- Bo Demmick
- Open The Boxoctosis
- Clasp Hands
- What About Us
- Pacifying Joint
- Wrong Place, Right Time
- I Can Hear the Grass Grow
- Theme from Sparta FC
- Ride Away
- Assume
- Mountain Energei
- Touch Sensitive
- Blindness
- Hit the North
- White Lightning
- Mr. Pharmacist
- Big New Prinz
NOTES
71 minutes
A distorted recording….the group is reasonably well captured but MES is somewhat distant.
From Varsity (Cambridge University student newspaper), by Sam Blatherwick:
Example of the demographic of Fall fans; The couple in front of me had seen The Fall more than seventy times, including in New York and Moscow, and had booked a week off work to follow them around the country. The fan beside me was at his third Fall gig, having got into them in 1978 when he was thirty-two. A woman behind me moaned that it was one of the most male dominated gigs she had ever been to. I, am a huge Fall fan, they dominate my cd collection and I only envisage the problem getting worse as my life goes on and I continue to buy up their gaping back catalogue. For me, however, this was the first time I had ever seen one of my favourite bands, nearly thirty years after their birth. They have been round longer than my parents have known each other.
When I say they, however, I mean – HE. The Fall is very much one constant and his reign across a huge number of musicians who have worked under him. Mark E. Smith trails behind the rest of his band on stage, he saunters onto stage in a leather jacket. He looks like the granddad you always dreaded in comparison to his once biggest fan, he stalks the stage dragging his microphone stands along with him and as the gig goes on the entanglement of wires and stands becomes ridiculous – but of no concern to the man, he simply takes the next microphone on stage and starts all over again. Sometimes two microphones – especially in the closing song of the main set “Blindness”, where the layers of sound are so brutal, so bruising and so incredibly powerful that he needs the added velocity to snarl over the racket.
Interaction with the crowd is reduced to a mere “I think you’ll like this” before the band rockets into ‘Theme from Sparta FC Pt 2’ and handing the microphone over to members of the crowd to sing along during the final song ‘Big New Prinz’. Surprisingly they play quite a few older songs, Hit the North and Mr. Pharmacist both being tracks I didn’t expect to hear, it may sound strange to talk like this, but The Fall tend to play almost solely songs off their latest record. They also hammer through ‘Touch Sensitive’, as heard on a Vauxhall Corsa advert recently, but this is probably the most disappointing song of the evening and comes across as fairly shambolic.
This was the only downer though (if we discount the lack of support – John Cooper Clarke got lost). ‘ICan Hear the Grass Grow’ is another in the long line of Fall covers, I was told by the guy next to me it was the first song ever played on Radio One, but in the hands of the Fall it is timeless. ‘Open The Boxoctosis #2’ is danceable to fuck and “Mountain Energei” pounds like a jackhammer to the skull live, adding so much raw energy to the studio version. The presence of old songs only shows up how brilliant their latest stuff is. ‘Blindness’ is just immense, a powerhouse of sound building and building whilst Smith cries “Blind man; have mercy on me”.
A Fall fan claims that no matter how much music he listens to he always finds himself being drawn back to the Fall. They are a band for the obsessive in a certain type of person. They have been constantly touring and releasing records for nearly 30 years, they have outlived so many bands whilst still retaining a hardcore base of fans. They rip apart bands, they ooze charisma, they never age, because they never look back – only forward. And I can’t wait for the next chance I get to see them.