A Figure Walks
Before The Moon Falls
Underground Medecin
Music Scene
Repetition
NOTES
A dire audience audio replete with wow, flutter, whooshing and pendulum swings between tinny and bass dominated.
17 minutes net of the missing Repetition
The last available live recording of Martin Bramah with the group before his return in 1989.
Feted by Charles Shaar Murray in the New Musical Express the following week (see below), this performance is short because of the packed bill of other acts (viz Good Missionaries, Mekons, Human League, Gang of Four, Stiff Little Fingers). Described as unorthodox, suffering from missiles (glass, plastic, and sputum), and actually bodily harm on the singer, this is The Fall at their most challenging, straddling Witch Trials and Dragnet this protean rush of noise deserves/requires/evokes breathless enthusiasm.
The recording is cut short as the band are morphing Music Scene into Repetition.
Before The Moon Falls sounds a bit different from its eventual studio release, though the poor quality of this recorded gig may distort things somewhat. This is the first known recording of this track.
Charles Shaar Murray said the following:
Lots of young people seem to have it in for The Fall, and a fair proportion of them were at the Lyceum.
The Fall were by far the most unorthodox band on the bill (i.e. they sounded less like The Clash than anybody except The Human League, but then they’re different), since Good Missionaries weren’t so much a band as an event or a happening or Art or something like that, and the intolerant boilsuckers who can’t see that there’s room for more than one sort of rock band made them pay for their daring.
They’d hardly had time to get plugged in before it became blindingly obvious why they’d entitled their album ‘Live At The Witch Trials.’
Plastic glasses! Beer cans! Coke cans! Gob! Yep, what we had here was a classic case of remembering those fabulous seventies. The low point of the set was when some spiky psycho leapt on stage and slugged Mark E. Smith (Fall mikeperson) two or three times and then jumped back into the audience before Smith or anybody else had time to ask him to account for his behaviour.
Okay, The Fall are Difficult And Arty, if that’s how you interpret attempts to dispense with orthodox rock ideas of what structure and texture ought to be; or alternatively, if that’s how you’d describe a band who can’t take their music where they want it to go by using the conventional language of rock. The Fall are threatening: not in the conventional tear-ya-down sense, but threatening in that they tell you stuff that you may not want to hear in a manner to which you are not accustomed.
The Fall are not comforting in the way that even the most badass conventional rock act is: The Pistols could be incredibly comforting if you identified yourself with their threat rather than with their targets. Yeah! We’re All Punks Together! Bugger the Queen!
This response is not possible with The Fall. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later, when we’ve all learned the words to the songs and started to dress like them and the people who threw things at them (maybe even the scheisskopf who hit Smith will be boasting about having been to this gig), right now, they are not just alienated from (ta-daaaaaa!) society but from standard rock, and that includes punk.
None of them look like punks, and the punks gave ’em the kind of response that Dr Feelgood used to get from Ted audiences when they were starting out. The worst kind of Teds are stuck in 1957 and yeah, sure, we’ve all been laughing at them for years, but punks stuck in 1977 (or anyone stuck anywhere, for that matter) are just as bad, and this kind of shit has GOT TO STOP NOW.
If you don’t like The Fall, sod off to the bar and get quietly pissed with your mates until Stiff Little Fingers come on in approved clothes and play some approved pogo music. All right, creeps?
Back to The Fall … Martin Bramah plays upside-down guitar on a drastically surgeried Fender. All his licks sound to he upsidedown as well: high squibbling rat-scratch solos when you’d expect chunky rhythms (enriched with marrowbone jelly) and verse vica. He looks both perpetually surprised and Somewhere Else. Mark E. Smith, who has a Prince Valiant haircut, a maroon shirt that keeps coming out at the back, an indomitably accusing voice and more personal courage than anybody else in the hall that night kept on singing: after a lesser human would’ve split the stage in either a hood of tears or a fit of pique.
Yvonne Pawlett pats away at her piano and looks shit-feared, as well she might be. Singers and guitarists can dodge f’Chrissake, and drummers have kits in front of them, but a small girl behind a small piano is vulnerable beyond belief and Rock Against Sexism does not mean that Real Men can now chuck stuff at girls onstage. (Sorry to keep going on about all this, but I was pissed off and I still am. Okay?) Her sound is misty and pervasive, gauzy and stinging.
Marc Lacey (sic) is huge and stolid and his sound is likewise: bass playing that you could build any kind of edifice upon. Karl Burns’ replacement (dunno his name; sorry) kept his head down and the beat in place. The Fall impressed me enormously. I haven’t learned to like their records yet but any band this powerful live has to be able to get it down in the studio somehow.
They were the only group on the bill (Perry wasn’t billed, remember) who didn’t do an encore, but they were the band who deserved one the most.