Track of the Day; 25/1/18
Psykick Dancehall - The Fall, 1979
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3upVG_Bj3A
R.I.P. Mark E. Smith
The Fall
Montage
Fantastic Life: The 20 Greatest Fall Songs In No Order Whatsoever. No. 1 - “Fantastic Life”
I can’t, in conscience, not do *something*. Attempting a cover version of a Fall song is, in my view, a fool’s errand and a musical tribute of any other kind would almost certainly miss the point. So, this is all I can do. Inevitably, this will be an entirely personal selection but the first has come up so many times in the last 48 hours that it really chose itself.
As was called out in a clutch of reviews of the recent Singles 1978-2016 box set, it’s remarkable to think that this was a b-side. Then one considers the red-eyed, Force Ten, noise blast of its A-side “Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul” and you sort-of see why. “Fantastic Life” is one of those absolutely classic Fall numbers which hinges around Smith’s sly but rheumatic worldview, a simple repeating musical figure and the quality of the performances. Pitched fast without seeming hasty, “Fantastic Life” scores full points on all fronts. As is so often the case, the main riff is in Steve Hanley’s bass with Marc Riley’s organ prodding insistently into the core. Scanlon slashes away with an almost funky precision keeping it low-key, adding to and enhancing the rhythmic attack and adding a glittering little melody in the breaks. And there’s the drums. Oh, the drums on this. Paul Hanley has commented that he was sidelined at the recording session but that was in relation to “Lie Dream”. This certainly sounds like both he and Karl Burns are having a ball; the drums sound less like stick on skin and more like meteor on planet. Smith rises to this with a delightfully encrypted lyric and a superb performance, raising his shout to that point where in nearly breaks into a screech but doesn’t, pitching himself at the very edge of exploding…and that’s how the whole track sits, right at the point of collapse but, by sheer willpower and strength of will, staying together. It’s absolutely thrilling.
A few things to note in the lyric.
“Style’s too easy to buy nowadays
And there’s interference with the mail”The first line would come to fruition in the group’s next single “Look, Know” and the second would return repeatedly, most explicitly with “Telephone Thing” where Smith moved from the Royal Mail to British Telecom (as was in 1990) as his focus. A certain Orwellian theme lurks regularly in Smith’s work of course but it was rare for him to be quite so specific. The opening line is “Got eighteen months for espionage“, harks back to “New Face In Hell” where the government are fingered for Orwellian behaviour - that our correspondent here got a mere 18 months inside suggests someone was considered rather less dangerous than the wireless enthusiast…
Anyway, here’s the song. FEEL it first - that attack, that thrust, that insistence, the vague wobbles on the high wire. This is The Fall at one of several peaks; they were a powerful, fearless 12 legged monster in 1981/1982 and this is one of the prime entries from that imperial phase.
Week Fifty Two Point Nine: The End Of Fifty Two Weeks Of The Fall.
I’m finally done. Sat in the same place as I was three hundred and sixty three days ago when I pressed play on Bingo Master’s Break-Out for the first time, but now I’ve listened to every one of The Fall’s studio albums, EPs, and live albums that have been considered noteworthy enough to receive Wikipedia pages (and a couple that haven’t). The only way I could get more invested would be to listen to all of the singles (an extra forty one releases), and the Peel Sessions box set (over seven hours long). I don’t know if I’ll ever do either. The second one seems more likely because The Peel sessions I’ve heard have been great, but I’m not sure if I can put myself through it.
Ok then. Final count! Pedantic and nerdy stats that I find interesting but everyone else finds boring. Fifty three records in my iTunes, clocking in at five hundred and sixty six songs, four and a half gigabytes in size, with a duration of thirty nine hours, forty two minutes, and 39 seconds. One thousand, seven hundred and eighty five plays on last.fm, putting them fifteenth in my charts overall, above Moving Mountains and below This Town Needs Guns. They’re way out in front for the whole year, six hundred plays above the second place, Los Campesinos!.
The Marshall Suite’s been played the most, with seventy two plays, though The Real New Fall LP follows close behind on seventy one. No Xmas For John Quays remains the most played track at sixteen, though that’s mostly because there’s so many versions of it. The highest played song that only appears on one record is The Marshall Suite’s Birthday Song.
