The Fall have only ever, to our knowledge, played eight gigs in Spain. I was lucky enough to find the La Vanguardia archive website while surfing the web one day, and so found a few references to Fall gigs in the country over the past few years. What follows is a translation of those articles along with a few other Spanish (and one Catalan) source, from both online and printed sources. I’m not, let me be quick to say, a professional translator, so any corrections would be more than welcome!
Barcelona, 9 November 1990:
Article in La Vanguardia, 9 November 1990 (page 45)
Under the title “The Fall and 21 Japoneses [a group from the Basque Country] will play at BarceWomad”, the unnamed writer offers a short resume of the group’s career. He draws attention to a couple of cover versions, There’s a Ghost in My House and Victoria, as well as to Hit The North. The Fall’s prolific creative activity is mentioned, as is I Am Curious Oranj and Hey Luciani. Mention is made of The Fall’s recent tours of the USA, Europe and Brazil, and finally the author has a few lines to say about the then recent single, Telephone Thing and its conversion from Lisa Stanfield/Coldcut’s original song.
The Fall’s participation was only one of hundreds more in a festival which went under the general title of “El Festival de Tardor” (Autumn Festival) and which lasted from 28 September until 30 November, 1990. Events included gigs, dance, street music and theatre and featured such artists as Ingmar Bergman, Syberbeg, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. The Fall played on 9 November.
Review in La Vanguardia, 14 November 1990 (page 60), by Karles Torra:
“Trapped in their Claws”:
“Maintaining a trajectory free of concessions to encores is the constant thing illuminating the work of The Fall, the group headed by Mark E Smith. Few examples of such creative purity can be found today, however hard we look, in this hackneyed world of pop-rock. From their founding, coinciding in time with the maelstrom of punk, they haven’t stopped setting high standards with each new release. Personified in The Fall is the old aphorism of I Ching, the book of Chinese wisdom, which says, “The only unchanging thing is change.” It’s only necessary to go deep into the grooves of Hex Enduction Hour, Perverted By Language, Bend Sinister or The Frenz Experiment to realise the enormous wealth they have accumulated in the field of musical experimentation. They’ve written some of the most substantial pages in the recent history of pop-rock.
Mark E Smith, of whom it was said a couple of months ago that he’d broken up the group, appeared in Barcelona with a heavyweight addition, the violinist Kenny Brady. More wax to pour on the creative fire of the band. Impossible to separate this from what happened on stage. The Fall’s music traps you unforgivably in their claws and subjects you to a mind-boggling journey to the depths of the mind, seasoned with obsessive rhythmic lashes and sweetly oppressive ambiances. An impeccable concert frombeginning to end, crowned with a special version of The Kinks’ Victoria, in which Mark E Smith allows himself the luxury of destroying with the utmost artistry the lovely melody written by Ray Davies. And it’s that Smith doesn’t sing, but rather he goads, bellows, vomits and corrupts. His tongue is dirty. And his musical ideas, very clear.
Inconsiderate towards the public, The Fall left the stage twice, leaving us at the mercy of canned music. The blood of spoiled kids runs through their veins. They played little and showed themselves to be slackers when it came to give an encore. Psychologically they were not at the same level as their music. The substance of their work doesn’t need this absurd “not giving a fuck” to call attention to itself.”
Barcelona, 20 September 1996:
The Fall participated in the fourth edition of BAM (Barcelona Acció Musical). Other artists who played at this festival included Robyn Hitchcock, Lambchop and The Divine Comedy. A report in La Vanguardia on 21 September 1996 written by Ramon Súrio said that this would be the third time that the group were playing on “nuestros escenarios” (our stages) by which one supposes he means Spain in general…so either the journalist was mistaken or The Fall played a previous gig in the country of which we are not aware…Anyway, Ramon Súrio wrote that Smith introduced “an acidic note in the Musicárium [arena in which the gig took place] demonstrating the guts of someone who has survived since the early days of punk with contrary views to everyone else”.
A longer appreciation of the gig, written by the same journalist, appeared two days later in La Vanguardia (23 September 1996, page 32):
“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 and if it wasn’t the best his third performance [sic] was the strangest. 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.”
Review, published on Fallnet of Barcelona gig: 21 September 1996, by Alex Gutiérrez (a native Catalan, reproduced as published without corrections):
“The Fall played live in BCN last Friday. Here’s a mini review of the concert.
