Wednesday, 2 February, 1983 – Hotel Ekkehard, St. Gallen, Switzerland

Order of set not known but included were

  1. Mere Pseud Mag Ed
  2. Tempo House
  3. I Feel Voxish
  4. Kicker Conspiracy
  5. Hard Life In Country

Mere Pseud Mag Ed appears on the Hip Priest and Kamerads compilation.

Mark E. Smith was a legend during his lifetime. This also applies to his group’s only appearance in St.Gallen: In February 1983, The Fall at the Hotel Ekkehard, as the final impetus of the «mobile action hall St.Güllen», played in the fight for alternative culture in the Grabenhalle. The fact that it was free, or the organizers had set up an urn (!) To the collection could not restrain the anger in the audience.

No, St.Gallen never becomes a pilgrimage destination for fans of The Fall.  On February 2, 1983 Smith played with his group (he called them “Group” and not “band”) on the first tour of Switzerland in addition to Biel, Basel, Zurich and Lausanne in St.Gallen. Not yet in the Grabenhalle, but in the bourgeois Hotel Ekkehard. That was one of the few available halls in the city at that time and had already proven itself at prog rock concerts by the Africana organizers and a performance by Marianne Faithfull.

The case was transmitted via Zurich RecRec channels, booked for St.Gallen by activists of “IG Kohle”, who fought with “mobile actions” such as concerts, films, performances and festivals for an action hall of non-commercial culture. After a test concert in 1982 in the gym Graben with the anarchy group Schröders Roadshow (which came from a squatter) and appearances of experimental bands such as Skeleton Crew or V-Effect in the Colosseum or in the AZ-printing stood at the end of the series in 1983, the concert of The Fall in the Ekkehard. A risk for all concerned, and hotelier Ernst Leander least knew what he had gotten himself into.

In Switzerland, only a few insiders knew the group from Manchester, which had already released five albums, two of them in 1982: Room To Live and Hex Enduction Hour. Underground works such as the Aarauer “Alpenzeiger” spread the word that The Fall, with its cunning vocalist and taunting Mark E. Smith, was unlike any other band since the punk explosion: a fantastically stinging concentrate of urban rockabilly, hypnotic rock’n’roll and Krautrock, Gene Vincent meets Velvet Underground meets Captain Beefheart meets Can. Never heard that before, certainly not with an attitude that denied all drawers and hugs. Prole Art Threat, a proletarian art threat, was called a programmatic song title.

Pretty bad-tempered guys

So great the anticipation of the St.Gallen, so quickly their stress: There were no subtle, friendly avant-garde from New York, as Comedia bookseller Pius Frey remembers, but rock’n’roll bullying in leather jackets, uncouth and rather ill-tempered Guys impregnated with all the pride and frustration of the northern English working class. Frey belonged with Chrigel Braun, Mathias Stebler, Budaz Keller and others to the Ad Hoc group, which organized the guest performance.

And it went awry from the beginning: already in the afternoon, Smith and his musicians were blaring with beer, whiskey and speed, and the drugs that they otherwise demanded could not and could not be obtained by the St.Gallen. They spurned the risotto in the left-hand apartment and looked for a hamburger bar instead; that their favored fast-food chain in the town did not exist, but only the other, did not contribute to the mood. Smith himself made stress with his tour companion and swore backstage in Ekkehard Swiss conditions, it was the Tour Basel (dance of death) with the evil pharmaceutical giant, which he had attacked in the Valium Song Rowche Rumble, yet to follow.

What happened off the stage had little impact on the concert: this was announced on the poster at “19.62”, ie shortly after eight, for the event. Beautifully Dadaist staged: In the original blue shirt of the FDJ (Free German Youth) of the GDR and hidden behind a tiger mask, cried one to fall attention – Felix Kälin, bookseller, art activist and later music program director in the barracks Basel. Then the group, driven by two drummers, stoically chased one blast after the other through the hall, on the setlist among others Tempo House, I Feel Voxish and the fabulous football song Kicker Conspiracy.

The memory is spongy, but the sound must have been so good that a live recording of Ekkehard came on the compilation album Hip Priests and Kamerads – St.Gallen is highlighted there next to the studios in Rochdale and Reykjavik. The song? Mere Pseud Mag. Ed., Just before Hard Life In Country, in which Smith tells of the urge to have to run away from the country life.

In the crowd of one hundred people, the band’s aggression was fed back; there was mutual hostility, especially a horde of Vorarlberg punks was acidified. As a result, much Suff and Zoff, up to a mass brawl. The sturdy carpenter Stebler tried to calm down actively, Frey had to comfort the hotelier, in the hall all sorts of damage remained like broken chairs, in addition to perplexity. Coal had the IG coal activists no choice, and certainly not for the shambles. The fee was small, so no one had asked for admission, only a “withdrawal.” No hat collection, but an urn, which was posted at the exit to the collection, in fact, an urn for The Fall in St. Gallen. If they knew that now in Manchester.

Find on the screed

Many years later, during a roof renovation on his barn floor, Pius Frey found a dusty Harrass with plates in it: a remnant of case plates that he threw into the screed “after all the stress”. Including the first singles of the band: Bingo Master’s Break-Out and It’s The New Thing, graying, with water damage, but a wonderful gift for a fan from Rorschach …

Whether the stress of 1983 was that The Fall in the next 35 years should never appear in the east of Switzerland, remains an open question. Nobody liked to book them, neither the Grabenhalle nor later the Palace and certainly not the Hippiefestival in Sittertobel. A reputation preceded them, the stress did not become smaller, as the Conrad Sohm organizer in Dornbirn testifies, where Smith disappeared from the stage in 2002 after 15 minutes and left the band alone to play. The very last Fall concert in Switzerland took place again in 2011 near Salzhaus Winterthur, great. But St.Gall was spared by St.Fall, for better or for worse.