The Fall - The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… Omnibus Edition - Beggars' Banquet 4XCD
This Nation's Saving Grace Omnibus Edition - Beggars' Banquest 3XCD

The Fall's five releases from 1980-1983, - Grotesque (After The Gramme), Slates, Hex Enduction Hour, Room To Live and Perverted By Language – fused garage punk and droning Krautrock stasis with primitive improvisation, Mark E Smith in expansive lyrical flow. The Fall were the rock refusenik's rock band. But in 1984 a pre-album single, the heretically shiny c.r.e.e.p, boded ill to purists, with clanging casio keyboards, clipped female backing vocals, Tupperware percussion and childlike melody. And then, suddenly, there was The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… , a pop album of sorts, resubmitted here for your reconsideration, a quarter of a century later, the first of Beggars' Banquet's Fall 'omnibus editions'.

The first CD offers the album proper, crackling with previously obscured details.
Lay Of The Land's Quatermass chant cuts into a stop start polka built on twin tautened telegraph basses; 2 by 4 revels in the rockabilly rhythms with which the Seventies Fall endured an oedipal relationship; Copped It is closest to the one chord drones of Hex and Perverted; Elves closes the album's first side, one of many Fall rewrites of I Wanna Be Your Dog.
So far there's little to scare the horses, but on side two Mark E Smith struggles to expand the definition of what The Fall could be. Slang King's propulsive funk riff and fairy light keyboards frame the oft-quoted lyric 'Put the Curly Wurly back'; Stephen Song's modal clatter sees Brix E Smith's backing vocals finding a pop hook that no-one else could hear; Disney's Dream Debased pressgangs hazy California sunshine pop into The Fall's post-punk drizzle.
The meandering Bug Day is the only hint of filler. Just as their punk peers began to ossify The Fall struck out for strange new territories.

A fifty page booklet of key players' reminiscences accompanies a further three discs. The cd of singles and rough mixes includes the indispensably insolent Pat – Trip Dispenser and a newly discovered recording of the oddly euphoric anthem to domestic lighting difficulties, No Bulbs; a live disc from September sees the band replicate the album with an accuracy which perhaps sells them short; a disc of BBC sessions includes the soon abandoned work-in-progress Words Of Expectation, a magnificent nine minute torrent of words over a luxuriously lugubrious groove, but nevertheless a now redundant last gasp of the former Fall sound.

The following year The Fall were on The Tube in eyeliner and leather, where Bo Diddley praised the snake-hipped, Southern fried rock and roll of Cruisers' Creek, and my teenage Goth cousin had their picture next to the inverted cross on her wall.
The Fall had made it as big as Peel-patronised bands ever did in those days. This Nation's Grace, perhaps The Fall's most accessible album, is dirty urban psychedelia. Its sleeve, reproduced here in a miniature gatefold, depicts Blakean charioteers surging over decrepit tower blocks. The songs are big and beaty and alterno-disco primed, subversively in synch with prevailing trends.
Bombast and Gut Of The Quntifier offer the usual fractious barked poetics; the stomping chants of What You Need, My New House and Paintwork reveal the caveman within every consumer; I Am Damo Suzuki and Mansion plagiarise Can and The Deviants respectively, placing The Fall in the cult band continuum; Spoilt Victorian Child is a career high-point of spiky psychobilly and LA is a throbbing fug of Batcave blues.

A second disc compiles previously unheard album demos, including Ma Riley, a petty dig at Smith's former Lieutenant Mark Riley. A third collects all the album's attendant singles and Peel session tracks. Rewarded for their patience, The Fall's constituency coalesced, and cling loyally to this day.

(W Jan/2011)