise for a while, the group managing 69 performances. The first 16 were all in the UK and were spread across the first four months of the year. On January 23, they shared the bill with The Magic Band (minus Captain Beefheart/Don Van Vliet, who had gone off to live in the desert and paint) – reviews here.

Camden Barfly 4/2/04 Photo by Jaffoon Jaffoon

On 26 February, they played Newcastle Opera House, after which MES had his accident (see above). The bootleg of the gig is only of average sound quality, but it’s an excellent performance.

Smith’s mishap led to seven dates being cancelled. He returned to the stage at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall on 6 March for a spoken word performance. Reviews (on Fall News and the Fall Online Forum) indicate that it did not go well: MES was wheeled on in a wheelchair and only performed for 15-20 minutes; boos and heckling seem to have been in evidence.

The next two gigs (Birmingham on 1 April; Liverpool on the 3rd) featured both Trafford and Archer on bass.

In April, the group headed to America, where they played 20 dates; Smith played some of these dates sat at a table or on crutches (see above). There should have been more, but several were cancelled. The 28-29 April gigs in Columbia/Oklahoma City didn’t take place because Smith had food poisoning. Ten other dates were cancelled in May: a note from MES stated enigmatically that this was because ‘The Group / New York Agency + Tour Manager are too lazy to play. 50% refund to all ticket holders’. 

Front cover

The group’s performance at New York’s Knitting Factory on 9 April was released in 2007 as (yet another) Voiceprint live album. Also known as ‘Punkcast 2004’, this recording was filmed and released as disc one of the Access All Areas – Volume One DVD. It’s of middling sound quality, but contains spirited versions of Sparta and Mere Pseud Mag Ed, plus a nicely understated Janet, Johnny and James.

Reviews of the US tour were again generally very positive. At Asheville, North Carolina on 19 April 15 Ways was played for the first time in seven years; it was performed at the next five gigs before disappearing again until it was revived once more in 2013. On the 25th, MES squeezed in a spoken word performance in Chicago. Clasp Hands was debuted in Brooklyn on 22 May.

Dave Milner’s last performance was at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona on May 28 – a gig that nobody seems to know much about.

Moorfest, Heaton Moor, Stockport 14/8/04

July and August 2004 saw the group play half a dozen gigs in the UK and Ireland (some of which were rescheduled dates following Smith’s injury earlier in the year) with Birtwistle and Watts (on guitar) back in the fold. On 11 July in York, the group played What About Us?  for the first time. Spoilt Victorian Child was resurrected after 18 years; it was played six more times in 2004 before being permanently retired. On the 29th in Stourbridge, Blindness was debuted; it was entitled ‘Blind Man’ on the setlist (which also calls Clasp Hands ‘NYC Steve’).  The bootleg of this gig is of pretty poor sound quality and the performance is a little messy to say the least.

There were 26 more dates over the last four months of 2004; a mix of UK and European dates, plus another brief visit to US in mid-October. Bo Demmick (at this point known as ‘Bo Doodack’) was played as an instrumental opener on 5 October in Munster, Germany. (Six days later, it was entitled ‘Bo Diddley’ on the Nuremberg setlist.)

Munich 13/10/04

The group returned to Iceland for a couple of gigs in mid-November.

Reykjavik 17/11/04 Photo by Oskar P. Einarsson

There were half a dozen UK gigs to round off 2004. The second of these, at Manchester’s Bierkeller on 1 December is a cracking bootleg; a crisp recording of a tight and powerful performance. There are particularly effective and lengthy versions of What About Us? and Blindness.

Two nights later, at Bristol, Trafford and Birtwistle didn’t make the gig owing to being stuck in traffic; Jim Watts filled in on bass and the support band’s drummer stepped up to play. ‘Chris’, the drummer, does a remarkably fine job. The gig was cut short because the venue had a ‘heavy metal youth club night’ planned for 10.30; MES refers to this in the amended lyrics to Mountain Energei: ‘Good evening, we are The Fall. We have to be on quickly so the youth club can start…’ After White Lightning, Eleni announces that ‘We would like to play more but there’s a club night on and we cannot play any longer’, although the group do return to grind out an aggressive Blindness. An intriguing bootleg, worth acquiring.

Their last performance of 2004, at the All Tomorrow’s Parties ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ festival (which also featured Mercury Rev, Sunn O))) and Violent Femmes) was Jim Watts’ last appearance with the group.

2005 was a little less active than the preceding year, with 41 performances. The group started the year with a one-off gig at New York’s Knitting Factory on February 10 (they were in New York recording Fall Heads Roll at the time) where Pacifying Joint and Ride Away received their debuts.

There followed a dozen UK dates in March-May. Assume was played for the first time in Middleton on 7 March.

The Empire, Milton Keynes 12/3/05 – MES and mystery dancer. Photo by Marcus Kittridge.

On 12 March in Milton Keynes, Smith was joined on stage by a mystery dancer. According to this review, ‘a young lady got on stage during Wrong Place and tried rubbing herself up against MES for a while. He gallantly continued, moving around the stage to shake her off until he could do so no more and turned to her to have words (smiling with it). Eventually a security guard escorted her back to the crowd and MES gave him a kiss for his trouble.’

On 20 May, Youwanner was played for the first time at The Forum in London.

Edinburgh 23/5/05. Photo by Kevin Barclay.

After their June 17 gig in Berlin (an energetic performance of which there’s a more than decent bootleg) The Fall played the Feedback Festival at Parc de la Villette in Paris. There is video footage of the whole gig on YouTube, apparently shot by Pascal Le Gras. It’s split into four parts: 1, 2, 3 and 4. It’s a fascinating watch (despite the incredibly shaky camera work), which sees MES in an affable and communicative mood, even handing out bottles of water to the audience.

Paris
MES about to go on stage, Paris 10/7/05

The most intriguing part is at 3:15 in part one, which captures Smith looking genuinely apprehensive and nervous before his entrance. The group concluded the gig with Carry Bag Man, which hadn’t been played since 1990 (and is missed out on Reformation).

GDMW Festival, Rotterdam 30/9/05. Photo by Lutek Dabrowski

The group’s performance at the GDMW festival in Rotterdam on 30 September saw Midnight In Aspen played for the first time.

UK CD rear cover

The Album
Fall Heads Roll was released on Slogan records, a subsidiary of Sanctuary; the US released came out on Narnack. There were fewer differences between the UK/US versions than there had been with Real New, and the two CDs had the same tracklisting. The American version did, however, have a different cover.

US CD rear cover.

There were also some differences between the vinyl releases. The UK one was a single disc; in the US (where it also came out on white marbled vinyl – see below) it was a double album. In addition, it contained an alternative version of Blindness. This take doesn’t have that notable change in bass sound thirty seconds in; there are also a few occasions where the bass riff drops out for a couple of bars, which provides an interesting variation in the song’s rhythm. (And keep it under your hat, but you can hear it here.)

FHR US LP sleeve
US LP inner sleeves

The album generated much more in the way of column inches than any Fall album for years. This was probably at least partly due to the many mentions made of the group in the Peel obituaries the previous year. It even received a brief review in the Daily Mirror:

‘The late John Peel’s favourite band are, as ever, masterminded by Mark E Smith who now looks like a scary toothless gargoyle. But the group’s ferocious blend of lo-fi intrigue and brain-busting underground rock is as strong as ever. Peel is no doubt smiling down.’

Reviews were almost entirely glowing. In the Sunday Times, long-time fan Stewart Lee said that the album ‘balances provocative noise and hypnotic hooks, benefits from an uncharacteristically spatially aware mix, showcases a disciplined, ferocious and finessed Fall, and finds Mark E Smith at his cryptic and quietly hilarious best’. The Guardian‘s Alexis Petridis gave it five stars and described it as being ‘of head-turning quality… Nobody else writes like this.’

US LP white vinyl edition

Louis Pattison in the NME gave it 8/10 and challenged readers to ‘try and deny this is a band on form’. In The Wire, Sam Davies described it as ‘full-blooded Fall, fired up and amped up by some muscular production and rhythm playing… It’s harder than it looks to make simplicity sound this satisfying.’ Stuart Maconie, in Word magazine, said:

‘The current hirelings play with a vim and vigour that continual harangues from the boss will surely quell, but right now they rock… a sterling addition to a great canon, someone somewhere is hearing this glorious racket for the first time and their lives will never be the same.’

Mick Middles, writing in Record Collector, sounded a rare note of caution; whilst recognising the ‘sheer brilliance’ of the ‘towering’ Blindness, he felt that ‘hints of the formulaic do start to appear before the album’s eventual conclusion. In short… it’s too long.’

The increased media coverage did not, sadly, translate into greatly improved sales. Whilst Fall Heads Roll achieved the group’s highest chart position for six years, it only peaked at number 115.

UK CD booklet

The Songs
Ride Away
‘Divisive’ is a word that I might be charged with overusing throughout these blogs, but it really is apposite here. To some it’s a lazy, embarrassing bit of half-arsed nonsense; to others a bouncy bit of fun that sees the group challenging preconceptions with a spot of unpredictable humour. MES seems to be having a dig at someone (‘You spread lies and discontent, I wish you could see yourself / You think you’re a giant you know you’re nothing’) but it’s not at all clear who.

Whatever you think of it, it’s certainly a rather bold (possibly even foolish) choice to open the album; it’s also a bit of a ‘borrow’, owing a debt to Tami Lynn‘s I’m Gonna Run Away From You.

Personally I rather like its wonky and defiantly odd attitude, but I do understand why it annoys some people. Despite what many of the album’s reviews said, it’s clearly not reggae (which Reformation quite rightly points out).

It was played 33 times, 2005-06.

Pacifying Joint
Based around a hammering two-chord/two-note guitar/keyboard assault, it’s not among the group’s most complex and subtle moments, but it does have an enjoyably driving muscularity that’s well-suited by high volume. It’s also not one of MES’s most subtle lyrics, making a rather obvious play on the various meanings of the word ‘joint’ (‘With carrots and meat / a place where nice people should meet / the kind that puts you to sleep’). The learned folk on The Annotated Fall point out that this is an example of antanaclasis.

It was a popular live choice over the late 00s, being played 145 times 2005-08.

What About Us?
The album continues at thunderous pace with another heavy and basic riff. Like Pacifying Joint, the group strike a successful balance between Pritchard’s crunchy guitar and Eleni’s squelchy keyboard line; it’s also like its predecessor in that it begs to be turned up a notch or two louder.

It’s a great vocal, Smith sounding somehow simultaneously casually slurred and sharply focused throughout; the opening ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-buh-ba-ba-buh-ba’ and ‘wuh, uh-yeah’ being worth the price of admission alone.

The only song (that I’m aware of, anyway) that takes its inspiration from the case of Harold Shipman – ‘There was a doctor going around / He was dishing out drugs / He was dishing out left and right / To old ladies’. Eleni’s coolly dispassionate backing vocals (‘Hop hop hop!’) are also a treat, and recall the occasions when Smith and Brix’s vocals entwined so successfully.

Another popular live choice at the time: 150 outings, 2004-08.

Midnight In Aspen
Just when you think the album is going to bludgeon you to death, it takes a melancholy and delicate turn…

Ben Pritchard’s delicate minor-key arpeggios and Steve’s Trafford’s melodic but understated bass provide a sensitive, wistful background to MES’s pensive utterances. Smith is peerless in his timing (‘hyphen’ at 0:55, especially) and seems to express genuine emotion without, unusually, ever retreating into cynicism – ‘he was lucky this week’ (2:21). Not that there isn’t, as ever, a modicum of humour (‘highest bestest’).

Apparently inspired by Hunter S Thompson’s suicide, the minimal, oblique lyrics (‘Hyphen / Aspen / Utah / Ice mountain of Jehovah’) and gentle, melancholy backing make for a genuinely tender and moving song. It was played 37 times 2005-6.

Assume
Back to the crunchy riffs, this time with a more staccato approach;  there’s also a bit of discordant guitar that’s reminiscent of the early 80s. It has been suggested that the tune is inspired by the theme to ‘Supercar‘.

In a radio interview (4:53), MES ‘explained’ the lyrics: ‘That was a random one, definitely… it’s about humans, and air flight, and um, rabbits, and um, things like that.’ Nobody other than Smith himself really knows what a ‘hume’ is (although The Annotated Fall comes up with a few suggestions).

Aspen Reprise
Midnight makes a brief return; it’s not entirely clear why, but it continues to be gentle, melancholy and lovely.

Blindness
Not surprisingly, many of the album’s reviews focused on this track, widely regarded as the towering achievement of ‘late period’ Fall. I devoted several hundred words to it on the Fall In Fives blog, many of which are repeated here.

A brief swathe of oscillating distortion leads us into a taut, solid drumbeat; and then that bass line comes in – thick with distortion and menace. A sinister, snaking guitar line loiters furtively behind this wall of noise. And then the bass line is re-energised by a second version from another recording; less raw distortion, but a thick, reverberating coil of bottomless snarl. Its emergence (0:33) is one of the crowning moments in the entire canon. The highlights just keep coming, layered on top of each other: Eleni’s deep, sinister synth oscillations (1:08); the choppy, biting slashes of guitar (1:41); the bass’s brief, surprising diversion into an ascending pattern (2:34); the floor tom-led lull (4:18) that builds and breaks into a crescendo rounded off by a machine-gun blast of the snare (4:56). The final two minutes are just hypnotic, and could easily go on for another five.

And all of this is without considering Smith’s performance. The song is full of some his most memorable lines (‘The flat is evil’, ‘poster at the stop of the street’, ‘Cavalry and calvary’, ‘blind man – have mercy on me’, ‘99% of non-smokers die’). But it’s his timing here that is utterly remarkable, absolutely unique and breathtaking. He uses a variety of styles – abrupt snatches of dialogue, a strange, almost tuneless kind of crooning, even (2:28) what sounds like him attempting to play the kazoo whilst having forgotten the kazoo itself – and every bit meshes perfectly with the beast of a riff pounding away behind him. Just listen to his timing 5:10-5:21, as he delivers ‘blind man – have mercy on me’ – each utterance never where you expect it, slightly off the beat, but just perfect in a way that only he could do.

Despite the fact that the whole song was based around Steve Trafford’s hypnotic bass line6 (which does bear a little resemblance to Roots Manuva’s Witness), the song was inexplicably credited to Smith/Birtwistle. According to Jim Watts (posting on The Fall Online Forum, quoted on The Annotated Fall):

‘We took a break from Tuff Gong to go for a drink in The Original Wire pub. Pretty much the worst pub in Warrington. I remember a cloud of flies buzzing around in there.

And in the car on the way back we heard witness by Roots Manuva and Spencer got very excited. We were inspired by the groove and I think Spencer started the beat, then Steve came up with the bass and me and Ben came in with our guitar parts.

Then it was put forward to Mark as a demo and he went in to do his vocal sessions and he made it a Fall song.’

It was played 182 times. 2004-17.

I Can Hear The Grass Grow
We’re up to track eight, so it must be time for the obligatory cover version… and it’s actually not a bad one at all.

The Move were Roy Wood‘s band before he went on to ELO and Wizzard, and are most famous for the twee psychedelic pop of Flowers in the Rain (the first song to be played on Radio 1) and Blackberry Way. I Can Hear The Grass Grow was the band’s second single, a top five hit in 1967, and had much more bluesy edge to it. (It was also covered somewhat blandly by Status Quo.)

Several of the album reviews referred directly to the track, the general tone being that the group had ‘flattened’ (Stuart Maconie) or ‘laid waste’ (Alexis Petridis) to the song. In actual fact it’s a pretty straight, almost poppy rendition. Smith in particular seems to make a relatively concerted effort to deliver the song effectively (his attempts to follow the melody properly leading to the usual hit and miss results regarding the actual notes). He even affects a pleasingly Jagger-ish swagger on the ‘Get a hold of yourself…’ sections.

It’s energetic, good fun and the group sound like they’re enjoying themselves. It sits nicely in the middle ground between the slabs of full-on riffery and occasional gentle touches of the rest of the album. Another one that was a popular live choice at the time, racking up 123 appearances between 2004 and 2007.

Promo CD
Promo CD of the single

Bo Demmick
As it evolved, the song was called both ‘Bo Doodak’ and ‘Bo Diddley’ on setlists. The latter title is highly appropriate, as it deploys the signature beat of Ellas McDaniel, an approach taken many times over the years by a plethora of artists such as Buddy Holly, Bruce Springsteen, The Who and George Michael. The Fall had of course already explored this avenue with Hey! Marc Riley back in the mid-80s.

Bo Demmick is a vigorous stomp, with a hint of ‘soundcheck jam’ about it without being too formless or indulgent. The lyric is partly lifted from The CD In Your Hand (from The Post Nearly Man) and sees a reprise of Smith’s favourite made-up word, ‘moderninity’. Apparently ‘debate has raged’ over what Smith actually says (at, for example, 0:33) but it’s clearly ‘Hey fatty!’ to these ears. The identity of the ‘he’ referred to throughout is unclear; The Annotated Fall‘s suggestion that it might have something to do with Bo Derek seems a particularly tenuous one.

Like several on the album, it got a decent number of run-outs on stage at the time: 78, 2004-07.

Youwanner
Not for the first time on this album, the group deploy an aggressive, heads-down no-nonsense guitar assault; Alexis Petridis in The Guardian described it as ‘a riff that could strip paint’.

It charges along with brutal force, threatening occasionally to break into a chorus of some description, but always resisting the temptation. The relentlessness of it recalls Last Commands; the group would also take a similar approach on 2011’s I’ve Seen Them Come. It’s also another that begs to be turned up loud – a bit of a developing theme with this album.

Smith once again delves into his spoken-word material: ‘It is the outsidedness flavor of it’ being a variation on ‘the outside flavorness of it’ from Pander! Panda! Panzer! The lyric (‘I coulda had a life / Coulda had a wife’) suggests a tension between the personal and artistic life, perhaps related to Cyril Connolly‘s famous sentiment, ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. A contributor to The Annotated Fall, referring to some of Smith’s comments in Renegadesuggests that it could refer to Ben Pritchard and/or Steve Trafford.

It was played extensively in 2005, but had a shorter shelf-life than the other riff-heavy tracks on the album; it was played for the 28th and final time in June 2006.

Clasp Hands
A jaunty bit of rickety rockabilly, which sees Smith in uncharacteristically positive mood, expressing an enthusiastic esprit de corps regarding a performance by the group (‘It was a pleasure’; ‘It was one of the best shows ever seen / Ludicrous, majestic and exhilarating’). The lyric also refers to the fact that the song, written by Trafford was originally called ‘NYC Steve’ (see above) – ‘We’re going down NYC / Steve’s song’.

It’s not quite clear how ‘Priscilla Chaos is a lustrous jewel’ fits in with all of this, but it’s  a great line. The lyric also sees Smith revisiting his inexplicable obsession with wolverines (‘The lads were wolverines’) – also referred to in Service, Session Musician, Bury Pts 1 +3 and Arid Al’s Dream.

Simon Archer plays banjo on the track (he describes the experience in this interview (from 36:01) – ‘I just got thrown a banjo and got told, play on that’.

As with many Fall Heads Roll tracks, it was played frequently at the time before being dropped after a couple of years: 63 performances 2004-06.

Early Days of Channel Führer
Like Midnight In AspenEarly Days provides light relief from the heavier tracks that dominate the album. It’s amongst the prettiest, most fragile Fall songs in the whole back catalogue: a brittle, tender waltz, to which Pritchard contributes some tender folkish guitar whilst Birtwistle adds delicate brushstrokes.

MES refers to ‘channel fuhrer’ in this interview (at 0:42), during a lively discussion about late-night television (in which he pronounces Lidl as ‘Leedle’). This doesn’t go any great way towards explaining the particularly enigmatic lyric: ‘And the man who brushes against me in Heathrow / And the man who brushes against me in beyond Vienna midweek is shaggy’; ‘The snow is all around, like my hat’.

There’s a curious moment at 1:19, when a seemingly helium-infused voice (apparently Ben Pritchard’s) squeals ‘Where’s all the choccies gone? It smacks a little of early 70s Genesis (when Peter Gabriel used to put on silly voices), but The Annotated Fall has a slightly more serious assessment: ‘it conveys the narrator’s alienation from his surroundings, as his sad meditation is punctured by cries bespeaking a more trivial and temporary trauma’.

It was only ever played live twice, at Middlesbrough and Nottingham in October 2005 (although this review of the Nottingham bootleg suggests there was a third performance on the same tour). The Nottingham recording is of frustratingly poor quality and is marred by audience chatter, but suggests that the song worked well live.

Breaking The Rules
Hang on, haven’t we already had the obligatory cover version?

The group started playing a cover of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ Walk Like A Man in late 2003 (see above). Breaking The Rules is basically the same song with amended lyrics (credited by The Annotated Fall to ‘Bec Walker, who was 17 at the time and recording in the same studio’), and whilst it’s bouncy and fun and all that, it does feel at this point like the album’s being stretched a little too far. One of the covers should really have been a b-side, and this seems the likelier candidate of the two; the inclusion of both on the album feels unnecessary. The ‘have we finished?’ last ten seconds of Rules just emphasise the throwaway nature of the track.

It was played 24 times (in its various incarnations) 2003-05.

Trust In Me
A curious closer. The strangest thing about it, obviously, is that it’s one of that select band of songs that doesn’t feature MES. (Reformation suggests that Smith does appear, using an ‘old man voice’; I presume they mean the ‘trust in me’ part at, for example, 1:14, but it doesn’t sound like him to me.)

The vocals are supplied by Simon Archer, engineer Billy Pavone and Kenny Cummings and Phil Schuster from New York band Shelby. (Shelby released their sole album, The Luxury of Time, in 2005; it’s on YouTube and Spotify – a pleasant enough if rather generic bit of alternative rock around the Buffalo Tom/REM end of things.)

Cummings and Schuster described their experience on a now-defunct website, quoted on Reformation:

Shelby arrived at the Gigantic Music offices this evening to sign their recording contracts… Hanging out in the lounge of the recording studio were Mark E. Smith and Elena Poulou of The Fall (who were there recording their new album for Narnack Records).

Enjoying a break from recording their parts, Mark and Elena were happy to join in the signing ceremony acting as official witnesses. One thing led to another, and before the ink was dry, Kenny and Phil were in the recording studio adding vocals to one of the new Fall tracks. Mark christened the song ‘Kenny and Phil and Billy and Ding’… commemorating vocals added by engineer Billy Pavone and producer Dingo. We don’t know if the track will make the album, but it was a fun experience.’

It’s not just the absence of Smith’s voice that makes the track unusual: it’s a taut, lean and ominous stomp that doesn’t sound much like The Fall musically either. Tommy Mackay suggests, not unreasonably, that it sounds like a cross between Wire and Queens of the Stone Age7, but the discordant arpeggio/spoken word section at the minute mark is also highly reminiscent of Slint. A comment on the YouTube video below also suggests Placebo.

The identity of ‘Dr Lee’, the dentist who will come round to your house and give you an x-ray for the price of a cup of tea, is unclear. It was never played live.

Overall Verdict
The received wisdom regarding Fall Heads Roll (if there ever really is such a thing with a Fall album) is that, whilst it contains several outstanding tracks, it’s overlong, lacking in variety and over-reliant on simplistic and unsubtle three-chord bangers.

It is indeed overlong. Like The Unutterable, it suffers from the curse of the CD age – having over an hour to play with rather than around 45 minutes leading to an ‘oh let’s just stick that one on as well approach’. As a result, for example, a second, distinctly ropy cover version gets the nod which would have been far more unlikely 15 or 20 years earlier. That said, it is – like Unutterable – under an hour long, making it shorter than Hex.

Accusations of it being a one-paced, monolithic slab of riffery are also a little unfair. Whilst it does have more than its fair share of uncompromising two/three chord weighty rockers (What About Us?Pacifying JointAssumeYouwanner), there’s plenty of variety – the poppy and almost melodic Grass; the gentle and melancholy Aspen and Führer; the dark and mysterious Trust In Me; the humorously bizarre Ride Away.

If you had a friend who was completely unfamiliar with the group’s work whom you wished to indoctrinate, and you were giving them a full album rather than a mix tape, you might start here. Although you might suggest that they skip Ride Away to begin with…

CD booklet, European release 

My “Version”
Although I enjoy its oddness, Trust In Me doesn’t quite make the cut; perhaps the sort of song best tucked away on a b-side or on an obscure various artists compilation. Pacifying Joint is a perfectly decent song, but in order to get the album down to regulation length it had to go on the basis that you don’t really need it as well as What About Us?

This is not to say that Ride Away is a better song than Pacifying Joint, but in the interests of balance and variety, the strangely wonky stomp of the former is preferred over the heads-down rock of the latter, an approach that is more than amply represented elsewhere.

Side 1: What About Us? / I Can Hear The Grass Grow / Midnight In Aspen / Assume / Ride Away / Aspen – Reprise (22:57)

Side 2: Youwanner / Bo Demmick / Blindness / Early Days Of Channel Führer (20:30)

Rankings
A real tussle between this one and Unutterable. The sheer presence of Blindness almost tipped the balance in FHR‘s favour, but Unutterable has Dr Bucks’ Letter and also edges it for variety and invention.

  1. This Nation’s Saving Grace
  2. Perverted By Language
  3. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of
  4. Hex Enduction Hour
  5. The Real New Fall LP Formerly ‘Country On The Click’
  6. Levitate
  7. Slates
  8. Grotesque
  9. The Unutterable
  10. Fall Heads Roll
  11. The Marshall Suite
  12. Cerebral Caustic
  13. I Am Kurious Oranj
  14. Room To Live
  15. The Infotainment Scan
  16. Extricate
  17. Bend Sinister
  18. Dragnet
  19. The Light User Syndrome
  20. Are You Are Missing Winner
  21. Middle Class Revolt
  22. Code: Selfish
  23. Shift-Work
  24. Live At The Witch Trials
  25. The Frenz Experiment

The sublime barrage of controlled noise and aggression that is the single version of Sparta finally dislodges long-standing number one Living Too Late from the top of the  singles chart. I Can Hear The Grass Grow is amongst the group’s best covers, and eases into a mid-table slot. The Rude (All The Time) EP is a mix of the pointless and the terrible.