Of the fifty three records, I’ve picked out eighteen that I’d happily keep hold of and listen to again. That’s a hit rate for The Fall of 34%. Being generous, I’ve chucked in two more to give them a more generous 38%, as well as conveniently providing a nice round number of twenty records. Ranking them all like I have in previous quarters just feels a bit pointless and arbitrary, and it feels a little bit more final to instead provide, in reverse order, a one hundred percent definitive and authoritative list of my top twenty records by The Fall:
20 – Last Night At The Palais
19 – Room To Live
18 – Ersatz G.B.
17 – The Peel Session EP
16 – The Infotainment Scan
15 – Your Future Our Clutter
14 – Live At The Witch Trials
13 – Grotesque
12 – Seminal Live
11 – Extricate
10 – Bend Sinister
9 – Cerebral Caustic
8 – Levitate
7 – The Remainderer
6 – Hex
5 – Fall Heads Roll
4 – The Real New Fall LP
3 – This Nation’s Saving Grace
2 – The Marshall Suite
1 – I Am Kurious Oranj
I know Hex being outside of the top five will be scandalous for some, but I don’t think the number one will be a surprise for anyone who’s been following this all year, although the top three are all very nearly equal and interchangeable. Those are three I would say are essential listening, but to be fair, the top seven are records that I’d recommend to anyone. After that… less so. But I’d stand behind all twenty of those as solid choices. If you feel like you need more than that, then I guess you deserve everything you get.
This feels even more anticlimactic than Live: Uurop was as the last one to listen to – I’m not sure what to say, exactly, to sum up the year without repeating things I’ve said before. What have I learned from the whole thing? Have I learned anything? I think, yes, actually, I have learned things from listening to The Fall for an entire year. Mostly I’ve learned things as a reaction to The Fall, rather than because of them, if that makes sense.
I’ve learned, or maybe just realised long-held beliefs more fully, about what I value in music as a form of art and community, and it’s pretty much the opposite of The Fall. Leaving your band members at the side of the road and endlessly churning out records with little to no value is not admirable. Continuously trying to change, grow, evolve, and make challenging music is, on the other hand, pretty admirable, but I don’t think The Fall achieve that very consistently, even if it is my favourite thing about them when they manage to do it. Listening to The Fall has made me want to go back to bands that have achieved that creative ideal a little better – Fugazi, Fucked Up, Aphex Twin, and Joan of Arc stand out especially.
Similarly, bands that provide a sense of safety and community that seems beyond The Fall have been a source of comfort all year – Iron Chic, Los Campesinos! and, most of all, Against Me! and The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die have provided that endlessly. So I think I understand my own tastes in music a little better now, what draws me to some bands and drives me away from others.
My other favourite thing about The Fall is… hard to explain, but the feeling of danger and uncertainty that surrounds them. Being in The Fall in their prime was a risk, and something that not even Mark E. Smith seemed to have any control over. They lived, as a band, with their backs up against the wall, lashing out at everything around them and just trying to survive. You don’t really get bands like that anymore – just like there will never be another Beatles, there will definitely never be another Fall – and it makes them exciting to listen to and get swept up by. But that aspect is both caused by, and causes, some of the completely shitty parts of The Fall.
At the end of the day, I couldn’t tell you if I liked The Fall or not. Do the slew of awful records and Mark E. Smith’s notoriously colossally dickheaded behaviour towards those in his employ outweigh the seven records I’d consider to be classic? Do they make it all worthwhile? The answer is… a tricky one. I mean, Smith isn’t Varg Vikernes, he’s never burned down a church or planned terrorist plots or, y’know, murdered anyone. But he’s not Evan Weiss, current contender for the nicest man in punk rock, or Ian Mackaye, lifetime holder of the most ethical, either. It should just be the music that matters, but so much of the music is legitimately bad, or at least just very, very misguided. If every record was gold, it would make it easier to divorce Mark E. Smith from the records he makes, but his personality, and the circumstances in which he chooses to make music, are stamped so firmly across every single one. Sometimes that pays off, sometimes it doesn’t.