First of all, i dunno if Brix Smith is bustier than ever, as a fallnutter suggested several weeks ago, but i can confirm the well state of health of her legs, which she gently showed up her nickers. Once lusty feelings of fallnutts have been satisfied, we must say she played quite well, and supported by the second guitar in an effective way. MES almost didn’t sing. He went off the stage in half of the songs, and sang in a wrong way the others. Benett was the guy who sang all he could (sometimes he looked comic, singing with erm… to much excess, in a Rollins Band way). The band looked at each other frequently asking themselves what to do. Still the gig was great. Hanley’s superb, as ever. When the light turned in, and the gig was supposed to have finished, MES went onto the stage again and invited the musicians to perform I’m going to Spain. At the mid of first verse, he said no no no, pulled Hanley’s bass and ordered him and the rest of the band to go off.
They played 15 ways, Behind the Counter, He Pep, Spinetrack, Powder Keg, Us 80’s 90’s, LA (sung by Bennett), Cheetham Hill, and others.
I got the paper with the songs written in it that used Brix. Offers admitted!!!
Next day, BCN press said that he sang in distress and “in the midst of a difficult relationship with the band”
Here’s the question: was the normal sadic feeling MES has for the band, or it is anything more terrible.”
Barcelona, 28 May 2004:
The group’s debut at the Primavera Sound Festival. On the web page of Mondosonoro, a Spanish music publication, the unnamed critic writes of the group’s performance: “The Fall sounded good, though Mark E Smith was a caricature of what he was years ago. Luckily, his vocals are still up to it.”
And that review is it as far as the internet goes, as far as I can tell. Nothing on The Fall Online, nothing else in Spanish or Catalan. Most contemporary reviews concentrate on the performance by The Pixies, in the middle of their comeback tour, and The Fall, apart from the brief review above, are ignored. No recordings of the event have come to light, and nor do we have any indication of what songs were played..
Málaga, 21 January 2007:
One of the more peculiar of recent Fall gigs, at least in terms of its setting, in a theatre mainly used for classical and traditional Spanish music, as well as for theatre, all-seated and dating from 1870. Other artists to have played the venue are King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator. The Fall’s concert was sparsely attended but quite a lot of fun was had by those who made it there, as internet reviews in English and YouTube clips show. There were also some locals there, one of whom wrote the following review:
Internet review (on the blogspot “Maladjusted”), by Pedro Finch:
“That Mark E Smith, The Fall’s singer, was a Martian was already known, but I didn’t expect to witness what I did at the gig on the 21st January.
To start we had the dubious pleasure of seeing of hearing a species of video DJ who came on before them with I don’t know what intentions. What does a video DJ do? Well, he does scratching using images, that’s to say, he takes a fragment and pauses it, fast forwards, rewinds, passes from still to still while the sound is distorted according to the speed that he feels like playing it at. The thing is that at the beginning it seems fun, but after ten minutes one gets a bit fed up. So imagine when this joke stretches to half an hour.
After this the musicians came out and started to blare out their music. We could see that that the line-up was slightly untypical: a posh girl with a handbag on keyboards, a guitarist like the one in Sonic Youth and with skinny jeans, a drummer with an English indie style and two bassists, one resembling a hillbilly and who played the bass with a distortion which hit you in the gut, and the other in the style of Flea [of The Red Hot Chili Peppers] with a metallic string sound which makes your ears crack.
The Fall’s sound is now what would be called post-rock which isn’t anything else than trying to play the songs in a way distinct to the conventional. Of course, if we think that they’ve been doing this for nearly 30 years, then we see that this isn’t a style that they’ve recently cottoned on to.
Their songs are like monolithic steamrollers. One bass line is repeated unceasingly while the other bass profoundly deafens. The guitarist behaves more as a rhythmic instrument along with the drums and the female keyboard player outlines 4 or 5 notes simulating a melody. But don’t go looking for a chorus, verses, or anything to sing along to. The trick of the music is that the repetition leads you to mental states that you couldn’t have imagined, and when this is done among the noise, distortions and incessant rhythm the effects are unsuspected.
And then Mark E Smith. Mark appears skinny, old and emaciated, more or less as he’s looked during all his life. This man has never looked well. He comes with a white jacket and gloves. After he spends all the concert taking them off and putting them on again. His walk towards the microphone makes us doubt if he’s really ill or inconvenienced by having swallowed something the wrong way. And the show begins.
Mark E Smith doesn’t sing. He shouts, gabbles, declaims, narrates, without stopping. All in a monotone, repetitive, tireless on top of the background created by the musicians. This I already knew, knowing the group [‘s records]. What I didn’t know is how he behaved on stage.