  1. Theme From Sparta F.C. #2
  2. Living Too Late
  3. Jerusalem/Big New Prinz
  4. Kicker Conspiracy
  5. The Man Whose Head Expanded
  6. How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
  7. Totally Wired
  8. Free Range
  9. Behind The Counter
  10. Marquis Cha-Cha
  11. Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul
  12. The Chiselers
  13. Touch Sensitive
  14. (We Wish You) A Protein Christmas
  15. Cab It Up
  16. Cruiser’s Creek
  17. Hey! Luciani
  18. F-‘Oldin’ Money
  19. I Can Hear The Grass Grow
  20. Mr. Pharmacist
  21. Couldn’t Get Ahead/Rollin’ Dany
  22. Look, Know
  23. The Fall vs 2003
  24. Telephone Thing
  25. There’s A Ghost In My House
  26. Victoria
  27. Hit The North
  28. Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!
  29. Rowche Rumble
  30. Fiery Jack
  31. Masquerade
  32. Ed’s Babe
  33. High Tension Line
  34. 15 Ways
  35. It’s The New Thing
  36. White Lightning
  37. Popcorn Double Feature
  38. Why Are People Grudgeful?
  39. Oh! Brother
  40. Rude (All The Time)
  41. Rude (All The Time) EP

Interim is a flawed but intriguing semi-live album. Knitting Factory 2004 is solid enough, but definitely mid-table material.

  1. Live To Air In Melbourne ’82
  2. In A Hole
  3. A Part Of America Therein, 1981
  4. 2G+2
  5. Live In San Francisco
  6. In The City…
  7. Nottingham ’92
  8. The Legendary Chaos Tape / Live In London 1980
  9. Totale’s Turns
  10. The Idiot Joy Show
  11. Live In Cambridge 1988
  12. I Am As Pure As Oranj
  13. Touch Sensitive… Bootleg Box Set
  14. Creative Distortion
  15. Live 1993 – Batschkapp, Frankfurt
  16. Live 1981 – Jimmy’s Music Club – New Orleans
  17. Live 1977
  18. The Twenty Seven Points
  19. Interim
  20. Seminal Live
  21. Live At The Knitting Factory – New York – 9 April 2004
  22. Live 1998 12th August Astoria 2 London
  23. Live Various Years
  24. Live At The Phoenix Festival
  25. Live In Zagreb
  26. 15 Ways To Leave Your Man – Live
  27. Austurbaejarbio
  28. BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert
  29. Live At The Knitting Factory – L.A. – 14 November 2001
  30. Live At The Garage – London – 20 April 2002
  31. Live 2001 – TJ’s Newport
  32. Live 3rd May 1982 Band On The Wall Manchester
  33. Live 1980 – Cedar Ballroom Birmingham
  34. Live From The Vaults – Alter Banhof, Hof, Germany
  35. Live From The Vaults – Glasgow 1981
  36. Live From The Vaults – Oldham 1978
  37. Live At The ATP Festival – 28 April 2002
  38. Liverpool 78
  39. Live From The Vaults – Los Angeles 1979
  40. Live From The Vaults – Retford 1979
  41. Live At Deeply Vale
  42. Yarbles

 

References
1The Fallen, p288

2The Fallen, p276

3Margrave of the Marshes, pp310-312

4Renegade, p103

5Renegade, p100

6The Fallen, p289

7Mackay, p210

YMGTA #32 – Fall Compilations Part 2 (1999-2004)

“Essential to acolytes.”

The deluge of (often dodgy) Fall compilations that gained momentum in the late 90s – ten in two and a half years – maintained its relentless onslaught around the turn of the century, with sixteen being released between January 1999 and May 2004 (an average of one every four months).

I will continue (as I did on the previous compilations post) to give the compilations a grade on a ‘Worth buying?’ scale, using the following criteria:

  • A: Worthwhile purchase, even for those who just have a few Fall albums
  • B: Contains enough interesting material to make it worth a few quid to the more than casual Fall fan; or serves as a useful introduction to the inexperienced
  • C: A few aspects of interest, but only for the really committed who have all of the ‘proper’ stuff already
  • D: Only of interest to the really hardcore completist
  • E: Even the hardcore completist should think long and hard before parting with cash

The Peel Sessions

Released 25 January 1999 on Strange Fruit.

Front cover

Released in January 1999, The Peel Sessions was compiled by Steve Hanley and is a carefully selected overview; as Hanley himself said (The Big Midweek, p429), it was ‘impossible to pick twelve songs out of a hundred without disappointing someone’.

At the time, this was a valuable release, as most fans would only have had these songs on C90s taken from Peel’s show. Once the Peel Session Box Set was released (and session tracks started to appear on album reissues), this album became rather redundant.

Worth buying? A (then); D (now)

A Past Gone Mad

Released 19 April 2000 on Artful Records.

A Past Gone Mad (sub-titled Best Of 1990-2000) was a rather random and pointless ragbag of previously released material from the 90s albums.

Worth buying? D

Psykick Dance Hall

Released 7 August 2000 on Eagle Records.

Front cover

Psykick Dance Hall was a 3 CD set that featured 49 album and single tracks from the first few years of the group’s career. Again, it didn’t feature anything previously unreleased; according to thefall.org, it was ‘largely mastered from inferior Voiceprint CD reissues, so the audio quality is not optimal’.

Worth buying? E

Backdrop

Released 5 February 2001 on Cog Sinister/Voiceprint.

Front cover

Backdrop was a 1994 bootleg that received an official release seven years later. It was a much more valuable release than the previous two compilations, containing an interesting variety of obscure b-sides, live recordings and songs from freebies (the alternative version of Hey! Luciani, for example, came from a 7″ given away with the 28 February 1987 edition of Sounds). It also saw the first official release of Dresden Dolls.

The album concludes with an entertainingly odd lo-fi recording of MES interviewing himself, recorded just before the release of How I Wrote Elastic Man in July 1980.

Sleeve of 1994 bootleg version

In The Sunday Times, Stewart Lee described Backdrop as ‘essential to acolytes’.

Worth buying? A

A World Bewitched

Released 6 February 2001 on Artful Records.

Like A Past Gone Mad, this double-CD compilation was subtitled ‘Best of 1990-2000’. However, it was more a rarities compilation in the vein of Backdrop rather than a straightforward ‘best of’. It contained numerous hard-to-find gems, such as Theme From Error-Orrori, and also rounded up a wide range of MES collaborations, such as those with Badly Drawn Boy, Edwyn Collins, The Inspiral Carpets, Elastica and Tackhead. Whilst some of these were fairly well known, others were much more obscure.

Fistful Of Credits is an atmospheric piece of slow-tempo techno that was recorded in 2000 with ‘Mild Man Jan’, aka Spencer Marsden who co-wrote Mad.Men-Eng.Dog from The Marshall Suite.

Heads Of Dead Surfers was a track by Scottish band Long Fin Killie, released as a single in 1995 (it also appeared on their album Houdini). It’s an excellent piece of folk/jazz-tinged post-punk skronk, with MES contributing some trademark distorted ‘megaphone’ backing vocals (which sound as though they might have been sped up a little on occasion).

The album was compiled by Q‘s Ian Harrison; the magazine’s review described it as ‘a vital sieving mechanism for all but the most monomaniacal Fall panhandler’.

As nearly half of the tracks were already available on ‘regular’ Fall LPs, it didn’t have quite the value of Backdrop, but at an average price of £13 it represents very good value for money.

Worth buying? B+

Totally Wired – The Rough Trade Anthology

Released 15 July 2002 on Castle/Sanctuary.

2003 Earmark reissue

A collection of early 80s songs, all previously released. Great selection of tracks, and at £7 it would serve as a good intro to someone unfamiliar with the group’s work from that period. Not that much point to it otherwise.

Worth buying? B-

The Rough Trade Singles Box

Released on 15 July 2002 on Castle Records.

Box cover

Box set comprising the four singles released on Rough Trade. Re-released on vinyl the following year (see below) as The Rough Trade Singles Collection.

According to thefall.org:

‘Boxed set comprising the 4 singles released on Rough Trade in miniature duplicate card sleeves, plus booklet… On the original pressing of the box set, the versions of Container Drivers & New Puritan on CD5 were the album versions from Grotesque and Totale’s Turns respectively, not the John Peel session versions that appeared on the original 7″ single. This was due to initial difficulties in obtaining clearance from the BBC for the use of those session recordings. Later pressings have the correct John Peel session versions. There is nothing to visibly distinguish the different pressings

Very much for collectors only.

Worth buying? D+

High Tension Line

Released 23 September 2002 on Recall/Snapper Music.

Front cover

High Tension Line was, like A Past Gone Mad, a rather pointless and random collection of previously released 90s material. It begs the question of who, compiling a 24-track ‘best of the 90s’ would include Why Are People Grudgeful? and Cloud Of Black.

Worth buying? D-

Listening In

Released 11 November 2002 on Cog Sinister/Voiceprint.

Front cover

Subtitled “Lost Singles Tracks 1990-92”, Listening In rounds up (as the title suggests) the various b-sides from the Extricate to Code: Selfish era. It included three remixes of So What About It? from a white label promo 12″ that were otherwise hard to obtain, if not exactly essential listening. It also featured the first appearance of all three sections of Zagreb on an album.

Not the most pointless of Fall compilations, but still of niche interest only.

Worth buying? C-

Early Singles

Released 2 December 2002 on Cog Sinister/Voiceprint.

Front cover

It does, as the cliché goes, exactly what it says on the tin: a compilation of the A and B sides up to 1982. According to both Discogs and thefall.org:

‘The original concept was to include every single A and B side up to the end of 1983 on a double CD, however Voiceprint was unable to come to a satisfactory arrangement to procure the rights to the Rough Trade singles, so they had to be dropped and it ended up as a single CD.’

A useful enough round-up, although quickly made redundant by album reissues over the next few years.

Worth buying? C-

It’s The New Thing! The Step Forward Years

Released 31 March 2003 on Castle Records.

A 1978-80 singles/b-sides compilation that’s very similar to the previous release, and is no more enlightening.

Worth buying? C-

Time Enough At Last

Released 28 April 2003 on Castle Records.

Front cover

A 3-CD box set, comprised of Oxymoron and Cheetham Hill (see the first compilation post), plus the live album 15 Ways To Leave Your Man (see the Levitate post). A collection of three very patchy releases: possibly worth picking up if found in a bargain bin.

Worth buying? D

Words Of Expectation – BBC Sessions

Released 26 May 2003 on Castle Records.

Front cover

A rather odd compilation, in that it includes all the tracks from the first five Peel sessions (1978-81) and then leaps to sessions 19 and 20 from 1995 and 1996. Full of great moments, but soon superseded by the Peel Sessions box set.

Worth buying? C-

The Rough Trade Singles Collection

Released 8 September 2003 on Earmark (Italy).

Front cover

The Rough Trade Singles Box (see above) on one vinyl album. Yet another pretty pointless compilation of early 80s singles.

Worth buying? D

The War Against Intelligence – The Fontana Years

Released 20 October 2003 on Universal Music.

Front cover

Yet another compilation of early 90s material. Once again, if you’d never heard any Fall and you picked this up in a charity shop then it might form a half-decent introduction. Otherwise, it’s just the same old dead horse being flogged.

Worth buying? D

Rebellious Jukebox

Released 10 November 2003 on Shakedown Records.

2007 reissue (without DVD)

Even by the shoddy standards of most Fall compilations, this one has a dreadful cover, featuring a disembodied MES Madame Tussauds-style head looming over a catastrophic and disjointed series of fonts.

thefall.org describes it as:

‘A completely unfathomable compilation – the cover says “from 3 decades of studio recordings” yet 20 tracks are from 1978-1983, then there are 6 tracks from Extricate (1990) and 4 from Are You Are Missing Winner (2001).’

I haven’t heard the 43 minute interview (conducted by “Jet” Martin Celmins on September 19, 2002). I suspect it doesn’t rescue this carelessly knocked-out compilation from bargain basement status.

Worth buying? D-

50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong – 39 Golden Greats

Released 31 May 2004 on Sanctuary  Records.

Front cover

Regarded by many as the best, most comprehensive Fall compilation50,000 (the title and cover of which was inspired by an Elvis Presley compilation) is a 39-track summary of the group’s work from 1978-2003. Anyone who loves The Fall could quibble about what is or isn’t included, but most would agree that it’s a pretty balanced and comprehensive retrospective. If this doesn’t convert an unbeliever…

Fair play to Daryl Easlea, Steve Hammonds and Conway Paton for undertaking the almost impossible task of summarising the group’s achievements over two discs. Mine would be different – as I’m sure yours would be – but they did a pretty sound job. Fabulous cover too.

Worth buying? A-

 

 

 

YMGTA #31 – The Real New Fall LP Formerly ‘Country On The Click’

“They were swearing, throwing newspaper with snotballs… I told him that if this continued I would have to review my position.”

Details
Recorded: Gracielands Studio, Rochdale December 2002 – January 2003.
Released: 27 October 2003

  • Mark E Smith – vocals
  • Ben Pritchard – guitar, vocals
  • Jim Watts – bass, guitar, computers
  • Dave Milner – drums, vocals, keyboards
  • Eleni Poulou – keyboards, vocals
    With: 
  • S Beswick – keyboards (track 12)
  • “The Plouty” – organ, text (track 11)
  • Simon “Ding” Archer – bass (track 1)

Background
Shortly after Are You Are Missing Winner‘s release in November 2001, the group played a short, well-received US tour (see below). However, despite the positive reception, the line-up merry-go-round continued – Spencer Birtwistle quit after an altercation with someone from a New York venue’s management1.

His replacement was Dave Milner, the drummer from Trigger Happy (see previous post). Par for the course by now, he had less than an hour of rehearsal time before his first gig, in Manchester on the 29 November 2001 (see below).

The group’s next release (June 2002) was 2G+2. Like Seminal Live and The Twenty-Seven Points, it featured a mix of live recordings and studio out-takes. The studio recordings were I Wake Up In The City (see previous post), New Formation Sermon and Distilled Mug Art (all of which I included on my ‘version’ of Are You Are Missing Winner).

New Formation Sermon (the first Fall song I ever blogged about) has a pleasing, laid-back hoe-down/honky-tonk vibe and features a typically impenetrable lyric that MES slurs through engagingly: ‘The arms outstretched / Fearsome waist / Elbows in triangle / The bracing chill of the market is no friend / Like pictures of yours from the fifties’. There’s  some particularly pleasingly twangy guitar throughout. It was never played live.

Distilled Mug Art is a folky-swamp-blues stomp that has vague echoes of Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison. The Jew’s harp (?) twanging away in the background adds an interesting texture too. Smith seems to be having a rant about the indiscriminate use and manipulation of images for commercial/merchandising purposes – on mugs, ‘CD covers’ and so on. His despairing groan at 2:38 has a movingly desolate and resigned tone. Also never played live.

In September 2002, MES released his second spoken word album. Pander! Panda! Panzer! adopted a similar approach to The Post Nearly Man – lyrical fragments accompanied by snatches of Fall songs – although this album was merged into one 43 minute track. Parts of it are interesting, but it’s also hard work in places. There’s a detailed review here.

In the same month, Ruth Daniel joined the Nick Dewey ‘in-The-Fall-for-one-day club’. In a 2006 interview she described how she was approached by Ed Blaney after performing with her band Earl in Manchester and invited to play with the group. Which she did, on 22 September at King George’s Hall in Blackburn, the gig that was filmed for the DVD A Touch Sensitive (Live). This performance also saw Eleni Poulou’s debut (see Live section below).

Front cover

The group’s first ‘proper’ single release for over three years emerged in December 2002.  The Fall vs 2003 featured two versions of Susan vs YouthclubSusan is an odd little neglected gem in the group’s back catalogue. It’s an intriguing tale that encompasses the famous ‘Badly Drawn Boy/false teeth’ incident and involves the eponymous Susan travelling back in time and being appalled by her 16-year-old self. Possibly inspired by an episode of Neighboursapparently.

A review of the single in Time Out commented that, ‘Smith “sings” as if stricken by chronic toothache in a wind tunnel and the whole lurches along in a twisted disco fashion’.

The sluggish electronica and Smith’s laconic delivery are oddly appealing. The crunchy, distorted remix is also well worth a listen.

The Fall vs 2003 also included an alternative version of Janet, Johnny + James (entitled Janet vs Johnny). It’s a slowed-down, delicate and rather lovely take on the song. Susan  was played live once, at the Camden Electric Ballroom on 22 November 2002. The single reached number 64 in the charts.

Towards the end of 2002, Ed Blaney resigned as the group’s manager over problems regarding visa applications for a proposed US tour. In the Manchester Evening News, he said that the group had been in Europe and hadn’t been able to attach their passports to the application because they wouldn’t have been able to get home otherwise. According to an article on Manchester Online, Blaney insisted that ‘the fiasco was not his fault and that his long-term friendship with Mark E Smith is now over’ – the article described the situation as a ‘John and Yoko-style rift’.  In a letter from Eleni (who had taken over the group’s management) to one of the American venues, she said:

‘Ed just booked the tour without making sure we would have a visa…  Why Ed didn’t sort that out beforehand or why none of the promoters reminded him of the petition that the promoter has to request in your country I don’t know.’

Photo of MES from Independent interview 7/12/02

In February 2003, the group recorded their 23rd Peel session (Theme from Sparta F.C. / Contraflow / Grooving With Mr Bloe – Green-Eyed Loco Man / Mere Pseud Mag Ed) which was broadcast on 13 March.

The day before the group’s gig in Turkey on 5 March, Jim Watts was sacked. He described the events in an interview with the playlouder website (link now defunct, but it’s quoted on Fall News):

‘It was the night before Turkey and Mark came to the pub to meet us. Bought the others a drink and purposefully didn’t get me one, then came out with some nonsense saying I was off in London spending The Fall’s money… playing with a Heavy Metal band and his contacts at MI5 had intercepted my calls to book rehearsal rooms. And [he said] I could play the gig in Turkey then leave the band, and obviously I opted not to go to Turkey and just walked out.’

Watts seems not to have taken it too badly, as he said there was no ‘blazing row’ as he was ‘laughing too much’. Steve Evets filled in on bass for a couple of gigs before Simon ‘Ding’ Archer took over. Archer had acted as sound engineer on Pander! Panda! Panzer! and remixed much of TRNFLP. According to Dave Simpson2, his brief was to ‘water down’ or get rid of Watts’ parts on the album.

The summer of 2003 saw a sudden glut of Fall-related books. Simon Ford’s Hip Priest: The Story Of Mark E Smith And The Fall, Dave Thompson’s A User’s Guide To The Fall and Mick Middles’ The Fall. You can find several reviews of all three here.

Image result for simon ford hip priest

Six weeks after the album was released, The Fall released a Xmas single. This was an unlikely first, although they had given their Peel session back in December 1994 a festive tinge with Jingle Bell Rock and Hark The Herald Angels Sing.

Front cover

(We Wish You) A Protein Christmas was a reworking of the album track Proteinprotection. Musically a little more understated than the original, it also contained an amended Xmas lyric, ‘The feast of man in October / Menus for hampers / Why did I come back?’ possibly suggesting God’s dissatisfaction with commercialisation and overly early celebration.

The single contains another reworking of a RNFLP track, Recovery Kit #2. There’s a slightly stronger techno flavour to it, and it has a more delicate and melancholy air. Worth acquiring. (A friend of Smith’s, Rob Lally – who, according to thefall.org’s biography page was MES’s best man at his wedding to Eleni – gets a co-writing credit here, although he didn’t on the album version.)

There were also two new tracks included, (We Are) Mod Mock Goth and (Birtwistle’s) Girl In Shop. The former was a popular live choice in 2003-04, racking up 37 live appearances. Devoid of percussion, it’s driven along by two guitar parts: in the right channel, a choppy, brittle three-chord figure; in the left a fuzzy, grungy equivalent that lags just slightly behind. Every now and again, what sounds like a child’s toy piano being tortured intrudes. Smith’s double-tracked vocals are slightly disturbing. The lyrics are apparently about a specific, but not confidently identified individual – there’s a detailed discussion here.

All of the instrumentation on Birtwistle – according to Reformation – was supplied by Spencer Birtwistle, so it was presumably recorded at some point in 2001. It’s silly – sounding like a novelty 60s dance-craze single that Smith came back from the pub and shouted over randomly – but works somehow. It was never played live.

In The Wider World…
Concorde made its last commercial flight on 24 October. Ian Duncan Smith resigned as Conservative party leader on the 29th. On the 4 November, Brookside‘s 2915th and final episodes was broadcast.

In the music charts, the execrable Black Eyed Peas’ Where Is The Love? had just been replaced as number one single by Sugababes’ Hole In The Head. Dido’s insipid Life For Rent was the number one album.

The Fall Live in 2001-03
After their October 2001 European dates, the group played one London date before heading to America. They played seven gigs in LA, San Francisco, Seattle and New York during November.

MES LA Knitting Factory, 13/11/2001 (Photo by Kamil Kutra)

The night before the first date (at The Knitting Factory in Los Angeles), MES made a spoken word performance at the same venue. Gail Ann Dorsey (best known as David Bowie’s long-serving bass player) played, as did Lydia Lunch. A fan review:

‘MES appears after lamp & table are brought out & adjusted to his liking (everyone else had to make do with a music stand to read from). Launches into a powerful Enigrammatic Dream.

A couple of new things, along with an expanded & improved Dissolute Singer. Also read-out versions of Idiot Joy & Luc Over Lancs. Skitterings of noise & scraps of tunes as backing (maybe just a snippet of Art Bell, something about Ron Howard). MES in very good voice, enunciating clearly, maybe even a little stilted. Audience in palm of hand!’

Front cover

A recording of the 14 November gig at LA Knitting Factory was officially released in 2007. It’s not of the greatest sound quality; it’s thin, hissy and rather empty sounding. In addition, there are three songs from the gig that are missing (Two Librans, My Ex-Classmates’ Kids and I Am Damo Suzuki.) The group sound like they’re on good form, but it’s one for completists only. Amateur camcorder footage of the gig was also released as disc 1 of the double DVD Access All Areas – Volume Two in 2004.

LA Knitting Factory, 14/11/01 (Photo by Cole Coonce)

The San Francisco gig from five days later has also had an official release, which came out in 2013. It’s much better than the LA recording, although MES’s vocals are a tad over-dominant in places. The group are on top form here, Smith sounding particularly focused and vehement. Bourgeois Town (played at a cracking pace) gets a whole new lease of life; Sons Of Temperance is also delivered at breakneck speed, but the slower passages also have a delirious wooziness. Even And Therein, which by this point seems to have become a rather lazy opportunity for a breather, fizzes with gusto. Should be towards the top of your shopping list.

Front cover LP

There’s also a decent bootleg available of the 24 November New York gig (a recording of the previous night’s performance at the same venue was included in the Touch Sensitive… Bootleg Box Set) – see previous post). There are clearly several highly committed American Fall fans in attendance, as indicated by their frequent and enthusiastic singing along to Unutterable songs (the album wasn’t released in the US). In Enigrammatic Dream, a heckler shouts out ‘speak English mate’; MES, without deviating from the track’s delivery style, responds with ‘What does that mean? You are a complete f*cking cretin’.

2G+2, released on 10 June 2002, was a compilation of the November US tour (plus three studio tracks – see above). The sound quality is great, the version of The Joke is an absolute belter, Bourgeois Town has much more oomph that the studio take, Ibis-Afro Man has a powerful, lumbering strength and the version of Damo Suzuki is one of the few live versions that comes close to capturing the mayhem of the original.

There’s a really clumsy edit towards the end of F-Oldin’ Money (3:56) which Conway Paton suggests Smith might have ordered in order to cut out Pritchard’s ‘macho guitar-hero solo’.

Given that the three studio selections are all inventive and intriguing, overall 2G+2 should also be high on your shopping list of Fall (semi-) live albums.

On their return to the UK, The Fall played their final gig of 2001 at the Footage and Firkin in Manchester on the 29 November – Dave Milner’s debut. The bootleg is of pretty poor sound quality – ‘boomy’ and hollow, it sounds like the group are playing in an empty aerodrome. It does tell you, however, that Milner did an admirable job considering his limited rehearsal time.

After a one-off appearance in Athens in January, the group embarked on a 15-date European tour in February-March 2002. Mansion/To Nkroachment: Yarbles (which had only been used as an intro tape at the time of its release) began to be deployed as a set opener.

Verona, 01/03/2002 (photo by Stefano Butini)

There’s decent enough bootleg of the Dortmund gig on 4 March. It contains some entertainingly tuneless keyboards (for example in Two Librans) that sound like the work of MES, although this review suggests that Jim Watts also played some of them. The opening section of the F-‘Oldin’ Money/Kick The Can medley is entitled Ben’s on this bootleg (as it was on the 24/11/01 New York one as well as on a few setlists from the time), but in both instances it just seems to be a slight variation on the introduction to Kick The Can.

The Fall were due to play half a dozen US dates in April, but these were cancelled over the visa problems that led to Blaney resigning as manager. They played seven (possibly eight – see below) gigs in April-May, a mix of UK and European performances.

Front cover

Their 20 April gig at The Garage in London was filmed (on an amateur camcorder) and released in 2004 as one half of the double-DVD Access All Areas – Volume One, ; the recording was also released as a 2007 Voiceprint live album, Live At The Garage – London – 20 April 2002. Like the Knitting Factory live LP from 2001 (see above), there’s not much wrong with the performance, but it’s no better than an undistinguished audience recording. The track labelling is also fouled-up (as you can see on Spotify).

Front cover

The group’s performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties in Camber Sands eight days later also made its way onto a Voiceprint live LP and DVD. Amateur footage made up the second disc of Access All Areas – Volume Two (see above). As far as the live LP goes: virtually the same cover as the others, similarly messed-up tracklisting and on this occasion, really appalling sound quality. It’s a messy performance too. Only for the serious collector.

Copenhagen 24/05/2002 setlist 

By this stage, it had been around six months since The Fall had debuted any new songs – a substantial gap by their standards. This changed in May 2002. Reformation suggests that Contraflow was played for the first time at a Danish festival on 1 May (although thefall.org doesn’t record this gig). The Past was possibly debuted at Leipzig on the 19th, and the Copenhagen setlist from 24 May (see image above) refers to ‘New One’ and ‘New New One’. This isn’t exactly clarified by thefall.org gigography:

‘Jim Watts says one of the new songs was an early version of The Past, and the “new new one” might have been an early Mike’s Love Xexagon or Contraflow, or possibly something else the band had just come up with.’

When The Fall played King George’s Hall in Blackburn, where Eleni Poulou made her debut and Ruth Daniel her sole appearance, the group (according to thefall.org’s gigography, anyway – it’s not something that’s straightforward to measure) were on line-up number 46.

The gig was filmed for the A Touch Sensitive DVD. It’s not easy to get a hold of the DVD these days (certainly not for a reasonable price), but it is on YouTube. It’s an interesting, if frequently odd performance; also a long one, around two hours. Presumably because of the DVD, the group resurrected several songs that hadn’t been played for some time, for example Mere Pseud Mag Ed, Free Range, Behind The Counter, Jerusalem, Telephone Thing, Hey! Luciani and Hit The North.

