Fall Instrumentals

Although The Fall are not and have never been known for the quality of their instrumental tracks there are nonetheless quite a few examples of MES-less songs scattered about their discography, and the live history is full of occasions when, for one reason or another, songs devoid of vocals were played. This brief article seeks to round up the various instrumental tracks.

Firstly, there are those songs which never had vocals, perhaps because MES never got round to writing any or maybe due to him thinking that the tune or riff wasn’t strong enough to warrant lyrical accompaniment. Countdown, played on seven or so occasions during the 1986 US tour, is an early example of such a song. Played always as the opening song, it was quickly dropped from the set and disappeared until turning up again, this time with vocals, as an Ark song. It boasts an excellent riff, and was an excellent way to get proceedings under way. In 1990 Zagreb would be treated in the same way by MES. It’s another strong effort. An offshoot of this is The Funeral Mix. However, as the website The Story of The Fall puts it, “this lumpen keyboard and syndrums instrumental is as dreary as its title suggests.” Moving up to the present day, songs such as Chino Splashback or Bury may or may not have vocals added to them if they are ever officially released (it’s a moot point as to whether MES proclaiming “Good evening, we are The Fall/long long days of cheese/etc.” over the riffs count as real lyrics or not!). Going back in time again, Jumper Clown was played in the set in the early part of 1979 and remained without vocals until Mark Riley and The Creepers recorded the track in 1983.

Tragic Days is an oddity among The Fall’s instrumentals. According to Martin Bramah, it “was recorded on an old stereo cassette machine at my flat in Whalley Range, Manchester, sometime in early 1990. We were working on an idea of Craig’s, to which I may have contributed something, it was just a work in progress type of thing, with no title, that was never finished as such. When it was released on Levitate in ’97 I think Mark credited me as the writer but as I said it was an idea of Craig’s really. Given the title of the song and the poor recording quality I dont think he was doing me any favours really!”

Then we have Ronney The Oney, released as an excerpt on Interim. The full (or a fuller) version of this track has recently come to light, and although it has its moments I think it would be fair to say that MES was correct in curtailing it on its official release. Some might wish that he had done the same with the short (and pointless?) Outro which closes Reformation Post TLC, but to my mind it finishes off proceedings in a typical Fall way: irreverantly, irrelevantly.

On the re-released, expanded version of The Infotainment Scan we have the prosacially titled Instrumental Outtake, little more than a guitar doodle. More recently, on The Unutterable re-release, Rubber and Weirdo have been given a release and so can now be heard by those who didn’t have access to the bootleg versions. (The newly-released ones are a little longer and perhaps mixed a little differently.) Still unreleased is a tune called Dramatic which seems to come from the Country on the Click sessions. I think it deserves a wider hearing.

There are a handful of oddities. Interference, though credited as a Fall track, appears to be little more than random noises from the tape of Hurricane Edward at the end of Live: Various Years. As for White Lines, which appears on Oxymoron, who knows? There are those who say that this techno-influenced song has nothing to do with The Fall at all, but little information seems to be available. Finally, Prague ’91 is a short drums and violin (played by Kenny Brady) ditty which leads into Mr Pharmicist. There is no record of The Fall having played in Prague in that year and so the origin of the track, if indeed if it was every intended to be a separate song on its own (this seems more than doubtful, but we must be as complete as possible here) remains a mystery.

A second main category of Fall instrumentals is that which contains versions of songs with vocals. This includes vox-less tracks such as The Knight, The Devil and Death (on Sinister Waltz) and Ed’s Babe (on Fiend With A Violin). The writer of this piece, having never heard the single version of this song, thought that the track had been put out only as an instrumental until quite some time later! Mansion is the wordless version of To Nkroachment: Yarbles, though the song was given some desultory lyrics by MES when it was recalled for various gigs in 2002. Service and Glam Racket on the expanded The Infotainment Scan are further examples: neither does anything to expand on or improve the originals and are valuable only as historical artifacts.

