Open the Boxoctosis
Dr. Bucks Letter
Mountain Energei
Theme from Sparta F.C.
What About Us
Proteinprotection
Blindness
Mr Pharmacist
Touch Sensitive
I can hear the Grass Grow
Wrong Place, right time
White Lightning

56m

Excellent audience recording.

An exceptional performance. Hometown gig in the seedy fleshpots on the wrong side of Piccadilly (where the large black slug is). Part of a two night stint at the same venue.

The band is tight and Smith is in excellent form – vocals are very clear and the guitars are particularly crisp. There is a great middle section of “What about us?” where the band drops out and only the guitars back Mark. Some exceptional riff interplay between Pritchard and Watts.

Memorable moments are a charged version of “Proteinprotection”, in its final outing, followed by a little audience interplay and a mammoth version of “Blindness” which is more guitar orientated than the versions played from 2005 onwards. We are treated to the standard Smith keyboard meanderings and an interesting narrative like reading of the lyrics. Again there is a nice dub like interlude towards the end where the band drops out and lets the guitar dominate.

A short gig but perfectly formed

Manchester Online Review

The second leg of The Fall’s two-night residency to plug new album Interim could have been one of their more straightforward recent appearances. Anyone with a passing interest in Manchester’s prickliest band, though, would know Mark E. Smith never makes life easy.

In the basement of a Manchester record shop last December, the rest of The Fall played for ten minutes before Smith eventually strolled on stage to deliver some vocals, inexplicably clutching a filofax under his arm.

This summer he cut an even more bizarre figure at the Bridgewater Hall. Slumped in a wheelchair due to a fractured hip, he bellowed incoherent punk poetry down a pair of microphones and filled the hall with agonising feedback.

Then most recently came a baffling appearance on Newsnight in the aftermath of John Peel’s death, when Mark ignored the (admittedly inane) questions and went off on a tangent of his own choosing.

This time around, in a venue and part of town that’s one of the last bastions of the old Manchester which moulded him, Smith seemed preoccupied with the sound levels to the point where the scene on stage resembled the plot of a pantimome [sic].

Whenever Mark’s slurred, sarcastic growls weren’t required, he went to the back of the stage to fiddle with the volume knobs on the amps, only for the rest of the band to correct them again as soon as he turned away.

Ignore that distracting game of cat and mouse, though, and the constantly-chewing Mark and his current five-piece backing band were in storming form, though their recent dalliances with electronic music were less pronounced.

The guitars and bass crunched like bones being snapped and the drums were beaten like a naughty Victorian child, while Smith’s latest wife Elenor (sic) pouted and pawed some barely audible notes on the keyboards.

While The Fall have never had a proper hit single in 26 years, and they haven’t even grazed the charts for over a decade, the renditions of long-standing live favourite Mr. Pharmacist and car ad soundtrack Touch Sensitive were joyous affairs that caused the audience to punch the air and sing along to Smith’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics.

The tubthumping choruses of Wrong Place Right Time and the Theme From Sparta FC caused similar waves among the hometown crowd, while a gloriously twisted cover of I Can Hear The Grass Grow was suitably unrecognisable from The Move’s psychedelic original.

A musical triumph and a reassuringly peculiar performance.