Pritchard, Watts and Milner are generally in tight and raucous form; Jim Watts is especially solid, pumping out that heavy, distorted bass sound that became so characteristic of 21st century Fall. With the older songs, they make a decent fist of Mere Pseud Mag Ed and The ChiselersThe Classical is energetic if rather lacking in subtlety; Hey Luciani , however, is strangely thin and disjointed, and Victoria (which Watts plays with a broken string) is an unholy mess – not helped by Smith’s painfully tuneless vocal.

Ruth Daniels acquits herself well in her sporadic appearances. Eleni doesn’t appear until The Classical, to which she adds some woefully tuneless accompaniment, as is the case with Jerusalem. Her contribution to Ghost is more successful.

Steve Evets makes a bizarre appearance during Touch Sensitive. Fag and can of lager in hand, he starts off by yelling ‘buy the car’ before proceeding to drown MES out by shouting out random song titles. He does, to be fair, make a much more successful contribution to Big New Prinz (before Smith ushers him off stage). Ed Blaney also makes an appearance to sing the first part of I Wake Up In The City.

Throughout, MES seems (relatively) sober, generally sings with focus and energy and also behaves himself, although he spends a lot of time squatting by the drum riser, rifling through his lyric sheets; he does also appear to unplug Pritchard’s guitar lead during Free Range.

Hit The North makes for a shambolic finale, featuring both keyboard players performing together plus Blaney and Evets taking a drumstick each to the drumkit as Milner ploughs on determinedly. The whole performance is bizarre, chaotic and well worth a watch.

Front coverFront cover

The Blackburn gig was released in 2014 as a double CD, Creative Distortion, followed a week later by a single-disc version, Yarbles. Seeing as the former (which also includes the Touch Sensitive DVD) goes for around a tenner, whilst the latter will set you back around £15, you would have to be the most commited of collectors to purchase Yarbles.

There were a further seven UK gigs in September-November to round off 2002. The bootleg of the 3 October date in Gloucester is a decent one. Cyber Insekt sees MES referencing Beefheart’s Dropout Boogie towards the end; the transition from Enigrammatic Dream into a slow, woozy Ketamine Sun is strangely captivating; the muscular version of The Classical is more coherent than the one from Blackburn (although there are still some very dodgy keyboards lurking in the background); Dr Bucks’ Letter (performances of which from this period are highly variable) is here taut and focused.

At the last gig of 2002 (at The Electric Ballroom in Camden), Janet, Johnny and James was played for the first time and Susan vs. Youthclub made its only appearance. There are a few (very varied) reviews of the show here.

The group’s first gig of 2003 (just after Watts’ dismissal) was in Istanbul on 5 March. On the 4 April at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, Green-Eyed Loco Man, Contraflow, Mountain Energei and Theme from Sparta F.C. were debuted. On 1 May they played the Recession Festival in Denmark.

Recession Festival, Denmark, 1/5/03 (Photo by Martin Kremers)

In June-July 2003, the group undertook a 21-date US tour. Online fan reviews suggest that the group were generally on form and MES was in good spirits. In Minneapolis, he even made a gift of a bottle of whisky to a fan who provided the group with a free breakfast.

MES, Minneapolis 28/6/03

Last Commands was played for the first time on the opening night in San Diego on 19 June. Proteinprotection was (probably) debuted in Chicago on the 28 June (although this review suggests it might have been played in San Francisco on the 21st).

Chicago 28/6/03 (Photo by Robert Gilroy)
1/7/03, Cleveland Ohio

At Atlanta on 12 July, I’m Going To Spain received an unlikely revival, described in this review:

‘Only MES and the drummer return, and the latter taps the high hat as the former subjects us to a bizarre, feedback-laden accapella-solo version of “Going To Spain” totally off key – even more so than the original – and marginally heartfelt. All that feedback on the one mic could have been corrected so I suppose it was intentional. Very successful as a performance art piece but musically hopeless.’

On 29 September 2003, The Fall played in Lisbon. The bootleg is a pretty dire recording,  featuring their first crack at Open the Boxoctosis (which is aborted after only a minute or so) and a shambolic attempt at the Grooving With Mr Bloe /Green-Eyed Loco Man medley that they did on the Peel session earlier that year.

The most notable thing about the Lisbon gig was that it led to the track Portugal. MES described the story behind the song in an interview with The Independent in 2004:

‘Last time we played in Portugal there was this road crew. It’s completely surreal. We arrived and they sort of pissed off on the day of the show, saying we behaved really badly and all this. Somebody threw a bit of paper at them, like a plane or something. It was quite funny; they wrote, like, their excuses for running off. But if you saw these blokes you’d laugh your head off, because they were four big blokes with long hair and leather jackets, and like, I’d knocked on the door at 12 o’clock at night to ask what time they’re going down to the show. Just banging on the door. And they wrote, “he was banging on our door at 12 o’clock at night”, and I got the group to read all their letters out.’

Smith apparently wanted to put the track on the b-side of Sparta, but was told it might be libellous. It did, however, appear on the US edition of the album (see Reissues below), as well as a ‘hidden track’ (only playable via computer) on the CD version. (Apparently the wav/mp3 file was only meant to appear on the promo version, but ended up on the general release.)

flyer

There were four more gigs before The Real New Fall‘s release: two dates at Manchester’s Bierkeller (Loop 41 Houston was played for the first time on the second night); Leeds Irish Centre on 8 October; and an in-store performance at the Manchester branch of HMV, which one reviewer described as ‘surprisingly excellent’.

HMV Manchester 27/10/03 (Photo by Chris Trew)

The Album
The album was recorded in December 2002 and January 2003. Originally entitled Country On The Click, it was originally due to come out in April, but the release date was pushed back; on July 5 Fall News reported that Amazon were listing a revised date of 4 August.

At some point in the first half of 2003 (the playlouder website suggested as early as February), Country On The Click was ‘leaked’ online, which led to the original release being withdrawn and the album being remixed, re-sequenced and re-titled.

According to this promotional online announcement:

‘The tracks were originally recorded in December 2002 and January 2003 and mixed by Grant Showbiz and Jim Watts in February 2003. Mark E Smith then remixed and rerecorded large parts of the album, and re-sequenced it, interrupted by a highly successful tour of the USA. The first mix of the album, which had leaked onto the internet under the original title Country On The Click, is easily surpassed by the final version. This is The Real New Fall LP!’

Ben Pritchard:

‘The internet leak was the best thing that could’ve happened to COTC because we were all really unhappy with the album especially Sparta and Recovery Kit. Mark gave us some time to go back and remix them. Hence Sparta #2 and a version of Recovery I was really happy with.’

According to the playlouder article above,

‘Mark E. Smith has taken it upon himself to remix the album diligently “rather than just going ‘ah f*ck it, that’ll do'” said an insider.’

Despite the comments above, it seems more likely that Archer and other members of the group contributed significantly to the new version, rather than it being revamped by Smith alone. Like most Fall fans (I imagine), I have a copy of the original, leaked Country On The Click, and I’ll compare those versions with the RNFLP ones in the comments on individual tracks below. The promo CD carried the warning: ‘For promotional use only – anyone abusing this will have Mark E Smith to contend with and may God have mercy on your soul!!!’

The music press were almost entirely enthusiastic. The Wire‘s John Mulvey, like many others, considered it ‘one of Mark E Smith’s perennial “returns to form”‘; Mojo‘s Ian Harrison thought it the group’s best since The Infotainment Scan – ‘This newest payload of hostile cryptic garage rock impacts so immediately with its purpose and strength’. In The Guardian, Helen Pidd gave it 4/5 and said that ‘Smith is on magnificently mad form here… incomprehensible but irresistible’. The NME‘s Stephen Dalton was a rare voice of dissent, decrying the album’s ‘workmanlike anonymity’. Despite the critical acclaim, however, the album only reached 156 in the UK album charts.

Smith was clearly proud of TRNFLP, saying so in Renegade3. Like Extricate  and Hex, he felt he had ‘proved something’:

‘It does bring out the best in me when I’m forced into a corner. I don’t wilt like other people. I’m used to being up against it.’

The Songs
Green Eyed Loco-Man
One of the group’s best album-openers, Loco-Man harks back to the best moments of the Infotainment Scan era, a wonderful blend of ponderous heavy rock and slinky, twisted electronica. The thundering drums and fizzing, distorted guitar are complemented perfectly by a range of warped electronic noises (the discordant section 1:34-2:04 is a notable example).

It’s dense and heavily layered; one of those songs where – especially if you have it on headphones and crank it up – you hear something new every time.

The COTC version is a little more skewed towards the electronica, lighter on the guitars and features a menacing double-tracked MES vocal (as well as jarring, clumsy edits at 2:06 and 2:55). It’s interesting, but feels thin in comparison.

There’s an early version of the lyrics here. The Annotated Fall suggests a connection to The Pretty Things’ Old Man Going, although I can’t hear it myself. It was played 80 times, 2003-06.

Mountain Energei
The relentless, stomping drum beat sees the group once again (cf Big New Prinz and Glam Racket) taking percussive inspiration from The Glitter Band’s Rock and Roll Part 2. It’s incredibly infectious, a loping rhythm to which it’s almost impossible not to bob your head to; Watts adds a lithe, throbbing bass and Pritchard’s guitar work is careful and subtle.

Smith (supported by a mix of strikingly deep and surprisingly gentle and high-pitched backing vocals) sounds more considered and carefully paced than he has for years. The lyrics (which echo F-‘Oldin’ Money – ‘To get a mortgage you need an income’) are drily funny; the lines ‘Dear dope, if you wanna catch us / You need a rod and a line / Signed, the fish’ are adapted from the 1950 cartoon A Fractured Leghorn (0:44).

It’s a gentle, melodic piece of sparse beauty; and its delicate grace is all the more treasureable because you might well have never expected that the group – especially at this stage in their history – would produce anything like it. Just lovely.

The origins of the song can be heard in Dave Milner’s demo, 8 Clothorn Road. The COTC version is very pleasant, but is a little blurred and lacking focus in comparison to the final take.

It was a popular choice for the setlist – it was played 183 times 2003-08, before getting two final outings in 2011.

Theme From Sparta F.C.
An even more popular live choice, racking up nearly 300 appearances, Sparta is probably the non-cover Fall song that your unbeliever friends are most likely to have heard, due to its use as the theme music to the Final Score section of BBC television’s Saturday afternoon sports coverage. (This led to Smith’s hilarious performance reading the results in 2007: ‘Tottenham Hotspur postponed; West Ham United one aitch’.)

It’s sharp and crisp, the crackling guitar riff contrasting beautifully with Smith’s casual, impeccably timed drawl and the energetically bouncy backing vocals.

The song appears to be narrated by a Greek football hooligan, a supporter of the (fictional) Sparta FC. Unlike Kicker Conspiracy (the group’s other famous football song), Sparta is more focused on crowd violence (‘we live on blood’) than the gentrification of the game. That said, it does contain a reference to ‘ground boutique at match in Chelsea’ which is probably a dig at Ken Bates‘ attempts to commercialise and modernise Chelsea in the 80s and 90s.

The only problem with it is that it pales in comparison to the best version: not the one from COTC, which is rather sluggish and flat, but the 2004 single version (Theme From Sparta F.C. #2) which is simply outstanding.

Contraflow
An urgent, swirling assault in which MES expresses his distaste for all things bucolic. The lyric was apparently4 inspired by the group having to pick Dave Milner up via Snake Pass. To me, it always sounds reminiscent of Please Don’t Touch by Motorhead & Girlschool (although as nobody ever seems to agree with me on this, I may not include it in the next ‘borrows’ post).

The COTC take gives the electronic elements and the backing vocals a higher profile (and it all gets quite interestingly urban halfway through), but overall it’s a little incoherent.

It got 68 outings 2003-05.

Last Commands Of Xyralothep Via M.E.S.
A song that must come very high in the ‘must be a Fall title’ stakes, Last Commands is a dark, driving and sinister piece. Based around a looping three-note figure that builds in intensity throughout (the emergence of the discordant synth over the last minute adds very effectively to the drama), it’s impressively intense but restrained. It wrings everything possible out of the simplistic riff: it’s taut, urgent and impeccably paced and builds into a layered maelstrom; the ‘drop-out’ from the barrage of noise (2:54) is breathtaking.

Its only flaw, possibly, is its brevity; after the ‘breather’ just before the three-minute mark, it might have been nice to hear it all build again. The COTC version is largely similar to the finished track.

Xyralothep is most likely a Lovecraft reference. It’s one of those songs where even if you don’t have a clear understanding of the lyrics, you can appreciate Smith’s use of language: ‘Avoid fat aggressive men and handsome aggressive men / In conflict they disappear overnight with bad backs / Cod-science/cod-psychology is to be avoided.’

It was only played ten times, all in the summer of 2003.

Open The Boxoctosis #2
A popular live choice 2003-06 (making 85 appearances), Boxoctosis is based around an insistent, circular riff that’s slightly reminiscent of Iggy Pop’s The Passenger.

The lyric is intriguing, perhaps referencing Pandora’s Box, 50s/60s TV game show Take Your Pick (‘take the money… open the box!), an episode of The Twilight Zone (one of Smith’s regular sources of inspiration) or a box of toy soldiers given to MES by his sister. A slightly more prosaic interpretation is that it’s about fags (in the British sense), the line ‘I opened the box of imperial stuff / And to my surprise I found twenty five warriors’ referring to Royals cigarettes which came in 25s rather than the customary 20s.

It’s a little obvious in structure, but has more than enough vigour to sustain it. The COTC  version includes an interesting little guitar line over the chorus, and the comparatively delicate second half (with acoustic guitar flourishes) makes it nearly an equally attractive alternative to the final album take, although the shouty backing vocals are a bit of an unwelcome distraction.

Janet, Johnny + James
Another hypnotic, circular guitar line, and another chord progression that’s not a million miles away from The Passenger. It’s delicate and understated, and Smith’s vocal is timed beautifully (frequently emerging just where you don’t expect it to). The pairing across the channels of two similar but distinct guitar parts – one with a folky twang, the other with just a dab of distortion – is perfectly balanced.

The Annotated Fall suggests that the riff bears a passing reference to Classical Gas, seemingly based on the notion that Pritchard played it during Enigrammatic Dream at the 22 September 2002 Blackburn gig that was filmed for the Touch Sensitive DVD; but he only actually plays it for a couple of bars, and it doesn’t actually bear that much resemblance to JJ&J.

It’s an opaque lyric (‘All that rubbish you create / In the lock / Suddenly cranking / Nepotism’) that has led to several interpretations, discussed in detail here. It replaced Susan vs Youthclub on the final remixed version of the album. It was played live 63 times, 2002-05. PJ Harvey (with Archer on bass) covered the song in 2004.

Inner sleeve of the US version

The Past #2
An energetic, concise hi-tempo stomp that contains surprisingly little guitar: you keep expecting some sort of thrash to appear, but there’s only ever a little bit of high-pitched wailing lurking in the background (the COTC version is much more guitar dominated).

Smith’s vocals are very forward in the mix, have a distinctly ‘stream of consciousness’ feel, and feature quite a bit of the gargling/growling that would become common on the group’s material in their last decade (for example, ‘but I love the justice and falling for the melancholy’ at 0:10).

Some great lines – ‘Pictureless memories dissolve in a panic / Motif: the one can see oneself’ – but as usual rather impenetrable. Contains the second reference to ‘abdominizers’ in a Fall song (the first being in Noel’s Chemical Effluence). The leaked COTC version titled it as ‘The Fast’ – the final version might (possibly) reference this in the line ‘Only humans carry their fast around’.

It was only played three times, all on the European tour of May 2002; apparently no recordings exist.

Inner sleeve of UK version

Loop41 ‘Houston
The ‘Loop 41’ part of the song is a thirty-second blast of staccato distortion and what sounds like a snippet of Trans-Europe Express that, after 30 seconds, cuts incongruously into a slurred, whisky-soaked country ramble. The opening section was used at several occasions as an intro tape.

It’s a cover of a Lee Hazlewood song that was also performed by Dean Martin (the latter version is far more entertaining). The COTC version was entitled Ho(e)uston, probably to reflect that Smith often sounds like he’s singing ‘Euston’. According to Reformation: ‘This is reinforced by the singer’s use of the word “station” in the only two live renditions of the song.’

MES actually sings this rather well. He stays remarkably close to the actual melody, and puts a bit of feeling and verve into it; he captures the song’s (admittedly rather cheesy) maudlin world-weariness with no little style. The group’s sparse and simplistic backing is just right for the song’s sat-in-a-honky-tonk-bar-down on-my-luck atmosphere, and (at 1:38) Ben Pritchard steps forward, tilts back the brim of his stetson and knocks out a nifty little country-twang solo.

Arguably should have been a b-side, but does provide a little light relief in a generally intense album. It was only played live twice.

Inner sleeve, UK version

Mike’s Love Xexagon
Opening with some heavily treated drums that resemble an uptempo version of Dr Bucks’ Letter, the most striking thing about the song is the backing vocals, a curious mix of Low and ELO.

The crunchy guitar riff and solid, no-nonsense drum track make it a formidable slab of noise. It has an unworldly sci-fi atmosphere (not unlike Last Commands) which is enhanced by the vocal’s random wandering across the stereo channels; the rapid-reverb effect at 2:12 is a delight. It has been suggested that the vocal harmonies and lyrics (‘His name was Love’) are a reference to The Beach Boys.

It was played a dozen times in 2004 (and possibly once in 2002 – see above).

Proteinprotection
From the word go, taut and full of barely-controlled menace. A relentless, aggressive bass/drums intro is soon chopped into pieces by a grainy, slashing guitar. The verse is dark and malevolent; the chorus breaks out into a joyfully abandoned thrash; the group’s control of this shifting dynamic is exemplary. The heavily phased breakdown at 1:28 is a masterful touch.

Smith is on superb form here: controlled, menacing, impeccably-timed; he sits above everything, aloof and disdainful yet utterly in sync with the group. Highlights include his enunciation of  ‘abstraction’ at 1:02; the simmering anger of ‘no protein protection’ at 1:50; and – above all – the ‘hey, wuh!’ at 1:13.

Over on The Annotated Fall, bzfgt unearths several possible individual references in the lyrics, but any sort of overall meaning is hard to detect. The COTC version is one of those that varies the least from the final take. Proteinprotection was played nine times 2003-4, and once more (as an instrumental) in 2006. The sleeve credits ‘The Plouty’ (Smith’s pet name for Eleni) with ‘organ + text’, although it’s not clear why.

Recovery Kit
Revolving around a loping bass line and an insistent, driving sequencer, Recovery Kit has a mesmerising, melancholy atmosphere enhanced by gently floating synth chords. Some heavily-treated guitar and harsher electronic noise bookend the song to great effect. Smith’s performance is restrained and moving, demonstrating a level of subtle calmness that he would rarely better.

The highlight of the song, however, is Dave Milner’s drumming. The measured pace, the ebb and flow of the emphasis, the beautifully judged rolling snares (0:34 – 1:03) are reminiscent of Jaki Liebezeit at his best.

The COTC version is a little lacking in subtlety in comparison: the portentous synths are a little overdone, and the double-tracked vocals, though interesting, lack the haunting melancholy of those on the final album. The ‘Oh father’ refrain does add a certain plaintive longing to the performance, however. The Annotated Fall‘s analysis of the lyrics is one worth quoting:

Recovery Kit has a somewhat melancholy air, but it’s ambiguous whether the dominant emotion is sadness or calm; it’s even possible, depending on one’s reading of the song, to detect a sense of elation, as the protagonist throws off the constraints of a well-plotted life and finds a sort of vindication or redemption in the form of the “recovery kit,” whatever the latter actually is. The song is remarkable in that it is so subtle and multivalent, as the music perches on a razor edge between these three emotions (sadness, calm and elation) without betraying the lyrics by committing to one or another of them. The ambiguous entwining of all three of these, as well as the ambiguity of their joining, can be captured by the single adjective “haunting,” which is perhaps clichéd but nevertheless sees apt in this case.’

Stephen Beswick, credited with keyboards on the track, was a friend of Ben Pritchard’s. According to the fall.org biography page, he helped write the song, although he doesn’t receive a credit for this. It was used at a few gigs as an intro tape, but was never played live.

Reissues & Bonus Tracks
The US version of the album, released in 2004 on Narnack Records, featured a different cover, different track selection, and different names for many of the songs on the sleeve (see below).

Cover of US edition

It featured Mod Mock Goth and Recovery Kit #2 (from the (We Wish You) A Protein Christmas single), the 2004 single version of Sparta, plus the song the song that MES wanted to be its b-side (see above), Portugal.

Portugal is the very definition of the sadly lost art of the throwaway b-side; a classic of its type. It’s a fabulous, silly stomp with volleys of thunderous guitar riffery and the group (sans Smith) simply reading out the po-faced email of complaint (‘I told him that if this continued I would have to review my position’) in a hilariously straight fashion. The “Snotballs!” moment (1:38) is priceless.

The truncated ‘trak’ titles of the US edition

Overall Verdict
Smith’s pride at having ‘proved something’ with this album is understandable. Not for the first time, The Fall at the beginning of the 21st century were being written off by many: an interesting footnote in ‘alternative’ music history, perhaps; a much-loved institution, possibly – but one that people were glad existed without having any great desire to actually listen to anything they’d released over the previous decade or so.

Following the group, both in terms of buying their music and attending the gigs, was increasingly being seen as the preserve of nostalgic obsessives, those who lapped up the Fall’s work simply because it involved MES. Listening to the many live recordings from 2001-02 provides some explanation of this attitude. Whilst there are many really strong performances, there are also a fair few shoddy ones; in addition, the setlist was (especially by Fall standards) in danger of becoming samey and predictable; several of the more straightforward tunes (The Joke, Touch Sensitive, F-‘Oldin’ Money, And Therein) being wheeled out with increasingly predictable regularity.

The ‘return to form’ Fall album (complete with ‘their best album since…’ reviews) has become a cliché for good reason. Throughout their forty-odd years, Smith and the group repeatedly pulled out something special when most thought that they (or, more to the point, he) didn’t have it in them/him. And never was it more the case than with Real New. The patchy, shambolic Are You Are Missing Winner (despite its occasional moments of genius) suggested that the highly-regarded Unutterable might be the last ‘renaissance’ album of which The Fall were capable.

And yet, somehow, RNFLP was one of the most consistently strong albums in the group’s history. Not only was it full of outstanding material, thrillingly well executed, it was almost entirely free of the low points that had marred several previous releases. True, it did contain the obligatory throwaway cover version, but Houston is one of the better examples of the genre. Other than that, the material is notable for the remarkable consistency of quality.

As well as consistency and coherence, the album also offers incredible variety: the direct energy and fury of SpartaContraflow and Proteinprotection; the surreal sci-fi spaciness of Last Commands and Xexagon; the delicate nuances of Mountain EnergeiJanet and Recovery Kit. And, for once, the album’s sequencing makes absolutely perfect sense.

Real New Fall LP is also arguably the album that sees the most successful fusion of Smith’s post-punk/garage and electronica/experimental tendencies. Green Eyed Loco-Man is an obvious example – a largely straightforward rock song smothered (to great effect) in squiggly synths – but Last Commands also features a thrashy garage punk riff adorned by electronics.

Promo CD sleeve

If Smith had a point about having ‘proved something’, then Ben Pritchard also has one about the internet leak being ‘the best thing that could’ve happened’ to the album. It’s impossible to judge Country On The Click fully based on the ‘leaked’ version, as you don’t really know at what stage this version of the album was; judging by the version I have, anyway, it’s still a rough mix. But even taking that into consideration, the majority of tracks have clearly been more than improved; they’ve been raised to another level.

In the often random and chaotic trajectory of The Fall’s career, you can almost see some sort of pattern emerging: heavy on the dance/electronica (early 90s/late 90s) replaced by knee-jerk reaction into primal garage-punk/rockabilly (Cerebral CausticAre You Are Missing Winner). An interesting thought in advance of Fall Heads Roll; but that’s for another time…

My “Version”
This is a rare occasion when I would, by and large, leave the album how it is. The only change I would definitely make is to replace Sparta with the vastly superior 2004 single version. It’s tempting to include Portugal – perhaps at the expense of Houston – but perhaps the song should remain in its natural habitat as an obscure b-side.

Rankings
The Real New Fall LP only just falls short of the top four as far as the volume of classic Fall tunes is concerned; in terms of exhilarating variety, it’s arguably only topped by TNSG.

  1. This Nation’s Saving Grace
  2. Perverted By Language
  3. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of
  4. Hex Enduction Hour
  5. The Real New Fall LP Formerly ‘Country On The Click’
  6. Levitate
  7. Slates
  8. Grotesque
  9. The Unutterable
  10. The Marshall Suite
  11. Cerebral Caustic
  12. I Am Kurious Oranj
  13. Room To Live
  14. The Infotainment Scan
  15. Extricate
  16. Bend Sinister
  17. Dragnet
  18. The Light User Syndrome
  19. Are You Are Missing Winner
  20. Middle Class Revolt
  21. Code: Selfish
  22. Shift-Work
  23. Live At The Witch Trials
  24. The Frenz Experiment

With the singles, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish what’s a great single from what’s just a good song, especially with a group so resolutely uncommercial as The Fall. Susan is an intriguing, inventive little track, but not exactly a classic single like, say, Kicker Conspiracy. (That said, Kicker comes from an era when singles mattered a great deal more.)

(We Wish You) A Protein Christmas, on the other hand, is more of a true single. Whilst it falls short of the astonishingly powerful album version, it somehow works as an A-side because it’s something crafted to stand alone; it’s its own little moment

  1. Living Too Late
  2. Jerusalem/Big New Prinz
  3. Kicker Conspiracy
  4. The Man Whose Head Expanded
  5. How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
  6. Totally Wired
  7. Free Range
  8. Behind The Counter
  9. Marquis Cha-Cha
  10. Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul
  11. The Chiselers
  12. Touch Sensitive
  13. (We Wish You) A Protein Christmas
  14. Cab It Up
  15. Cruiser’s Creek
  16. Hey! Luciani
  17. F-‘Oldin’ Money
  18. Mr. Pharmacist
  19. Couldn’t Get Ahead/Rollin’ Dany
  20. Look, Know
  21. The Fall vs 2003 (Susan vs Youthclub)
  22. Telephone Thing
  23. There’s A Ghost In My House
  24. Victoria
  25. Hit The North
  26. Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!
  27. Rowche Rumble
  28. Fiery Jack
  29. Masquerade
  30. Ed’s Babe
  31. High Tension Line
  32. 15 Ways
  33. It’s The New Thing
  34. White Lightning
  35. Popcorn Double Feature
  36. Why Are People Grudgeful?
  37. Oh! Brother
  38. Rude (All The Time)

Live albums: quite a task with this instalment, there being seven official releases from this period. If you bought Yarbles for a couple of quid in a charity shop, you’d have a bargain, as it’s a decent recording of an interesting gig. But in the context of all the Fall live releases, there isn’t really any point to its existence. ATP Festival is a ropy performance in places, has shoddy packaging and is a poor recording.

