Grotesque (After The Gramme) (Album) (1980)

Ed says:

In the intro to this project, Pete mentions being proud that he got me into The Fall, and he should be as it is true. He also says that it was the repeated playing of the greatest hits compilation ‘Fifty Thousand Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong’ while on a road trip that did the job . This is partly true, but it was actually the other Fall album he brought along that had the most profound impact. The album happened to be Grotesque (After The Gramme), which we’ve got to this week.

The three of us on this trip, Pete, our friend Adam and myself took it in turns to drive as we escaped the November snow of Sheffield headed for Spain. As is only right and proper, the person driving got to select the music for their shift. By the time we were halfway through France it was Pete’s turn to drive and he put Grotesque on. I’d like to say that I was caught up in it straightaway, but this would be incorrect - Pete likes to sing along and he knew all the words. I find this distracting. However, I heard enough to be intrigued and he kindly shut the fuck up when it came to further listens. By about the third listen I knew that I loved The Fall and I knew that this was a very special album.

A weird one to write this week - this is the Fall album I love the most and it’s quite hard to write this post without just enthusing and gushing and the like. I’ve also had little sleep this weekend so who knows if my thought processes are firing properly. Having said that, I’ve got a large pot of Assam in front of me stewing happily away.

So let’s begin - well I was going to go off into a rant about the heritage rock industry but it was getting a bit incoherent. Anyway, where I was going was this - Grotesque is a stunning piece of work, an artistic high watermark and it certainly doesn’t deserve the obscurity within which it languishes. Its top level, mind blowing, high echelon transcendental shit. To my mind,  it is completely unique, does everything on its own terms and is 100% successful. The rough and ready production veers all over the place, which should be recipe for inconsistency, but perversely does nothing to affect the cohesiveness of the album. There’s no dead weight, no filler and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

There’s a common perception, it would appear, that The Fall are in some way difficult or impenetrable, or that the music is simply nasty or the lyrics willfully obscure. I think in reality that this is rarely true, but that in order to engage with this music you actually have to stop what you are doing and listen to what is going on. Fight the idea of background music as opposed to something you sit down and listen to. Maybe this is because we know, deep down, that with 99% of music out there nothing of any real interest is being said, so we refuse to engage. What would happen if people started listening and really thinking about the cod-profound-reading-Nabokov-in-a-showy-manner-on-public-transport lyrics of Sting, or the extended piano backed empty platitudes of Coldplay? That’s picking some extreme example for the sake of illustration, but you get the gist, People aren’t too stupid to comprehend poetry, they’re just buried under tonnes of anodyne lyrical cardboard. Grotesque is a great album to listen to uninterrupted and undistracted. This may of course be why the enforced imprisonment of a long journey down an autoroute afforded the time to properly engage with and become absorbed by it.

The album opens with a piece of music that is really hard to describe - Pay Your Rates. By turns scratchy, punky bop, then atonal, languid, shambolic collapse. MES demanding -

Pay your rates! Pay your water rates!
If your rate’s too high, write a snotty letter

The ‘snotty letter’ - the English passive aggression, the bureaucracy, the estates - the well meaning but ultimately poor town planning of the ‘neurotic red landscape’. This is all an appropriate setting of tone for the whole record, which although swerving through various narratives seems to have at its centre a highly brutal look at the English culture and psyche. That’s how it feels to me anyway. A state of the nation that a nation would rather not hear. A nation that wants to see itself as keeping calm and carrying on, the self-congratulatory stoicism of Kilping’s ‘If’, but who are in fact ridden with neurosis, class war, ugliness, petty jealousy, prejudice, gross incompetence, stupidity and an excessive trust for authority. This comes in with a vengeance with the almost pastoral English Scheme. Well its half pastoral, half the as Fall cabaret band, with the cheesy organ returning, bringing the shiny foil curtain WMC vibe. Very poppy and almost delicate. Lyrically it is a tour through the English Scheme, where the ‘clever ones tend to emigrate’, like:

Like your psychotic big brother, who left home
For jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome
He's thick but he struck it rich

and Albion’s myriad failings are dipped into, including

Peter Cook's jokes, bad dope, check shirts, lousy groups point their fingers at America

So - love this song. Its a perfect little portrait that says more than the sum of its words - we’re dealing with little English signifiers and cultural cues. I wonder how this translates abroad. I wonder how it translates to people outside of the age it was written in - I was just a toddler when this was release, but I’m just about old enough for most of this not to go over my head.

This picture of right-on middle class political correctness is recognisable today -

He's the greenpeace in us all
He's the creep-creep in us all
Condescends to black men
Very nice to them
They talk of Chile while driving through Haslingden

Maybe today they are less interested in Chile, but might be a member of Respect. You know the type - well meaning and essentially on the side of good, but encumbered with their own prejudices filtered through a gauze of post-colonial guilt, self-loathing and fear of the working class.

New Face In Hell. Another pop gem. With a kazoo. An engaging and comical story of a suburban CB enthusiast who accidentally discovers a secret state operation, tells his neighbour and is then framed by the state for the state’s murder of his neighbour. Again, this shows Smith’s talent for storytelling in a the constrained medium of the song. In just a few lines, he tells you everything you need to know. You can fill in the rest from the archetype of the suburban hobbyist - the drab shed, the mug of tea, the tank top, hours spent there, only emerging to eat the tea rustled up by wife or mother.

C'n’C-S Mithering. This actually looks like one of those droll fake Fall song titles beloved of lazy journos. One of the centrepieces, a tract, or specifically - ‘ a treatise’. There is a hypnotic and hallucinatory quality to it. Another one of these great Fall exercises in repetition - some intertwining all on-one-chord acoustics and a persistent nagging metronomic snare. The perfect bed for MES to unleash a long poem over the top, the musical repetition showcasing the lyrical invention. Delivery wise he’s riding the rhythm, his flow is ridiculous. Basically a very weird hip-hop track, in fact ‘this was going to be called crap rap fourteen’. Again, we have some fantastic state of the union style observations as well as a (fictional?) account of an American trip, where ‘Californians either think of sex or think of death’ and we visit the founder of the Tijuana Brass on his home turf:

Big A&M Herb was there
His offices had fresh air
But his roster was mediocre
US dirge, rock 'n' pop filth
Their material's filched

and castigating the English groups for acting like ‘peasants with free milk’.

I’m not going to relate the entire lyrics, because there are tonnes and because you should listen to it yourself. This is poetry of the highest order. Its better than most of the lyrics you’ll ever hear, its better than most words you’ll ever read. It segues magnificently into Container Drivers, which was covered last week. This version is just as good and as essential as The Peel Session version.

The Impression Of J Temperance - we’re back in Dragnet territory here, but we’re not looking back. That close martial drumming, the erratic buzzing of the keyboard, like a cardboard box of dying insects. The guitar here is amazing, abrasive, scything through the rhythm track, echoing Smith’s melody (yes - melody) lines. The story - its another extremely sinister pulp horror narrative, which also harks back to Dragnet. A vet is called out to deliver the birth of a dog that bears a horrific resemblance to its owner for reasons we perhaps don’t want to go in. The great thing about this is the climatic build up to the reveal of the grotesque beast, and MES frenzied screaming ‘This hideous replica! This hideous replica!’. More Hammer than MR James. Again, lyrically it is economical, but everything is there, either explicitly or implicitly.

In The Park is a straightforward rocker about post closing time shagging, with a few double entendres, which is itself works rather well and segues into the weird, experimental and fun WMC Blob 59. Which consists of a few segments of poetry over what sounds like a badly degraded tape of Nico, or a Nico-esque singer. Anyhow, it sets up the album for the final push.

Gramme Friday. Bedsit Peter Gunn-esque ode to the joys and pitfalls of amphetamines now that the weekend has come - ‘Hitler lost his nerve on it!’, includes the hilarious:

‘I am Robertson Speedo and this is my Gramme Friday!’

Building up and building up, but never reaching resolution - which is typical Fall thing - ramp up the tension, but offer no respite.

Finally, on an album full of essential material is the most essential of them all - The N.W.R.A , the North Will Rise Again. Its an involved, feverish speculative narrative set in the aftermath of a incompetently executed uprising (‘but it has turned out wrong’) - a medicore nation that can’t even conduct a civil war how’s supposed to ne. There’s a fantastic spoken intro which involves an epic Northern journey to Newcastle, shasing off feral children, the West Germans have shipped in trains,  bastardised versions of Fall songs are played on ‘Junior Choice’:

DJs had worsened since the rising. Elaborating on nothing in praise of the track with words they could hardly pronounce, in telephone voices. 

The uprising is a shambles, our embedded reported tells us in lurid, dreamlike detail

But out the window burned the roads
There were men with bees on sticks
The fall had made them sick
A man with butterflies on his face
His brother threw acid in his face
His tattoos were screwed
The streets of Soho did reverberate
With drunken Highland men
Revenge for Culloden dead
The North had rose again
But it would turn out wrong
The North will rise again

Its an epic in the truest sense, musically its cohesive and driving, repetitive but ever evolving. There’s these lovely chiming guitars, that buzzing keyboard, held down by an insistent bass and drums. What The Fall manage to do here, and on the rest of the tracks that precede it on the album is to create a different way of doing things both lyrically and musically, and absorbing you into this world, making you look at your own differently. In doing so they also demonstrate how much scope there is to create art in a traditional rock and roll band set up and additionally highlight the woefull lack of ambition and artistry in most other bands for not doing it. In short, Grotesque is a revelation and every home should have a copy.

Pete says:


I'm at something of a loss at how to approach this this week, purely due to the fact that Grotesque is yet another step up - Dragnet blew me away as I'd forgotten just how class it is, and though I knew Grotesque a lot better it's still taken me aback. Most fundamentally, the unabashed confidence, the sheer verve of this music which really resists definition, eschews pigeonholing... it's really rather remarkable. As ever, its always, clearly, undeniably The Fall, but the way that that 'Fall Sound' mutates and changes and wears different guises is astonishing. And moreover, this is a proper album - well sequenced, recorded with an unconventional (some would say poor, but they would be wrong) yet utterly appropriate sound. It's the sort of record that, if the world were a more grown-up and thoughtful place, would appear on those periodic 'Greatest Albums Of All Time' lists, rubbing shoulders with Abbey Road and OK Computer and all the obvious stuff that 10% of normal people love and take to their hearts, 15% of music fans say isn't as good as their previous album, 5% of naysayers dislike purely because they make that kind of list, 20% of people have never heard of as they are young, or wilfully stupid, or dead, and 50% of people have bought just because everyone else did.

