My Door Is Never
Pacifying Joint
Theme from Sparta FC
Over! Over!
Fall Sound
What About Us
Mountain Energei
I Can Hear the Grass Grow
Hungry Freaks, Daddy
Blindness
Reformation!
Mr. Pharmacist
NOTES
63 minutes
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!”