The LA Knitting Factory and London Garage albums are decent enough if not outstanding performances and have mediocre sound quality which makes them of only mild interest.  Creative Distortion doesn’t exactly capture the group at their very best, but it’s full of unusual versions (including of songs not often performed at the time) and is well worth acquiring, especially as it comes with the entertaining DVD.

2G+2 and Live in San Francisco are both crackers: good starting points if you’re just dipping your toe into the wonderful and frightening world of Fall live records.

  1. Live To Air In Melbourne ’82
  2. In A Hole
  3. A Part Of America Therein, 1981
  4. 2G+2
  5. Live In San Francisco
  6. In The City…
  7. Nottingham ’92
  8. The Legendary Chaos Tape / Live In London 1980
  9. Totale’s Turns
  10. The Idiot Joy Show
  11. Live In Cambridge 1988
  12. I Am As Pure As Oranj
  13. Touch Sensitive… Bootleg Box Set
  14. Creative Distortion
  15. Live 1993 – Batschkapp, Frankfurt
  16. Live 1981 – Jimmy’s Music Club – New Orleans
  17. Live 1977
  18. The Twenty Seven Points
  19. Seminal Live
  20. Live 1998 12th August Astoria 2 London
  21. Live Various Years
  22. Live At The Phoenix Festival
  23. Live In Zagreb
  24. 15 Ways To Leave Your Man – Live
  25. Austurbaejarbio
  26. BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert
  27. Live At The Knitting Factory – L.A. – 14 November 2001
  28. Live At The Garage – London – 20 April 2002
  29. Live 2001 – TJ’s Newport
  30. Live 3rd May 1982 Band On The Wall Manchester
  31. Live 1980 – Cedar Ballroom Birmingham
  32. Live From The Vaults – Alter Banhof, Hof, Germany
  33. Live From The Vaults – Glasgow 1981
  34. Live From The Vaults – Oldham 1978
  35. Live At The ATP Festival – 28 April 2002
  36. Liverpool 78
  37. Live From The Vaults – Los Angeles 1979
  38. Live From The Vaults – Retford 1979
  39. Live At Deeply Vale
  40. Yarbles

 

References
1The Fallen, p271

2The Fallen, p262

3Renegade, p173

4The Fallen, p270

YMGTA #30 – Are You Are Missing Winner

“Evidently recorded in a tin filled with seagulls.

Details
Recorded: Noise Box, Manchester mid-2001
Released: 5 November 2001

  • Mark E Smith – vocals
  • Ben Pritchard – guitar
  • Jim Watts – bass, guitar, vocals
  • Spencer Birtwistle – drums

With: 

  • Brian Fanning – guitar, vocals
  • Ed Blaney – guitar, vocals
  • Julia Nagle – keyboards (live excerpt of Ibis-Afro Man only; not credited on the album)

Background
As the line-up above indicates – with four new faces, Ben Pritchard now a full-time member, Julia Nagle only making a fleeting, historical appearance, and the disappearance of Helal, Wilding and Head – 2000-01 was another period of turbulence in the wonderful and frightening world; a pattern that was to be repeated for much of the decade.

The Fall’s first performance following the November 2000 release of The Unutterable was an in-store appearance at Oxford Street’s HMV. The group played drummer-less, the official reason given for Head’s non-appearance being his acting commitments1. However, a few days later, Spencer Birtwistle (previously a member of Manchester bands Laugh, The Bodines, and Intastella) replaced Head behind the drum kit. In typical fashion, his first rehearsal was at the soundcheck for his debut gig in Nottingham on the 21 November.

Eleni Poulou

The following month Smith met up with the woman who would become his third wife. Eleni Poulou (her first name seems to get spelled a multitude of different ways, but Eleni was what was on the later Fall album sleeves) had performed with Shizuo and Zen-Faschisten. The two were both in Berlin when Smith was helping out his old collaborator Michael Clark2.

Smith proposed to Eleni before the end of 2000 and they were married the following year. According to Smith’s own account in Renegade3, he had known her since 1996, although several sources – including Simon Ford – state that the two first met in December 2000. However, this interview with Poulou confirms that they had known each other for five years before they married.

By the end of 2000, Wilding and Helal had also gone. Their exit was undoubtedly linked to arguments over royalties from Unutterable, although it’s not entirely clear as to whether their dispute was with Smith himself or the record label (in The Fallen, Helal asserts the latter version4, but Jim Wattssupports the former).

Image result for ben pritchard the fall
Ben Pritchard

Of the new recruits, Ben Pritchard had been known to Smith the longest. A native of Prestwich, MES had known him ‘since he was a lad‘. At the beginning of 2001, Jim Watts was in the band Trigger Happy with Dave Milner and Ed Blaney. They were due to support The Fall, but following Helal and Wilding’s departure, Watts was drafted into the group. The Smith/Nagle/Pritchard/Watts/Birtwistle line-up played throughout most of 2001. Ed Blaney – who would become The Fall’s manager- added extra vocals at a few gigs.

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Haarlem, Netherlands, 6/4/01

In May, Smith managed to injure himself at a Great Yarmouth rockabilly festival, falling and hurting his leg on a concrete post. Despite being on crutches, he travelled with the group to Greece in July for a festival date, but it was cancelled due to a thunderstorm.

By the summer of 2001, Nagle had ended her six year stint in the group. According to her interview with Dave Simpson6, she ‘deliberately priced herself out of being in The Fall because she needed a break and to spend time with her son’. According to Simon Ford, her reasons for leaving were:

‘…continuing contract problems (i.e. the lack of one) relating to The Unutterable and the mistreatment of Helal and Wilding. She also had little stomach for the hard slog of breaking in another transitional line-up.’7

In August, the group gained another guitarist. Brian Fanning had previously worked as a guitar technician and made his debut at the 2001 ‘Bulldog Bash‘ (he had been due to play at the cancelled Greek festival gig in July). He played on Are You Are Missing Winner, but was only in the group for three months overall (and only got a ‘with’ credit on the album), leaving because of the pressures of touring8.

Front cover

The group’s first single for two years was released in August 2001. Rude (All The Time), recorded at Ed Blaney’s home studio, came out on Flitwick Records, a label that specialised in limited-edition releases. It was limited to 500 copies (according to Discogs, a copy will set you back around £120.)

Rude (All The Time), originally a Trigger Happy song (from a 1997 EP), here featured a minimal line-up of Smith/Blaney/Watts/Birtwistle. It is, frankly, bloody awful: a lazy, half-arsed strum through a vague and not very inspiring idea.

The b-side, however, is a completely different kettle of fish. I Wake Up In The City is a companion piece to My Ex-Classmates’ Kids – different lyrics, but they share the same primitive three-chord riff – and is an absolutely blistering piece of scuzzy garage rock. The completely overloaded and distorted guitars are a joy (there are particularly fine moments at 2:31-2:44 and 4:01-4:13), as is the biting snarl of Smith’s vocal; he even manages a cough at 1:15-1:20 that is simultaneously comical, sneering and menacing.

Despite its similarities to My Ex-Classmates’ Kids, both songs were on the setlist whenever the group played I Wake Up In The City in late 2001; at its final three outings in 2002, City was played as part of a medley with Kids.

In The Wider World…
Just before the album’s release, Microsoft released Windows XP; shortly afterwards, the first Xbox went on sale and the first Harry Potter film premiered in London.

In the UK charts, Afroman’s stoner-rap Because I Got High was at number one, having succeeded Kylie’s million-selling and critically-acclaimed pop classic Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Steps’ greatest hits collection, Gold, was the number one album.

The Fall Live In 2000-2001
2000 was slightly lighter on gigs than 1999 (26, compared to 32) but 2001 was a little busier, with 44 dates.

The first gig following The Unutterable‘s release was at HMV in Oxford Street on 15 November 2000 (see above). Chris Hopkins’ review (on thefall.org) described the experience as ‘very strange’ –

‘…the stage was set up at the end of the aisles which were still in place, covered in tarpaulin and protected by crowd control barriers. The overall effect was therefore like standing in a queue, with no moshpit in sight. “I’m going to Spain” was the worst I’ve ever heard… Adam appeared to forget the notes halfway through (or maybe he’d just lost the will to live -it’s a possibility that MES includes it in the set purely to piss the musicians off).’

Six days later, Spencer Birtwhistle made his debut at Nottingham’s Rock City. On thefall.org, Ian Leaver posted this entertaining review:

‘Sometimes it’s hard to explain why The Fall will always be the best band in the world but last night summed it up. Shambolic, drunken, bad tempered at times, funny at others but not for one second dull.

He doesn’t look a well man and was pretty p*ssed (in the UK rather than USA sense), although I’ve seen him worse. Made Adam go and stand at the front instead of lurking by the amp, pulled Nev over who landed on top of him and continued to play while lying on the floor. Smith himself got up about three songs later. Seen to be smiling on more than one occasion which is always nice. Finished with a whimper rather than a bang as they finally gave up. F*cking great night though.’

The next night in London saw Paintwork‘s first performance for 14 years. The following day, Smith pulled the band off-stage halfway through for a pep talk after an aborted Sons of Temperance. Reviews of the remaining seven 2000 gigs can be found at the fall.org page linked to above.

Irish Centre, Leeds, 30/11/2000 

The first gig of 2001 was in Dublin on 24 February. The new line-up was, to put it mildly, under-rehearsed. Ben Pritchard had only rehearsed four songs; Jim Watts had to be cajoled by Smith into even travelling to Ireland and his only rehearsal, inevitably, was just a ‘short strum’. Fan reviews confirm that, in the end, ‘Smith was literally shouting out titles and the band were making it up as they went along’9. One notable feature of the gig was that it saw the first performance of Midwatch 1953.

The group played three Dutch dates in April, which seem to have gone much more successfully. Ibis-Afro Man was debuted on the second night. Shortly afterwards, MES performed a well-received spoken-word set in Dublin.

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The Fall played a further ten UK gigs in April 2001. There’s a bootleg of the first of these, at Newport in Wales. It’s of no better than average sound quality, but the group have clearly gelled since February and it has a couple of  interesting features. It includes a rare performance of Devolute (Smith had also included it in his recent spoken-word performance): it’s rather haphazard, though – Smith apparently loses track of what he’s saying in several places – and is much less effective without the double-tracked vocals.

The group also played I Am Damo Suzuki for the first time in 14 years. Stretching to seven minutes, it features some effective sustained guitar work from Pritchard and sees MES in invigorated form. The song would be played regularly throughout 2001-04, often in this extended fashion.

This gig is another that was released as part of the Set of Ten in 2018.  Presuming that it’s the same recording as the bootleg that I have, it’s a solid enough mid-table affair.

Oxford Zodiac, 22/4/01 (photo by Claire Risley)

There’s another bootleg of the date six days later in Oxford, and it has a far brighter, cleaner sound than the Newport one. It’s notable that by this stage Ben Pritchard is confident enough to add quite a few showy rock ‘n’ roll flourishes (for example the little solo in F-‘Oldin’ Money) that Smith wouldn’t have put up with twenty years earlier. Ibis-Afro Man is a model of coherence compared to the album version.

The last of the April dates, in Macclesfield, saw Bourgeois Town played for the first time.

gig-list

After the ‘Bulldog Bash’ (see above) The Fall played another ten UK/Ireland dates in October, followed by ten European gigs. The first night at Leeds Cockpit saw several new songs debuted: Crop Dust, Jim’s “The Fall”, Kick The Can and My Ex-Classmates’ Kids. What was at the time known as Bastardo was played for the first time in Dublin.

There’s a bootleg of the 17 October Bristol gig (of pretty reasonable quality). Bourgeois Town sees Ben Pritchard in full-on Eric Clapton mode; Kick The Can and F-‘Oldin’ Money are played as a medley (as they often were at the time); Dr Bucks’ Letter is performed as a heavy, messy stoner-rock instrumental. Bastardo is fast-paced and features more bluesy soloing from Pritchard; it’s followed by the first ever performance of Gotta See Jane.

Hamburg 24/10/01 (Photo by Sebastian Cording)

The group spent the last part of October in Europe, playing ten dates in Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. Reviews suggest the gigs generally went well.

In July 2003, Castle/Sanctuary released Touch Sensitive… Bootleg Box Set, a five-CD collection of 2001 live recordings: Haarlem, Amsterdam and Brighton from April; Seattle and New York (the first night) from November. It’s a mixed bag. The sound quality is generally ok – pretty standard audience recordings – and there are a few gems (the version of Crop Dust from New York is a cracker, for example). However, you might find yourself tiring just a little of the F-‘Oldin’ Money/Kick The Can medley, MES repeatedly saying ‘moderninity’ and the group trundling endlessly through Mr Pharmacist.

The Album
The album wasn’t recorded under the easiest of conditions. Ben Pritchard recalls:

‘The studio we were recording it in was still being built it was damp and dark and we were directly underneath a body builders’ gym. We had to keep deleting takes because you could hear the clanging of dumbbell weights being dropped on the recordings!’

Although Are You Are Missing Winner was officially released on the 5 November, it was available at gigs from the Leeds date on the 8 October onward (you can hear it being advertised in an announcement at the end of the Bristol bootleg). This may well have had an impact on official sales figures: whilst the previous three LPs had achieved only lowly placings, AYAMW didn’t even trouble the chart at all.

Like the ruck of MES-flicks-the-Vs live albums that emerged throughout 1998-2001, Are You Are Missing Winner came out on Cog Sinister/Voiceprint. The cover is widely regarded as the worst of all the Fall’s LP covers: a blurred negative image of Smith and his new wife is surrounded by cheap and nasty lettering and ugly splotches of pink and purple. There’s almost (almost) something winning (pardon the pun) about its unapologetic hideousness.

The first editions of the CD contained typos, incorrect titles and were poorly mastered (with lots of skips and inexplicable gaps). As to the origins of the album’s title, Ben Pritchard says:

‘There was an article at the time about the national lottery, someone had won and didn’t come forward to claim the prize. It’s as simple as that. Mark took his inspiration for lyrics and titles from anywhere he could find. Are you ‘our’ missing winner, he just spelt it wrong.’

The album was not received very positively, either by fans or by the music press. In Q, Ian Harrison described it as sounding like ‘wildly variable fragments recorded in Smith’s shed’ that at their worst were ‘bemusingly thin’. He thought it ‘strictly for the kind of fans keen to display levels of dutiful devotion last seen at the Charge Of The Light Brigade.’ Edwin Pouncey, writing in The Wire, described it as a ‘rockabilly racket which makes no apparent sense at all’, although he did recommend playing it ‘loud enough to wake the dead’.

The Songs
Jim’s “The Fall”
A brash, non-nonsense opener in the tradition of The Joke and D.I.Y. Meat that Dave Thompson describes10 as ‘a gnarly statement of intent for the latest line-up’, it being named after new recruit Jim Watts, who wrote the tune.

It’s tidy enough, if perhaps verging on the pedestrian; not quite breaking out into the abandoned thrash that you might expect or want it to. Played 17 times, 2001-02.

Bourgeois Town
A cover of Lead Belly’s The Bourgeois Blues, it doesn’t really do much exciting with the song, translating it into a rather bog-standard pub-rock trundle. Not that it’s entirely without appeal, however; there’s some nicely scuffed-up riffing lurking behind the main guitar line and Smith’s slurred growl is fairly affecting.

According to Reformation, MES quoted the song in performances as far back as 1985. It got 73 outings, 2001-04.

Crop-Dust
One of the group’s most blatant ‘borrows’, being lifted from The Trogg’s I Just Sing, it’s a scarred and venomous piece of warped psych-garage-punk, led by a twisted, snake-charming lead guitar fuzz and underpinned by a galloping, distorted drone-clatter rhythm section. It’s not as extreme as Ibis-Afro Man (see below), but is similar in its stitching together of several brutally-edited segments. The transitions between these sections are unsettling and compelling: there are wonderfully discordant overlaps at 1:18, 1:42 and 2:30 (the last of which leads into a woozy descent in tempo).

Besides the hypnotic lead part, there’s a shedload of excellent guitar here: the cracked, hesitant chords that emerge at 0:07; the wavering feedback that cuts in and out from 0:57; the atonal drone at 1:13; the sharp, tinny fuzz at 4:30.

As for the lyrics, Reformation suggests it’s about the gentrification of Manchester; The Annotated Fall that it’s about post-9/11 terrorist paranoia. The latter interpretation is supported by a Record Collector interview from February 2002, which says that the song was ‘inspired by a dream Smith had about two towers and office executives running from a building’.

Whatever the meaning, it’s a fine example of Smith’s use of language:

‘The editor bedraggled, stumbled
Some hurt, some dazed with film crew
Their equipment strewn on the new development
As the rain tumbles down over the riverside complex
Still not covering up the ominous thunder of the hymn.’

It was played 23 times, 22 in 2001 plus a final performance in Milan in 2002.

My Ex-Classmates’ Kids
A swinging, energetic bit of blues-rock that echoes the sentiments of Married, 2 Kids. Smith’s distorted vocal works particularity well, but overall it has a slightly thin feel, especially when compared to its ‘sister’ song, I Wake Up In The City. It was performed 29 times between 2001 and 2003.

Kick The Can
The song opens with a guitar part so heavily flanged and distorted that it sounds like it’s being played underwater; two minutes in it kicks into a clean and taut groove that shimmies along for the remaining three minutes.

Lyrically, it’s a rather minimal effort; live versions often saw MES just bark out the refrain whilst the group repeated the riff. Not unpleasant, but not especially inspiring either. It was played 57 times 2001-03, often as part of a medley with F-‘Oldin Money.

Gotta See Jane
The Fall had secured their highest ever chart position with R D Taylor’s There’s A Ghost In My House back in 1987; here they cover another Taylor song, originally released in 1967.

It’s one where the group really don’t do the original justice. Taylor’s original has a keening, desperate tone that’s touching and emotionally involving; The Fall’s take is a little plodding and lazy in comparison. Not entirely unpleasant, but one that leaves you shrugging your shoulders. It only got four live outings, all in October 2001.

Ibis-Afro Man
One of the more divisive tracks in the group’s history, one that City Life magazine called ‘the worst song in The Fall’s 25-year old career’. It’s based loosely around Iggy Pop’s (racially dubious – ‘I live in the bush and I’m going to stomp like a gorilla / Here I beat my chest’) African Man, from his 1979 album New Values.

It’s an unholy mess and a terrible racket throughout. In style, it’s a close relation of Hurricane Edward, in that it sounds like several unfinished versions of the same track  edited together by chopping the tapes up with blunt scissors and binding them with Sellotape. Stewart Lee commented that it was ‘evidently recorded in a tin filled with seagulls’.

The live section at the end is taken from the 23 April 2001 gig at The Mean Fiddler; it contains some of the lyrics from Race With The Devil, a Gene Vincent song that the group played at John Peel’s 50th birthday celebration in 1989 (and was included on 2013’s The Remainderer). The keyboard squiggles mark Julia Nagle’s final contribution to The Fall.

There’s something both ridiculous and exhilarating about the wilfully ham-fisted way the different versions of its thumping, primal stomp barge into each other from either side of the stereo. It’s an acquired taste, undoubtedly (the ‘chattering monkey’ section is rather trying to even the most open-minded listener), but you can’t imagine anyone else but The Fall recording it. It was played 19 times 2000-01.

The Acute
A little simplistic and obvious, The Acute is a country-ish toe-tapper where no chord change is ever a surprise. However, the Pixies/Violent Femmes-esque skittering guitar at 2:43 is a nice touch. Smith’s vocals straddle precariously the line between ‘idiosyncratic delivery’ and ‘unlistenably tuneless’ and are almost uncomfortably forward in the mix.

The line regarding ‘the motive of this film’ may possibly refer to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; according to The Annotated Fall, Jim Watts suggested (via the Fall Online Forum) that there was an alternative version of the song that included lyrics referring to Frank Skinner. It was never played live.

Hollow Mind
Another fairly simplistic tune, based around a straightforward (mainly) two chord pattern played on a scratchy acoustic accompanied by a pretty bog standard root note bass line. The melody is not a million miles away from Jerusalem.

Although it’s quite slight, it has a certain ramshackle charm, and the gnarly fuzz of the electric guitar that emerges over the last third peps it up a bit with a little rickety thrash. The almost comically deep backing vocal (possibly supplied by Ed Blaney) gives it a bit more body as well.

The target of Smith’s derision (‘You don’t know f*ck sh*t’) is unclear. It was never played live.

Reprise: Jane – Prof Mick – Ey Bastardo
The album’s closer revisits a couple of Fall tropes: experimental p*ss-taking (the lengthy ‘is there something wrong with my CD player?’ gaps) and the roll-call roasting of group members (cf North West Fashion Show).

As the title suggests, it’s a mix of the loose jam Bastardo that was played a few times in 2001 and a reprise of the cover of Gotta See Jane. It’s unclear who ‘Prof Mick’ might be, but Mick Middles is an obvious candidate.

An interview with Brian Fanning in The Fallen contains a description of the song’s recording:

‘When they were recording… Gotta See Jane… Smith suddenly started shouting at the drummer, Spencer Birtwistle, that the music was all wrong… Smith suggested a ten minute break, during which Birtwistle started playing a different beat. Fanning picked up the bass and played along. Then Smith started rapping over the top – ‘Spencer is a bastardo, he needs to go back to Rusholme’ – before going on to sing the same song as before over a completely new rhythm.’11

It’s not without its charms – the group sound like they’re having a great time (Smith in particular) and Pritchard contributes some nifty guitar work – but its seven minute length is rather indulgent for a novelty interlude. It was played (albeit in a fairly different form) half a dozen times in autumn 2001.

2006 Castle reissue

Reissues & Bonus Tracks
A remastered (the mastering on the original was notoriously poor) version of the album was reissued in 2006 on Castle Music, a subsidiary of Sanctuary. It included six bonus tracks: both sides of the 2001 Rude (All The Time) single, two studio tracks from 2001 (New Formation Sermon and Distilled Mug Art – see next post), a live version (with considerably more gusto than the album take) of My Ex-Classmates’ Kids, recorded in Cologne on 23 October 2001 and Where’s The F***in Taxi? C**t.

Taxi was recorded at the same session as Rude (All The Time) and I Wake Up In The City, and was released as part of the EP version of Rude (All The Time) that came out in 2005.

It’s a waste of five minutes of your life: Smith, Blaney, et al wittering drunkenly while someone tortures an acoustic guitar. Supremely self-indulgent. If you have nothing better to do, it’s transcribed here.

Overall Verdict
Cerebral Caustic saw Smith attempting to drag The Fall away from its dance/electronica-tinged early 90s incarnation and establish a stripped-down, back to basics approach. And yet, that album was still infused with electronic effects amongst the primal garage rock. Are You Are Missing Winner represents a much purer take on the guitar-bass-drums ethos. Nagle’s departure, which left the group without a keyboard player, means that Winner is almost entirely devoid of electronic sounds.

This minimalist approach is not in itself a problem. Where the group demonstrate strong levels of innovation and invention (Crop DustIbis-Afro Man), it makes sense, even if the results don’t always represent easy listening. But overall, the song-writing is just not strong enough to sustain the ‘back to basics’ ethos. Whilst many of the songs contain some pleasing guitar work, too many of them (The Acute and Hollow Mind, for example) feel like thin and underdeveloped ideas; and the covers are workable but uninspiring.

It’s not a terrible album by any means – several others have low points that are lower than the weaker songs here – but overall it’s just too ragged and disjointed to be entirely satisfying.

My “Version”
I’ve included a couple of tracks (Formation and Distilled) that I haven’t written about yet – they’ll be covered in the next post. The minimal length (35:38 – just within the minimum limit) says a lot…

Side 1: Jim’s “The Fall” / Gotta See Jane / I Wake Up in the City / New Formation Sermon / Kick the Can (17:02)

Side 2: Crop-Dust / Distilled Mug Art / Ibis-Afro Man (18:36)

Rankings
I’ve always had rather a soft spot for the album, and have often defended it. This comes from an admiration for its perversity and also my love of Crop Dust and Ibis. However, the intense process involved in doing this blog has undoubtedly exposed its flaws, and even as an admirer I have to confess that it comes nowhere near to standing up to the top half of the rankings so far.

Light User Syndrome and Middle Class Revolt are similarly flawed albums. The former has a greater number of highlights; the latter has a flat and samey atmosphere that isn’t the case with Winner. So it goes between the two of them.

  1. This Nation’s Saving Grace
  2. Perverted By Language
  3. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of
  4. Hex Enduction Hour
  5. Levitate
  6. Slates
  7. Grotesque
  8. The Unutterable
  9. The Marshall Suite
  10. Cerebral Caustic
  11. I Am Kurious Oranj
  12. Room To Live
  13. The Infotainment Scan
  14. Extricate
  15. Bend Sinister
  16. Dragnet
  17. The Light User Syndrome
  18. Are You Are Missing Winner
  19. Middle Class Revolt
  20. Code: Selfish
  21. Shift-Work
  22. Live At The Witch Trials
  23. The Frenz Experiment

As far as singles go, I decided at the outset that I would only consider A-sides, as to include other tracks would complicate things horrendously. So, despite its excellent b-side, Rude find itself in grave danger of relegation…

  1. Living Too Late
  2. Jerusalem/Big New Prinz
  3. Kicker Conspiracy
  4. The Man Whose Head Expanded
  5. How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
  6. Totally Wired
  7. Free Range
  8. Behind The Counter
  9. Marquis Cha-Cha
  10. Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul
  11. The Chiselers
  12. Touch Sensitive
  13. Cab It Up
  14. Cruiser’s Creek
  15. Hey! Luciani
  16. F-‘Oldin’ Money
  17. Mr. Pharmacist
  18. Couldn’t Get Ahead/Rollin’ Dany
  19. Look, Know
  20. Telephone Thing
  21. There’s A Ghost In My House
  22. Victoria
  23. Hit The North
  24. Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!
  25. Rowche Rumble
  26. Fiery Jack
  27. Masquerade
  28. Ed’s Babe
  29. High Tension Line
  30. 15 Ways
  31. It’s The New Thing
  32. White Lightning
  33. Popcorn Double Feature
  34. Why Are People Grudgeful?
  35. Oh! Brother
  36. Rude (All The Time)

Live At TJ’s is fine, if unremarkable. The Bootleg Box Set has its ups and downs, but does capture a specific period of the group’s work very well; plus, at an average price of around £25 for a five-disc set, it does represent pretty good value.