In fact, when you consider Grotesque's constituent elements you could argue that it's a very informative template of how to construct an album that'll stand the test of time - you've got your singles (ok, they weren't actually singles, but 'New Face In Hell' and 'Container Drivers' could easily have been), your energetic poppy album openers, your 'challenging' track (though listen up younger bands - any song that strongly implies dog fucking must be handled with care), and then with that backbone your meander through whatever genre you fancy - bluesy blank-verse-come-rap, sci-fi futurology, twisted surf tunes. Clearly nobody sits down at session one and draws a list of what type of songs to write (though Pisco Sour Hour do come dangerously close to at times), but when you consider the creative decisions that songwriters and musicians make at every step of the process I can think of a fair few bands that could do with a whole heap of Grotesque in their lives and the charts might be more interesting and music might actually do what it can do a lot more often - entertain, yes, and get you moving about of course, but also challenge and confront and delight and play tricks.

And while I'm on the subject (or at least near enough to switch tracks), let's put something to bed right now. MES is no one trick pony - "they say I rip off Johnny Rotten" he says here, and while I'm not confident enough to unpick that observation, the fact that people are accusing MES of
ripping of anybody is a utter joke. And that reminds me - though he says "I shout for the Fall" in the self-interview I told you to listen to last week, that's either working class self-effacement, or an acknowledgement that we really don't have the words to describe what MES does... or maybe we do actually but... erm, can somebody please remind me to return to this idea at some later point? Anyway, there is, I am sure, a great swathe of opinion that goes something like this -

Mark E Smith shouts.

Mark E Smith shouts and puts the suffix '-ah' after words.

Mark E Smith does not sing

Mark E Smith cannot sing.

Okay - one thing I am 100% confident on regarding popular music is this - if you cannot as a listener buy into the lead vocalist, then you're not going to dig their music. The music of The Who is lost to me, as I don't dig Daltry's voice. I yearn to find a way of appreciating Jagger, as if I did I would be able to enjoy a vast array of Rolling Stones which is apparently fucking ace.

The difference with Mark E. Smith though is that you have to put aside any notion that melody is fundamental to singing... we'll go with 'singing' right now until I can think of a better word. For those of you that find that this concept is so difficult to comprehend that you're currently smirking at me then fine - off you pop, there's a whole world of Mariah Carey records to explore though you might want to avoid those nasty rappers she sometimes hooks up with, what are they all about eh, just talking over music?! Anyone can do that?! OK then, cheerio, just pull the door to on the way out, see you...
... good. The two key words I want to get over to those noble few of you who are left are balance and subtlety. Subtlety, because MES does not always shout, does not always stick '-ah' at the end of words, and most times is working the songs, using his voice in ways that benefit that word, in that line, in that verse of that song. And 'balance' because (if we focus on Grotesque at least) he's generally bang on, and yes that does include shouting and '-ah'ing, but also includes talking, reciting, rapping, percussion, story-telling, and even at times melody. And I do mean melody, proper singing, in not the most wonderful voice you've ever heard, but a proper singing, tuneful register.

So since I was unsure how to do this week, lets do it like this - an analysis of MES's vocals on Grotesque, or something like that anyway - I suggest you fire up Spotify and listen along...

And to neatly undermine everything I've just said, opener 'Pay Your Rates' has MES shouting away over buzzy guitars, insisting upon paying your water rates, writing snotty letters (oh hi, back again? Yes 'Always Be My Baby' is very good. Pop back in a paragraph or two). That is until the other bit of the song, where all the instruments collapse in on themselves, and dredge their way through some dense old chords at a slower tempo. At this point we get a seemingly calmer MES ruminating on 'debtors retreat estates', and then tunefully - yes, tunefully Mariah! - proclaiming 'Neuroticred landscape / A socialist state invention / The old government bones working'... it's funny, its daft, so much so that MES sniggers to himself just toward the end before everything hikes up again and we're told to 'PAY TOMORROW!'. But its the contrast - indeed, the balance - between the two sections that provides the humour.

'English Scheme' is funny too, but more satirical than merely daft (the mention of Peter Cook is telling). Its a fabulous lyric, but as with all good jokes its the way you tell it - for example, the drop into a lower, more-spoken register for the 'like your psychotic big brother' bit leading into the fabulous phrasing of 'for jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome'. MES's sense of timing is sensational, and even in something as seemingly spoken as this (and indeed 'New Face In Hell' next and 'C 'n C - S Mithering' after that) he manages to drag hooks out of nowhere. And Mariah - don't you dare suggest to me that the sing-song way that he delivers 'condescends to black men / very nice to them' doesn't make that line an utter triumph, effortlessly ladling scorn and derision on somebody with 8 words and without recourse to shouting or sneering.

As an example of how to take a ostensibly stream of conscious narrative and route it into song (music having a natural propulsion let us not forget, which is often why bad music is better than bad poetry. At least bad music moves itself along to a conclusion, whereas bad poetry either makes you - you! the poor unsuspecting Mariah! - move it along yourself, or affords a orator an opportunity to employ the ponderous pause) 'C-in-C - S Mithering' is supreme. As an example of how that narrative can transcend that rhythm, slave it to its own intentions, I'm not sure I know a better example. The first half of it is as precise an example of phrasing you will hear - split vaguely into three sections the way in which the syllables build up as it goes on, from for example 'three days / three months' to 'there was america / we went there' to 'a mexico revenge it's stollen land / they really get off on "don't hurt me please"', these snatches of life from the supermarkets of Lancashire to over-stimulated California build up, not exactly relentlessly - the bluesy chugging guitar backing doesn't really feel relentless - but inevitably. Having just thought about it in fact, there's an air of 'It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding' (one of my favourite Dylan tunes) about it, but an English, resigned, ironic... oh sod it, a northerness, a jokiness. The second half of the song is great too - and has lent Ed and myself our 'See you mate!' exchange which crops up from time to time - but the first half is class class class.

We touched upon 'Container Drivers' and 'New Face In Hell' last week, but its worth saying in this context that the way that MES sings 'the uh-containeeeers, and their driveeeeers' as if in wonderment is charming and helps the songs unironic, gleeful nature. And as for 'New Face In Hell' -

(well firstly, is it a shaggy dog story? I really want it to be for some reason.)

- the level of detail in this narrative, delivered at great speed but with great clarity, is impressive not only lyrically and technically also. You hear words rush past you but in full colour - 'Aghast goes next door to his neighbour, secretly excited, as aforementioned was a hunter whom radio enthusiast wanted friendship and favour of.', 'muscular, thick-skinned, slit-eyed neighbour', 'cream porches' - all rounded off with the squealed hook of 'a new face in hell!'. You follow a fully rounded little story which means as much or as little as you want. And there's a fucking kazoo.

Are you getting this? There is great skill happening in these vocals. Artistic decisions have been made (whether instinctive or considered is irrelevant), and the way that MES sings isn't a compromise, he's not straining at the bit to do a three octave spanning melody here, he's chosen to do it this way in order to best mesh words, music, and voice together. Consider the amount of voices Bowie has - nasal Ziggy, operatic Station To Station, cockney Be My Wife - and then consider MES who probably hasn't a voice that could charm the birds from the trees, but he's a working man with a tool and by god he's getting good at using it.

Impression Of J. Temperance has dog fucking in it, yes, but don't worry about that - instead, focus upon the second line of each verse. Sung, tunefully, each second line of four. Now, what does that do to this song? Well, in my opinion, there's something very earthy, very base about J.Temperance, very English indeed, and what might be a dirge (I use that word non-pejoratively) is lifted by that line, heralded even. And to go back to something Ed said - if MES = The Fall then we can hear it when the Scanlon's guitar chimes back what Smith just sang. And the same thing happens in Gramme Friday, a proper demented surf number, a tune and everything, this could be busked so its clearly a proper sung song Mariah. But MES singing that melody is almost just a set up for the most severe vocalisation on the whole album when at the end of the song which sort of just falls apart under the weight of its amphetamine fuelled paranoia he begins to shriek - and I mean shriek, its the sort of noise you wake up at night having had a nightmare about - 'I can't relax!'.

Okay - so this is no drunken oaf managing to kid anyone. He might hate the description, but MES is an artist, and his words and his voice are his tools... and his band, of course (can someone remind me to pen something about 'Disposability and The Fall' please). The final track begins with perhaps the calmest bit of vocal on the album, and also probably my favourite moment. The N.W.R.A is essentially a story about a future where the tables have turned in England and in his own inimitable style Smith begins:

When it happened we walked through all the estates, from Manchester right to, er, Newcastle. In Darlington, helped a large man on his own chase off some kids who were chucking bricks and stuff through his flat window. She had a way with people like that. Thanked us and we moved on. 

'Junior Choice' played one morning. The song was 'English Scheme.' Mine. They'd changed it with a grand piano and turned it into a love song. How they did it I don't know. DJs had worsened since the rising. Elaborating on nothing in praise of the track with words they could hardly pronounce, in telephone voices. I was mad, and laughed at the same time. The West German government had brought over large yellow trains on Teeside docks. In Edinburgh. I stayed on my own for a few days, wandering about in the, er, pissing rain, before the Queen Mother hit town.

... I quote all this only to say that this is brilliant scene-setter, a proper little tale being told over some (at that moment) thoughtful chuggy music. And MES has a lovely storytelling voice, a real sense of timbre - the admiring tone for 'she had a way with people like that', the slight edge of steel on 'Mine'. And this is merely a set up for the thrilling moment when MES finds his singing voice (we've really got to work on this terminology) to proclaim:

I'm Joe Totale
The yet unborn son
The North will rise again
The North will rise again

And that's only the start to this behemoth of a lyric, with an air of post-appocalypse, a smidgen of social commentary...

I see that I have written much and possibly conveyed little. Let's recap. Grotesque is a remarkable album. Its a fully realised piece of work, is probably better than Dragnet, and contains more classic Fall songs than it has any right to. And while the band are on top form - my favourite Fall drumming performance thus far by the way, really tuned into what's happening - MES reigns supreme, both lyrically and vocally goddammit! And while I will not deny anybody the right to not get on with his voice, I compel anyone who hasn't given themselves the opportunity to buy into MES to properly listen, and ready yourselves for something which is at times peerless. I cannot recommend this record highly enough.

