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The Fall, Live

By Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times Posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006

The notriously volatile cult group The Fall played four London dates over the course of five nights. The final show, at a delightful Irish showband venue in Cricklewood, saw two of the line-up that played at Brick Lane’s 93 Feet East on Moday already departed. When jazz soloists seek out new collaborators, it’s seen as evidence of artistic restlessness, but rock journalists, fetishising the gang notion of the classic band, find the erratic line-up changes of the group Mark E Smith formed in Manchester in 1976 endlessly amusing. The Fall frontman, glossing over accusations that he is simply ubearable, compares himself instead to a football manager, reshufflling his squad.

Smith currently operates two basic Fall formations. Monday’s show saw he and his wife, the keyboard player Elena Poulou, backed by a principally American Fall, hastilly assembled in San Diego last May, when the duo were abandoned by their group soon after an incident involving a plantain. The drummer Orpheo McCord maintains the streamroller thrust of What About Us and Pacifying Joint whilst simultaneously making them swing, and the guitarist Tim Presley lends an uncharacteristically psychedelic flavour to The Fall’s pulverising riffs. The bearded bassist Rob Barbato refutes The Fall’s historic baldness, and he and British bass player, Dave Spur, create a heavy, larval bedrock. Smith’s voice has recovered a range presumed lost, and his cryptically compelling lyrics are riddled with dog growl rumbles and flasetto yelps. The new material, – the high-octane drone of Reformation, derived from Can’s Mother Sky, and Fall Sound, a speed-metal declaration of intent, – are amongst his most electrifying compositions to date. Smith may look like a Weatherspoons regular, but his apparent lack of stage craft conceals an understanding of the damatic power of the smallest gestures.

Two nights later, Presley’s gone home, and an ashen-faced Pete Greenway, of the band Pubic Fringe, plays the same guitar riffs with harsher, serrated textures. Barbato nods the group through the changes as Smith, often hiding behind amps, sontaneously extends and contracts songs. A pleasingly unprepared encore sees Poulou reading her husband’s lyrics over improvised backing. “You are the sort of person who keeps a pair of plastic women’s breasts under his desk”, she declaims, to the delight of the crowd. By Friday, Barbato is gone too and the band have peaked, shrinking back to the five piece that played the Summer festival circit. The Fall’s music remains impossible to define, incorporating the visceral, blue-collar thrills of 50’s rock and roll and the visionary experimentalism of Krautrock and dub reggae. The Fall sound exists only in Mark E Smith’s head. Last week he came uncharacteristically close to defining it.

Written by Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times on 17th September 2006. Filed Under: Written For Money
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