  1. Live To Air In Melbourne ’82
  2. In A Hole
  3. A Part Of America Therein, 1981
  4. In The City…
  5. Nottingham ’92
  6. The Legendary Chaos Tape / Live In London 1980
  7. Totale’s Turns
  8. The Idiot Joy Show
  9. Live In Cambridge 1988
  10. I Am As Pure As Oranj
  11. Touch Sensitive… Bootleg Box Set
  12. Live 1993 – Batschkapp, Frankfurt
  13. Live 1981 – Jimmy’s Music Club – New Orleans
  14. Live 1977
  15. The Twenty Seven Points
  16. Seminal Live
  17. Live 1998 12th August Astoria 2 London
  18. Live Various Years
  19. Live At The Phoenix Festival
  20. Live In Zagreb
  21. 15 Ways To Leave Your Man – Live
  22. Austurbaejarbio
  23. BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert
  24. Live 2001 – TJ’s Newport
  25. Live 3rd May 1982 Band On The Wall Manchester
  26. Live 1980 – Cedar Ballroom Birmingham
  27. Live From The Vaults – Alter Banhof, Hof, Germany
  28. Live From The Vaults – Glasgow 1981
  29. Live From The Vaults – Oldham 1978
  30. Liverpool 78
  31. Live From The Vaults – Los Angeles 1979
  32. Live From The Vaults – Retford 1979
  33. Live At Deeply Vale

References

1Ford, p275

2Ford, p277

3Renegade, p133

4The Fallen, p245

5The Fallen, p255

6The Fallen, p227

7Ford, pp276-277

8The Fallen, p250

9The Fallen, p254

10Thompson, p167

11The Fallen, p250

 

 

YMGTA #29 – The Unutterable

“Checklist: I never leave home without…”

Details
Recorded: Testa-Rossa Studios, Manchester; Street Level 2 Studio, London; Sonic Surgery, Manchester mid-2000.
Released: 6 November 2000

  • Mark E Smith – vocals, SFX
  • Julia Nagle – keyboards, guitar, vocals, programming
  • Tom Head – drums, percussion, vocals
  • Neville Wilding – guitar, vocals
  • Adam Helal – bass, pro tools, vocals
    With: 
  • Steve Evets – vocals
  • Kazuko Hohki – vocals (Cyber Insekt)
  • Ben Pritchard – guitar (Dr. Bucks’ Letter)
  • Grant Cunliffe – vocals

Background
On the day of The Marshall Suite‘s release, Smith made one of his increasingly frequent guest appearances, on this occasion revisiting his connection with The Inspiral Carpets. He appeared on stage with The Clint Boon Experience (the band that Boon had formed following the Carpets’ demise) in Camden, providing vocals on their cover of I Wanna Be Your Dog. This haphazard but entertaining gallop through the classic Stooges song (with an added ‘now’ prefixing the original title) was the b-side of The CBE’s August 1999 single You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down. MES puts in a fine performance, full of bite and fury.

Another August 1999 release saw Smith working with an old acquaintance. Dave Bush, now a member of Elastica, persuaded Smith to join the band in the studio. MES contributed to two tracks on Elastica’s 6 Track EP – How I Wrote Elastica Man and KB.

Justine Frischmann of Elastica described the experience in a 2000 NME interview:

‘We were in the studio and he (Mark E Smith) was in a pub around the corner. Dave bumped into him and invited him to come down. He was up for doing some stuff so we did.

I was initially too scared to come out of the control room but when I did he was charming. I think he probably can be quite scary but he chose to be the perfect gentleman when he was working with us. He was actually very inspiring to be around – really cool.

We’d had that track for a while and we didn’t know what to do with it and he walked into the studio room and plugged his mic into an amp, turned it up until it was all feeding back and started shouting ‘E!- L!-A!’ doing his cheerleader bit which was quite bizarre.’

Despite seeming to have established a relatively stable Fall line-up, Smith still had a tense and unpredictable relationship with his musicians. In a September 1999 interview with a Dutch newspaper (scroll down for the translation) he said that ‘the mistake I made in the past was getting a bit too close to them’ and described the current group as ‘a lot of reserves’.

The May tour passed off without major incident (see reviews here), but the group’s summer festival appearances saw them descend into some of their old bad habits. A bust-up with Tom Head saw Smith sack the drummer on the day of their appearance at the Reading Festival. Wilding persuaded Nick Dewey (ex-member of shoegaze band Revolver and at the time part of The Chemical Brothers’ management) to play for them, even though he hadn’t played drums for several years.

Dewey’s experience was described in Dave Simpson’s The Fallen1:

‘Dewey found himself being led on to a tour bus with blacked-out windows. Mark E Smith was on one of the tour bus benches, shirt off, passed out… Wilding tried to wake Smith and couldn’t rouse him, so punched him in the face. After two or three blows, Smith finally woke up to be informed by Wilding, “Mark, this is Nick. He’s going to be playing drums for us.”‘

By the time Smith appeared on stage, he was covered in blood, apparently as a result of being ‘at it with knuckle-dusters’2 with Wilding back stage. Head was reinstated in time for the next day’s performance in Leeds.

Two of the songs recorded for The Unutterable were linked to MES’s late 90s flirtations with the world of acting. His first screen role (although he did appear in a Jerry Sadowitz sketch show in 1992) had been in Diary of a Madman, a frankly baffling ten minute piece that appeared on BBC2 in 1997.  Based, apparently, on a 19th century Russian short story and starring Steve Evets, Smith’s appearance (at 6:56) lasts around 30 seconds and largely consists of him repeating the word ‘name’.

The following year, he appeared in Mark Aerial Waller’s short film Glow Boys, playing ‘The Caterer’. The film featured snippets of The Caterer (from The Post Nearly Man) which was re-worked as Das Katerer for The Unutterable.

In 1999, MES appeared in another Waller film. Midwatch was set in the galley of a ship returning from Operation Mosaic, nuclear tests conducted by Britain in 1956. It doesn’t appear to be online, but Waller’s own website describes the film as:

‘…an intensely claustrophobic scenario shot in infrared that depicts the plight of two individuals trapped in the galley of a ship returning from the first British nuclear test. The confined conditions reference such purgatorial works as Sartre’s play In Camera or the bleak German masterpiece Das Boot. But here the characters, played by Steve Evets and Mark E. Smith of the band The Fall, act out their frustrations with each other in a comic rambling exchange.’

Despite there being several strong candidates, the group did not release any singles to promote Unutterable – the next single to be released was the limited-edition Rude (All The Time), and there wouldn’t be another ‘proper’ one until December 2002.

In The Wider World…
October 30, a week before The Unutterable‘s release, marked the final date during which there was no human presence in space; since the day after, the international space station has been continually crewed. A couple of weeks later, Judith Keppel became the first person to win £1m on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

In the charts, The Spice Girls’ double A-side, Holler / Let Love Lead the Way was spending its one week at number one. It was preceded by Stomp by Steps, and succeeded by Westlife’s My Love. (Does anyone actually remember any of these dreadful songs?) The top spot in the album chart was filled by something equally bland and insipid: Greatest Hits by Texas.

The Fall Live In 1999-2000
The new line-up and positively-received (critically, at least) album seem to have invigorated the group a little on the live front. They played 32 dates in 1999, only 13 less than 1997 and 1998 combined. It’s a period that is well represented by bootleg recordings.

There was a trio of dates in Ashton early in 1999 and then the XFM performance in April (see previous post). After The Marshall Suite‘s release, the group embarked on a dozen UK dates in May to promote the new album.

After the opening night in Leicester, they played Leeds Irish Centre on 4 May. There’s a bootleg recording of this gig, where they played Tom Ragazzi for the first time. It’s not bad, either sound quality or performance-wise, although the group do sound a little stilted and uncertain in places. Like many recordings from this period, Smith’s vocals are frequently smothered in excessive layers of reverb. The version of Spencer is interesting, sounding (musically) rather like early Mogwai, as is the closing Status Quo-esque Ol’ Gang.

The following night, at Birmingham’s Foundry, saw Ketamine Sun‘s debut and also has a widely circulated bootleg. It’s a pretty rough recording, although the group seem on generally good form (reflected in the reviews here). Ketamine Sun is rather brief (under two minutes) and sounds oddly like a Bob Dylan/Velvet Underground hybrid.

flyer

After gigs in Brighton, Salisbury, Hastings, Sheffield, Cheltenham, Cambridge and Southend, the group played Venue 21 in Luton on 13 May, yet another one with a widely available bootleg. It opens with an intriguing version of Birthday Song that’s radically different from the album take. It’s a strange gig all round. Everything is very concise (21 songs in under an hour); Wilding sings most of Ten Houses Of EveThe Joke is played twice for no apparent reason, as is Ketamine Sun. Not exactly their finest performance, but definitely worth a listen out of curiosity.

There is also a bootleg available of the Reading festival gig from August. The recording is of a very muddy quality, and there’s lots of obtrusive audience chatter. That said, it’s another intriguing listen, especially as – considering the circumstances – it’s remarkable that the group performed at all. Nick Dewey performs heroically: the drums are (understandably) generally plodding and generic, but taking into account that he had only an hour or two to prepare for a set of unfamiliar songs, it’s incredible how he keeps it together throughout. MES sounds thoroughly inebriated, particularly on Birthday Song, where he launches into a drunken ramble that bears little resemblance to the original lyrics: ‘Backstage, the chitter-chatter of the Reading backstage camp(?) is louder than the music of the group’.

In September, the group played half a dozen gigs in the low countries. The first of these, at Doornroosje, Nijmegen on 14 September, is yet another of the discs from the 2018 box set Set Of Ten that I don’t own. I do, however, have a recording of the fifth of these gigs, in Brussels on 18 September. It’s an untidy but interesting performance, full of extemporaneous lyrics (examples here). Ten Houses Of Eve is notably thrashy and Touch Sensitive gets two outings; Big New Prinz is an unholy shambolic mess with no vocals and a brief dip into Midwatch 1953. The last of the six low countries gigs (at Leiden in The Netherlands on 19 September) is yet another one available on bootleg, and it’s an unmitigated disaster. Wilding isn’t present, Smith appears only sporadically, they play a particularly terrible version of Shake-Off and the whole sorry affair is over in only 38 minutes.

Tilburg, The Netherlands, 17/9/99 (Photo by Andre Nieuwlaat)

The group played half a dozen UK gigs to round off 1999. At the first of these, at Camden Dingwalls, Cyber Insekt, Hands Up Billy and The Caterer were debuted.

They played 26 gigs in 2000, 15 of these before The Unutterable‘s release. Two Librans was played for the first time in York on 23 March; Way Round debuted the next night at Leeds.

Untitled
Wrexham, 21/03/2000

The Fall played London’s Astoria on 24 May 2000; this is another one where there’s a bootleg available (although the sound is not great). thefall.org’s gigography states that The Crying Marshal was played live for the first time (as an instrumental) but this is inaccurate; Reformation correctly identifies the opening track as an instrumental version of SerumReformation is, however, wrong to say that Das Katerer didn’t receive its debut until 2001, as it was played at this gig (and actually received its first outing in Camden seven months earlier).

What is certainly true is that Dr Bucks’ Letter was played for the first time that night. Fan reviews at the time suggested, not unreasonably, that the new song might have been entitled Essence of Tong or even The Essence of Tom. The distinctive, treated drum loop appears briefly at the outset, but thereafter the riff is played by live bass and guitar. The lyric at this stage is largely focused on the ‘essence of Tong’ magazine interview (see the ‘more information’ section on The Annotated Fall) and does not contain the ‘I lost my temper with a friend’ element. In fact, MES reads out quite a large proportion of the article (as can be seen from the scan below), not just covering the ‘never leave home without’ checklist, but also Pete Tong’s favourite books, magazines and TV shows. If you’re a fan of this song (i.e. a sane person) then it’s an essential and intriguing snapshot of its development.

Cyber Insekt is also clearly a work in progress: it’s much more frantic heads-down garage-rockabilly in comparison to the studio version (as is true of most live versions of the track), and sounds very different without the distinctive and prominent backing vocals. Way Round is played twice. It’s all a bit of an experimental shambles, but worth a listen.

The next gig, in Ashton on June 12, saw WB played for the first time. After half a dozen more UK gigs, The Fall played the Festival de Arcos de Valdevez in Portugal, where Hot Runes was debuted. Sons of Temperance was played for the first time at the Water’s Edge Festival in Castlefield, Manchester on 13 August.

The Album
The Unutterable was recorded relatively quickly; in around a month according to Simon Ford3. Pascal Le Gras supplied the cover art again, and Grant Showbiz returned to produce, his first involvement since 1995’s The Twenty-Seven Points and his first production credit on a studio Fall album since Shift-Work.

Reviews were almost universally positive. In Mojo, John Mullen described it as ‘The Fall’s most musically exciting LP since 1990’s Extricate. An unutterable pleasure.’ Simon Goddard in Uncut thought it, ‘tight, witty and deliriously catchy’. The NME‘s Piers Martin said the album was ‘as vital and relevant as The Fall have sounded for a considerable length of time’. Dave Simpson’s Guardian review was especially glowing:

‘When Mark E Smith sacked his band in 1998 it seemed as though the old curmudgeon had finally tipped the scales from being an institution to entering one. However, it has rejuvenated the group. Last year’s The Marshall Suite – the first with his new line-up of fiery whippersnappers – was excellent, but this is a career peak.
Smith’s scattergun muse has certainly been refreshed by something, and the old vitriol is increasingly laced with delicious humour.’

This critical acclaim did not, however, transfer into sales. The album only reached number 136 in the charts, nineteen places lower than Levitate and the worst commercial performance by a Fall album for seventeen years.

The Songs
Cyber Insekt
The album opens with a sprightly, unusual piece of sci-fi skiffle. Kazuko Hohki of Frank Chickens (who apparently recorded her part without actually meeting the group) contributes the deadpan, robotic vocals that are reminiscent of several tracks recorded when Elena Poulou was in the band. The lyrics supposedly deal with the aftermath of the 1998 Brownies gig, although it’s not entirely obvious how this is the case.

It was played live 73 times, 1999-2002.

Two Librans
After the comparatively light Cyber InsektTwo Librans crashes in with a hard/garage-rock attitude reminiscent to some extent of the Cerebral Caustic material, especially in the descending thrash chords. But there’s something new here: the grizzly, monstrous bassline strikes a different note to the Steve Hanley years; a coiled, fuzzy menacing tone that the group would return to frequently in the 21st century, especially in the Dave Spurr years.

The understated, circumspect guitar line of the verse feels like it’s circling the vocals, waiting to pounce when they reach the chorus, at which point the fuzzed-up chords crash in. There’s a load of other delights chucked in for good measure: horror-movie-soundtrack piano, some up-the-neck string-bending guitar soloing and a spot of scuzzily treated Dr. Buck-like drums.

MES is on top form too, finding a perfect balance between disdainful slur and aggressive bark. There’s a hint of what was to come with the vocals too; a trace of the 21st century growl/gargle emerging, for example ‘Librans’ at 1:01. A typically opaque lyric, but not one without humour, the line about Oprah Winfrey’s interest in melittology always raising a smile. (There are some who argue that the lyric doesn’t necessarily suggest that it was Oprah studying the bees; I’m not one of them.)

It was played live 70 times, 2000-2002.

W.B.
The title refers to William Blake, and the lyrics take their inspiration from A Song Of Liberty. It’s a little loose and shapeless, but the swirling synths and looping twangy guitar are undoubtedly appealing.  Only played nine times, all in 2000.

Sons Of Temperance
As is the case with much of Unutterable, this features an exciting mix of electronics / sequencing and fuzzy garage rock. It’s a tale of two halves (or four quarters, to be more accurate) – a taut, riff-driven onslaught and a floaty, laid-back  interlude. The first is sharp, biting and fizzes with energy, especially the staccato bursts; the second is woozy, menacing and psychedelic. Both are very ably supported by a wide variety of synth swoops and squiggles.

MES deploys the full arsenal of Smith techniques: random growling, an (almost) tight double-tracked chorus refrain, a slightly disturbing and creepy falsetto; and the way he pronounces ‘temp-or-anzh’ (the best I could do to render it phonetically) is worth the price of admission alone. Played 18 times, 2000-2001.

Dr. Bucks’ Letter
One of the group’s finest ever moments, and a personal favourite. On The Fall In Fives I took the opportunity, given the song’s list theme (apologies for quoting myself), to identify ten great things about it:

1. The programmed drum sound: it’s dirty, grainy, distorted and I could listen to it endlessly…
2. …in fact, I wake up to it every day, as it’s the alarm on my phone. It’s a fine way to start to the day and I can highly recommend it – download it here if you want a joyous way to begin your morning.
3. The contrast between that drum track and the ‘live’, comparatively subtle and delicate rimshot drums is just wonderful.
4. MES’s vocals are sublime on this: the perfect mix of intriguing wordplay and modern-day-Smith growling…
5. …and there are several superbly ‘only MES could have written’ phrases, in particular ‘vulgar and arrogant abeyance’
6. Plus, there are multiple examples of specific words/phrases where MES’s enunciation is just amazingly spot on: ‘recompense’, ‘magazine’, ‘checklist’, ‘CDs’, ‘download it’.
7. The guitar sound on the little break at 3:01 is remarkable: it’s distorted yet tidy; fuzzy but perfectly contained and controlled.
8. There’s also a simple and melodic little guitar line that runs through parts of the song (e.g. at 2:20) that subtly cuts through the fuzz and distortion.
9. MES’s laughs at 4:19 and 4:36-4:38 are truly endearing
10. The ‘Pete Tong magazine article’ section overall is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard in a song: I laughed out loud the first few times I heard it and it still makes me smile despite having heard the song a million times.

With uncannily prescient timing, dannyno unearthed the source of the ‘checklist’ at the exact moment I was in the middle of writing about the song. It’s from Hotline, a Virgin Trains complimentary magazine, Autumn 1999.

20190827_191409[1].jpg

Although the ‘checklist’ is the part of the lyric that most people remember, the bulk of the studio version is actually a melancholy and intriguing tale of broken friendship. Having lost his temper with a friend, who he ‘mocked’ and ‘treated… with rudeness’, the narrator ‘tried to make amends’, but is ‘depressed’ about their estrangement. He hopes that ‘one day a door will be ajar… so we can recompense our betrayal of our hard won friendship’. He read the ‘essence of Tong’ article (MES invented the title) in order to cheer himself up.

The punctuation of the title suggests that the title character’s name is Doctor Bucks. It’s not entirely clear if the Doctor and the friend are one and the same. Whether the character in question is a real friend of Smith’s, an invention or a story that he read is unclear; suggested candidates for a ‘real’ friend have included Craig Scanlon, Alan Wise and Rob Waite, editor of the fanzine The Biggest Library Yet.

On The Annotated Fall, dannyno adds this:

‘Just to add to the confusion, the second Fall Lyrics book contains what appears to be a circular letter addressed to Smith from Nutrihealth International, all about prostate problems. It includes a quote from a “Doctor Buck M.D. Sleaford, Lincs.” The company does exist.’

In addition, there’s a reference in the lyrics to ‘J. McCarthy’ which seems likely to be journalist John McCarthy.

On the album’s press release (quoted on Reformation) Julia Nagle/Adamson stated that Adam Helal constructed the track; in a 2003 interview, however, Ben Pritchard suggests it was one of his inventions:

 ‘I came up with just a little riff that ended up being “Dr. Bucks’ Letter.” So we went in the studio and I just started playing this riff, and Mark said, “Yeah, that’s it! That’s great! Yeah, do that! Do that!”‘

A later (2006) interview with Pritchard clarifies matters a little: it would seem that Helal programmed the rhythm and Pritchard added the guitar riff.

Pritchard (according to the album credits anyway) did play on the song, although he wouldn’t join the group full-time until February 2001. It was played live 102 times, 2000-05.

Hot Runes
A delightful bit of sparse rockabilly twang whose riff is not a million miles away (albeit at a much faster tempo) from Howlin’ Wolf’s Spoonful, most famously covered by Cream. MES references Alan Brazil and Derek Hatton, pronounces ‘hyperbole’ as ‘hyper-bowl’ and with typical perversity sings ‘hot June’ rather than ‘hot runes’ throughout. It feels a little slight, simply because of its truncated length – things are just getting cracking with some added distorted guitar before it fades away far too soon.

Live versions (there were 20 of them, 2000-01) were much generally more frantic and thrashy.

Way Round
More twangy guitar, but this has a much more electronic, sci-fi flavour. The synths provide squelchy oscillations and haunting, floating chords that give it an urgent and mysterious air. Tommy Mackay describes it neatly as ‘Iggy Pop meets Dr Who’4.

Fairly obtuse lyric (including the glorious phrase ‘glass disco sweatboxes’) that Julia Nagle/Adamson described as being about ‘MES having trouble finding his way round, lost in a disco’. It got 79 outings, 2000-04.

Octo Realm/Ketamine Sun
The opening 43 seconds are in the worst tradition of Fall self-indulgent p*ssing about (cf Crew Filth, North West Fashion Show), involving Rob Ayling, Julia Nagle and Grant Showbiz (hence his vocals credit under his real name). MES’s abrupt interjection (‘I’m Smith’) is an amusing moment, however.

The next minute or so sees a diversion into Post Nearly Man territory, Smith declaiming tinnily over a thin, distant drum track. It’s a great little piece of Smith invective however, including one of his best put-downs: ‘You’re a walking tower of Adidas crap’.

The main Ketamine Sun part of the song is one of the group’s clearest ‘borrows’, being heavily indebted to Lou Reed’s Kill Your Sons. It’s an atypical Fall track, a dark, brooding, hypnotic but actually quite conventional rock tune; one that most bands would probably have chosen as the album closer.

The Reformation page contains lots of detail about the song, including this interesting quotation from Julia Nagle/Adamson:

‘There was also this joking sort of fatherly thing going on between MES and Nev [Wilding]… I think the song was partly about this ‘surrogate paternal’ relationship, not sure whose idea it was initially, probably Mark’s. When we recorded the vocals at Grant’s (Showbiz) in London, Mark did this really stuttering chorus ‘k.k.k.ket…a.mine’ sounding like a seizure. It wasn’t as nice on the ears as another vocal take, but MES and I were really wanting this to be used, as it was reflective of how dangerous drug taking is, but Grant wanted the song to sound nice and when it came to the final mix this vocal take was left out.’

The Ketamine Sun section was played 59 times, 1999-2002.

Serum
A dark slab of ominous electronica that you could easily imagine sitting alongside Oxymoron and Hostile on LUS. The combination of a deep, grainy distorted drum track (reminiscent of Doctor Bucks’ Letter), the dark and disturbing synth/sequencer effects and floating, spooky Twilight Zone-esque guitar lines creates a richly oppressive and foreboding atmosphere.

The meaning of the repeated refrain ‘101’ is obscure (there are some tentative suggestions here), but the most surprising line – given that Smith rarely wrote directly about physical relationships (In The Park being a rare exception) – is ‘Many have found pleasures in curvaceous women / Their undulating curves upper and lower / But what I really need is a glass of cold water’. This is probably linked to a piece of advice from his father that MES quoted in Renegade: ‘If you’re feeling too sexy, have a glass of water and a run round the backyard’5.

It had a brief and chequered live history. It first appeared as an instrumental intro (see above) in May 2000; its next appearance was apparently ‘aborted‘; it got five more outings in 2000, the last of which was another instrumental version.

Unutterable
Dutch music magazine OOR (January 2001) described the title track as ‘no more than a minute of a grumbling Smith while somebody in the background is playing a radiator rhythmically’. Would possibly have sat more comfortably on one of Smith’s spoken word albums. His Elvis impersonation is fun though.

Pumpkin Soup And Mashed Potatoes
By which point we’ve had nearly 40 minutes of excellent stuff; but now things go a little awry…

It may well have been a bit of a laugh in the studio to have a bit of a crack at lounge-jazz, throwing in some mellow electric piano, trilling (often unbearably shrill) flute and some laid-back brassy keyboard stabs. But it isn’t much of a laugh to listen to. It might have made for a mildly diverting novelty b-side – at a stretch – but placed here it just dilutes what the album has achieved thus far. Never played live, unsurprisingly.

Hands Up Billy
One of the handful of Fall songs that don’t feature MES as main vocalist (although he does contribute the opening lines and some backing vocals), Billy is a pleasant enough little thrashy number. Neville Wilding’s vocals are energetic if not exactly subtle, and it rattles along entertainingly enough. The narrative of the song isn’t terribly clear; The Annotated Fall suggests there might be a boxing link, but it’s by no means conclusive.

It was played 17 times 1999-2000 and has b-side written all over it.

Midwatch 1953
Presumably inspired by Smith’s experience with Waller’s film (see above); although the film was set in 1956, the events depicted followed on from Britain’s earlier tests in 1953. The lyric largely consists of variations on the question ‘Who could foresee what happened in 1953?’; as The Annotated Fall comments wryly, ‘unfortunately, hindsight hasn’t made things much clearer’.

Synth strings, a random squelchy bass-line sequencer, a swing drumbeat, a strummed acoustic, some sort of plinky 80s video-game sound effect… and all at different tempos and apparently taken from different songs – somehow mangled and merged and shoehorned into five and a half minutes of woozy, disturbing, oscillating, disorientating mayhem. Nothing fits; nothing is in tune or time; there is no sense of it being within a million miles of what most people would recognise as a proper song; it’s overly long and self-indulgent.

It is, understandably, a very divisive track. It’s clear why some people hate it, but it’s also the sound of a thousand intriguing ideas colliding randomly with each other, bouncing around the studio and then p*ssing off down the pub.

Devolute
Given the title, and the reference to ‘English glasnost’, the lyric might well refer to the moves to devolve power to Scotland and Wales that took place in the late 90s (there’s also the phrase ‘since end of May’ that could possibly reference the election of the Blair government that enacted the reforms). However, it’s all rather too abstract and jumbled to interpret with confidence; something that’s made even more difficult by the double-tracking of Smith’s vocals in the first half. (Rather alarmingly, Smith sounds like he’s been locked in a cupboard and left to mumble to himself in the second half.) And whilst its connection to the rest of the lyric is unclear, Smith’s deployment of the phrase ‘fat arse’ always raises a smile. As ever, The Annotated Fall makes a noble effort to transcribe and interpret the chaos.

Musically, it consists of little other than randomly morphing synth oscillations (rather like a mangled old cassette of an early Tangerine Dream album) and odd little pieces of brittle percussive noises. But it works – just about, somehow. One of the better examples of the group’s ‘experimental’ pieces.

Das Katerer
A fleshed-out version of The Caterer from The Post Nearly Man that in turn recycled the riff from Free Range (giving Simon Wolstencroft a writing credit). It’s a pleasant enough bit of electro-pop, but the somewhat mundane and simplistic melody combined with Smith’s rather off-hand and sluggish delivery – plus the fact that it’s a retread of an already retrodden song – make it a bit of a damp squib to conclude the album. Another that should have been a b-side.