Basically, if I was to sum up the entire year, how I feel about Mark E. Smith and The Fall, how I feel about everything, the answer would be: confused. Are The Fall a great band? Are they a terrible one? Are those records really great, or are they just great, y’know, for a Fall record? Would I call myself a Fall fan? A casual Fall fan? A curious observer? A Fall appreciator? A well-wisher? Fall-sympathetic? Is Mark E. Smith really cursed with the power of precognition, like some would have you believe, doomed to predict future events through the medium of rambled lyrics? Is he the punk rock king of the lizard men, hiding in plain sight while he waits for the day the lizard people uprising begins? Is he the greatest musician the country, even the world, has ever produced? Or is he just the old chap in the corner of the pub, muttering incoherently in to his pint, forgotten by the rest of the world? Is he all of these things? None? I don’t fuckin’ know, man. Do you? Does anyone?
(via markechacha)
Week Twenty Four: Shift-Work.
Shift-Work came out in 1991, the year punk broke, the year Nevermind dropped, the year riot grrrl got started. Devo, Talk Talk, Gorilla Biscuits, The Replacements, and Talking Heads all split. Pearl Jam, Cypress Hill, Nation Of Ulysses, Tupac, Richard D James, and the Smashing Pumpkins all put out their first records, whilst Fugazi were on full-length number three (or two, depending on if you count 13 Songs, y’know?) and Sonic Youth were riding on the high of Goo, their first major label record. 1991 is, oh god, the year Reel Big Fish formed. Emperor formed that year, too, kicking off the second wave of Black Metal. I never thought I’d get to reference Reel Big Fish and Emperor in the same paragraph. But I mention all of this fairly disparate stuff to highlight the fact that 1991 was a fucking BIG year for music. So much hugely influential and important stuff was going on, a lot of scenes finding their voice, a lot of bands hitting their stride, a lot of things unexpectedly hitting the mainstream. A lot was changing. But what were The Fall doing, I wonder, with bated breath.
The Fall have always been a constant throughout any cultural turbulence. Although always popular with John Peel and various other critics, their chart performances were never really anything to shout about, and they always just did their own thing, albeit within a channel that has its limits. Which is cool – you could never accuse The Fall of selling out. I was very much expecting them to keep plugging away in the same vein throughout the 90s, but this period of musical unrest captured them too – Extricate picked up on the electronic Madchester vibes of the very end of the 80s, and I think it was the first time when their music progression didn’t feel entirely natural. Like they were going for a certain sound, actively pursuing it, instead of just settling in to the sound that felt most comfortable at the time.
They lost two members during the Extricate tour, including their keyboard player, making this a largely four-piece-Fall effort. I was actually hoping for some stripped back returns to Fall-basics, but with a few of the more listenable tendencies they’d learned along the way – this was their highest charting effort at that point, after all. But, no, Shift-Work builds on Extricate’s Happy Mondays-leanings and, relatively speaking, obviously, is just poppy as hell. Edinburgh Man is their breakaway pop hit, and this is essentially the Fall’s summer record. It’s an odd experience and I’m not sure if it totally works. I mean, it fit in kind of nicely with this week’s amazing weather, but Great Cynics fit in so much better, so Shift-Work didn’t really get played a whole lot in the situations that would have suited it best.
Although I did say nothing really grabbed me on Extricate, the record was, as a whole, a fairly engaging listen. Shift-Work is… less so. This might be the first time I’ve just totally zoned out on a Fall album and completely forgotten what I was listening to as it sunk in to the background. There’s better moments, yeah, and worse moments too, but in general? It’s a bit of a haze. I guess that actually just means it’s one of their most listenable yet – it’s not that weird, at all, and it sorely lacks the edge of their best work. Obviously in some ways I’m happy that The Fall seem to be well past making records that are 20-70% fucking awful at this point because it means I’m angry less of the time, but at least that was a bit more interesting, you know? I guess The Fall just can’t win. Or I can’t win. Or neither of us.
