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A PRIMER TO THE FALL - THE WIRE – MARCH 2006 The Fall made their first appearance on vinyl in October 1977, on a 10” EP of recordings from their local Manchester punk venue, entitled Short Circuit: Live At The Electric Circus (Virgin VCL5003/CDVCL5003). The two spindly songs included, “Stepping Out” and “Last Orders”, gave no indication that, nearly three decades and 27 studio albums later, The Fall would turn out to be the only group to survive the punk era with critical status undiminished and critical faculties intact. Over the years, the group have mixed rockabilly rhythms, pounding riffs, experimental collages, misappropriated electronica, a subversive pop sensibility, a dark and often deceptive sense of the absurd, and frontman Mark E Smith’s immediately recognisable anti-vocals, stream of consciousness lyrics and left-field literary references to create a body of work unequalled in scope and sheer size by any other rock outfit. Smith, The Fall’s single long term constant, is publicly disdainful of what he calls ‘look-back bores’ and the cult of ultra short-term nostalgia. Fall sets rarely include any songs older than the last couple of albums, unless they are seasoned covers of 60s garage classics and old rockabilly riffs ripe for reinterpretation, or songs that fans don’t really like, offered up as if to teach them to appreciate the new stuff. Smith refuses to become a keeper of sacred relics – the living interpreter of his own back catalogue. Compared to The Fall, even Dylan’s apparently sacrilegious approach to the casual rephrasing of his own legacy of song seems accommodating and respectful. The very notion of a Primer on The Fall would no doubt irritate Smith a little, as if someone were preparing his obituary, and the nature of the group’s output and the passion of its followers makes it impossible to agree on generally accepted highlights. The most recent Fall record is always the most important one. The music speaks for itself, albeit in an often impenetrable accent, and about things that appear to make little sense. Perhaps appropriately, The Fall’s recorded output has been in comparative disarray for some years, with semi-legal CD reissues mastered from scratched, skipping vinyl, songs mislabelled, and vital singles and session tracks completely overlooked. Compilation albums have been assembled from un-sourced outtakes that were allowed to fall, in lean times, into the hands of unscrupulous labels, as if in exchange for plastic bags full of used fivers. There are more Fall live albums than are strictly necessary, and most are of a sound quality best described as no-fi. The band’s late 90’s studio output is already deleted. Though the Fall’s sales probably peaked sometime around the late 80’s, the group’s critical status and press coverage by the inch is greater than at anytime since its 80’s high watermark. Why? Is it that young people, whose ranks swell unstoppably every day, find in The Fall a compelling, uncompromised mystery absent from contemporary groups aping the era that spawned them? Is it because Franz Ferdinand like them? Or is it simply that the legion of Fall fans weaned on the addictive speed-gruel of the band’s early output have grown up to include a phalanx of balding 40-ish media bit-players, ready to include the group in their magazines, rave about them in Sunday Supplement questionnaires, and use their music to soundtrack car commercials, light entertainment programmes and television football coverage trailers? We have included details of the original label release in the headers below, while the text points out the most reliable currently available CD version of each relevant record, avoiding illegal/bootleg releases. The
Fall All of the Fall’s early singles are collected as extra tracks on the satisfyingly thorough Castle reissues of their first and second albums Live At The Witch Trials (CMQDD847 CD)and Dragnet (CMRCD848 CD). From the opening notes of August 1978’s “Bingo Master’s Breakout” 7”, The Fall were clearly a group merely sheltering from the spit-storm behind the convenient punk umbrella, while in fact defining themselves in opposition to any prevailing orthodoxies. As youngsters, Smith and his cohorts were nourished by the 70s counterculture drip-feed of Krautrock, Iggy Pop, Captain Beefheart and weird Prog, and it could be argued The Fall became Peel favourites in the 80s precisely because they reflected a decade of digesting the DJ’s more extreme musical choices. The Sex Pistols may have inspired Smith to form a group, but there the comparison ended. The Fall’s debut album, January 1979’s Live At The Witch Trials, is characterised by Yvonne Pawlett’s cheap and nasty keyboard sound, suggesting a toddler channelling Van Der Graaf Generator. Producer Bob Sargeant attempted to counterbalance the group’s inherent griminess with a clean and shiny production job, resulting in a kind of grey, industrial psychedelia. Witch Trials suggests magic mushroom tea drunk from a dirty pub ashtray, an Ambrosian dishwater. It doesn’t taste very nice, but it’s probably good for you. Although
guitarist Martin Bramah and drummer Karl Burns were to be on-off
members of The Fall for the next two decades, neither were present
on the October 1979 album Dragnet, which saw the arrival of two
new guitarists, future Radio 1 DJ Marc ‘Lard’ Riley
and Craig Scanlon, and bassist Steve Hanley. Scanlon, a gifted interpreter
of Smith’s often incomprehensible instructions, spent the