Reissues & Bonus Tracks
There was a double CD reissue of the album in 2008. The second CD consisted of the ‘Testa Rossa Monitor Mixes’, early, rough versions presumably recorded at the first studio session. (If you don’t own them, they’re on Spotify.)

They’re an interesting set of recordings. Some are just early, rough drafts – for example BillyWB and Dr Bucks’ LetterKetamine Sun cuts out the intro but is pretty similar otherwise; Midwatch is just slightly longer; Serum and Insekt have added reverb; Sons Of Temperance relies more on sequencer than guitar; Two Librans is rather polite and pedestrian.

The most intriguing alternative version is Hot Rune (it becomes singular here). It features a monologue by Julia Nagle that rails against soap operas – ‘Life is so much better than that… but now these ugly, psychotic, attention-seeking crap actors scare me’ – that was dropped from the final version.

Overall Verdict
It’s easy to see why The Unutterable gained such positive reviews. Whilst there was a certain sense of renewal with The Marshall Suite, there’s a distinct sense of purpose and energy here, things coalescing into a driven, coherent piece of work.

The album is laced with electronica, but unlike the early 90s albums (which sometimes relied a little too heavily on Dave Bush’s sequences) it’s a very welcome embellishment here, adding texture and contrast. It gives the album a more organic feel than Shift-Work or Code: Selfish without retreating into the (admittedly generally effective) garage-rock bunker of Cerebral Caustic. As a result, The Unutterable achieves a successful blend of primal rock ‘n’ roll and contemporary electronica.

It’s not, however, without its flaws, and those flaws are not dissimilar to The Light User Syndrome. It’s too long for a start – the curse of the CD age – and it includes tracks that are clearly b-side material. The fact that were no singles released at the time is possibly a contributory factor – tracks such as Das Katerer and Pumpkin Soup may well have been b-sides had a couple of singles been released.

The received wisdom is that the album deteriorates towards the end; whilst this attitude is understandable, bzfgt’s comments on The Annotated Fall (regarding Devolute) are pertinent:

‘It is strong evidence, in my view, against the claim sometimes made that the album runs out of steam down the final stretch; there is plenty of steam here, but there is no doubt that the running order of the album is odd, with most of the more conventionally-structured or accessible songs in the rear view mirror at this point.’

My “Version”
It’s impossible to get this down to a 45 minute or less album by my rules without a little editing, so if you wish to listen to it then it’s here.

Side 1: Two Librans / Sons Of Temperance / Cyber Insekt / W.B. / Unutterable / Dr. Bucks’ Letter (20:30)

Side 2: Serum / Hot Runes / Devolute / Way Round / Midwatch 1953 (edit) / Ketamine Sun (edit) (22:44)

Rankings
Better than its predecessor; just short of the early 80s albums:

  1. This Nation’s Saving Grace
  2. Perverted By Language
  3. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of
  4. Hex Enduction Hour
  5. Levitate
  6. Slates
  7. Grotesque
  8. The Unutterable
  9. The Marshall Suite
  10. Cerebral Caustic
  11. I Am Kurious Oranj
  12. Room To Live
  13. The Infotainment Scan
  14. Extricate
  15. Bend Sinister
  16. Dragnet
  17. The Light User Syndrome
  18. Middle Class Revolt
  19. Code: Selfish
  20. Shift-Work
  21. Live At The Witch Trials
  22. The Frenz Experiment

 

References
1The Fallen, pp239-240

2The Fallen, p18

3Ford, p273

4Mackay, p181

5Renegade, pp173-174

YMGTA #28 – The Marshall Suite

“I’m never getting on stage with you again.”

Details
Recorded: Battery Studios, London late 1998/early 1999
Released: 19 April 1999

  • Mark E Smith – vocals, keyboards, guitar
  • Julia Nagle – keyboards, guitar, programming
  • Tom Head – drums
  • Neville Wilding – guitar, vocals
  • Karen Leatham – bass
  • Adam Helal – bass
    With:
  • Steve Hitchcock – string arrangements

Background
A brief glance at the personnel list above (with only Smith and Nagle remaining from the previous album) gives an indication of how tumultuous 1997-99 was in the wonderful and frightening world, although it doesn’t tell half the story…

After Levitate‘s release, the group headed to Ireland for a trio of gigs in November. The first two, in Cork and Dublin, passed without any particularly untoward incidents (Steve Hanley described the latter performance as a ‘great gig’1). Things started to go pear-shaped, however, once they headed north to Belfast.

The headline of the NME article that reported on events was ‘WHAT A CORK-UP!: TOUR FALLS APART. According to Mark Erskine, the stage manager at the venue, Smith had ‘walked off the tour bus, straight onto the stage, and started kicking stuff about. He sacked the band and they went away’. The article goes on to say that ‘Smith also upset the staff of the venue by flinging a bottle of ketchup against a backstage door.’ One fan account of events archived on thefall.org reports that Smith had got into a fight with a roadie and ‘was ranting with wild scary eyes and insanity… the management had locked themselves in a room to keep him away’.

NY Post Nov 97
New York Post article November 1997 (with rather out-dated photo)

Steve Hanley (who was at this stage acting as tour manager) doesn’t describe what happened as a sacking, however:

‘…as soon as he started, we walked off and called a strike by sitting in the bus and staying there’2.

In an NME interview the following February, Smith, inevitably, gave a very different account. Blaming his behaviour on a bout of the flu, he said:

‘You give musicians space, and trust them, then you come back and everything’s in complete bloody chaos… That’s what happened in Belfast. Someone kicked a guitar stand over at rehearsal, and it was like… open rebellion!’

Rumours circulated at the time that Smith had considered going ahead with the gig, playing with Nagle alone; the NME story (and an article in the Belfast Telegraph) even suggested that he proposed playing ‘an a cappella set of Beach Boys covers’ with the assistance of Terri Hooley, an old friend of his who had promoted some of The Fall’s early gigs in Ireland.

The 7 February interview with John Robinson from the NME (‘Narky Mark’) is the one that gave rise to one of the most (in)famous quotations about the group:

‘If it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s a Fall gig.’

This quip (the ending of which is often truncated to ‘…it’s The Fall’) was wheeled out in almost every MES obituary, and even features on the back cover of Dave Simpson’s The Fallen. Whilst there is undoubtedly some general truth in its sentiment, it’s unclear whether Smith himself actually said it. When asked (by dannyno on Twitter), Robinson said that the phrase was reported to him by a PR called Bernard, which may well have been Bernard MacMahon (who was credited as ‘associate producer’ on The Marshall Suite).  However, in the retrospective article, The Fall: album by album in Uncut magazine, July 2019, Dave Bush suggested that he was the origin of the phrase:

‘I’d done back-line for The Fall and told Mark I could do some programming for them and make them sound brilliant. He asked me what I knew about the group and I said, “If it’s you and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.” He laughed so much he used that line himself.’

A group meeting shortly after the Belfast debacle did – in the short term at least – resolve the issues (Hanley claims3 that he negotiated ‘a blag of terms’) and the rest of the 1997 gigs proceeded without great incident.

The Forum, London, 5 December 1997

January 1998 saw MES on stage in the unlikely setting of an awards ceremony. The ever-so-amusingly titled NME ‘Brat Awards’ bestowed upon him the title of ‘Godlike Genius’. The award was presented by Eddie Izzard, who launched into a eulogy about Smith’s work4 that was interrupted by the recipient – perhaps tiring of the protracted introduction – striding onto the stage in the middle of his speech. MES thanked a few people, including John Lennard, Steve Hanley and Julia Nagle, before wandering off stage leaving the trophy on the podium. The post-award interview saw the generally smooth and bland Jo Whiley express distinct irritation with Smith’s vague answers – see 2:35 in the video below:

The financial pressure surrounding the group was, by now, also having a significant impact on Steve Hanley. Just as Simon Wolstencroft had taken to taxi-driving to supplement his income, Hanley accepted a position as a school caretaker in early 19985.

In amongst all of the ongoing chaos, Fall Peel sessions remained a reassuring constant. Number 21 (Calendar / Touch Sensitive / Masquerade / Jungle Rock) was recorded on 3 February and broadcast a month later. Session 22 (Bound Soul One / Antidotes / Shake-Off / This Perfect Day) – featuring a very different line-up – was recorded on 18 October and broadcast on 4 November. February 1998 also saw the release of the three versions of the Masquerade single (see previous post).

At the end of March, the group flew to America for their first US tour for four years. The first two dates were at Coney Island High in New York, where Smith appeared on stage sporting a black eye, apparently caused by ‘an altercation between him, Nagle and a telephone reciever’6. Smith’s version was that he ‘had a heated argument with Julia about sharing a room and we knocked each other about’7. According to Ian Landau of Rolling Stone, there was an ‘impromptu 10-minute break just a few songs into the set’ on the first night, but the second ‘went off without a hitch’.

Coney Island 30/03/98, featuring MES with a black eye (photo by Stefan Cooke)

The group moved on to New Jersey, Massachusetts, Philadelphia and Washington (see Live section below). The New Jersey gig was another tense one, with Smith up to plenty of his usual antics, resulting in sporadic walk-offs and lots of (as one eyewitness described it) ‘near fisticuffs’. The next night’s gig at The Middle East in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 3rd went more smoothly. It also featured the unusual sight of MES in a t-shirt.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 3, 1998 (photo by Stefan Cooke)

Things took another downturn the next night in Philadelphia, however, with Smith apparently very drunk and indulging in his worst behaviour for much of the gig. Steve Hanley:

‘During the gig he tries to push me aside so he can f*ck with my amp. It is the first time he has laid a finger on it in years… I push him out of the way with the end of my bass and turn my back… I finish the song and walk off, to be joined shortly after by Tommy and Karl, leaving him with nothing else to do but to sing Everybody But Myself all by himself.’8

To add to the group’s woes, their tour van was broken into that night and several pieces of equipment, including Nagle’s keyboard and guitar, were stolen. Although the stolen items were recovered a couple of days later, this meant that the group had to borrow equipment for the next night’s gig at the Black Cat in Washington DC. The gig went ahead relatively smoothly, although Nagle, frustrated by the unfamiliar keyboard, walked off after a couple of songs9.

With all of the seething tension and bad feeling, it seemed inevitable that at some point things would reach breaking point. And that’s exactly what happened in New York on the 7th April 1998. The group were playing Brownies in Manhattan (the venue, after having been renamed The Hi-Fi Bar, closed in 2017) .

SH orders KB
Brownies, New York 7 April 1998 – Hanley orders Burns to get back behind his drums

The night started cordially enough, with Hanley and Smith having a pre-gig drink together in the bar next to the group’s hotel10. However, whilst the rest of the group walked to the venue, Smith got a taxi and somehow managed to get into some form of altercation with the driver, who he claimed pulled a gun on him (Hanley’s account11 suggests that this might have been because MES opened a can of beer in the cab).

The whole sorry affair that was that night’s infamous performance can be seen here. The group open with Spencer Must Die; Smith enters at 0:57 (there seems to be some sort of cut in the video), clearly the worse for wear. After accepting a cigarette from someone in the front row, he snidely remarks (in a peculiar mock-American accent) that the group are going to ‘beat me up like the big men they are’. For the next few songs, the musicians plough on – with the Hanley/Burns rhythm section as tight as ever – whilst Smith spends much of his time crouched, back to the audience, in front of the drum riser, barking out the occasional lyric.

After a pretty horrendous version of Hip Priest (MES hands the mic over to the audience, Crooks contributes some tuneless thrash, Hanley keeps himself awake by fashioning a few jazzy bass solos) the group launch into a ragged Free Range. A couple of minutes in, Smith decides to amuse himself by chucking Burns’ spare drumsticks across the stage, at which point Burns decides he’s had enough. The drummer leaps out from behind his kit and wrestles Smith across the stage into Nagle’s keyboard. Hanley orders Burns back behind his kit, but shortly afterwards Smith tries to grab Crooks’ guitar, who promptly gives the singer a firm kick up the arse.

At the end of the song, Smith launches into rant about his fellow group members:

‘What we’ve got here is a Scottish man, a f*cking animal on drums and a f*cking idiot. I’ve been assaulted in public here, by two people, or three people; you be witness to this; bear witness laddies. They’re very big. I’ll tell you what – these three… I got a taxi, and some f*cker pulled a gun out on me, from f*cking Pakistan or someone [sic] … These three were cowering in the f*cking dressing room – as usual. They’re nowhere to be seen. They’re very hard, when they’re together.’

Meanwhile, Karl Burns is shouting ‘cock’ from behind his kit, and Hanley does a mocking ‘sad violin’ mime with his bass.

Remarkably, the group plough on once more, performing an energetic Levitate (sans MES) before Smith rejoins them for a rather disjointed and sludgy Lie Dream. An equally messy Behind The Counter (‘Get the f*cking song going, you f*cking c*nts! Can you manage it?’) is followed by a chaotic, desultory He Pep! At this point, Hanley, Burns and Crooks decide they’ve had enough. The last few minutes are painful: Smith and Nagle attempt Powderkeg, which consists of his incoherent ramblings accompanied by her occasional vague prods at the keyboard. During this, Smith picks up Hanley’s bass and tosses it casually across the stage; a symbolic and melancholy moment.

This video captures the main altercations:

Later that night, Smith was charged with third-degree assault and harassment charges relating to an argument that he and Nagle had had back at the hotel. A week later, he appeared in court and was ordered to undergo an alcohol treatment programme and anger-management counselling.

Smith outside court with his lawyer Steve Saporito, April 1998 (Photo from invisiblegirl

Smith’s version of events12) is typically flippant:

‘So, back in my room, I’m having a cigarette, and I just put it out on her trainer and went to sleep. Next, I’ve been reported by them and her, and handcuffed and put in jail.’

Nagle’s account, as given in Dave Simpson’s The Fallen13 doesn’t really clarify matters. She says that ‘the incident was distorted, and made out to be about Mark and myself, but there was a lot more to it’. Her version (according to Simpson) was that ‘he was lashing out angrily in all directions and it was unfortunate she was in the way.’ Simpson also points out that Nagle paid Smith’s bail.

Steve Hanley’s account of post-gig events describes Burns wrapping a guitar lead around Smith’s neck in an atmosphere of intense rowing, accusations and threats.

‘A line’s being crossed. Any remaining respect from either side is being lost. Him trashing the gear is him trashing the band, and the three of us have finally lost interest.’14

Hanley, sadly but understandably, had just had enough. After post-gig drinks with Burns in a bar near the venue, he witnessed Smith being arrested: ‘There’s Mark outside the hotel, whiter than ever, handcuffed in the back of a police car’15. Although Hanley did contact a lawyer to ask him to help Smith out, he refused to accompany him to the police station.

He had told Smith after the Brownies gig: ‘I’m never getting on stage with you again’16, and he was true to his word. On the 8th April 1998, Steve Hanley boarded a plane back to the UK.

‘As the plane heads up over New York, one thing’s certain: I’m never going to play bass with The Fall again.’17

On their return to England, Hanley, Burns and Crooks formed a band called Ark. An album called Brainsold eventually appeared in 2002. He currently performs with Brix and his brother in The Extricated.

Image result for steve hanley the fall 1982
Steve Hanley, Bradford 17/01/83

If Simon Wolstencroft’s departure had been a shock, Hanley’s departure was a seismic event. Not only had he been in the group for a record-breaking nineteen years, he had defined The Fall sound more than anyone other than MES himself. GardenTempo HouseBombast, The Classical, New Big Prinz… you can easily list dozens of The Fall’s very best songs that would be critically diminished without his contribution. Always solid, deep and resonant; never unnecessarily showy, but sparingly flamboyant. To me, the greatest example of the wonder that is Hanley’s bass work is The Fall’s national TV debut on The Tube. Just watch 4:58-5:03.

Smith’s lukewarm, off-hand dismissal of Hanley’s contribution in Renegade is unsurprising but still disappointing:

‘He was always very loyal. Always gave a good performance, good at organising things. I think he just got fed up… pressure tells with some more than others. Eventually he said, “I can’t cope any more.” But this was before he bloody dumped me.’18

He had, however, recognised Hanley’s importance in a Melody Maker interview back in 1983:

‘The most original aspect of The Fall is Steve on the bass. I’ve never heard a bass player like him in my life. I don’t have to tell him what to play, he just knows. He is The Fall sound.’19

That last sentence is undeniably true.

His contribution was not just musical either: his organisational skills and – above all – his ability to mediate between irate group members and the irascible Smith were all that kept the group from disintegrating on many an occasion.

It is with great sorrow that YMGTA waves Steve goodbye. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for the rich source of evidence provided by his excellent book (please do buy it here if you haven’t already) as well as his likes and retweets that have helped hugely in promoting this blog and have, of course, been much appreciated.

Steve Hanley, The Fall 1979-1998

The aftermath of the Brownies gig also saw the fourth and final departure of Karl Burns. Much of what has been written about him tends to focus on his off-stage antics, and no one would claim that he had anything like Hanley’s influence on the sound of the group. That said, his excellent drumming – particularly in tandem with Paul Hanley in the early part of his second stint – left a hugely positive mark on large parts of the group’s work – look no further than the Smile clip above for an outstanding example.

Rather enigmatically, Smith says this about him in Renegade: ‘In the end he became his own audience. He wasn’t sure of his role’, before remarking sourly, ‘I don’t miss him…’20. Burns’ current whereabouts remain – despite Dave Simpson’s best efforts – a mystery.

Burns’ sheer tenacity – a handful of  musicians have at various times rejoined The Fall, but who else could have managed to do so three times? – makes him in some ways a symbolic group member, representing the stubborn refusal to quit and the capacity to launch a surprise comeback that runs deeply throughout the history of The Fall.

Untitled
Karl Burns, The Fall 1977-1978, 1981-1986, 1993-1996, 1997-1998

After the New York disaster, Smith’s immediate concern was the remaining April gigs – two dates at Camden Dingwalls and one in Reading. Remarkably, the group fulfilled their commitments and just about got away with it. Smith and Nagle were joined by Kate Methen, drummer with Polythene (who presumably had one of those infamous crash courses in the group’s back catalogue) and, aided considerably by backing tapes, stumbled through the three performances. Jonathan Romney of The Guardian described the first of the Camden gigs:

‘…what the partly-enraptured, partly aggrieved audience got was a subsistence-level Fall – Smith with Julia Nagle on keyboards, guitar and stacks of rough-and-ready pre-programmes, and a terrified-looking woman on drums. Sometimes it sounded like Suicide’s pared-down electronica, sometimes it harked back to the Xerox scrappiness of The Fall’s very early days on the Manchester punk scene. It was possibly in honour of those days that Smith revived their antique number Industrial Estate… a prospect as likely as David Bowie encoring with The Laughing Gnome.’

Kate Methen, Reading Alleycat, 30/04/98 

Over the next few months, Smith set about rebuilding the group. On bass, he recruited Karen Leatham, an acquaintance of Nagle’s who had played in a band called Wonky Alice. Tom Head (original name Thomas Murphy, younger brother of Smith’s friend Steve Evets and a part-time actor who had appeared in Emmerdale, Coronation Street and The League Of Gentlemen) became the new drummer. The Smith/Nagle/Leatham/Head line-up of The Fall played only two gigs, at Manchester University and London’s Astoria on 11-12 August.

Tom Head (Photo from invisiblegirl)

By the time they played St. Bernadette’s Catholic Social Club in Whitefield on 21 October, the line-up had been augmented by guitarist Neville Wilding, who according to thefall.org used to play ‘in Rockin Gomez, Rhyl’s finest psychobilly act’.

Neville Wilding, Camden Dingwalls October 1999

Shortly afterwards, Leatham quit (apparently in response to bottles being thrown onstage at the 14 December Bristol gig21) and was replaced by Adam Helal (original surname Bromley), a friend of Wilding.

Adam Helal, Salisbury May 1999

In amongst all of this chaos, MES somehow found time to record and release a spoken-word album, The Post Nearly Man. A determinedly inaccessible and fractured mix of Smith’s musings and snippets of Fall songs, it’s worth at least one listen. Johnny Cigarettes of the NME, however, was less than impressed. Awarding it 2/10, he declared that ‘you can count the substantial ideas here on the fingers of a Kit-Kat’.

[It contains the line, ‘Atlanta, Albania, whatever’, which I used as the title of this mix of instrumental outtakes and vocal samples.]

The first recorded product from the new incarnation of The Fall was the March 1999 single, Touch Sensitive.

Front cover

The lead track is one of the most recognisable Fall songs to those generally unfamiliar with the group’s work, owing to its deployment in a car advert. In Renegade, Smith claimed that Nagle gets two-thirds of the royalties despite that fact that (according to him) he wrote the lyrics and the guitar part22. The CD and 12″ version both feature a fatuous remix of the title track.

Despite the catchy riff and chorus, it only crawled to number 90 in the singles chart.

CD1 cover

Five months after The Marshall Suite‘s release, F-‘Oldin’ Money became the group’s 37th single. It features a frankly silly falsetto version of Perfect Day (that MES considered ‘a better version… but no one else liked it.’23) There’s also an interesting version of The Crying Marshal, entitled The REAL Life Of The Crying Marshal. While the album track sees The Fall veering into Prodigy territory, this sounds like a DJ Shadow remix of the song. Well worth a listen. Commercially, the single fared even worse than its predecessor, only managing a chart placing of 93.

In The Wider World…
The news in April 1999 was filled with acts of violence. Over three weekends, Neo-Nazi David Copeland planted nail bombs in London that were targeted at ethnic minority and LGBT communities. TV presenter Jill Dando was shot dead on her doorstep in what remains an unsolved murder. In Colorado, the Columbine massacre saw twelve students and a teacher shot dead by two disaffected teenagers.

Soap star Martine McCutcheon was in the first of her two weeks at number one with her syrupy ballad, Perfect Moment, having knocked Mr Oizo‘s novelty-techno Flat Beat from the top spot. Irish sibling band The Corrs had the number one album, having been preceded by The Stereophonics and Blur.

The most notable event of the year as far as music was concerned, however, came a couple of months later with the launch of peer-to-peer service Napster.

The Fall Live In 1997-99
In the same month as Levitate‘s release, Live Various Years became the twelfth Fall live album released in eighteen years. It was the first to feature the famous ‘MES flicks the Vs’ picture, variations on which would appear on half a dozen Cog Sinister/Voiceprint releases over the next three years (as well as all my Facebook and Twitter posts).

Front cover

Cog Sinister had been set up by Smith in 1987 to re-release old Fall material and promote MES-approved new talent. It had little success with the latter aim, but it did at least result in the release of In: Palace of Swords Reversed, one of the best Fall compilations. When the group signed to Phonogram/Fontana in 1990, they used Cog Sinister as a ‘vanity label’; this continued until the group left Permanent records in 1995. In 1997, Smith signed a deal with Rob Ayling of Voiceprint (a label that specialised mainly in re-releasing prog-rock material) that allowed Ayling to release live Fall recordings using the Cog Sinister imprint.

The first of these, Live Various Years, contains a mix of recordings from 1988, 1993 and 1997. The first half a dozen are – according to the credits – from New York and Munich in Autumn 1993. (Whilst the group did play in Germany at the time, there seems to be no record of a Munich gig, however.) They’re sound enough, quite energetic performances, although the two New York tracks are of better sound quality than the other four. Dave Bush adds some rather superfluous squiggles (for example in Dead Beat Descendant), but the most notable moment comes when MES, apparently irritated by Bush’s sluggish intro to Strychnine, tries to gee up the group by calling them ‘f*cking pot heads’.

The six tracks from 1997’s first gig at Bristol Bierkeller are also reasonable in terms of sound quality. The (rather brief) Spinetrak, despite Smith and the group’s best efforts, feels distinctly empty without Brix; Behind The Counter is curiously flat; Interferance is just a tape of some of the random noises that found their way onto Hurricane Edward. The most notable aspect is the revival of Hip Priest after a nine-year absence from the set. Julia Nagle adds some interesting, if ultimately incongruous sequencer/keyboard work, and while it’s a long way from being the best live take on the song, it’s worth a listen out of curiosity. The album concludes with three pleasant enough but fairly unremarkable recordings from Vienna in April 1988.

After Levitate‘s release, the group played a further 18 dates in 1997, bringing the total for the year to 28 – better than they’d managed over the previous two years. After the ill-fated Irish venture in November, the remaining UK dates passed largely without incident, although on 27 November in Oxford, the venue’s management pulled the plug when the group played past the 10pm curfew. According to a review here, the group carried on with an improvised version of I’m A Mummy:

‘Karl and Mark just keep it going, while Julia and Steve mime sarcastically – and silently – Tommy joins in enthusiastically with b/vocs; altogether absolutely bloody hilarious.’

Three days later, Container Drivers was played for the first time in 13 years in Stoke. This gig is yet another one of those (that I don’t own) included in the 2018 box set, Set Of Ten.

Image result for Live 1997 30th November Stage Stoke UK

In Cambridge on 7 December 1997, Steve Hanley experimented with the MES not-actually-performing approach:

‘For the duration of Hip Priest I sat on the monitor stack, bass in the stand next to me, not playing a single note. Nobody on stage took any notice, they just carried on regardless.’24

This very enthusiastic review of the gig suggests that he actually sat out Masquerade (which possibly makes more sense).

The last gig of 1997 took place at Bristol Bierkeller on 9 December. A bootleg recording is on YouTube that’s worth a listen: it’s an uneven and in places haphazard performance, but there are several highlights. The taut, energetic Lie Dream is one; the second and final outing for The Quartet Of Doc Shanley – which sounds nothing at all like the album version – is another.

1998 was relatively light on gigs, with only 17 being played. The first six were part of the infamous US tour, the first two of which took place at Coney Island High in New York on 30-31 March. The first night saw the only ever performance of Ivanhoe’s Two Pence, plus the first outings for Scareball and Calendar (although the latter was largely instrumental).

There is a good quality bootleg of the second night, and it sees the group in solid form, MES giving a relatively coherent performance. Crooks’ guitar playing is forceful, but his limited technique is exposed on occasion, most notably on Hip Priest.

Coney Island High, New York City 30/03/1998

After the tense New Jersey gig (see above), the 3 April gig in Cambridge, Massachusetts saw Touch Sensitive played for the first time.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 3, 1998 (photo by Stefan Cooke)

There’s a bootleg of the next night’s gig, at the Trocadero in Philadelphia (see above) where Smith makes only sporadic, slurred appearances and the whole performance is an incoherent mess. The 5 April gig at The Black Cat, Washington, D.C. is on YouTube. Crooks’ performance on Hip Priest is much better here:

After the Brownies disaster, the group played three more UK dates in April (see above). The last of these, at Reading, saw long-time fan Stuart Estell briefly join the group from the audience to play a 5-string guitar25.