Fiend With a Violin (which contains no violins) is an alternative version of 2 X 4. It has all the feeling of being a very early runthrough of the song, and if you don’t own it, you’re not missing anything. Jap Kid is the instrumental version of I Come and Stand at Your Door. Though never played by the group on stage, it was heard at least four times on DAT in 1997 and 1998. Then we have Guest Informant (excerpt), a sort of reprise of the main song, except that it comes earlier on the album, so sneak preview may be more accurate an expression! Life of the Crying Marshall is a sound effects spin-off from other Marshall songs on the same album. And Tunnel is an early version of The Chiselers, unreleased until its appearance on The Fall Box Set recently.

Turning now to those Fall songs with lyrics but which have been played as instrumentals at gigs, we find the following, which is by no means an exhaustive list but in any case shows the extent that this has occured over the years:

1990: You Haven’t Found It Yet, Arms Control Poseur
1991: The Mixer
1993 : Behind The Counter, It’s A Curse, Happy Holiday
1994: The Legend Of Xanadu
1995: Idiot Joy Showland
1996: Hurricane Edward, Cheetham Hill, Oleano, The Mixer, US 80s-90s, 10 Houses of Eve
1997: Das Vultur Ans Ein Nutter-Wain, Cheetham Hill, Spencer Must Die, Idiot Joy Showland, Ol’ Gang
1998: Spencer Must Die, Calendar, Levitate, Oleano, Behind the Counter, I’m A Mummy, He Pep, 10 Houses Of Eve, Jungle Rock, The Joke, Everybody But Myself
1999: This Perfect Day, F-‘oldin Money, Inevitable, Jet Boy, Shake-Off, He Pep
2000: The Crying Marshall, W.B. Das Katerer
2001: He Pep, Birthday Song, Hot Runes, Kick The Can, Dr Buck’s Letter, Ibis-Afro Man
2002: I Wake Up In the City
2003: Behind The Counter
2004: Blindness, Paintwork , Dr Buck’s Letter
2005: Blindness , Youwanner, Touch Sensitive, Janet, Johnny and James, Assume
2006: F-‘Oldin’ Money, The Boss
2007: Reformation, Systematic Abuse
2008: Can Can Summer

A lot of these instrumentals occur either at the beginning or the end of sets, firstly because MES leaves it too late to come on/can’t be bothered to come on; and secondly because for one reason for another he’s had enough and wants to get back to the dressing room. There are myriad examples of the group doubling the length of the opening song before realising their leader isn’t about to make an entrance and so winding it up and starting another song. Hurricane Edward, in contrast, is one of those tracks which started off without lyrics, the words coming after it had been played several times in live performances. The Light User Syndrome, Levitate and The Marshall Suite are the albums which have “enjoyed” the most number of tracks played in the MES-less way, obviously mainly due to the often erratic behaviour of the singer himself around this time. The 2 April 1998 Loop Lounge, Passaic Park, New Jersey gig features no less than five instrumentals, one false start and one song with Tommy Crooks on vocals. ( A similar record was set at the Concert Hall, Motherwell, on 5 October 1996.) Two days later, the gig at Trocadero, Philadelphia, contains four songs without the direct intervention of MES; and the only surprising thing about the infamous gig at Brownies, New York City on 7 April is that only one song, Levitate, is an instrumental.

There are also numerous occasions, more frequent in the past ten years or so, in which MES strips down (or simply fails to remember!) the lyrics of various songs with the result of turning them into semi-instrumentals. Many of the tracks on The Unutterable enjoyed/suffered this fate.

Instrumentals can be great. I think I’d argue that the nature of Fall songs, with their general emphasis on repetition, often need vocals as a counterbalance because without them they are not varied enough, within each song, to make them a valuable work or art, or to put it in less high-faluting a manner, a decent song in their own right. The Fall needs MES and MES needs The Fall. This said, the instrumentals we do have by the gruppe are, while rarely reaching classic Fall status, an important part of their history.