How I Wrote Elastic Man (Single) / Totally Wired (Single) / Peel Session #3 (1980)

Pete says:


One of the interesting things about this retrospective (over and above all the quality music we've been listening to) is just how fragmented it has been.  Mainly this is due to how we've organised ourselves, which is basically taking sensible chunks of recorded output, but that in itself reveals a couple of truths regarding The Fall - that they're prolific, that they don't follow your standard pattern of record, release, tour that many bands do, but also that they're moving and developing so fast that your sensible chunk might be an album, or a couple of the many amazing singles they were churning out in the late 70s/early 80s, a session or two, some live stuff.  So you might say that in trying to trace a narrative here, to plot a progression, we've made life tricky for ourselves, because just doing the albums might have been clearer, or doing a year at a time, or something like that.

However, maybe this week can be seen as one were we can see a band that have arrived at a set of sounds that's going to see them good for quite some time.  In this context we can speculate that, whereas Witch Trials was a noble stab in the dark, Dragnet was your leap into a brave new world, and Totale's was a glance back over the shoulder, the various things we're listening to now are the first proper steps in Falltonia.  Now clearly, Falltonia is a place that moves and shifts and does all sorts of crazy things - this is a band that never stays still, and rejects the notion off consolidation (just ask everyone who played on Witch Trials (probably even Riley)) - but even so, there is a Fall Sound (now thats a phrase that I'm going to be typing again before this crazy train stops), and I think this week sees the band starting to confidently make the most of it.

'Fiery Jack' may have instigated the rockabilly Fall, but 'How I Wrote Elastic Man' nails it, and even begins to toy with it from the very first languid guitar riff introduction.  A jaunty verse is offset with a rather more pained chorus, though its MES who shines - his tale of the artist crippled by public expectation (and ignorance too - all the way through 'all the people ask me how I wrote Plastic Man') whips between first and third person, self-loathing and misogyny, the sublime and the ridiculous, resulting in a tangible character, and yet another advance in this mode of lyric writing.  Its B-Side plays with the horror-lyric thing that MES so clearly enjoys, a daftish tale of 'City Hobgoblins' played for laughs (ish) all energy and thrust. In terms of a single encapsulating a band at that moment of time, showing two diverse angles of themselves, yet still, always, revealing in that Fall sound… well, you have ears I suggest you use them.

But then… THEN… the next single, coming only two months later ups the ante again (well, half of it).  'Totally Wired' is probably just a fucking marvellous song, all booming toms and call and response vocals and northern funk, but it could just as well be seen as the updated manifesto of the Fall.  It's taught, its tense, its funny, in just the way that fellow at the bar is seriously funny all night until he twats someone.  It takes from poetry and speech and rock preconceptions in equal measure, embraces daftness, sets out its parameters early and fully mines them for maximum effect.  It's knowing and clever and pure pop goodness:

Can't you see? A butterfly stomach round ground. I drank
a jar of coffee, and I took some of these.  And I'm totally wired.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.  The finest Fall single thus far.  The B-Side, however, though impressive in its playing, leave me cold, and therefore I'll move on to…

The Peel Session. Now, we've looked at two of these and they were undoubtedly impressive, suited the band, afforded them good recording facilities and the freedom to explore.  Great.  However, number 3… well, if we hear a better one I'd be very surprised…  Some have said that Peel session versions of tunes are more often than not better than the official recordings, an opinion I've often questioned.  However, there is something very special about this one.  For a start, the four tunes are corkers.  Secondly, the band sound energised and focused, clearly buoyed by their recent (artistic) successes and fully aware that they have an album about to be released which surely - clearly! - will propel them to international stardom and glory.  Finally, I feel that this session is an audible example of a key element of the Fall finding exactly what and how to play - step forward Steve Hanley, bass wrangler extrodinare.

Three of the four tracks here are totally dictated by the bass, and the fourth demonstrates that sometimes the best thing a bass can do is just play the obvious thing and let everything else get on with it.  'Jawbone and The Air-Rifle' is pretty much a bass line with words over it and some other stuff.  It seems odd hearing it now, as it won't be properly recorded for ages, but since we can revisit it, lets just focus on Hanley's contribution.  In the verse he dictates the rhythm entirely, whilst being unafraid to just thud appropriately.  The chorus he dictates the rhythm AND the melody, while again not being afraid to thud.  And in the bridge he shows that thudding isn't just a 'safe place' for him, and that he's quite able to move around, coaxing life into something that might sound add-onish without it.  In 'The Container Drivers' he roots the whole thing down with his stupendously simple playing, which in turn allows other instruments to wander off and be bonkers - owing to the lyrics this song has to be pop, just has to be, or it'd be stupid.  Hanley's playing facilitates Scanlon and Riley to meander off and helps MES's bathetic story of lorry drivers to shine.  And on 'New Face In Hell' Hanley brings da funk.  Again.  More on all this songs soon, suffice to say that I was delighted to rediscover which Fall song it is that has provided the Collins's household with a favourite catchphrase 'you never can tell, you never can tell'.  Doesn't look much on paper, I know.

All hail the new puritan
Righteous maelstrom, cock one

(NB - there is an argument it's 'cook one'.  It isn't, to my ears at least)

But the jewel in the crown of this week, over and above all this class is the Peel session, electrified glory of New Puritan.  From its scratchy, ill-recorded beginnings on Totale's to this monstrous, towering, terrifying thing, embracing chanting - either of the tribal or football terrace variety - discordant scratchy guitars, sparse yet driving drums.  This, seriously, is up there with the very finest of The Fall, and its no wonder that they never managed a proper studio recording of it that topped this effort.

Its the lyrics though which take it into the stratosphere - its a crazy mix of England old and new: "The grotesque peasants stalk the land / And deep down inside you know everybody wants to like big companies".  Sounds seem to cross this mishmash of time and equate with one another in peculiar ways: "It's a dinosaur cackle / A pteradactyl cackle / In LA a drunk is sick on Gene Vincent's star on Hollywood Boulevard".  The listener is never sure quite where to settle, the singer relentless in surging on - this is clearly important dammit, but goodness knows why.  And yet - its not important like some Dylan stuff sounded important, vital, essential.  No, its too self-aware for that, and shuns analysis with stuff like "The conventional is now experimental / The experimental is now conventional" and even manages to undermine itself with "Why don't you ask your local record dealer how many bribes he took today?" which manages to work only because its snottily funny, a throwback to the early live stuff, a knowing acceptance that this music is too dense, too clever for the vast majority of the record buying public.  It's bile, and self-aggrandisement, and pure bollocks, and pure brains.  I don't think I could take a whole album of New Puritan's, but by god I'll surrender willingly to this one.  Perhaps the best thing thus far.

To finish - I have two theories:

1) The 'why the Fall are like the Beatles' theory.  I shall touch upon this some other time.

2) The 'listen to the self-interview' theory at the end of the Grotesque re-release.  And speaking of which...


Ed says:

The following is one of the many ways that art works - little aspects of one thing influence the next, influence the next and so on. Native Lancastrian LS Lowry spends most of his life knocking up his naive paintings, which are clasped to the bosom of both the establishment and the common man. In the late 1960s, bubblegum psychedelia practitioner, Francis Rossi of pre-denim Status Quo seeks refuge from his wife and mother in law in the outside toilet. His forty five minutes on the bog are not squandered, as he pens ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, a piece of heavily phased daftness that draws on the work of Lowry for its title and has a rather catchy one string one note hook. Thirteen or so years later, The Fall release the single - “How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’” which half cribs the melody line and mocks the title. Anyway - influences can and should come from anywhere.

This week we’re looking at eight songs from 1980. Two singles and a Peel Session. This is the good shit:



We’ve already established in previous installments that we’ve been gradually ramping up the quality - words, music, performance - well I won’t keep banging on about it, but we’re in a seriously good period here. I will attempt to do it justice with my weak-ass lit-crit, but I, like the rest, will be found wanting. Instead I can present you with some personal impressions which you may take or leave.

Those idiot acquaintances you barely tolerate will no doubt trot out the lazy tabloid line that all there is to Mark E Smith’s lyrics are a series of non-sequitors with the -ah suffix. And you trust those idiot friends? Well, I imagine they’re harmless, but you - you’re more inquisitive, aren’t you? Listen to this and what you get is literature, poetry - shit that if you clothed it in the finery of Hampstead would be much lauded across the round tables of the Late Review and the like.

Importantly, you get narrative. Lots of narrative. Rich, lush, detailed narrative and characterisation. Fanciful situations, allegories. If you are trying to write - songs or whatever, this is a quality you should aspire to. Tight, edited, expressive, imaginative. Not just banging together vaguely thematic rhyming couplets like some sort of unimaginative tit.

How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’. A tale of artistic entrapment. How to follow a massively popular hit in the face of public approval? Writer’s block. They can’t even get the name right - Plastic Man? Elastic Man? Returning to the role of the jobbing writer devoid of inspiration

His last work was "Space Mystery" in the Daily Mail,
An article in Leather Thighs
The only thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes
So I'm resigned to bed
I keep bottles and comics stuffed by its head
Fuck it, let the beard grow
I'm too tired,
I'll do it tomorrow

And one of my favourite Fall lines ever:

The Observer magazine just about sums him up
E.g. self-satisfied, smug

Which has the lovely ambiguity - does the Observer Magazine sum the writer up or is the reader of Observer Magazine summed up by their newspaper choice? I prefer the second one as I guiltily flick through another snotty review of a restaurant i will almost certainly never visit.

However, clearly not autobiographical - the work is both top notch and abundant. Check the guy’s track record.

The B Side, City Hobgoblins further explores MES’ obsession with the supernatural and the spirit world. The spiritual(ist) cousin of Psycick Dancehall. Mark’s house is infested with supernatural energy, the undead are all around, but its not scary, its more manic and midly inconvenient. The ectoplasmic echoes of the past do not restrict themselves to the constraints of class -

Queen Victoria
Is a large black slug in Piccadilly, Manchester

Musically this A/B side follow on nicely from the Dragnet era - its great, super tight. Mike Leigh, the drumming teddy boy who contributed to Dragnet's weird and wonderful atmosphere is out. Ridiculously young Hanley brother Paul is in and promise is shown. I picture him being picked up and bundled into a van outside the school gates before being dragged to another gig. The promise is realised on the next single, Totally Wired, which is muscular tom pounding garage band nirvana.

Speaking of garage bands, which I kind of just was, your local neighbourhood garage band should hang their heads in despair and stop rehashing the work of their forebears forty years back - for what we have here is the last word in the evolution of freaky, brutalist instrument bashing. Modernist and primitive simultaneously - pushing things forward and pulverising everything at the same time. A catchy pop song for the twitchy and chemically enhanced.