Their next performance (with the Smith/Nagle/Leatham/Head line-up) was in August at Manchester University, where F-‘Oldin’ Money and This Perfect Day were played for the first time.

The next night (12 August) saw the group play London’s Astoria (again with the Smith/Nagle/Leatham/Head line-up). This is yet another gig that has been released as part of the Set Of Ten. I don’t have that release, but I do have the bootleg, which is (presumably) the same recording. It’s pretty good quality, sound-wise (although there is a distracting level of audience chat), and features a rare performance of Calendar. The slurred lope of Spencer is also a highlight. Plug Myself In is oddly disjointed but seems to go down well with the audience (at least those near the mic – ‘F*cking brilliant, I can’t believe it; so focused; he’s totally sober…’).

After the Astoria gig, the group played two nights at the unlikely venue of St. Bernadette’s Catholic Social Club, Whitefield on the 21-22 October. Fan reviews suggest that the first night in particular was a bit of a disaster:

‘The version of Pharmacist ‘improvised’ at the end of the main set was so appalling it was almost funny. Almost. Can’t see any future for this band at present.’

The second night saw the first outings for Antidotes and Bound, although both were instrumentals. The Bristol gig on 14 December saw Anecdotes + Antidotes in B# and Shake-Off played for the first time. There were four 1999 performances before The Marshall Suite‘s release, now featuring the Smith/Nagle/Wilding/Halal/Head line-up. The first three were at Ashton Witchwood, where On My Own, Inevitable, Birthday Song and Mad.Men-Eng.Dog were debuted. On 15 (or possibly 14) April, the group played an afternoon gig sponsored by XFM Radio at Sound Republic in London which formed disc 3 of the 2011 reissue (see below), where they first played their less than distinguished cover of the New York Dolls’ Jet Boy.

The Album
The recording sessions began with The Fall reduced to the trio of Smith, Nagle and Head, but as time went on Leatham, Helal and Wilding also contributed. The album (once again on Artful Records) was released on vinyl as a three-sided affair – the fourth side was blank. (The only other album I knew of to take this format was Joe Jackson’s Big World, but there’s actually a list of several of them here.) In an interview with a Dutch magazine, Smith explained that he’d had this idea in mind from the very beginning:

‘I had the concept in my head, you know, the three sides. That was from the offset really… I’d always wanted to. And you couldn’t do it with the old group, you know. I wanted a straightforward side, a second side that was opening up and a third side that was like really off the wall.’

Pascal Le Gras returned – after a couple of album’s absence – to provide the cover artwork.

Smith himself was clearly (and perhaps understandably) defiantly proud of the album. In Renegade, he describes it as his ‘glorious return’26 and says that it ‘must have annoyed certain people when it was released, because the general consensus was I’d had it; no more comebacks for Mad Mark’27.

The critical response was guardedly warm. In the Guardian, Caroline Sullivan felt that the album’s ‘itchy garage rock and irascible shouting’ demonstrated that the turmoil of 1998 had ‘sparked a creative renaissance of sorts’ and there was ‘a sense of purpose that has long been missing’. Select took a similar view: ‘the upheaval has clearly spooked him into making a renewed effort… A varied and strange album, expected Fall requirements of tangential freakishness and nagging pop lucidity are at their highest levels for some time.’

In The Times, Mike Pattenden was a little more cautious, giving the album 6/10, although he acknowledged that the group could ‘still nail-down a groove with that same blend of ruthless precision and perverse amateurishness’. Uncut‘s Simon Goddard, however, gave the album five stars and declared that ‘The Fall have pulled it off again… The Marshall Suite sees Smith in his finest form in aeons’.

These positive words did not translate into sales, however. Whilst The Marshall Suite performed a little better than Levitate, it still only made number 84 in the album chart.

The Songs
Touch Sensitive
The album hits the ground running with an energetic slice of poppy rock ‘n’ roll. Head’s thumping drums, Wilding’s crafty little riff (which owes more than a little to Iggy Pop’s Girls) and the catchy ‘hey hey hey hey’ backing vocals combine to give the opener an infectious sense of exuberance. The touch of strings (from producer Steve Hitchcock) add welcome breadth and texture.

Smith’s performance seems to show him bearing few scars from the previous year’s trauma. There’s real bite to his delivery, the lyrics are sharp and funny and his off-kilter timing is impeccable: the way he phrases ‘and a Star Wars police vehicle pulls up / I say gimme a taxi!’ is simply perfection. The Annotated Fall points out that the phrase ‘vanity and presumption’ references both the Bible (Ecclesiastes 6:9) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

Regarding the song’s use on a car advert, Smith remarked drily,  ‘I didn’t have full control over that. And at the time I needed the money. Sometimes that’s the sad case. We’re not all Elton John.’28

It was one of the group’s most often played songs: 161 outings 1998-2006. It also had an endearingly terrible promo video:

F-‘oldin’ Money
The album maintains its opening momentum with a lively, fuzzy cover of Tommy Blake‘s obscure 1959 rockabilly tune. (The original is well worth a listen, both for its outstanding bluesy guitar work and the strange, reverberating backing vocals.)

The group sound like they’re having a whale of a time, and there’s a joyous little handclap solo (not something you often hear) around the 2 minute mark. Like Touch Sensitive, it was a long-standing live favourite, being played 136 times 1998-2006.

Shake-Off
Gladys Winthorpe’s Emporium Of Particularly Underacknowledged Fall Compositions (reproduced here) describes Shake-Off as a song ‘which begs to be played at excessive volume’, and truer words have never been spoken.

It opens with floating, portentous synths and reverb-heavy, random MES declamations –Give me the teachers who said if you deny the strong pot or ecstatic imbibed within you will be end up in eyeball-injecting – before a gloriously brash and jagged D&B rhythm kicks in at 0:33.

The combination of taut, crisp, angular rhythms and layers of Smith’s shouting and crooning is sublime. It’s full of playful moments too: ‘play guitars all night’ and the delicious reversal at 1:55. The crescendo of volume and intensity over the last thirty seconds is a lovely touch too. It is one of those ‘f*ck you, this is just what we do’ songs that the group produced from time to time and as such captures clearly the overall defiant attitude of the whole album. As Gladys says, it should always be played at full volume.

It was played live 34 times 1998-2002.

Bound
A curious one: a cover of a Northern Soul instrumental by The Audio Arts Strings called Love Bound with added lyrics from Smith. It’s a little slight and predictable, although Wilding does try to add some interesting variations on the chord progression as the song develops. It was played 14 times, all in 1999.

This Perfect Day
Another cover, this time of Australia’s The Saints (you can see an excellent Top Of The Pops performance of the track here.) The Fall’s version is appealingly distorted but feels rather flat compared to the original. It was played 37 times, 1998-2000.

(Jung Nev’s) Antidotes
After a slight dip in momentum, the album clicks back into gear here. It’s an aggressive, sweeping wave of noise, featuring multiple layers of heavy feedback, reverb and distortion. There are echoes of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir (especially in the hefty drum track), as well as U2’s Bullet The Blue Sky. It was played live 84 times, 1998-2002.

Inevitable
A delicate and plaintive song based around a simplistic two-chord guitar part, hesitant piano and a melancholy oboe-sound keyboard line. Smith contributes an endearingly vulnerable performance, and the lyrics have a touching air, although they’re somewhat opaque: ‘The peculiar call in aquarium / In Burmese right on the call line’.

There’s a slightly unfinished feeling about it, but it’s still rather lovely and tender. It was only played nine times (three of those as an instrumental), all in 1999.

Anecdotes + Antidotes In B#
A companion song (although lighter in tone) to (Jung Nev’s) Antidotes, revisiting the ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats‘ theme. The line ‘if chewing gum is chewed / the chewer is pursued’ (in both songs) is from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.

It’s a loose-limbed, almost funky shuffle that meanders around aimlessly but pleasantly enough. And ‘B#’ is, of course, just ‘C’. It was played 22 times, 1998-99.

Early Life Of The Crying Marshal
A bit of casually entertaining silliness: 51 one seconds of tape collage, featuring strings (that sound like they may have come from a ballet), a spot of twangy guitar and a few random noises. Pointless but inoffensive.

The Crying Marshal
In which the group revisit the brutal, industrial sound of (Jung Nev’s) Antidotes. Reformation quite rightly describes it as ‘a veritable assault on the senses’. It throws everything at you – thumping, overloaded big beat drums; snaking, scuzzy guitar lines; strings, synths and liberal doses of distortion applied across the board. MES sneers across the whole thing to great effect. An unsubtle but highly successful slab of noise.

Birthday Song
A fragile little composition by Julia Nagle that Smith (at her suggestion) added lyrics to. It aspires to being touching and delicate but ends up rather limp and wet, not helped by one of Smith’s more bland lyrical efforts: ‘and in dreams I stumble towards you’. Inoffensive but inconsequential. It was played live 23 times, 1999-2000.

Mad.Men-Eng.Dog
Reformation describes this as an ‘experimental track, often lasting less than a minute on stage and consisting of MES shouting various repetitive seemingly nonsensical phrases
accompanied by various drum beats and other discordant sounds, often played on machines’.

It’s actually a quite interesting little interlude, although strangely placed as the album’s penultimate track. Played live 16 times, all in 1999.

On My Own
A rather pointless revisitation of Levitate‘s Everybody But Myself, which smooths out all of the original’s edges and replaces them with a bland house-style chug.

It was performed 24 times in 1999, then was played (not entirely successfully, it would seem) once more the year after.

Reissues & Bonus Tracks
Cherry Red reissued the album in 2003 as a 3 CD set. CD1 contained the bonus track from the original three-side vinyl version, Tom Raggazzi, a sluggish, dreary, half-arsed bit of reggae in which MES seems to have little interest. CD2 contains Peel sessions #21 and #22, plus the b-sides from the Touch Sensitive and F-‘Oldin’ Money singles.

CD3 consists of eight tracks recorded at an afternoon gig sponsored by XFM Radio in April 1999. It’s raw, unbalanced and generally all over the place; MES’s vocals are also slathered with unnecessary amounts of reverb. It’s a cracking listen nonetheless. (It seems, unfortunately, to have disappeared from YouTube.)

Overall Verdict
There’s a huge amount to admire about The Marshall Suite. Considering where the group were in Spring 1998, it’s incredible that they produced an album this good only a year later. It’s undoubtedly patchy and uneven, but it still contains some blistering and exciting moments; there’s an indefatigable, resilient spirit that runs through the whole thing.

Like all of the 90s albums, it has its weaker tracks, plus those that sound as if they could have been much much better with a bit more time spent on them. However, the lows are nowhere near as poor as, say, the worst moments on Light User Syndrome.

After the back-to-basics garage rock of Cerebral Caustic, the best moments on Light User Syndrome and Levitate saw the group find an effective blend of that no-nonsense approach and the early 90s dance-infused electronics supplied by Dave Bush. Many of the highlights of The Marshall Suite see The Fall strengthen and harden this sound. (Jung Nev’s) Antidotes, The Crying Marshal and Shake-Off see them add a grinding, industrial tone that’s hugely effective. Shake-Off in particular is a perfect storm of gritty, angular aggression that’s among their finest moments.

My “Version”
I don’t really have one, to be honest; there aren’t enough contemporary b-sides, etc. to produce a viable alternative.

Rankings
Just about tops Cerebral Caustic for invention and aggression, although it’s similarly uneven; some way short of the top 7, obviously.

  1. This Nation’s Saving Grace
  2. Perverted By Language
  3. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of
  4. Hex Enduction Hour
  5. Levitate
  6. Slates
  7. Grotesque
  8. The Marshall Suite
  9. Cerebral Caustic
  10. I Am Kurious Oranj
  11. Room To Live
  12. The Infotainment Scan
  13. Extricate
  14. Bend Sinister
  15. Dragnet
  16. The Light User Syndrome
  17. Middle Class Revolt
  18. Code: Selfish
  19. Shift-Work
  20. Live At The Witch Trials
  21. The Frenz Experiment

Live Various Years wouldn’t be a terrible purchase for those dipping their toe into Fall live albums, although perhaps not at the £17 average price indicated on Discogs. There’s a handful of interesting versions, but there’s also an air of shoddiness – Hip Priest is clumsily spliced in two for no apparent reason, most of the brief second section actually being a repeat of the Hurricane Edward/Interferance sound effects; the songs are also carelessly and inaccurately labelled, for example Why Are People Grudgeful? becomes ‘Grudgefull’.

Live 1998 Astoria 2 12 August is an interesting recording, especially as it captures the group at a particularity notable point in their career. There’s a slightly sluggish tone to it (possibly how it was recorded?) but it’s certainly worth owning.

  1. Live To Air In Melbourne ’82
  2. In A Hole
  3. A Part Of America Therein, 1981
  4. In The City…
  5. Nottingham ’92
  6. The Legendary Chaos Tape / Live In London 1980
  7. Totale’s Turns
  8. The Idiot Joy Show
  9. Live In Cambridge 1988
  10. I Am As Pure As Oranj
  11. Live 1993 – Batschkapp, Frankfurt
  12. Live 1981 – Jimmy’s Music Club – New Orleans
  13. Live 1977
  14. The Twenty Seven Points
  15. Seminal Live
  16. Live 1998 12th August Astoria 2 London
  17. Live Various Years
  18. Live At The Phoenix Festival
  19. Live In Zagreb
  20. 15 Ways To Leave Your Man – Live
  21. Austurbaejarbio
  22. BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert
  23. Live 3rd May 1982 Band On The Wall Manchester
  24. Live 1980 – Cedar Ballroom Birmingham
  25. Live From The Vaults – Alter Banhof, Hof, Germany
  26. Live From The Vaults – Glasgow 1981
  27. Live From The Vaults – Oldham 1978
  28. Liverpool 78
  29. Live From The Vaults – Los Angeles 1979
  30. Live From The Vaults – Retford 1979
  31. Live At Deeply Vale

Touch Sensitive is a strong A-side, although it falls a little short of The Chiselers‘ inventiveness; F-oldin’ Money is fun, if a little obvious.

  1. Living Too Late
  2. Jerusalem/Big New Prinz
  3. Kicker Conspiracy
  4. The Man Whose Head Expanded
  5. How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
  6. Totally Wired
  7. Free Range
  8. Behind The Counter
  9. Marquis Cha-Cha
  10. Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul
  11. The Chiselers
  12. Touch Sensitive
  13. Cab It Up
  14. Cruiser’s Creek
  15. Hey! Luciani
  16. F-‘Oldin’ Money
  17. Mr. Pharmacist
  18. Couldn’t Get Ahead/Rollin’ Dany
  19. Look, Know
  20. Telephone Thing
  21. There’s A Ghost In My House
  22. Victoria
  23. Hit The North
  24. Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!
  25. Rowche Rumble
  26. Fiery Jack
  27. Masquerade
  28. Ed’s Babe
  29. High Tension Line
  30. 15 Ways
  31. It’s The New Thing
  32. White Lightning
  33. Popcorn Double Feature
  34. Why Are People Grudgeful?
  35. Oh! Brother

 

References

1-2The Big Midweek, p424

3The Big Midweek, p426

4Ford, p255

5The Big Midweek, pp429-430

6NME 25/4/98, quoted in Ford, p257

7Renegade, p201

8The Big Midweek, p439

9The Big Midweek, p440

10-11The Big Midweek, p441

12Renegade, p203

13The Fallen, pp226-227

14The Big Midweek, p443

15The Big Midweek, p444

16The Big Midweek, p443

17The Big Midweek, p444

18Renegade, p54

19Ford, p262

20Renegade, p53

21The Fallen, p236

22Renegade, p105

23The Wire, May 1993

24The Big Midweek, p428

25The Fallen, pp232-233

26Renegade, p225

27Renegade, p227

28Renegade, p221

YMGTA #27 – Levitate

“Either the best or worst record you’ve ever heard.”

Front cover

Details
Recorded: West Heath Studios, London, Beethoven Street Studios, London and PWL Studios, Manchester mid-1997.
Released: 29 September 1997

  • Mark E Smith – vocals, keyboards
  • Steve Hanley – bass
  • Julia Nagle – keyboards, guitar, programming
  • Simon Wolstencroft – drums
  • Karl Burns – drums
  • Tommy Crooks – guitar
  • Andy Hackett – guitar

Background
When The Fall returned from their trip to Denmark to play the Roskilde Festival in the summer of 1996, Smith revealed to Wolstencroft and Hanley that the group had been presented with a £32,000 VAT bill(for which the three of them were jointly liable). They avoided bankruptcy by agreeing to pay the debt out of future earnings2 , but money was becoming a serious issue for the group; Simon Wolstencroft even turned to driving a taxi to supplement his income3. Declining sales (since Infotainment Scan‘s impressive number nine chart placing, the group had failed to dent the top 40 of the album chart, and they hadn’t had a top 40 single for four years) meant that revenue from gigs was more important than ever. However, the group only played 35 gigs in 1996 and 1997 combined – compared to 51 in 1993 and 73 in 1990.

Smith’s continuing issues and their impact both on and off stage no doubt weighed heavily on the minds of potential promoters. At London’s Astoria in June 1996 he walked off stage three times4. On the way to the Roskilde Festival from the airport, not wishing to share transport with UK hip-hop group The Brotherhood, Smith used the unfortunate phrase ‘get off the bus, boy’. Brix5 and Wolstencroftdefend Smith against charges of being a racist, but both were clearly shocked by the incident. Both also report that Smith received ‘a hiding’7 for his troubles.

On June 30, the group clocked up their twentieth Peel session. Broadcast on 18 August, it consisted of D.I.Y. Meat, SpinetrakSpencer and a Captain Beefheart cover, Beatle Bones ‘n’ Smokin’ Stones.

Because of all the financial and behavioural issues, before she joined the group for their Autumn 1996 tour Brix insisted on being paid in advance (and in cash) for each date. This only actually happened on the first night, however8. Her nervousness about the tour was well-founded. The performance in Cheltenham on 4 October (where Smith apparentlytemporarily sacked half of the group during the gig) was described by a contributor to thefall.org’s gigography as an especially tetchy one:

‘Mark was constantly messing around with Brix’s guitar amp, turning the dials, changing the sound, altering the volume, much to her annoyance. Loads of tension.’

Things got even at worse at Motherwell the next day. Smith threw a mike stand ‘like a spear’10 at an unfortunate sound man, leading to a huge row with Brix11 during which  she threatened to hit MES with her guitar. A shaken Brix headed for Glasgow airport and flew back to London. The gig itself is described by another contributor to thefall.org’s discography:

‘She never appeared on stage. Mark, unfortunately, did, and peering at the audience shook his head at the fifty-plus crowd and immediately tried to pull the band offstage. Hanley refused… The gig was a farce… numerous walk-offs… After forty-five minutes Mark E grabs a guitar and hides behind a speaker, strumming and grinning with no teeth. What a disaster.’

ticket

The group’s insane tour itinerary (Cheltenham – Motherwell – South Shields – Worthing) saw them arrive on 6 October for a performance at the opening weekend of the new South Shields Arts Theatre. It never took place: the theatre manager insisted on the group performing at the prescribed times; MES found himself unable to oblige; things descended into chaos – the disgruntled crowd ripped up seats, attacked the group’s tour bus and six police cars arrived12.

Two nights later, the group played Worthing Assembly Rooms, a gig that some consider to be The Fall’s worst ever performance. Simon Ford describes the tour at this point as an ‘increasingly macabre pantomime’13. Smith sang very little and just gave the mike to the crowd; he exited then reappeared bare-chested beneath a jacket (possibly Nagle’s); and finally he fell flat on his back after someone at the front of the crowd tied his shoelaces together. Worthing Council were so appalled that they refused to pay the group’s fee. There are reviews of the show here and here.

MES takes a fall

By this stage, Smith’s problems seemed to have gone beyond excessive drinking. Brix describes how, in a hotel room, he turned all the paintings to face the wall because they ‘were speaking to him and spirits were coming out of them’14. She, as well as Simon Wolstencroft and Steve Hanley, noted Smith’s growing obsession with washing his hands:

‘Washing his hands constantly… claiming he’d caught a skin disease after shaking hands with a young girl in a wheelchair. He had welts on his arms, trying to bite away the sores.’15

Brix also suggests that he was having seizures at the time: ‘Often he would turn up to a gig with a blackened tongue or a bruised face, from where he’s smacked it while thrashing and writhing on the ground.’16

Brix was persuaded to return for one last gig – the group’s penultimate 1996 performance at London’s Forum on 11 October. At the end, she said ‘goodbye’ rather than her customary ‘good night’.

Steve Hanley’s summary17 of the tour:

‘Total tour wreckage: five mike stands, seven bus lights, several theatre seats, three cordless mikes, two amps and one lead guitarist.’

A new guitarist, Adrian Flanagan (Smith’s sister Caroline’s boyfriend) joined the group for their final gig of the year in Berlin on Christmas Eve, and would play with them four more times. His last gig was at London’s Astoria in February 1997, a tribute gig to music journalist Leo Finlay – the group played And This Day (Finlay’s favourite song18) for the first time in 14 years, which was the track’s final outing.

Despite his and the group’s difficulties. Smith once again managed to squeeze in a guest appearance, this time on Edwyn Collins’ Seventies Night. (Steve Hanley was less than impressed: ‘The hypocrisy is sickening’19). The song featured on Collins’ album I’m Not Following You. Smith seems to have enjoyed the experience, and asked Collins to produce The Fall’s next album. Collins declined, but did offer the use of his Hampstead studio20; his guitarist Andy Hackett also played on Levitate.

After Adrian Flanagan’s departure, the guitarist role was filled by Tommy Crooks. Crooks, who had contributed some (uncredited) art work to The Twenty-Seven Points, had written to Smith offering his services when he heard about Craig Scanlon leaving the group. In time-honoured tradition, he was given a long list of songs to learn and then discovered that none of them were to be played at his debut gig (13 May, Jilly’s Rockworld, Manchester).

poster

The two gigs that the group played at Jilly’s also featured Simon Spencer, aka D.O.S.E. (Kier Stewart, Spencer’s partner in Inch, had made a one-off appearance for The Fall at the preceding gig at the Astoria on 26 February). The second (May 14) performance at Jilly’s proved to be Simon Wolstencroft’s last.

In The Wider World…
Just before the album’s release, Wales voted in favour of devolution and the formation of a National Assembly for Wales. The BBC released a version of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day with performances (of highly variable quality) by various artists that raised over £2m for Children In Need.

A month before Levitate came out, Princess Diane’s death had flung much of Britain into a bizarre, sentimental, almost medieval orgy of bereavement. As a result. Elton John’s unspeakably maudlin Candle in the Wind 1997 was in the middle of five-week stay at number one. Ocean Colour Scene’s pedestrian indie/pub-rock (and thankfully largely forgotten) album Marchin’ Already was number one in the LP charts.

The Fall Live In 1996-97
1996 was almost as quiet a year for Fall gigs as 1995, featuring only 19 performances – just three more than the previous year. Their second gig of 1996, at London’s Astoria on 26 June was recorded and released (in August 1997) as 15 Ways To Leave Your Man.

Front cover

It’s an interesting recording, given that it documents the group at a very difficult point in their history, but it’s not a great listen. The vocals are way too loud throughout, the music buzzing away thinly in the background; the (often tuneless) backing vocals are distractingly obtrusive (Brix’s disgruntled rasp on Darling is almost comical).

There’s a certain tense energy about it, but the overall impression is of a group only just about holding it together; The Mixer, for example, sounds like they only learned the track half an hour before the gig. Not for the first time, it sounds like Wolstencroft and Hanley are mainly responsible for preventing it all from falling apart.

After the Astoria performance, the group played Roskilde, Sheffield Leadmill (where Secession Man got its first and only outing) and the Phoenix Festival. In September they played at the BAM (Barcelona Acció Musical) festival. A review in La Vanguardia (translated here) paints a picture that was becoming only too familiar:

‘The Fall, led by the dangerous and repulsive man who responds to the name of Mark E Smith… unpredictable and irate, he didn’t let down expectations… It seems that the Fall arrived at a time of big internal tensions and this was obvious on stage. A wrinkled and stubborn Mark E Smith constantly kept leaving the stage during a gig which lasted under an hour and which was summarily interrupted by him during the encore.’

The September/October tour kicked off in Oxford before moving on to Cannock, where Ten Houses Of Eve and Hurricane Edward received their debuts. A recording of the next night’s gig in King’s Lynn was one of the recent Set Of Ten releases;  it’s another one I haven’t actually heard yet.

Masquerade was performed for the first time at Norwich on 29 September.

photo
   Manchester Ritz 1 October 1996

October saw the group play (or not play) their infamous sequence of gigs in Cheltenham, Motherwell, South Shields and Worthing. The bootleg recording of the Motherwell gig is actually not the car crash you might expect it to be. It’s messy, certainly, but the most notable thing is how well – given the circumstances – the group (Wolstencroft and Hanley in particular, yet again) hold things together. After Brix’s final gig at the Forum, the group’s last performance of 1996, in Berlin on Christmas Eve (review here), saw their version of Hark The Herald Angels Sing being played for the first and last time.

The first gig of 1997, at Bristol’s Bierkeller, saw Ol’ Gang‘s debut, as well as Hip Priest‘s first outing for nine years. Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul was also revived on the next night in Swindon, this time after eleven years.

The February 26 date at the Astoria featured And This Day (see above) as well as the first of Plug Myself In‘s four appearances. It was also the only performance of the Smith / Hanley / Nagle / Flanagan / Stewart / Wolstencroft line-up; the review of the bootleg on Reformation describes it as ‘horribly under-rehearsed… a bit of a trial to sit through’.

Jilly’s Rockworld, Manchester 14 May 1997

The May 13-14 gigs at Jilly’s (see above) were Tommy Crook’s first performances with The Fall, and Simon Wolstencroft’s last. Crackhouse and Kimble both got their only two outings at this pair of gigs; Everybody But Myself received its debut on the first night, and part of its performance on the second was used on the Levitate version. The Reformation review of the second night provides this summary:

‘All in all a most peculiar confection of moments of pure Fall magic and totally under- rehearsed un-togetherness and mayhem. Charmingly and effectively barking mad in summary. Worth getting for the silliness and Funky Si’s last gig. At least you can say its not boring.’

The July 27 Cardiff gig featured Karl Burns returning yet again, and a performance of Hurricane Edward that was used on the album version. After dates in Bangor and Edinburgh in August, the group’s last gig before Levitate‘s release was at Camden Dingwall’s on 24 September. It saw several Levitate tracks receive their live debuts: The Quartet of Doc Shanley, I’m A Mummy, Levitate, Spencer Must Die and Jungle Rock. This performance also featured a one-off reunion with Michael Clark.