So, yeah. To bring it full circle, The Fall’s contribution to the big, important year of 1991 feels like a fairly minimal one, and they may have ridden it more than contributed to it - their highest chart position yet may have had something to do with both the combination of the ever-increasing interest in underground alternative/indie/punk music, and borrowing from the current mainstream Madchester buzz. Sure, there’s stuff on Shift-Work that sounds like a blueprint for a lot of alt-pop music that would come out in the 90s (Rose in particular. Probably the best on the record, too), but unlike the Pixies and Pavement, they’d probably have got their without The Fall’s input, and it feels like they’re bowing to other influences rather than being the outlandish influence that the outsiders look to for inspiration.
It feels like The Fall are having a bit of an identity crisis through one of my favourite periods for music, like they’re just mucking around making tolerable music, and not really giving it their all anymore. With that in mind, Shift-Work is an apt title - The Fall, and the act of making Fall records, as I’ve mentioned in the past, has always seemed like more of a job to Mark E. Smith rather than a creative output. It feels, at this point, like he needs a holiday.
Week Eleven Point Five: The Mark E. Smith Pocket Zine Of Wisdom by Jean McEwan
So last Sunday, the day after writing my spiel on Room To Live, my partner and I hit up Leeds Zine Fest for the second year running. It was held at Wharf Chambers again, Leeds’ premiere co-op bar and venue, pretty much one of my favourite places ever, and it’s always completely rammed when they have zine events, with a really great community vibe. Whoever supplied the playlist slipped in some Algernon Cadwallader while we were there, too, so I was pretty satisfied with the whole experience.
Anyway, one of my purchases was this bad boy. To be honest, I’ve seen it around before – it was on a zine table at an art exhibition that I think I referenced in an earlier week – there was a performance from an underwhelming noise musician and we got drunk at a Wetherspoons in Bradford afterwards – but it was way more expensive there so I couldn’t be doing with it. On this occasion, though, I had a chat to the zinester who put it together, and only had to fork over a pound, so I couldn’t really say no this time. Following the Beacons announcement and my weird fuckin’ Mark E. Smith dream, I’m starting to feel like The Fall are following me around a little bit. Makes sense to go along with it and purchase my own Mark E. Smith Pocket Zine Of Wisdom to carry with me at all times, so I can whip it out when I feel like my surroundings aren’t confusing and repetitive enough.
It’s a micro-zine, if you’re interested in the technical aspects of zineship, which is a little eight page zine made out of one piece of A4 paper, one cut and a bunch of folds, and it contains six Mark E. Smith quotes that can be offer support and counsel in any situation, sort of like a comfort blanket. From Manchester. Jean McEwan, who put the thing together, described it to me as being like The Little Book Of Calm for Fall fans, which kind of makes me want to eat it to see if I turn in to Mark E. Smith, or at least gain the power to ramble incoherently to music. It contains such nuggets of wisdom as “I’m not saying I know what I’m doing all the time. I don’t. But I do believe in what I’m doing. That’s the difference” which provides massive amounts of insight in to The Fall in general, as well as “99.9% of people with a healthy diet will eventually die” which offers no real insight in to anything at all, but did manage to shut a co-worker up today when he was banging on about nutrition and why only ever eating houmous for lunch is an awful idea (it isn’t).
You can check out Jean McEwan’s work at jeanmcewan.com. She told me at the zine fair that she’s working on a project about weird Fall gig experiences and I bet some of you would be in to that. For now, though, The Mark E. Smith Pocket Zine Of Wisdom will accompany me as I make my way through the world, trying to cope with my horrendous life decision to listen to every Fall record in order.
Record Store Day 19/4! ‘The Fall - White Lightning’ on 180 g translucent vinyl in silver foil cover!
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/572379433863717732/
(via thefallthings)
“…the large mass surrounding the stage start grumbling loudly about how they were being taken for a ride…as if they deserved better for their entertainment dollar…god, if these people only had a clue as to what they really deserve.”
JIMMMY JOHNSON’S WEEK OF CLUB GOING PAIN CONTINUES, April 4 1985: 29 YEARS AGO ON THIS DATE IN FUCKIN’ RECORD REVIEWS HISTORY!
FORCED EXPOSURE 7/8 Summer 1985 (page 7) JIMMY JOHNSON, Editor