You don’t have to be weird to be wired

A Hunter Thompson quote. Tense! Nervous! Headache!

I drank a jar of coffee and I took some of these. Now I’m totally wired!

Watch, because words only augment, look on these works, and despair - because this is some super cool business.



This was a Top 20 hit in New Zealand. New Zealand got it right.

The B side. Well its a kind of collage. We get a bit of last week’s Cary Grant’s Wedding. We get something from the future and we get Putta Block. Essentially a cut and paste tour through some still bubbling ideas or some offcuts that were too good to throw away? "We had salmon on the bus?" I don’t know. It’s compelling though

Two singles. Next the third Peel Session. Bang fucking bang, the mighty Fall.  Just under two years since the last one they return a class act and outfit to be reckoned with. I hate to get all hyperbolic - OK - I actually rather enjoy getting all hyperbolic, but this is grade A Fall. Four essential pieces of music. Confidence. Swagger (or ‘swag’, if you’re an idiot). All bunged through some sort of genre blending apparatus to arrive at something that may contain a few recognisable elements of RnR, country, NYC art rock but that is essentially in a genre of its own.

Container Drivers - I hate to use the word ‘rollicking’ but this is, well, rollicking. A further refinement to the whole Country and Northern thing. Storming white line fever semi-romanticsm of the container drivers who ‘get no thanks from the loading bay ranks’. Intercut with jagged guitars, like somone breaking windows during the most strung out and cranked up trucker hoedown you could imagine. Poetry wrung out of something as simple as ‘RO-RO, roll on-roll off’

Jawbone and the Air Rifle. Another narrative. Hallucinogenic tale of an impotent rabbit hunter who falls under the ‘curse of The Broken Brothers Pentacle Curse’. Visceral, attacking with a werid refrain which strikes me almost as owing a little to a Chas and Dave style singalong. Perhaps in a world where Chas and Dave were rabid occultists. This sequence is the middle:

The rabbit killer did not eat for a week
And no way he can look at meat
No bottle has he anymore
It could be his mangled teeth
He sees jawbones on the street
Advertisements become carnivores
And roadworkers turn into jawbones
And he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime
The villagers dance round pre-fabs
And laugh through twisted mouths
Don't eat
It's disallowed
Suck on marrowbones and energy from the mainland

Yes!

New Puritan. We saw the germ of this last time with the Totale’s Turns home demo. Now it returns with an apocalyptic state of the union. Self flagellating monks chant a kind of liturgical quasi latin in unison to introduce the track and the effect is cinematic, specifically it calls to mind the end of the world religious mania and witch burning scenes from The Seventh Seal. Or perhaps its more Monty Python's The Holy Grail. It feels medieval - pre-puritan in fact.The New Puritan curses

the self-copulation
Of your lousy record collection
New puritan says "Coffee table LPs never breathe"

New Puritan wields a rod of correction to the corrupt music industry where ‘bands send tapes to famous apes’ and is prophetic, again apocalyptic:

The conventional is now experimental
The experimental is now conventional
It's a dinosaur cackle
A pteradactyl cackle
In LA a drunk is sick on Gene Vincent's star on Hollywood Boulevard
Ha-ha ha-ha
Stripping takes off in Britain's black spots
The Kensington white rastas run for cabs
This I have seen

Musically it is driving, manic, focussed and staring straight ahead and importantly, massive. Large, widescreen - something new to The Fall and signs of what may be to come.

Finally, New Face In Hell. A story of intrigue with a kazoo. ‘This is off our new LP!’ We’ll be dealing with the LP next week and in more detail, so to some extent I want to keep my powder dry, but in short this is a great way to end the session - more narrative, creative writing and the strong vein of humour that runs through the music. Did I mention the kazoo?

That’s it for now. A great week - more ideas and fantastic music spread over two singles and a radio session than most bands have in their entire discography.

Fiery Jack (Single) & Totale's Turns (Album) (1980)

Ed says

Fiery Jack/2nd Dark Age/Psykick Dancehall #2

Where The Fall follow Dragnet with an absolutely killer single. The A side all chug, chiming harmonics, further exploration of the ‘Country and Northern’ thing, warped rockabilly with a touch a white line fever. Portrait of grizzled pub fixture?

I sat and drank
For three decades
I'm 45
Cause I am Jack
From a burning ring
And my face is slack
And I think think think
I just drink drink drink
Too fast to work
Too fast to write
I just burn burn burn

a working man who lives off hot dogs and pies using himself up. Insidious and worms its way under your skin.

For the B Side, 2nd Dark Age - a rant that feels pretty millennial. Doom! As with a lot of these lyrics, they are opaque and don’t always yield to probing, but you can always just enjoy the poetry of:

It's a second dark age.
No Psalm Sunday or any day.
The city is dead.
Bust. Ghost-dance rite. Tepid

Additionally, we have Psykick Dancehall #2, from a version of the song from last week’s Dragnet. What’s worthwhile here are some additional lyrics in the middle about Helen Duncan - who’s weird story is worth reading about (http://www.helenduncan.org.uk/). This further underlines the medium/ESP/supernatural themes of the song.

Totale’s Turns as a list with bullet points and stuff.

The Fall as smart arse noise cabaret band with MES as master of ceremonies.

1. Mostly a live album, recorded in the Working Mens’ Clubs  of Doncaster, Preston and Bradford during the winter 1979/1980. Clearly as a southerner born in 1980, this is another world to me, but in my head it is more David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet than Peter Kay’s Phonenix Nights - i.e. subtle undercurrent of menace, overflowing ashtrays, yellowing wallpaper, Double Diamond, tough crowds.

2. The band are a well drilled, firing on all cylinders, snarling beast of a group. Further exploring the Country and Northern thing that we’ve seen developing in Fiery Jack, a grimy but surprisingly detailed chug providing the perfect platform from which MES to do his thing. The two guitars in particular chime in and out beautifully. Hanley handling the bass like he is trying to play it and dismantle it at the same time.

3. MES’ ‘thing’ is pretty much compering, controlling the audience, hectoring the audience, admonishing the band, relating tales, telling jokes. Allowing no breathing space to encroach from any outside agencies, moving from front to confidence. Working them like a professional. Vocal tics on display:

• the yelp
• the ‘ah’ suffix (beloved of the lazy journalist-ah) 
• the strangulated scream

4. Excerpts:

• “The difference between you and us is that we have brains! Bang fucking bang, The Mighty Fall”
• “Last orders half past ten. This is a groovy number (aghh)!”
• “This is The Fall and this is the drudge nation. Your decadent sins will reap discipline. Still it is unclean! Unclean”
• “We’re breaking it in easy for you”
• “Come on, get a bit of fucking guts into it”
•  “Can you get it fucking together instead of showing off!”

5. A great live album makes you want to be there, makes you wish you had been there there. This is one of those records.

6. This is all good. Notable highlights however include:

• groovy number Rowche Rumble - “Valium!” which is full of unresolving manic tension. 
• Muzoweri’s Daughter - more funereal, more processionary, more heavy bass drone, more dread. Riley pops up towards the end to offer some of his trademark totally pointless backing vocals, but we can live with this.
• A less caustic but certainly no less demented version of Spectre vs Rector
• Something new! Cary Grant’s Wedding. Switches erratically between rockabilly and some sort of final reckoning, storm the citadel theme. Ridiculous, in the best possible way.

7. This is not completely a live album. The broadcast interrupted -

• That Man - a not too shabby pop song, but in the end kind of fails to stick. Accrington and 'Hovis land' get a shout out
• New Puritan - a home demo, one mic and rattly guitar job. The germ of something great, lyrically strident, sharp poetry and images. Word like this very exciting few lines:

In LA the window opener switch
Is like a dinosaur cackle
A pterodactyl cackle
Jet plane circle
Over imported trees 

8. And back to the previous programming to round things all off with a rousing and combative No Xmas For John Quays. Possibly the best version - closed in, head down, frenetic, focused, a maelstrom. Sound men are berated. The band is berated - ‘Can you get it fucking together instead of showing off!’. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Bang, the end, applause.

9. Sleeve Notes/Title. Right - I have this album only on MP3, legally purchased I might add, so I’ve missed out on some extra stuff that’s relevant. The sleeve notes have MES speaking through the persona of Roman Totale - I think Pete has the CD, so hopefully he can elaborate.

10. To conclude - a thrilling lo-fi collection showcasing a band more than hitting its stride, but hitting on something very special in a very focused, determined, deliberate way.

Pete says...

This week could always have been about another quality single and a budget live album thing.  However, on reflection its actually about a couple of giant leaps forward.  It's also going to be about being concise and focused as I seem to have run completely out of time this week.  Oh well.

… oh, well, concise.  Tight.  Focused.  Compare Fiery Jack to Bingo Masters Breakout - both character studies, but whereas Bingo was all gloss and sheen (lyrically at least) Fiery Jack manages to be both more obscure yet more insightful, and rather than telling a story of a character manages to capture some of their essence.  Stuff like...

And peace is a kite of materials you never catch
Come up for a snatch
Up from hell
Once in a while

… doesn't make much sense, but by the end of the song it all combines so that you really feel you know Jack.  All this lashed to a twisted rockabilly groove.  In terms of singles The Fall are on one hell of a run of form.  B-sides - 2nd Dark Age is pretty clumpy but entertaining, especially the bit about Abba, and the reworking of Psychic Dancehall an uncharacteristically pointless retread.


Totale's Turns was an odd career move.  At lest in hindsight it was - were we back in 1980, but a few months after Dragnet, a budget live offering which proudly proclaimed 'Doncaster! Bradford! Preston! Prestwich!' might well have had me bouncing with anticipation.  But looking back, after the thrill of Dragnet this seems just a little anti-climactic, though none the less essential.  What we have here is not just a live album with a couple of demo-y tracks thorn in for good measure - its also a minor rewriting of the band's short history thus far, and almost a manifesto.  MES has found his live footing, there's none of the slightly coy banter of before, he owns this environment, he owns the band, and quite frankly aside from being a little more verbose between songs and a lot more comprehensible this is exactly the MES that you'll get if you potter off and see the Fall now - clever, sneery, uncompromising, very, very rock and roll.  If he's not taking the band to task in No Xmas, or insulting the promoter during Rowche, he's toying with the audience, mocking them.  Its a very twisted version of what we love from our front-men, and masochistically compulsive.

