I’m Into CB – The Fall

Choose a song which has, at sometime, seemed like a soundtrack to your life, they said.
This choice, I am afraid, is largely about the act of listening itself. There were no other people involved. It does not trigger a memory of some vast social shift, or conjure a golden era. I did not emerge from my encounter with this piece of music as a better person. If anything, it ruined me, and made me fit for few practical purposes. It is the sound of doors slamming in my face.

I first heard The Fall’s single I’m Into CB in early 1982, aged 13, on the John Peel show late at night in the dark. I was alone listening to music, as I have been for most of my life. I did not know who The Fall were at the time and I’m Into CB seemed impossibly annoying. There was no chorus. There was no middle eight. Two guitar chords slashed around its vast formless space. A xylophone beat out a single note throughout. A man shouted incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness lyrics, making no concession to conventional notions of singing. It went on for six and a half minutes, and the band’s occasional extemporisations around the restrictive structure seemed to betray apparent frustration rather than joy. I thought it was one of the worst things I had ever heard.

Why would anyone make this music?, I wondered, with my Madness and Specials tapes stacked by my bed. It clearly had no commercial potential. Surely, no-one could actually like it? Yet, over the following weeks, as Peel repeatedly played I’m Into CB, I became captivated by it, and within a year I’d spent my paper round money on buying every record the Manchester punk veterans had released. One day, as a special treat, the classical music schedule of our school musical appreciation class was suspended and we were allowed to play whatever we wanted to the rest of the class. Our music teacher turned off I’m Into CB in a fury, assuming that I had submitted it as an attempt to subvert the lesson. To allay his suspicions, I then had to explain in front of the class why I liked the record. The Fall could not be accommodated. Authority could not loosen its tie and meet them half way.

The John Peel show, where I first heard The Fall, was a good example of old school, prescriptive, paternalistic BBC broadcasting, an approach that has vanished with the DJ. Peel didn’t give us what we thought we wanted. He gave us what he thought we needed. And we all need The Fall. Apart from a wobble around 1991, when I had an rebellious ideological issue with the group’s use of programmed beats, I have never looked back. But God, being a Fall fan is exhausting. Doubtless the musicians that caught your imagination as a thirteen year old have long since died, or given up, or carried on as ever more faded shadows of their former selves. Thus, you are relieved of living up to the absolutist standards your teenage self set you. Joe Strummer is dead. It is time to move on. Nick Cave is South Bank Show material. And Kurt Cobain’s suicide has set you free. But the Fall’s leader Mark E Smith is fifty and still out there, undimmed, howling at the moon over two note riffs, taunting Fall fans with his refusal to ft in, threatening to drain our spare cash on unnecessary live albums and reliably erratic tour dates for ever and ever and ever, providing the standard against which most else pales.

Sometimes, I wish I’d never heard I’m Into CB.