After singing a couple of songs he takes the bassist’s mike and starts to sing with two microphones at the same time. Then he drops one of these on the floor, making the audience jump quite a lot. From this moment on the gig is a case of seeing what he’ll do next. He turns up the volume of one of the bassists to painful volumes, turns down the other one and does so again, although it’s obvious that the poor lad can’t hear anything. He takes away the micro from the bassist when he’s going to sing the choruses, alters the volumes again, sings using the keyboard player’s mike, plays the keyboards, and all this with his own special English phlegm, without turning a hair, without saying a word, only letting himself be moved and moving us with the music.
The music has such an effect that small ripples of people in the theatre start to stand up and dance. A blond lad even goes onto the platform on top of the orchestra pit. I think that for security reasons it’s one of the most prohibited places in the theatre, above all because everything if many people start to jump here, it can collapse. So the hostesses approach him to tell him that this isn’t on and to get off and I don’t know if he didn’t understand, didn’t pay attention to them or didn’t know what he was doing because the more time he was up there the worse it was for him. The usherettes gave him three warnings as might be done with bullfighters until in the end a bulky security man had to come to get him down while accompanied by general booing.
Strange, strange, strange. Disconcerting. One of the strangest things I’ve seen in the Cervantes Theatre.
But I had a great time!”
Barcelona, 28 May 2007 (Primavera Sound Festival):
The gruppe’s second appearance at the Primavera Sound Festival which this year had been moved to its current venue of Forum Barcelona. There was a short review of the gig by Ramon Súrio in La Vanguardia.
“On the main stage the incombustible Mark E Smith was leading again a rejuvenated Fall, doing the same as usual, and very well, thanks. This nihilistic antihero, recovered from his alcohol problems, turned for a few moments into a rock star in front of a considerable audience, combining archetypal riffs with the rough lines of the two bassists along with his unmistakable vocal style.”
The following is a slightly longer review which appeared on the web site of Avui.el punt, written in Catalan by Guillem Vidal:
“With the constant queues to pick up at the entrance the tickets acquired by internet and the constant threat of rain that today, according to forecasts, won’t hold off so much, the tenth edition of Primavera Sound began yesterday in the Parc del Forum and was marked by its successes. The XX, who showed that they are more than merely hype, and a convincing Mark E Smith, at the head of The Fall, who was as incorrigible as ever. …The ugly Mark E Smith, accompanied by four of the 50 – yes, 50 – musicians who have formed part of The Fall over three decades of influential post-punk, put behind him the couldn’t-care-less attitude he had on his previous appearance [2007] at the festival. The band, energetic and convincing. And Mark E Smith, doing it his way.”
Review of the gig and set list on the Reformation site:
Barcelona (Primavera Sound), 28 May 2010:
El País 29 May 2010: review by Iker Seisdedos:
“The Fall, led by the unfriendly Mark E Smith, open Primavera Sound in front of 30,000 spectators:
A bloke with the look of someone who’s come to play a few hands of mus [a card game popular in Spain] is a rock star. One of the most unpleasant beings who tread the face of the earth, Mark E Smith is to experimental music what the semantic field of aggression is to Spanish vocabulary. He arrived at the gig with his habitual unfriendly gesture, embittered, disagreeable and aged, very aged. “And?” he muttered from between his false teeth yesterday at the start of the San Miguel Primavera Sound festival.
While the organisers celebrated with fine cava the heroic feat of having reached the tenth edition of the festival, The Fall, led by Smith, always more than the sum of parts of all classes of alcoholics, offered under a sky as threatening as their music a concert which only worked in parts, though Smith didn’t give a damn about this.”
On the Sea Festival, Orihuela, 7 August 2010:
It’s been far from easy to find any information at all about this gig, which seems to have passed group followers completely by, probably as it took place in many people’s summer holidays with other plans already made. But it really happened, as the following report shows:
“More than a thousand people attended last weekend’s On the Sea festival, which took place on La Glea de Campoamor beach, according to figures provided by the organisers. According to these sources, hotel occupation in the Orihuela coastal area reached one hundred per cent… In this musical event participating artists were Trans Am, Moon Duo, The Jonathan Reilly,The Fall, Los Plátanos, and Wau and Los Arrrghs!!”
This website previewed the gig:
The pertinent bit for our purposes says that “the [music] of the Americans Trans Am and Moon Duo complements The Fall perfectly…It hasn’t been easy to get these three groups over to Spain, given that none of them was on tour here.”
So…the gig and the festival did take place. But as yet, nothing like a set list or a clip on YouTube has come to light. We’ll keep looking…
La Vanguardia, 28 May 2010: review by Esteban Linés:
“The veteran British band, led by Mark E Smith, one of the still-active legends of the post-punk scene of the British Isles, returned to offer the same spectacle as they’ve done over the last quarter of a century: resounding and repetitive rhythms, his current wife on keyboards, and the same raspy voice as ever, out of tune as usual and as ironic as always.