But its the band who've made the greatest leap forward here… ok, so its an almost totally different band but bear with me.  The tunes utterly thunder along - Muzorewi's Daughter was already meaty, but god almighty it hammers you here, Spector vs Rector may not be as sonically oppressive as on Dragnet, but there's few musicians that could even contemplate this in a live setting, let alone pull it off, and No Xmas suddenly has lost any trace of silly, becoming an utter monster, circling round and round, sounding like a fight that is both happening, and is probably about to happen right in you face.  Cripes.

There is newness here - Cary Grant's Wedding swings from a doom laden chorus to a mainly chipper another chorus, and then another bit.  This is the sort of Fall song that gets your average Fall fan excited - lollopy, heavy, and with lyrical insights such as

Buster Keaton he turned up
He wasn't a woman
He didn't take hallucigens

… what does it mean?  Haven't a clue.  But its good.  I think.  Also new is That Man, which feels a bit like a Dragnet cast-off - bit Your Heart Out, bit Dicemanish.  It feels like a hyped-up 50s boy group + kazoo.  And of course New Puritan which (breaking all of my usual rules) I'll discuss next week.

Rowche Rumble (Single) and Dragnet (Album) (1979)

Pete says:

Okay, it's shocking to do this, but quickly…

Rowche Rumble is a classic Fall single, and neatly bridges the gap between the debut and what is to follow (faster, faster).  Pounding drums, heavy, heavy bass and the soon to be forgotten (for a bit) plinky plonk of a keyboard back MES who sounds ten-times more confident, more strident, more MES than anything on LIve at the Witch Trials.  Apparently 'Rowche' is a play on 'Roche' which is a pharmaceutical company, but regardless - this song feels like its more real, more pointed than anything that's come before.  But even this is merely a transition - a stepping stone on to…

(Oh, and In My Area, the B-side is very good, nice keys, lyrics, blah blah anyway…)

Ladies and Gentlemen, come in.  Sit down.  Leave your woes and travails behind you.  Welcome to The Fall.

There is so much to say about Dragnet.  I mean, it's class.  Surprisingly class for me - I'd forgotten just how marvellous it is.  So it would be very easy for me to just list each track and tell you how good it is, and ramble on about this bit of guitar, this poppy chorus, this marvellous mangling of instrument and voice, this turn of phrase.  Instead, I'll limit myself to two thoughts that keep recurring to me when I listen.  Hopefully Ed will do the proper stuff this week…

Firstly, there is something very interesting happening here regarding… well, I suppose the artifice of popular music, and writing and performing popular music, and all that brings with it, and as a result where The Fall sit within that artifice.  A couple of tunes have already hinted that The Fall will become as important a subject for The Fall to sing about as anything else (see Crap Rap, and even the aforementioned but criminally overlooked - by me - In My Area, both of which refer to The Fall).  But this doesn't feel like some Clash-like self-mythologising, which in reinforcing the classic rock 'n roll outsiderness that Strummer et al wanted to engender simply reinforced how conventional they actually where (though wonderful - I'm not knocking The Clash).  Rather, 'The Fall' are increasingly being presented by MES as something, somebody, that sits well away from the norm.  So far away, in fact, that they almost inhabit a whole different realm, picking holes in music.

If it's true that MES = The Fall it's here that it starts to happen - there's nobody left from the original lineup, and the guys that he's got around him now (including Scanlon and Hanley - you'll be hearing much more about these pair) seem here to be perfectly in tune with his vision.  Even Riley's held off the prima donna backing vox thank fuck.  Anyway, so if we accept that MES's lyrics and the music are joined in a fantastically sympathetic marriage (which, with hindsight, maybe wasn't always the case with Witch Trials) what does that mean?  Well, a sound which comes from a cupboard, but with enough clarity to demonstrate the fine, tight, inventive playing (even with the odd fluff and out of tune bass - get used to it, there's years before they sort this out), but which seems to provide a perfect environment for MES's voice and also of what he says here, which whether explicitly or not is often about music, and writing, and writing music, and writing about music.

'Pshychic Dancehall', bonkers rockabilly excitement that it is, begins with the cry 'Is anybody there?' to which the band (?) reply 'yeeessssss!'.  But who is the question for?  If for the audience, then obviously you're there at that moment - you've just popped the needle down and you've actively made this noise happen.  When combined with aspects of the lyrics such as "When I'm dead and gone / My vibrations will live on / In vibes on vinyl through the years / People will dance to my waves" that act of putting the needle on (or CD in, or iPod, or whatever) suddenly becomes a much more significant act.  We've unwittingly become part of a game, or a scheme, and MES is already one step ahead.

Casting a disparaging view over the music press is hardly groundbreaking territory, but 'Printhead' takes this further, deconstructing itself as it goes  - "End of catch-line / End of hook-line" - offering the confusing but intriguing insight "there's a barrier between writer and singer", and even going so far to explicitly quote a review of the band:

The singer is a neurotic drinker
The band little more than a big crashing beat.
Instruments collide and we all get drunk
The last two lines
Were a quote, yeah
When we read them
We went to pieces

… and all this allied to a thrilling pop-punk, conventionalish tune that could mistakenly be mistaken for something dumb.  Anything but.

The glorious 'Diceman' paints MES as a true maverick to a standard, you've-heard-this-a-million-times-before Bo Diddly beat.  'Your Heart Out' - probably my favourite thing here - has him deconstructing his own performance 'I don't sing I just shout / All on one note', while also pointlessly, yet very amusingly, taking a swipe at another songwriter "don't cry for me / Mexicooooooo!".  And 'Before The Moon Falls", perhaps the brooding, beating heart of the album, begins with a terrific spoken word bit which I must quote verbatim as its so ruddy marvellous -

We are private detectives onward back from a musical pilgrimage
We work under the name of the Fall.
Who would suspect this?  It is too obvious.
Our office is secluded.
Those there to suspect would not see the wood for the trees
We were six like dice but we're back to five
Up here in the North there are no wage packet jobs for us, thank Christ
While young married couples discuss the poverties of their self-built traps
And the junior clergy demand more cash
We spit in their plate and wait for the ice to melt

And then manages to sum up the whole sentiment I think I'm driving toward with the opening (sung) lines "I must create a new regime / Or live by another man's".

So what am I getting to here?  One of the implicit questions posed during the retrospective must be 'why do I like this stuff so much that its become not just music for me, but something more important than that?'  For some fans of the Fall their obsession with MES's stuff manages to completely undermine their enjoyment of other music, rendering it shallow and pointless.  I'm not quite at that stage, but certainly the effect The Fall has on me has raised the bar very, very high for other guitar groups, indie bands, whatever.  And I think that one important reason for that is expressed through Dragnet - the intelligence in The Fall's music, the ability to look beyond that which your usual band's would consider 'the point', the bravery through a combination of music, words and performance to challenge the listener, to make him or her think about what they are hearing outside of ones usual framework, is enthralling.  Dragnet makes it very clear that your usual expectations of music just aren't up to scratch when it comes to this band, and in working to keep up you're engaging with something dramatic, scary, and simply fucking brilliant.

Secondly, and I won't ramble on quite as much now - there is a wonderful, wonderful book by Nabakov called Ada and Ardor.  It's one of the finest things I have ever read, and I highly recommend it.  However, be warned, to begin with for about 50 pages it's a seriously hard and taxing read.  It makes sense, but the sense is deeply obscured, fascinating (if not strictly speaking vital) plot points are presented buried in plain sight, the breadth of its lexicon is thrilling yet renders even an intelligent reader feeling a bit under-educated.  One theory why Nabakov did this is that any reader that can wade through those opening pages is ready and equipped to deal with what follows, which though more straight is so nakedly beautiful and playful and emotional that you really have to be set-up to tackle it.

Whether this theory is 'true' or not - i.e. whether the author actively intended it to be so - I feel that a similar sort of thing happens on track ten of Dragnet.  Preceded but the poppy, intentionally ephemeral Choc-Stock (you'll have to listen to see what I mean - already gone on for far too long) which lulls the listener into a bouncy frame of mind, Spectre vs. Rector is perhaps the oddest song (for it is a song, definitely - there are instances in The Falls oeuvre when this is debatable) they recorded.  A long, winding, thrilling story of possession and fear, the first half was recorded in a garage or something, features two MESs ranting away, goes on and on in many parts which are grandly announced by the singer, and even when the song suddenly settles into a more conventional studio setting, it suddenly falls apart on itself if to reiterate that you cannot rest with this band - they're one step ahead and can play you like a puppet.  Essentially, if you listen to Spectre vs. Rector and enjoy it, you can approach this massive body of work and everything in it, and what is more - odds are you'll be a Fall fan my son.

Ed says:

Welcome to the world of para-psychic investigation, before the latter day table rappers Derek Acorah and Pyschic Sally normalised the weird for the consumers of supermarket magazines. Is there anybody there? Yeah! Step aboard with ESP medium of dis-chord. There is the feeblest veil that separates the world we experience from the supernatural. This is touched upon by the handful of case studies that the private detectives who work under the name of The Fall investigate in the collection, ‘Dragnet’. This is the second album, recorded in two days and released in the same year as ‘Live At The Witch Trials’, already a completely different band, both in terms of line up and attitude. Quite frankly they are taking the piss. Here’s a few of the parameters.

1. Replace all the band members who recorded the debut album earlier in the same year, with the exception Marc Riley, who’s been around for the shortest time.

2. Oh yes, the drummer. He’s pretty damn good, but what would be better would be to replace him with a teddy boy from a rock and roll revival band, who still insists on dressing like 1950s cinema trashing enthusiast

3. Studio time - two days should do it? There’s only eleven songs after all

4. Production - well clearly everything else is in place, so what we need is a guy who’s got no studio experience at all. That will work.

Dragnet has a very murky sound, mainly due to the inexperience of the people involved in its production. In a way, there’s a reminder to me of Lee Scratch Perry’s Black Ark work - murky, smoky, no quarter given to producing a shiny product. Already we’ve lost the hi-fidelity purists, but we didn’t need them anyway - sipping their ale and discussing the merits of gold plated phono plugs, screw them.

So Dragnet - second album we’ve reached that critical point. Everything I love about the music of the Fall is already present on the disc.

Principally, there’s a couple of strong themes running through this record - the supernatural world a the dread it inspires (‘A Figure Walks’, ‘Spectre Vs Rector), the Fall mission statements/distaste with the music scene (‘Printhead’, ‘Dice Man’). A couple of diversions thrown in for good measure. Some of the Fall’s poppiest moments sitting happily alongside some of there murkiest. There’s no dead wood either, there is no filler in amongst the killer. So broadly, I’m going to take this fucker track by track.