next 15 years reining in his improvisatory tendencies to define
The Fall’s majestically monolithic sound, alongside the similarly
long serving Hanley’s overhead power cable bass boom. Both
Witch Trials and Dragnet contain the kind of paper-cut, spiky post-punk
currently plagiarised by contemporary pop groups, but The Fall’s
vision remains too individual to assimilate easily. Grotesque
(After The Gramme) “C&N music is born,” declared Smith’s Northern playboy alter-ego R Totale on the sleeve of November 1980’s Grotesque (After The Gramme). The cover, a Friday night out Giotto fresco in lurid felt tip by Smith’s younger sister Suzanne, sums up Grotesque’s tone perfectly. This record, and its attendant singles “Totally Wired” and “How I Wrote Elastic Man” – both collected on the Castle reissue (CMRCD883 CD) – moved yet further from the prevailing punk template. As Echo And The Bunnymen and their indie rock contemporaries posited a vaguely mystical, post-punk psychedelia, shaped by album sleeves of wilting flowers and deserted beaches, Smith turned The Fall into kitchen sink realists who found Lovecraftian horrors lurking down the U-bend. Collapsed Country & Western cliches and rickety rockabilly rhythms pinned and mounted various contemporary social archetypes, - CB radio enthusiasts, long distance lorry drivers, and ambitious émigrés, - with an accuracy that escaped other lyricists of the era. While Paul Weller stuck ‘Kick Me’ signs on the back of be-suited businessmen and ran away, “English Scheme” explained the English disease in a hilarious stream of consciousness splurge of social theory, with exquisitely detailed supporting evidence. “Your psychotic big brother who left home for jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome – he’s thick but he’s struck it rich.” “Impression Of J Temperance”, “New Face In Hell” and “The NWRA” moved towards the expansive, narrative driven epics that would characterise the Fall’s best work in the near future. The 10” mini album Slates, issued the following year (and augmented with a Peel session and a single on Castle CMRCD1006 CD), pursued the same themes in less forgiving terms, with song structures sacrificed to relentless repetition, as if Smith and his cohorts were furiously scratching the tracks into the vinyl themselves. Slates includes the incendiary “Leave The Capitol”, a fevered vision of London at its most irritating with buried lyrical nods to the forgotten mystic Arthur Machen, rendered over a pulverising descending guitar riff that never fails to excite. “I laughed at the great God Pan!” Live In London 1980 is a sardine-tin recording of the group reaching towards ideas beyond their ability at the time, reissued by Castle with extra tracks (CMRCD1005 CD). But A Part Of America Therein 1981, though taped only a year later, reveals the group achieving its aims, with endless riffs approaching trancelike qualities, and includes a definitive, hallucinatory live reading of “An Older Lover”, against which the Slates version seems stunted in comparison. As usual, there are extra tracks on the Castle edition (CMRCD1006 CD). Hex
Enduction Hour The Fall’s recorded output from 1982 and 1983 is incomparable and indispensable. Hex Enduction Hour remains their greatest album, and the Peel Session that preceded Perverted By Language documented the group on the cusp of discovering a new and unique mode of expression that mixed rock’s primitive structures with a transcendental, avant garde aesthetic. The Hex era is great art, made by people who did everything they could to avoid looking or sounding like great artists. Hex Enduction Hour, issued in March 1982, is a masterpiece, contained in a studiously non-designed sleeve, on which Smith has been let loose with green Letraset and a black marker pen. Like the music within, it is ugly, intriguing, confusing, profound and beautiful. Smith’s lyrics balance recognisable fragments of narrative, and well chosen pop-cultural references, with cryptically alluring phrases. “You won’t find anything more ridiculous than this new profile razor unit, made with the highest British attention to the wrong detail, become obsolete units surrounded by hail,” he deadpans during ‘The Classical’. The music suckers you in with overdriven steamroller riffs, but kicks you sideways with the percussive clatter of the double drum kit line-up, the stop-start rhythms, and the uncharacteristic use of improvisation. The psycho-geographical incantation of “Iceland” was extemporised on the spot; “And This Day” was edited from a 25 minute jam, and “The Classical” includes a bass solo. The single “Look Now”, sung by Marc Riley, is omitted from the otherwise exemplary expanded Castle reissue (CMQDD1059 CD), for indecipherable reasons. Six
months later, Room To Live – reissued by Castle (CMRCD1135
CD) with the rare live track “Words Of Expectation”
– was considered a failure at the time, because of its refusal
to follow the acclaimed Hex template. But its retreat into a loose-limbed,
more fluid, fragmentary mode is typical of Smith’s characteristic
disinclination to satisfy expectations. The
Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall After Perverted By Language, Smith seemed to have had enough of leading Britain’s biggest unknown group, and emboldened by Brix’s way with a winning hook and a clothes iron, The Fall entered a new phase by signing to Beggars Banquet, the bat-cave like home of Gary Numan, Gene Loves Jezebel and The Cult. For the remainder of the 1980s, The Fall became a commercially successful alternative rock act, despite making no obvious concessions to public taste. They appeared on TV shows such as The Tube and The Old Grey Whistle Test. They did not look appalling. Smith wore long leather coats and eyeliner, as if attempting to beat the black-clad hordes at their own game. On Top Of The Pops, BBC cameramen tried to film up Brix Smith and keyboard player Marcia Schofield’s skirts. There were videos, 12” remixes, interviews in Smash Hits, collaborations with ballet dancers, and middle billing at summer rock festivals. Indie-guru producer John Leckie built an ongoing relationship with the group. Everything had changed. Their Beggars debut, 1984’s The Wonderful And Frightening World Of…, marked a seismic shift of direction, with short, often poppy tunes and a minimal amount of the extraneous noise that had previously deterred bystanders. Its attendant single “C.R.E.E.P.” was shockingly radio friendly by Fall standards. My cousin, who had an inverted cross painted on her bedroom wall, bought the album, and enjoyed the sinister pagan chanting, copped from TV’s Quatermass series, that precedes its opening track, “Lay Of The Land”. “Elves” stole its central riff from The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, and sold it back to a new generation of fans who didn’t recognise it. A previously undiscovered constituency was opening up, of disillusioned suburban teen types who a decade earlier were primed for punk, but now wanted a new strain of outsider music. Even in a stylish black raincoat, it was clear Mark E Smith belonged to no man. 1985’s This Nation’s Saving Grace is a stand-out amongst their five Beggars albums, and drew in the merely curious with a clean production, catchy choruses, and something of the Gothic grandeur that passed for drama during those dreary days. “I Am Damo Suzuki”, heavily indebted to Can’s “Oh Yeah”, flagged up The Fall’s Krautrock influences back before anybody could buy CD re-issues to follow them up, and the opening instrumental, “Mansion”, fingered The Deviants’ “Billy The Monster”. The Fall were stealing from the greats. “L.A.” was a moody instrumental, in keeping with the nocturnal feel of the era, but “What You Need”’s unerring repetition and impenetrable ranting recalled Perverted By Language, albeit in shinier shoes. “Spoilt Victorian Child” and the contemporaneous, rockabilly-styled single ‘Couldn’t Get Ahead/Rollin’ Danny” harked back to their thrash roots, and the moment in Paintwork where Smith accidentally erased a section of the tape confirms an ongoing faith in the artistic value of chance. This Nation’s Grace took the best of The Fall and force-fed it to fans beyond the reach of John Peel’s Festive Fifty. The following year’s Bend Sinister, despite the fan-favourite cover of 60’s garage band The Other Side’s ‘Mr Pharmacist’, lost some of the ground This Nation’s Saving Grace had gained in a quagmire of doomy songs, though ‘Dr Faustus’, a kind of marching song for small mechanical goblins, betrayed more Krautrock influences via a decipherable debt to Faust. 1988’s The Frenz Experiment (BEGA96) included an expected pop-hit, The Fall’s cover of The Kinks’ Victoria. Indeed, the Beggars period, of 1984-1990, is best enjoyed via the two 458489 singles compilations of A Sides and B Sides, which document The Fall either creatively crow-barring their individual aesthetic into a borderline pop format, or else enjoying the artistic freedoms and experimental opportunities that B sides offered in the pre-download era. I
Am Kurious, Oranj I Am Kurious, Oranj was the soundtrack to a collaboration with the progressive ballet dancer Michael Clark on a piece loosely based on William of Orange, which eventually ran at the Temple of culture that was London’s Sadler’s Wells. With I Am Kurious, Oranj, Clark and The Fall created a mild media panic. Today broadsheet newspapers are required to run reviews of the latest Pete Doherty biography, but there was no context in highbrow circles for The Fall in 1988. The high culture/low culture barrier was breached, however briefly, as ballet dancers with bare backsides twirled to the title track’s unusual fusion of off-beat reggae and 17th century history, and a spirited reading of William Blake’s “Jerusalem”, with its satirical sideswipes at compensation culture, reclaimed this righteous revolutionary anthem from rugby fans, public school assemblies and glib patriots. The stomping re-write of Hex Eduction Hour’s fragile Hip Priest, entitled Big New Prinz, survived in live sets until the early 21st century, where Smith’s romanticised description of an undervalued artist became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A belatedly issued live album, I Am Pure As Oranj, captures the strange, hostile ambience of the event itself. You can hear the audience stiffen as Smith’s mumbled spoken word bit, “Dog Is Life”, fills the expectant auditorium, punctuated by the inappropriate applause of excited fans. Other rock peasants have briefly dabbled in the realm of High Art. Few have done it whilst simultaneously enjoying hit singles and backing giant dancing hamburgers. Code:
Selfish The
Infotainment Scan The
Twenty-Seven Points The
Infotainment Scan aside, the mid-90s remains The Fall’s least
interesting period, and yet is its most thoroughly documented, with
six live albums – two of them doubles – covering the
four studio albums released during the muddled years from 1993-96.