The Album
The group began recording the album in July 1997. Simon Spencer and Kier Stewart were lined up to produce, but the relationship broke down rapidly. Typically, Spencer and Stewart’s version of events differed greatly from Smith’s: they apparently found his methods (‘staggering around, kicking things over and shouting stuff down the drum mikes’) impossible to work with; MES claimed that he dismissed them for taking an overly ‘rock’ approach21.

Steve Hanley was less than impressed with the duo, describing them as ‘two zeitgeist blaggers who are desperate to work with us’22. His version of events does, however, support Spencer and Stewart’s claim that MES was difficult to work with (‘It’s impossible getting him to sing at all today… Instead he starts to mess around with a stylophone and spends the entire day working his way around the plethora of antique studio equipment’) but also suggests that the issue of Spencer and Stewart’s remuneration was the producers’ greatest concern23. Hanley also casts doubts on the duo’s competence:

‘They set about miking up the drums, seeming for all the world like they’ve been doing this for years. But it was only last week that they were procuring a crash course from the demo-studio technician.’ 24

Most of the material that Spencer and Stuart recorded with The Fall seems to have been wiped. However, the duo did retain a track called Inch (which would form the basis for 4 1/2 Inch). Featuring a secretly-recorded piece of MES dialogue (where he describes to Kier Stewart how the bass and drums should sound, in rather comical ‘human beatbox’ fashion), they sent it out to John Peel and several record companies with (according to Stewart) the message, ‘Hey guys, check out the sound of my new album. This is the brand new Fall sound and I think you’ll agree – it rocks!’ It was eventually released in 1999:

The most notable event of the album’s recording, however, was Simon Wolstencroft’s departure. One of the factors involved seems to have been Everybody But Myself, which he had co-written and had anticipated being a potentially poppy, commercial single – not exactly how it turned out. This is presumably what Steve Hanley is referring to when he describes Wolstencroft having ‘seemingly endless rows [with Smith] about a song he has written’25. Wolstencroft’s need to resign from the partnership that he and Hanley had signed up to in order to avoid the crippling VAT bill was undoubtedly also a factor. However, Wolstencroft himself probably sums it up best himself: ‘I was out of money and patience’.

And so the group said goodbye to one of its most stalwart contributors. Eleven years in The Fall is, of course, a remarkable achievement in itself, but Wolstencroft should also be commemorated for his huge contribution to The Fall sound, both through dozens of writing credits and (by my reckoning) 456 live performances. I should add that his very engaging and informative book (buy it here) and Twitter videos have been incredibly helpful in writing YMGTA. Also, he has been very supportive of this blog (through likes, retweets, comments, etc.) – it is very much appreciated Funky Si, cheers.

Image result for Simon Wolstencroft the fall

The album was released on Artful Records, which saw the group working once again with John Lennard (allegedly26 Creation had offered to sign the group, but only on the condition that they wouldn’t have to deal directly with Smith). The distinctive, abstract cover (certainly an improvement on the last couple) was designed by Tommy Crooks. It only reached 117 on the UK album charts, the worst performance by a Fall album for 14 years.

In the NME, Steven Wells invited his readers to ‘Imagine pop without perimeters. Imagine rock without rules. Imagine art without the w*nk.’ He described Levitate as ‘either the best or worst record you’ve ever heard’. In Select, Ian Harrison said that the group’s ‘grudging, scrambled avant-rock has been a weeping sore on music for 20 years now… This is a band as far away from the mainstream as ever with the confounding ability to come back sounding vital just when you least expect it.’

Steve Hanley’s summary:

‘Weird, but respectable enough.

Like a shanty town almost completely destroyed by natural disaster, against the odds, a meticulous rebuild has left us with a finished product belying the traumas which underlie its creation.’ 27

The Songs
Ten Houses Of Eve
The album’s opener takes a twist of jerky drum & bass then adds a squelchy synth line, some twangy surf-rock guitar and a bit of grinding, industrial percussion. It then throws in a soft-rock-ballad curve-ball of an interlude, with tinkling piano and MES intoning earnestly about ‘your blue green and grey heart / bedecked in lace’. Like all of the best bits of Levitate, there’s a slightly unhinged and desperate quality about it; the contrast of Smith’s languid, off-hand tone with the frantic rhythm is an especially strong feature, as is the layering of his voice.

The lines ‘Identity art / If only the shards would relocate back in place’ form part of a mural at Affleck’s Palace in Manchester:

It’s also another Fall ‘borrow’ – this time from The Seeds’ Evil Hoodoo. According to Reformation it was the most played song in 1997 and joint first the following year. It was performed 86 times 1996-2000.

Masquerade
A piece of danceable(ish) indie-techno-pop driven by a techno-style synth sequencer, Masquerade is a decent enough tune, although perhaps not quite good enough to justify its multitude of remixes (for example the Record Store Day offering in 2017). Once again, however, Smith’s lazy, off-hand contributions contrast nicely with the sharp rhythm. It was played 34 times 1996-98.

Hurricane Edward
Even fans of the song would admit that this is an unholy mess. It’s an abrasive cacophony that sounds like the rough ideas for several different songs tossed into a blender: spoken word segments (the opening lines are spoken by Sebastian Lewsley, one of the engineers at West Heath Studios), live snippets, intense and frantic drumming, Sonic Youth-ish guitar torturing, electronic squiggles, cut-up drum machine samples, fuzzy drone noise…

It’s a divisive song: some see it as self-indulgent, uninspired nonsense; others (myself included) find it insanely, joyously entertaining. It was played live 40 times 1996-99.

I’m A Mummy
One of the group’s more successful covers. As is often the case with The Fall, it’s from a pretty obscure source: a 1959 single by Bob McFadden & Dor. You can hear it – plus another 1959 version by ‘Bubi & Bob’ – here. Both are entertainingly bizarre, and manage the remarkable feat of making The Fall’s version sound (almost) quite ‘straight’ in comparison.

Despite the difficult circumstances of the album’s creation, the group sound like they’re having a whale of a time on this one, and it buzzes with enthusiasm and energy. The scratchy, trebly lead guitar is a bracing treat, all sorts of entertainingly random noises pop up throughout, and there’s a wonderful deadpan hilarity about Smith’s delivery. It’s tongue in cheek without being throwaway.

It was played live 18 times in 1997-98. There’s a great in-depth review of the song quoted here that’s well worth reading.

The Quartet Of Doc Shanley
In which Mr Hanley contributes an absolute beast of a bass line; a piece of deranged, mutant funk, distorted to the point of lunacy. It was inspired (according to a 2015 interview) by The Osmonds’ bizarrely frenzied piece of acid-glam boogie, Crazy Horses.

It has the unhinged attitude of much of the album. There’s almost no mixing to speak of – everything is just loud; you can imagine Smith brushing the engineer aside and just sweeping an arm across the desk to push all the faders up to the top. There’s a multitude of layers to the song (which are not always synchronised – 3:01 is a good example) which just adds to the distorted mayhem.

Steve Hanley had this to say: ‘One of mine and he makes Julia sing the lyrics. What the f*ck?’28 Lyrically, Quartet is firmly in the ‘what in Christ’s name is he on about?’ category (‘Pentangle nine / iadomine penternine’), but the random layering of the three voices is completely in the deranged spirit of the tune. The indecipherable nature of the lyrics also led to one of the most entertaining footnotes ever on The Annotated Fall.

It was only played live twice, in September and December 1997.

Jap Kid
After five manic, energetic songs, the album comes to a bit of a grinding halt. Julia Nagle’s simplistic piano melody is almost pretty, but the overriding sensation is of lethargy and aimlessness. The fact that there’s a version with vocals later on renders this take head-scratchingly futile.

It was used as a backing tape at four gigs in 1997-98.

4 1/2 Inch
Thankfully we immediately get back to something abrasively random and difficult. Part of the short-lived Spencer/Stewart sessions, it may well be (according to Reformation, anyway) that Smith is the only member of The Fall that actually appears on this track, although Steve Hanley does suggest that it contains samples of both him and Simon Wolstencroft:

‘Before coming here, they [Spencer and Stewart] recorded an afternoon of Si and me just playing anything in a demo studio. Then they took the tapes, sampled the sound of me playing the bass, him playing the drums, and created a song.’29

Simon Ford suggests – although it seems rather too ‘neat’ to be true – that the title came from Smith’s perception that the song ‘half-reminded [him] of industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails30‘.

However it was recorded and named, it’s a mad, glorious mess: the sound of several genres each being battered relentlessly against a wall until they’re bloodied and semi-conscious then being bound together, crushed and crammed forcibly into the mixing desk. The drums crash, blare and distort; a heavy, twangy funk-rock riff muscles its way in periodically, trying in vain to assert its dominance; a shrill, atonal sci-fi synth darts in periodically, surveys the chaos, shrugs its shoulders and wanders out again; and somewhere, lurking in the shadows, a frightened little harpsichord-effect keyboard tinkles shyly.

Over all of this, the multiple layers of cut & paste MES vocals swarm like enraged wasps; a bit like being surrounded by a crowd of angry drunks getting down to a brawl at closing time in Wetherspoons. The words are frantically, angrily garbled and once again pretty much beyond interpretation; it’s hard to argue with The Annotated Fall that the song ‘isn’t meant to be explained’ when it contains lines like’ The house is falling in /
ecstatic midges / cloud coverage’.

According to Reformation, it was played only once (in New York on 30 March 1998) ‘with some venom’. It captures the overall spirit of Levitate perfectly: bleak, desperate, aggressive, venomous, chaotic, punishing – yet exhilarating.

Spencer Must Die
Co-written with Simon Spencer, Spencer Must Die is one of those songs that have contributed to the MES ‘pre-cog’ mythology following Spencer’s death in 2003.

Like several others on Levitate, there’s not much of an actual song, but it lopes along in a loose, head-bobbing fashion; an effortlessly engaging shuffle. Steve Hanley provides a fluid, sliding, oscillating rhythm that unobtrusively underpins everything (notwithstanding the little misstep at 1:19).

There are lots of little details to love: the (slightly cheesy) descending synth line that adds a splash of colour; the little snippets of understated twangy guitar (e.g at 1:34 and 1:37); the distortion on the vocals at 0:28-0:31; the gentle guitar strum that appears at 2:07).

It’s more of a skeleton of an idea than a ‘proper’ song, with MES doing little other than mumbling stuff about sunflowers and raspberries. It also features a fade-out that’s abrupt even by The Fall’s standards. But, like 4 1/2 Inch, there’s an air of confident disregard about the notion of what constitutes a ‘proper’ song that’s uplifting.

Jungle Rock
An odd cover of rather an odd song. Actually, the original song (by Hank Mizell) itself isn’t so odd, being a pretty standard rockabilly/novelty tune, albeit one with some pleasingly raw and twangy guitar; what is a little peculiar is that this 50s obscurity was a top ten hit in the UK in the mid-70s, for no apparent reason.

The Fall’s version is a rather curious affair in itself. Whilst the original had a earthy, gritty sound, it also had a fairly light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek tone. The Fall transform this into something harsh and abrasive: the synth blares out like some sort of distress signal, the guitars resonate like buzzsaws and MES drawls his way through the ridiculous lyrics with a deadpan disdain. There’s something slightly disturbing and discomforting about it; it teeters on the border between strangely compelling and just plain silly.

Ol’ Gang
After the old favourite ‘Walking down the street’ line has been wheeled out again, Ol’ Gang is most notable for its sheer, relentless tunelessness. Julia Nagle hammering away at an off-key piano gives it a gloriously discordant and aggressive edge, and there’s all manner of distorted squalls of noise in the background. Smith’s vocals are aggressively distorted and right at the front of the mix, sometimes uncomfortably so.

It’s harsh, discordant and full of the ‘f*ck you’ attitude that courses through the whole album. It was a popular setlist choice at the time, racking up 54 performances 1997-2000.

Tragic Days
The winner of the ‘Fall Wooden Spoon’, a cup competition I ran over on The Fall Online Forum to find the group’s worst song. It’s just 90 seconds of pissing about in (apparently) Martin Bramah’s flat. Typically perverse and pointless; it therefore sits entirely comfortably in the middle of such a wilfully difficult album.

I Come And Stand At Your Door
The ponderous, funereal rhythm and simple (if reasonably pretty) piano melody of Jap Kid is strengthened a little by Smith’s melancholy vocal. His contribution (‘death came and turned my bones to dust’) makes it endearingly fragile and sad. It was based on a poem by the Turkish writer Nâzım Hikmet Ran called “The Little Girl,” told from the perspective of a dead child who perished at Hiroshima. Smith’s hesitant, vulnerable vocals are touching, and work hard to rescue the song from its sluggish lethargy.

Levitate
Reformation quite reasonably describes the album’s title track as a ‘fairly conventional song’. In terms of structure, chord progression, etc., it certainly is – there’s no sudden bursts of drum & bass or live version clumsily spliced into a studio one. It’s actually quite a gentle and pleasant tune, and MES tries uncharacteristically hard to work within the boundaries of melodic convention. What is unconventional is the production. The production on Levitate is odd in many different ways; here, with wilful perversity, the treble is turned up ludicrously high and the bottom end is almost non-existent, giving it a feeling of frailty and brittleness.

It’s another lyric that deters analysis: ‘Had to levitate from a grey map pate / The snazzy japes of a Basingstoke shot / Basing in stocks under the green frock, below the granite complex’. It was played 37 times, 1997-2000.

Everybody But Myself
There’s an air of strange, bleak desolation about Everybody But Myself (emphasised by the mournful harmonica-effect keyboard that floats around from time to time), which makes the uptempo house-like chords intriguingly incongruous. The low ebb of Smith’s spirits is reflected in the weary ennui of his repeated refrain which stands in stark contrast to both the cheery crowd interaction of the opening and the playful falsetto with which he provides his own backing vocals.

Like a few other songs of the era (e.g. Ibis-Afro Man and Hurricane Edward) the song makes use of a disconcerting mix of live (from the second Jilly’s gig – see above) and studio recordings, with the transition as jarring and careless as ever. It is presumably a long way from the chart-friendly pop song that Simon Wolstencroft envisaged.

The Annotated Fall points out that the keyboard riff bears a passing resemblance to Strings of the Strings of Life by Derrick May. It was only played live twice, at the two Jilly’s gigs mentioned above.

Reissues & Bonus Tracks
There was limited version of the album released at the time, which a included a 5-track bonus CD. Powderkex is a mildly interesting drum and bass-inflected remix of Powder KegChristmastide is a rather pointless reworking of Xmas With Simon from the High Tension Line singleRecipe For Fascism is a brief bit of Post Nearly Man-style spoken word.

Pilsner Trail was a Perverted By Language-era tune (originally entitled Plaster On The Hands) – this rather thin and scuzzy live recording is from a March 1983 London gig. The live version of Everybody But Myself is the full version of the second Jilly’s performance that was used on the studio version.

For a long time, Levitate was out of print and very hard to obtain. In 2018, however, Cherry Red reissued the album in triple vinyl and double CD formats. Both versions contain the five original bonus CD tracks, plus a further nine songs that came from the various versions of the Masquerade single that were released in February 1998.

CD1 cover

Three of the nine are remixes of Masquerade. The ‘single mix’ is a little slurred and sluggish; the ‘Mr Natural mix’ is a rather ham-fisted and overlong funk/techno version; the ‘PWL mix’ is just the ‘single mix’ with the bass turned up a little.

Ivanhoe’s Two Pence, however, is one of those obscure little gems that are dotted around the group’s back catalogue. Closely related to Levitate‘s title track in terms of melody and structure, it’s a gentle strum, but one that features an interesting voice sample that intertwines with MES’s vocals throughout. A cute little high-pitched keyboard line, a bit of basic one-fingered piano and (possibly) a squeaky recorder make brief appearances too. It was played live once, in New York on 30 March 1998.

The live take of Spencer Must Die features some more ‘splicing’, this time between two live versions. The first section (from 9 December 1997 at the Bristol Bierkeller, according to Reformation) is a slow, thoughtful version and is crystal clear in terms of recording quality; the rest is much more lo-fi, abrasive and aggressive. It makes for a pleasing contrast, although it’s terminated rather abruptly.

The remix of Ten Houses of Eve doesn’t add a great deal to the original beyond boosting the bottom end and turning up the reverb; although it does kick off with admirable aggression from 2:31 onward.

Calendar is even more of a hidden gem than Ivanhoe’s Two Pence. One of the anecdotes that was most regularly trotted out in all the obituary pieces when Smith died was the story of how he mistook Damon Gough for a taxi driver and left his dentures in Gough’s car (there’s quite a touching little account from Gough himself here). The last thing that you might expect from a Fall/Gough collaboration – given the perverse nature of most things to do with Smith and The Fall – is that it would actually sound like MES singing a Badly Drawn Boy song. However, surprisingly, that’s exactly what it does sound like. The combination of the intricate, precise little guitar line (characteristic of BDB songs) juxtaposed with Smith’s smeared, haphazard but delicate vocal is simply lovely. It was played live 18 times 1998-99.

Scareball is a straightforward, stomping rocker that is sound enough but has a distinct flavour of b-side. It was played live nine times, all in 1998. The live version of Ol’ Gang (from 9 December 1997 at the Bristol Bierkeller) lacks the nagging one-note keyboard line of the studio version, but is instead heavy on the power-chord guitar. Mildly interesting but lacking in subtlety.

Overall Verdict
Steven Wells’ line about Levitate being ‘either the best or worst record you’ve ever heard’ might seem at first glance to be a typical piece of throwaway soundbite journalism, but there is some substance to what he says. The album is one of the most divisive amongst Fall fans, a majority considering it substantially flawed and a fair few considering it to be one of their weakest moments (perhaps only Are You Are Missing Winner, Ersatz GB and Reformation Post-TLC would attract significantly more ‘worst Fall album’ votes). That said, it also has a small but passionate coterie of admirers.

Inner sleeve of 2018 2xLP reissue

What is inarguable is that – both sonically and lyrically – Levitate captures (possibly better than any other Fall album) the emotions and dynamics of the group at the time. There’s an atmosphere of bleak, chaotic desperation that runs through the songs (the abrasive bedlam of 4 1/2 Inch; the keening pathos of Everybody But Myself; the anti-song aggression of Hurricane Edward) that reflects with chilling accuracy the dysfunctional and disintegrating environment that the wonderful and frightening world had become by 1997. Smith’s alcoholic paranoia; Hanley’s stoic but simmering frustration; Wolstencroft’s nervous impecunity – plus the resentful, regretful ghost of Brix’s promising but unfulfilled second coming – are etched clearly into every single groove of the record.

Inner sleeve of 2018 2xLP reissue

And yet, the album is not without its lighter moments – the exuberant zeal that both Smith and Crooks display on I’m A Mummy; the repeated use of ‘complete and utter pranny’ on Quartet of Doc Shanley; the throwaway silliness of Tragic Days – that cut through the otherwise bleak and unforgiving atmosphere.

Levitate epitomised catastrophe and triumph in equal measure. Catastrophe in that it saw the group sinking into obscurity (117 in the charts; gig attendance occasionally in only double figures) and utter turmoil (as will be seen in the next post that covers the events of 1998). But it also represented triumph amidst adversity – there cannot be many (if any) other artists who would ever even have got this album recorded and released under the circumstances.

My “Version”
Like Light User Syndrome, there’s a better album to be had from playing around with the running order and editing out the weaker tracks; but here there are also a couple of very worthy additions.

Side One: Ten Houses of Eve / Masquerade / I’m a Mummy / Ivanhoe’s Two Pence / Calendar / Hurricane Edward (21:51)

Side Two: 4.5 Inch / Spencer Must Die / Ol’ Gang / Levitate / The Quartet of Doc Shanley / Everybody but Myself (22:14)

Rankings
As far as the album itself goes (the single/live album rankings were pretty straightforward here), it’s a very tough call, this one. Of course it has its flaws (Your Door is rather dreary; Jap Kid is pointless; Jungle Rock is a nice try that misses its target; Tragic Days takes the p*ss in a not especially entertaining way – although it is only 89 seconds long) and it is, overall, a bloody difficult and challenging album. But if you don’t want difficult and challenging then clearly you’re listening to the wrong band.

And then: Ten Houses4/12 InchQuartet and Hurricane are amongst the group’s most thrillingly innovative work. Plus, Levitate is inexplicably lovely; and, much as I try to be objective in these posts, I love Spencer Must Die in a way that I can never entirely successfully put my finger on.

It’s clearly a better album than Cerebral Caustic; but it also falls short of Hex. For me, it just pips Slates and Grotesque in terms of thrilling invention and in the way it captures a pivotal time in the group’s career. (I am also aware that, possibly more than any other album on this blog, I will face criticism and derision wherever I put it.)

  1. This Nation’s Saving Grace
  2. Perverted By Language
  3. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of
  4. Hex Enduction Hour
  5. Levitate
  6. Slates
  7. Grotesque
  8. Cerebral Caustic
  9. I Am Kurious Oranj
  10. Room To Live
  11. The Infotainment Scan
  12. Extricate
  13. Bend Sinister
  14. Dragnet
  15. The Light User Syndrome
  16. Middle Class Revolt
  17. Code: Selfish
  18. Shift-Work
  19. Live At The Witch Trials
  20. The Frenz Experiment

Singles: there’s not much actually wrong with Masquerade, but its seemingly endless versions have rendered it just a little tiresome. A solid enough song, but not one that many would reach for when knocking up a compilation.

  1. Living Too Late
  2. Jerusalem/Big New Prinz
  3. Kicker Conspiracy
  4. The Man Whose Head Expanded
  5. How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
  6. Totally Wired
  7. Free Range
  8. Behind The Counter
  9. Marquis Cha-Cha
  10. Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul
  11. The Chiselers
  12. Cab It Up
  13. Cruiser’s Creek
  14. Hey! Luciani
  15. Mr. Pharmacist
  16. Couldn’t Get Ahead/Rollin’ Dany
  17. Look, Know
  18. Telephone Thing
  19. There’s A Ghost In My House
  20. Victoria
  21. Hit The North
  22. Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!
  23. Rowche Rumble
  24. Fiery Jack
  25. Masquerade
  26. Ed’s Babe
  27. High Tension Line
  28. 15 Ways
  29. It’s The New Thing
  30. White Lightning
  31. Popcorn Double Feature
  32. Why Are People Grudgeful?
  33. Oh! Brother

Live albums: 15 Ways To Leave Your Man‘s attractions are historical and contextual rather than to do with sound quality and performance.

  1. Live To Air In Melbourne ’82
  2. In A Hole
  3. A Part Of America Therein, 1981
  4. In The City…
  5. Nottingham ’92
  6. The Legendary Chaos Tape / Live In London 1980
  7. Totale’s Turns
  8. The Idiot Joy Show
  9. Live In Cambridge 1988
  10. I Am As Pure As Oranj
  11. Live 1993 – Batschkapp, Frankfurt
  12. Live 1981 – Jimmy’s Music Club – New Orleans
  13. Live 1977
  14. The Twenty Seven Points
  15. Seminal Live
  16. Live At The Phoenix Festival
  17. Live In Zagreb
  18. 15 Ways To Leave Your Man – Live
  19. Austurbaejarbio
  20. BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert
  21. Live 3rd May 1982 Band On The Wall Manchester
  22. Live 1980 – Cedar Ballroom Birmingham
  23. Live From The Vaults – Alter Banhof, Hof, Germany
  24. Live From The Vaults – Glasgow 1981
  25. Live From The Vaults – Oldham 1978
  26. Liverpool 78
  27. Live From The Vaults – Los Angeles 1979
  28. Live From The Vaults – Retford 1979
  29. Live At Deeply Vale

References

 1You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide, p208

2The Big Midweek, p424

3You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide, p210

4Ford, p243

5The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise, p388

6You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide, p207

7You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide, p207 / The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise, pp389-390

8The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise, p390 / Ford, p244

9Ford, p245

10Ford, p245

11The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise, pp396-397

12The Big Midweek, p412

13Ford, p246

14The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise, p391

15You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide, p209

16The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise, p394

17The Big Midweek, p415

18Ford, p248

19The Big Midweek, p418

20The Big Midweek, p417

21Ford, p249

22The Big Midweek, p418

23-24The Big Midweek, p419

25The Big Midweek, p420

26Ford, p251

27The Big Midweek, p422

28-29The Big Midweek, p419

30Ford, p252

The Fall’s “Borrows” Part 2 (1988-97)

A few months ago, I posted a little compilation of the songs that The Fall had plundered (to varying degrees) between 1984 and 1988. Having just finished writing the Levitate post, it would seem an opportune moment to revisit the ‘borrows’, as by 1997 the group have racked up another album’s worth.

Image result for the glitter band

The Glitter Band were originally Gary Glitter’s backing band, but released material in their own right from 1973 onward. I’m never sure if Rock And Roll Part 2 was a Gary Glitter or Glitter Band song (please feel free to enlighten me) – this YouTube video credits it to The Glitter Band, using the cover of the album Hey! as its image; but discogs shows that this song wasn’t even on Hey! 

Whatever: it’s not a very direct ‘borrow’, but you can certainly hear clear traces of the stomping drum pattern in both New Big Prinz and Glam Racket.

Smith claimed to have written all of Wrong Place, Right Time himself, but John Fogarty -who composed Gloomy from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1968 eponymous debut album – might argue that he provided some inspiration.

Little Doll is one of the best tracks from The Stooges’ patchy but frequently glorious 1969 debut. The song’s only flaw is the criminal way Ron Asheton’s imperious guitar solo is cut short just as it’s getting going. Smith and Bramah seem to have had at least half an ear on this track when they concocted Sing! Harpy.

Black Monk Theme Part 1 is a much more straightforward ‘borrow’ that I covered on the Extricate post:

Shift-Work and Code: Selfish were generally ‘borrow’-free; The Infotainment Scan (if you include bonus tracks) however, contained three (not including Glam Racket‘s debt to the Glitter Band). Why Are People Grudgeful? was an amalgam of two songs – People Grudgeful by Joe Gibbs and People Funny Boy by Lee Perry. The League Of Bald-Headed Men (although MES denied ever having heard any of their music) owes a clear debt to Led Zeppelin’s Misty Mountain Hop:

And – slightly tenuously – the line (at 1:36) ‘trying to get over’ in It’s A Curse is lifted from Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly.

Levitate also contains three obvious ‘borrows’. Ten Houses Of Eve is distinctly similar to the fuzzy, gnarly garage-rock of The Seeds’ Evil Hoodoo. Steve Hanley by his own admission was inspired by The Osmonds’ Crazy Horses when creating the bass riff for The Quartet of Doc Shanley.

Finally, the piano riff of Everybody But Myself is quite close to Derrick May’s house-trance Strings Of The Strings Of Life.