A seance - ‘Is there anybody there? Yeah!’. Psykick Dancehall. For one thing, they’ve ditched the keyboard, which is unfortunate as there were plenty of ace moments involving it. I would like to know what a Dragnet with Yvonne Pawlett’s keyboard on would be like, but my fear is the answer would be ‘samey’. Still we lose Pawlett and we gain Scanlon and Hanley. Steve Hanley’s bass is preposterous - he’s pretty much gone disco for the opening track, and it’s gorgeous. Riley’s on guitar now, joined by Craig Scanlon and we have something which is intricate, abrasive, intertwining. Don’t know who’s doing what, doesn’t matter. Psykick Dancehall sets it all up and combines the twin concerns of the record. ‘I saw a monster on the roof - its colours glowed on the roof’ and ‘When I'm dead and gone, my vibrations will live on, in vibes on vinyl through the years. People will dance to my waves’ - we are forever living with the imprints of the past, which indelibly imprint themselves in the ether, and this musical document is apparently powerful enough to achieve this.

Dragnet feels ‘old’ like an artefact that’s recently been dug up. Partly due to the sonic murkiness and partly because it feels a few steps out from conventional music. It also feels nocturnal. All the ingredients of a rock and roll band are there, but mixed up in a completely different way.

A Figure Walks. New drummer, Mike Leigh (not that one) has got a fantastic tom ting going on. Trance like, repetitive. What goes on just out of the corner of your eye? I think that this may be another MR James inspired number (see Spectre vs Rector later), but my friend Mike Whaley thinks I’m labouring the point who says - “Repeatedly singing about knowing a spooky ghost is behind you and how you plan to kick it, misses the confusion and dreaded building of anxiety that I feel with MR James”. He may have a point. For me though its the ‘if he grabs my coat tails’ which kind of transports this back towards a Victorian time frame.

Print Head - a proper good rant. a garage band. Weirdly meta with its quoting of music paper reviews of the band. The singer is a neurotic drunk. ‘The last two lines were a quote yeah’. There’s a guitar solo of sorts, which is certainly an extremely rare occurrence. It works. A little bit of showing off - its been earned.

Dice Man. The very popular novel of the 1970s. Luke Rheinhart. Never made it through the first few pages. Found it very irritating. Anyway, this is a fantastic Bo Diddley-esque romp. Where MES nails his colours to the mast and skewers his opponents. ‘They say music should be fun, like reading a story of love - but I wanna read a horror story’. Take a chance, create some art don’t become another ‘branch on the tree of show business’

Before the Moon Falls. Shhhh! We are being let on in a secret, lean in:

We are private detectives back from a musical pilgrimage
We work under the name of the Fall.
Who would suspect this?
It is too obvious.
Our offices secluded.
Those there to suspect
Would not see the wood for the trees
We were six like dice but we're back to five
Up here in the North there are no wage packet jobs for us
Thank Christ
While young married couples discuss the poverties
Of their self-built traps
And the junior clergy demand more cash
We spit in their plate and wait for the ice to melt

Unseen knowledge is being imparted. Paraphrasing William Blake - ‘I must create a new regime, or live by another man’s’. A field of one ploughing their own unique and revelatory furrow in the face of mainly indifference from the world in general. Blake was only really appreciated in his life time by a foppish group of young romantic artists who dubbed themselves ‘The Ancients’. The Fall have a similar following, but more bald. Its an angry song, raging at the music business - ‘I could use some pure criminals and get my hands on some royalties’ and the hilarious ‘A problem of this new scheme is answering obscene phone calls’. The intensity and the weird framing elevate a frustrated complaint about business and admin to the realms of something magical.

You’re Heart Out - featuring the excellent backing vocals of front man’s partner and general managerial hard ass, Kay Carroll. This is totally pop. Lovely lolloping bass line, tasty twisty guitar lines. Simplicity. ‘Don’t cry for me! Mexico!’. Lyrically its fairly opaque - but it who cares, its delivered in such a joyful way. ‘I don’t sing, I just shout, all on one note! Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing!’. This is fun! Love it. Its kind of indiepop, but with all the twee surgically removed.

Muzorewi's Daughter - big old tribal drums, a funereal, ceremonial guitar. MES doing that squeaky yelp thing that he employs so well. Have no idea what’s its about - something to do with some long forgotten aspect of Rhodesian politics, there is the hint of sacrifice and a touch of weird colonial hysteria about cannibalism. Intense. Eerie. Probably best not put this on that seduction playlist you keep on your ipod.

Flat of Angles - man kills wife, hides out in flat, which may or may not have some curious geometric idiosyncrasies. Tasty bit of what may or may not be slide guitar. Vague Americana punctuated by the return of the cheesy organ we know and love from previous episodes, which makes the occasional pass by to buzz the ears.

Choc-Stock - no! Haven’t got a clue. Its fun, jaunty, repetitive and loopy though. Softens you up in preparation for what’s coming next.

Spectre vs Rector. The hulking, malevolent centerpiece of the record. Remember earlier when MES said - ‘They say music should be fun, like reading a story of love - but I wanna read a horror story’? Here is the horror story. The perfect soundtrack for complete mental collapse. A relentless industrial guitar grind, half recorded in an extremely lo-fi manner in some warehouse somewhere. This is the most fully realised Fall narrative yet. Massively influenced by spooky Oxford don MR James, who if you’ve never read, I greatly recommend. They are mainly tales of supernatural possession and/or hauntings, where the characters, often clerical types or academics, experience some sort of horrific primordial terror that robs them of their sanity and leaves them broken men. At the heart the song is a straightforward story of Rector meets Spectre, Spectre possesses Rector, an Inspector attempts to exorcise the Rector, Spectre tries to possesses Inspector but the possession is ineffectual, but effective enough to leave the Inspector insane by what he’s seen. Its extremely meaty and full of great lines like the following:

"Those flowers, take them away," he said.
"They're only funeral decorations.
And O this is a tragic nation
A nation of no imagination.
A stupid dead man is their ideal
They shook me and they think me unclean."

Essentially eight minutes of trance like grinding, robotic rhythm with a great story over the top.

Following this, we have the hilariously incongruous contrast of Put Away, the album’s chirpy kazoo lead closer (with a baa-baa-baa-baa intro from MES), which first surfaced on a Peel session a while back. This version really rattles away. The band is really cooking.

So in conclusion, I’ve enjoyed this week a lot. Been great to revisit Dragnet and soak up its brilliance. The first Fall classic I’d say. All the pieces are in place - MES is hitting a serious stride lyrically and the band really work together well. The Fall are positioning themselves as a band apart - literary, an autonomous unit, experimental, darkly funny, supremely confident. So - listen to this - its freaking awesome and my blathering on about doesn’t do justice to the experience of listening to it.

Live At The Witch Trials (1979)

Ed says:

This week it’s the debut album - ‘Live at the Witch Trials’, which is not, as eMusic would have you believe, a live album. An assured piece of work in itself, it also feels like a psychic clearing of the decks in preparation for a great leap forward. This may of course be something that I’m applying retrospectively, which is always a temptation. A short one after last week's extended tract - some of these songs have already popped up when talking about last week’s Peel Sessions, and in most cases the sessions have a slight edge on the album versions - so for a few of these songs, I’m already all worded out.

Live at the Witch Trials has all the urgency you might expect of an album that was recorded in five days. A snapshot of a band at a moment in time. A tight unit with a supremely confident front man. A great guitarist on his way out. On drums particularly, Karl Burns is on fire*. In one of the weirder/more interesting/potentially irritating aspects of the production on this record, he’s panned curiously across the speakers, so he’s going back and forth left to right as he goes through the toms (which he does a lot). I like this immensely, but I imagine others might find this a little gimmicky and/or annoying. Well, they’d be wrong. The fools.

We open with an absolute killer, ‘Frightened’. A slo-mo ode to amphetamine psychosis, and the world’s slowest garage tune (sadly this remained unverified by the late Roy Castle). “I’ve got shears pointed straight at my chest and time moves slow when you count it...I appear at midnight when the films close”. The peripheral bedsitter. Keyed up, tense, paranoid, enveloping - the nervousness of the racing mind. Lyrically, the strongest moment on the record. I feel highly strung when listening to this right now, and I’ve had nothing stronger than a cup of tea, some toast and a multivitamin.

‘We are The Fall - Northern white crap that talks back’. Crap Rap 2. ‘Do not fuck us, we are frigid stars’. More mission statement/stall setting out business. No cap doffing here.  Segue into an OK version of ‘Like to Blow’, Not Bad, But The Peel Session Is Better (NBBTPSIB). I’m not in the mood to rehash that here, but we covered these sessions last week for if you’d like more information .

Rebellious Jukebox/No Xmas For John Quays/Mother-Sister/Industrial Estate - each and everyone of them is NBBTPSIB.

(Mother-Sister does however have the great little intro: “Errr what’s this song about?”, “Errrr, nothing”.)

I knew it!

Actually, on reflection, remove Mother-Sister from the NBBTPSIB pile and place it in its own Actually, The Album Version Is Better (ATAVIB) pile. This version is less sonically abrasive, but ups the doom quotient by a significant factor and increases the amount of dread per square inch to a dangerous level. I still don’t know what its about, but there’s a lot of disembodied poetry in the lines:

Reach or preach
It's all a diminished return
Now
Floorboard
Creaks

‘Underground Medicin’ opens nicely with a brilliant chanted intro, but fails to live up the initial promise, instead opting for bit of brisk murky noddling.

‘Two Steps Back’ though is a beautiful VU-esque dirge and a highlight, dense and taken in a twisted psychedelic direction with that lovely cheapo keyboard that we mentioned last week, played by the excellent Yvonne Pawlett, who will shortly leave, if I recall correctly, to become a vet. Deep, meditative, repetitive.

‘I still believe in the R and R dream, R and R as primal scream’ - a diamond in the lyrical rough of the title track - a musical snippet, which feels more of an afterthought.

Futures and Pasts - NBBTPSIB

We close with the excellent ‘Music Scene’, which is funky. Well it is to funk what photofit photographs are to passport photos - uncanny, wrong but there’s definitely a grain of resemblance. And of course there’s the Repetition. The narrative - another disjointed impression, venom spat out at an unnamed victim. Someone in the studio yells ‘Six minutes’, clearly wanting to get home to his fishfingers and chips. The band play on anyway - ‘Six Forty’. Chips will be getting cold. To quote The Clash - “it’s fucking long, innit?”, and musically at least, ‘Music Scene’ is the weird, squat dwelling, pasty faced, amphetamine dependent second cousin of the ‘Magnificent Seven’.