These are supplemented by recordings of around four dozen outtakes
spread thinly and repetitively over eight compilations on the ominously
named Receiver label. As Britpop flourished, recycling retro-Mod
aesthetics, it seemed there was little space for Smith’s scorched
earth attitude towards the past. Ironically, just as Pavement launched
a career built on appropriating the sound of early 80s Fall, the
genuine article released a series of increasingly weak albums, vast
portions of which sounded like a standard indie rock guitar outfit,
albeit one fronted by a determinedly distinctive vocalist. The period is perhaps best represented by the unfairly maligned, Smith-assembled live double The Twenty-Seven Points. The album adds found snippets and spoken word sections into a sometimes unflatteringly honest yet always entertaining portrait of a group in creative crisis, nonetheless capable of genius. ‘Idiot Joy Showland’ is abandoned after less than a minute. The otherwise unrecorded live track, ‘Noel’s Chemical Effluence’, is a gradually uncoiling, lean and slinky slice of snake-charming music, that ranks amongst the group’s finest moments. But on the whole, Smith seemed adrift. There seemed to be no obvious way forward for The Fall. Something was rotten in the state of dear Mark. Levitate
In
April 1998, the last line-up of The Fall with any link – apart
from Smith – back to its earliest officially recorded line-up
fell apart acrimoniously in New York, though fans who have seen
the video of the group’s on-stage collapse would be hard pressed
to tell it apart from any number of similarly shambolic mid-90s
live fiascos. But Steve Hanley and Karl Burns were finally gone.
This act of severance ultimately enabled the creation of a succession
of completely new Fall line-ups. These gangs of anonymous young
men, many only mewling infants when “Bingo Master’s
Breakout” hit the racks, were creatively unburdened by any
shared history, or any sense of what The Fall was supposed to be.
This, in turn, seemed to unburden Smith himself, who increasingly
resembled the last pink rabbit without any Duracell batteries. 1998 saw Smith play gigs with hurriedly assembled three-piece line-ups, issuing the famous onstage disclaimer, “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.” He released a spoken word album, The Post Nearly Man (Artful 14 CD), but things seemed increasingly desperate. Then Smith returned with a new Fall that retained only Julia Nagle, and The Marshall Suite, a record that ranks amongst the best of The Fall’s career. Guitarist Neville Wilding helped assimilate Tommy Blake’s rock ’n’ roll revenge number “F-oldin’ Money”, and The Saints’ “This Perfect Day”, into The Fall’s oeuvre, and “Shake-Off” and “(Jung Nev’s) Antidotes” found new ways of meshing rock tropes, noise and Nagle’s increasingly pervasive keyboards and electronica, without falling back into familiar patterns. “Touch Sensitive” – a chart hit that never was – later enlivened a Vauxhall car commercial, and was followed by a minor squabble for royalties. The following year, The Unutterable (Eagle EAGCD164 CD) was the last Fall album to feature Nagle. The high point amongst a playful and personable set was “Dr Buck’s Letter”, a menacing yet amusing re-appropriation of the text of an interview with Pete Tong. A
World Bewitched In
2001, the compilation A World Bewitched gathered together various
rarities and collaborations in an alternative history of The Fall’s
90s output. It suggested a parallel career rather more daring than
much of the decade’s official releases indicated at the time.
The same year saw yet another entirely new Fall line-up (featuring
guitarist Ben Pritchard, soon to become a key player), release Are
You Are Missing Winner. The group knocked out an unapologetically
simplistic set of high-octane punk noise, free from feminine keyboard
embellishments, as if to settle a score. In retrospect, Missing
Winner is the sound of the New Fall clearing its throat before commencing
the job of reclaiming the group’s reputation, and releasing
its best album for over a decade. |
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