To summarise - a good album, not yet reaching the heights of excellence they will soon achieve, but miles better than most debut albums. A record that I like, but not one I love. A weirdo warped record that sonically owes more to more psychedelic sounds than to three chord punk orthodoxy.


* Which is a fine opportunity to relate the fact that Karl Burns was rumoured to have been literally on fire during his stint at PiL, when it was alleged that Jah Wobble had ignited his bed as he lay sleeping. However, this was apparently the misreporting of a simple "LSD fuelled live re-enactment of Space Invaders" (http://www.fodderstompf.com/MEMBERS/drummers.html)

Pete says:

Rightio - The Fall are a pop band.  Yes, they owe a massive debt to punk.  Yes, their hooks are unconventional - not melodic very often, but utilising rhythm, instrumentation, impact to catch the ear.  Yes, their lead singer's lyrics - though not top drawer here it has to be said - feel more like poetry at times… gah, no, scrap that… hold on -

OK - MES is clearly a cut above most other writers of lyrics.  Perhaps that's simply because he is wilfully different and therefore the attentive and curious listener will get dragged along in this tide of 'new', but more likely he just seems to snatch phrases and juxtapositions and images and turns of phrase and wrap them all up in a way that looks askance at the mirror with the listener on the other side…

… but to reiterate, and get back on track, lyrically this album is a little let-downish.  Yes, 'No Xmas For John Quays' combines a cheeky pun with a swish of character, which when offset with a frankly bonkers musical backing incorporating frenetic punk, stuttering stop/start confidence, and a brazen yet oddly indecipherable Christmasyness ends up a surprisingly bold sketch of a song.  Yes, Industrial Estate is a concise and clear evocation of concrete manual working mundanity.  It's probably the best song here to be honest, tight and clear and all hanging on a rhythm that provides it with propulsion, charm, and hook all in one go.  The spoken word track 'Live At The Witch Trials' impresses not only for its curiously poetic nature (and it really is pretty convincing as poetry), but also because MES is clearly a good performer of poetry.  And yes, the 'Crap Rap' that prefixes 'Like To Blow' is as good a statement of identity as any band has presented us:

We are the Fall
Northern white crap that talks back
We are not black. Tall.
No boxes for us.
Do not fuck us.
We are frigid stars.
We were spitting, we were snapping "Cop Out, Cop Out!"
as if from heaven.

… but over and above these standouts, the rest of the album's words, though never less than interesting, struggle to catch the ear too much.

However, don't get me wrong, its a good album.  Sonically we have big bass, spindly, wiry guitar that for the most part wins through with its eerie discords, and occasionally OTT drums (toms are mixed a wee bit high which can irritate).  And while the keyboard on track one sounds top, it's blippyness driving these tunes toward pop with wide, white, bloodshot eyes, by the final track you would gladly put your head through it.  Twice.  The only really painful musical misstep is Marc Riley's backing vocals - good lord - cf 'Two Steps Back' a dull, repetitive wander through vague drug-culture references which just manages to stay the right side of 'ok' until just before the end when Riley starts honking away with more enthusiasm than sense.  Urgh.

The good stuff lingers in the memory - 'Like To Blow', propelled along with a heartfelt 'sucker, sucker, sucker, sucker, sucker, sucker, sucker, sucker' has a real funky fiddly jerk to it, with a chorus that revels in its own leeriness.  'Frightened' makes for a marvellous opener, brooding and prowling.  It also acts as an indication that MES is no mere shouter - his phrasing in the chorus forces a hook out of something that otherwise would be simple recitation - though these 'I'm addled on drugs and really, it's not all that great' tunes aren't really going to last him forever.  And 'Rebellious Jukebox', as well as a terrific title, is a fairly belting number, catching the ear with odd changes.  And, again, MES knows exactly what he's doing… its clear that his vocals are unconventional (really?!  No shit?!) but it's controlled, considered…

The rest of the album is a collection of spirited nearly-greats.  'Underground Medecin' has a dull, cliched chorus but a terrific verse, 'Music Scene' has a very different feel to it, but the lyrics fail to inspire and there's more Riley honking.  It's all often fun, but hardly catches fire.

So basically, as an indication of the sort of thing that we might come to expect from The Fall, Live At The Witch Trials is both fascinating and essential.  We can sense MES growing in stature, using his intellect and his musical sense to force this band into something in his own image.  We can hear the bass beginning to dominate, and the music push at the edges of all sorts of things whilst retaining that essential hook 'o pop.  We can feel this lyrical outlook starting to coalesce into a new, exciting force in music.    We can hear a band searching for the now, looking for the real thing, yeah?

But they've not quite found it. Not quite.  And maybe its not this set of personnel who can do the job - all change on the good ship Fall?

1977/1978

... including -

Bingo Masters Breakout single

It's The New Thing Single

The '78 June and December Peel sessions

Dresden Dolls

and any live stuff we might get around to cramming in.

Pete says -

If one were to listen to the first five tracks released by the Fall you would think they were a fey/aggressive punk/pop/new-waveish band, focusing their lyrical attentions on character studies/really seriously dark ruminations/comedy. You'd think that they didn't care about the playing, which might be truly, truly punk, but some of the song structures are actually pretty peculiar and must have taken a little bit of work. You'd think the playing was pretty loose, but there are some bits that are so impressively tight that you wonder what the chuff was going on with all the duff notes. And you'd think "who the fuck is this guy… singing? talking? shouting?"

You'd think all this, and then some more, and still wind up unclear, sometimes unnerved, and at points pretty unimpressed. However, there's always something interesting, and even at its worst you think there's something under the surface waiting to establish itself. The recording of 'Psycho Mafia' is limp, but a live cut shows it not only to have balls, but also be a pretty propulsive bit of punk-pop. 'Bingo Masters Break-Out' leaves a sort of pointless taste in the mouth, but it has character and isn't afraid to be a bit silly (I approve). 'It's The New Thing' is an odd choice for a second single - it's bitty and a bit too clever musically - but has some brilliant lyrics -

The Worst died because of you
Along with some others too
Erasing off our rainbows
We are men, we have big toes!
It's the new leather thing
Crash smash crash ring

… well, brilliant lyrics if you dig non-sequiturs like I do.

The good stuff though is really good. 'Repetition' still stands up as genuinely funny, and fun, and bouncy goodness, with some properly good jokes -

This is the three R's
The three R's:
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

… and 'Various Times', though maybe overlong, and maybe a bit too pretentious for its own good, is really quite eerie and creeping, not being afraid to labour and let the music become a bedrock for the lyrics to jump from, and when those lyrics start brushing the quality that (we may well suspect) might be awaiting this band it really hits home. Little lines like "But I'm the sort that gets out of the bath with a dirty face" and "My head is full of lead / and the beer is so week/ since they got rid of time around here" might not seem like much on paper, but they have some sort of power in context and resonate, zinging around your brain… hummm, some of this stuff is actually really good.

Right, so the singles are a mixed bag, but show promise. The live stuff is scratchy, sometimes amateur, but as a document of a band finding its voice, illuminating. MES (oh! First time I've mentioned him by name here - for some reason I was holding off doing it) has already got that sneery, snotty, kid with anorak attitude though I doubt ever again will we hear him sounding even slightly apologetic ("another slow one" he says between tunes) - we even get banter! Marc Riley snaps a bass string - MES says 'this is the avant garde bit of the set' to which Riley chips in 'avant grarde a third sting'… and MES laughs! Christ, clearly early days…

Before I finish up, clearly for whatever reason The Fall enjoy the environment a Peel session can bring - the two 1978 one's have more beef to them than anything else here (all but one of the songs appear on next week's listening, so I'll speak a little more specifically about them then). Basically, if one is prepared to invest a bit of effort in eking out the glory of these songs its probably worth it (with the exception of Repetition, which is just class, and Various Times which is worthy of merit), but hardly the most inspiring opening slavo of a band's career.

Ed says -

I’m in a hotel on the outskirts of Brussels. It's the evening and I’m whiling it away before tomorrow’s conference. I undertake said whiling by drinking beer and flicking through the local television stations. There’s what appears to be a three hour panel show where local Flemish big shots discuss the day’s events, punctuated occasionally by live performances from local beat groups, lounge jazz ensembles and a satirist with large, ironic glasses who I must assume is casting a sideways glance with his wry Belgian eye over the day’s events. Boring! But I alight on it every few minutes as I cycle through the 11 available channels. There’s also a flashy Dutch import, a police procedural about a maverick detective from the Maastricht art fraud unit who shoots first and asks questions later. Unfortunately, the plot is incomprehensible - something to do with the a badly authenticated Mondrian and the accidental shooting of an art dealer at a gallery opening.

I continue to cycle through the channels until something remarkable does catch my eye - some sort of game show. Grown men dressed as penguins skitter about on a slippery rotating dais, desperately attempting to mark up points in a complicated scoring system, while flailing around in exactly the way you’d imagine disorientated grown men to flail around in when attired as large flightless, flippered birds. What really interests me though, is that all this is happening to a demented, claustrophobic soundtrack that to my ears sounds like it is played untutored, on a child’s keyboard operated by oven-mitted hands. This childish keyboard is backed with a bassline that appears not so much picked, as gouged. Spidery meandering guitar that never quite resolves. Toms are thumped tribally. Ranting over the top, is a voice somewhat between children’s puppet favourite Zippy from Rainbow and the people’s favourite large eyeballed urchin, Johnny from the Sex Pistols. This is tense, claustrophobic, irritable music that threatens but never delivers release. It suits the scene of penguin carnage perfectly. Instantly I am won over. The song, I discover is ‘Psycho Mafia’ and this is the first time I am exposed to the music of The Fall.



This is, of course, a massive lie. Although I’ve been to Brussels, it was never for a conference. My pitch for the Maastricht art fraud detective who doesn’t play by the rules never made it past the development stage, despite some strong words of encouragement from Channel Nederland 1.

Before you accuse me of wasting your time, this untruth actually has a dual purpose:

a) as a device for introducing the subject of The Fall in 77/78 - which is quite a slippery thing and affords few cracks in which to obtain a foothold

b) as a convoluted attempt to describe how the song ‘Psycho Mafia’ from The Fall’s debut single, ‘Bingo Master’s Breakout’ calls to my mind at least an aural equivalent of the sort of deranged, frenetic, uncontrollable and unpredictable ping-ponging one might see best exemplified in the weird televisual tournaments of the likes of ‘Its A Knock Out’ or ‘Jeux San Frontiers’.

And so we’re running. We’ve established there’s the song called ‘Psycho Mafia’, its by The Fall and it is off their first single. Additionally, I’ve established a long, unwieldy and slightly stupid set of comparisons in an attempt to describe said recording and my reactions to it. I don’t want to go too much in chronology or into trivia, as there are plenty of places you can read about that if you want to know more. Cold, hard facts are available should you want them. You can learn these and impress your friends by repeating them verbatim in pub conversation.

Psycho Mafia is also the most punky, in genre terms, that they’ll ever get. It’s also, as ‘they’ say, a proper good tune. Lyrically, it’s so-so. There is this idea, which is the promise and potential of punk. On paper, naiive outsider music performed by non-musicians who form in a day, put a single out the following week and disband within a month. Often, but not always, in practice a rough and ready rehash of the work of Chuck Berry, The Who and the other beat groups. The same R’n’R DNA - three power chords, four boys. One note guitar solos that are, however primitive, still guitar solos. Music of the fond reminiscence of Tony Parsons with which he no doubt bores his children silly with, before embarrassing himself by writing another tedious book about fatherhood or another tortured treatise about how difficult it is to be a man in the 21st century, or some other balls.

So - ‘Bingo Master’s Breakout’ - a collection of three songs. The music sounds terrifyingly sober, although the personnel who recorded it almost certainly were not. Its not completely naive - its not The Shaggs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY), building rock and roll from the ground up with the assembly instructions missing from the box and no reference points, but its also in no way your grandfather’s rock and roll.

We haven’t yet mentioned by name Mark Edward Smith (hereon referred to as MES), which is pretty ridiculous, right? If you’re coming at this retrospective (eurgh) with little prior knowledge, let me assure that this is indeed ridiculous. Just take it for granted. In future posts its pretty clear that MES = The Fall. Sure he will be ably assisted by personnel with varying levels of utility and more importantly, the sheer mental strength of character to survive the privilege/ordeal of being a member of The Fall group, but be in no doubt that there is only room for one commandant in this unit. However, at this point in time we have a situation that looks dangerously like a democracy - there’s a general lack of focus and clarity of ideas that begins to resolve once the more dictatorial business begins to appear. And you don’t really have to wait too long for said dictatorial business.

They’re a band that are still trying to find a sound, which is why ‘Psycho Mafia’ is kind of half cocked. A great couple of minutes, but a bit one dimensional lyrically. Above average, dumb punk rock. Its the other two songs that serve to establish musical and lyrical ideas that are ‘Fall-like’ and to push MES to the forefront, where he will remain and still remains to this day. Very importantly, they also sound genuinely unique.

One of these two songs is the title track ‘Bingo Master’s Breakout’. Musically, its a nursery rhyme played by a heavily medicated cabaret band. More importantly, it is the first of the many stories and character studies that run through the group’s output. MES intones the tale of a bingo master, worn down by the drudgery of his monotonous and wasted life who finally flipped out when his ‘holiday in Spain fell through’ and so he ended his life ‘with wine and pills’. Its a character no doubt recognisable from a WMC roll call and it’s a tight little vignette. The singsong nursery rhyme nature of the song only serves to heighten the ridiculous existence the bingo caller.

The other of these songs is ‘Repetition’, a manifesto if ever there was one. Chairman Mao dug repetition. President Carter loves repetition. I myself am extremely partial to repetition and also to ‘Repetition’. Perhaps its the influence of all those forward thinking German groups? Or its a way to prevent showing off, the fear of becoming King Crimson? Maybe to really get inside an idea, you have to loop it round a few times, adding, subtracting and comparing iterations. Possibly the best thing about ‘Repetition’ is that its a excellent wheat/chaff separator. By the third listen, I’d suggest that you will either think this is one of the finest pieces of recorded music that you will ever have the pleasure to hear, or that now is the ideal time to plough the car you are driving into a brick wall - anything to make the racket stop. Knowing your luck, you’ll be trapped in the mangled wreckage for a good thirty minutes while the still functioning CD player continues to play. Maybe at this point you’ll have a little chuckle at the bit where Smith delivers the killer line: ‘These are the three Rs, the three Rs - repetition, repetition, repetition’ and realise that hold on, this isn’t bad at all. Before passing out from massive blood loss.

If you stayed awake though, and if you were listening to this on the extended ‘Live At The Witch Trials’ CD (actual album review coming next week I think), then the next song you’d be hearing as you wait for the paramedics to arrive would be ‘Its The New Thing’. Sucks to be you - all smashed up and having to listen to this half-arsed jingle. This one’s a bit of a misfire, starting promisingly with a nice bit of jaunty Woolworths organ before degenerating into something a bit Buzzcock-y that would have been better realised by actually being performed by Buzzcocks (but maybe they could leave the organ in as its rather good). Lose the self-regarding music scene sniping lyrics too - this mini-genre pops up a bit in early Fall and generally doesn’t work in my opinion.  There’s also some extremely irritating ooh-wee-oohs at the end from Marc Riley, who seems to mistakenly believe he’s in the Modern Lovers. He’s not and he should stop showing off. In short, not good.

What is good though, extremely good, is the b-side, ‘Various Times’. You might have to request that a fireman turns it up so you can hear it over the noise of the cutting gear. An intensely claustrophobic, dense, almost dubby, tight seething little number. A little bit PiL. A little bit of the vibe of the porridge and amphetamine fuelled Scritti rhythm section perhaps. MES sounds very much in command now, conversational, although perhaps there’s still a final level of confidence to achieve as the band have stuck this gem on the B side of a very wack A side. Nevertheless, something’s coalescing here. Here we have a nice set of narrative snapshots - past, present, future, but slightly impenetrable as if we’re being shown an a scrap from a larger whole. We have a disillusioned German camp guard, a drop out from the late 70s, and then the future - 1980. Allusions to the banality of evil in 1940s and 1970s fascism. In 1980: “My head is full of lead/And the beer is so weak/Since they got rid of time around here...Time mistaken/Three places at once”. Some sort of temporal displacement? Listen to the whole thing, I think there’s a weird sci-fi thing going on. A distant cousin of ‘Wings’, which we will be dealing with in about six weeks, when we will be about a fifth of the way through this - bloody hell. Various Times also has the killer line: “But I'm the sort that gets out of the bath with a dirty face”, which feels very hard boiled, film noir, or perhaps an aphorism from a northern matriarch.

In 1978, The Fall also get to record their first two Peel Sessions. These can be found on the Peel Sessions box set, which is marvellous and definitely worth purchasing. The sessions often throw up versions that feel more essential than official album/single releases. There’s a good little booklet that comes with it which tells you the history of it all, so you can either read that or wikipedia/google it. Am attempting in some way to steer around the rehash zone.

Firstly, these sessions show The Fall as a much more dynamic and together unit than the preceding singles, particularly the first one. If I recall correctly its because the single material was quite dated by the time it was release, whereas the two sessions were what was current. I think that’s right. I could be wrong. If I am, then I’m sorry, but only God can judge me.

Session One - June 1978 and Boney M’s ‘Rivers of Babylon’ is number one in the UK and a massive international hit. Its original writer, Brent Dowe of The Melodians, isn’t initially credited, only the German disco cash in puppetmasters . Brent Dowe is living in a fucking hut. It’s a shit business.

Anyway, I digress - its June 1978 and its session number one. OK, this cheap keyboard sound is getting a little wearing now. It was so charming when I started writing this, but now its buzzing around away in my brain. Tense nervous headache. This is what trepanning might be like. ‘I understand but I don't see it’ (Futures Past) a thrash racket, angst - perhaps the railing against being trapped in your allotted space, similar theme to ‘Bingo Masters...’. Mother/Sister - I have no idea what’s it about, its a racket again, but a lovely racket. Premium top of the range deluxe scream from MES at the end - think he might be experimenting with the high pitched yelp he enjoys utilising a little further down the line. Rebellious Jukebox - yes we have something interesting here. ‘Taxi for Mr Nelson’, a sense of urgency, nice little hook, Riley’s backing vocals (I assume its him) this time are restrained and less try-hard. Its urgent but insouciant. How do they do that? ‘Ind Est. Ind Est.’ (Industrial Estate). Another early classic. Anti-glam. The drudgery and danger of labour - ‘the crap in the air will fuck up your face’. Medicate your way through the thankless slog that you’re trapped in - ‘if you get a little depression, ask the doctor for some valium’. A fantastic, sarcastic sing along chorus - ‘Yeah yeah, industrial estate!’. Ace.

By the time we get to the second session, December 1978, changes have occurred. Not yet to the line up but more to the whole attitude. Here we have a sleeker, fitter, tighter Fall, helmed by a captain who has his hands firmly on the tiller. Vocal delivery of supreme confidence while the band propels everything along at a vigorous pace, probably due to the addition of Marc Riley on bass. “Mistaken for sarcasm, even belligerence” - ‘Put Away’ is cryptic, but worms away through repetition, repetition, repetition. ‘Mess of My’ was never released. Seems like more music scene sniping, but with added bite, a sinister every advancing churn with a rant.  The highlight is the terribly punning and beautifully demented ‘No Xmas For John Quays’. ‘Make sure the album this is on is in your Christmas stocking’. To my ears its another one of the frenetic pinballing songs of a similar genus to Psycho Mafia, but with added hilarity in the form of an unhinged Frankie Lymon impersonation in the middle of it - “Tell meee whyyyyyyy, is it sooooooo”. Presumably there was often no X-Mas for Frankie Lymon either, what with his deep appreciation for the horse. A great spoken intro: “The X in X-mas is a substitute cross for Christ” - but you know all this already cause you’re sick to death of hearing this record every bloody December sandwiched in between Slade and Wizzard. Finally ‘Like to Blow’, a punk remnant, a cut off. A short tale of a shut in. A Spurs fan who stays at home all day and who professes to “live on snacks, potatoes in packs".

That’s it for this one. I’m avoiding the live stuff unless I think it particularly notable - so you might get to hear me getting excited about Iceland 1982 in a few weeks. Anyway, what I particularly like about this period in The Fall is the rapid pace of evolution - from a chaotic, slightly better than average punk band into something unique and confident. You can see it happening in front of your eyes and by the end of the next review we’ll be into the beginning of an unparalleled run of excellent work.

Spotify link for this week: http://open.spotify.com/user/edpisco/playlist/2jGrWCHQnM3L6nHu8UeYi0