Anthony's Album Guide: The Fall, pt. 1

My handy-dandy super-subjective rating scale is explained here. 

Live At The Witch Trials (1979) 8
Dragnet (1979) 8
Totale’s Turns (It’s Now Or Never) (1980) 8
Grotesque (After The Gramme) (1980) 8
77-Early Years-79 (1981) 9
Slates EP (1981) 8
Hex Enduction Hour (1982) 8
A Part Of America, Therein 1981 (1982) 8
Room To Live (1982) 8
Perverted By Language (1983) 8
The Wonderful And Frightening World Of.... (1984) 7
This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985) 8
Hip Priests And Kamerads (1985) 7
Bend Sinister (1986) 7
Palace Of Swords Reversed (1987) 7
The Frenz Experiment (1988) 7
I Am Kurious Oranj (1988) 7
Seminal Live (1989) 4
458489 ASides (1990) 8
458489 BSides (1990) 6
Totally Wired - The Rough Trade Anthology (2002) 6

There are few groups in rock more inexplicable than The Fall. The most immediately striking aspect of their sound was leader Mark E Smith’s barrage of lyrics, barked in an unapologetic Mancunian accent, complete with a trademark “-ah” tacked on the end of more lines than not. But, despite loving the band since middle school (I bought 458489 ASides based their stature in rock mags and album guides), I don’t think I could quote more than a handful of words from any song. It’s not that there isn’t narrative detail, cultural references, political observation and more in the dense, obtuse code. I just enjoy it primarily as dense, obtuse code. The Fall were obscenely prolific for their nearly forty years of existence, despite a notorious propensity for line-up changes (Smith was the only original member by 1980, and over 60 people were able to claim membership before his death in 2017). They evolved with the times - and those line-up changes - but always sounded like the Fall, and overwhelmingly sounded good. “If it’s me and your Granny on bongos, then it's a Fall gig,” as Smith put it. 

You might assume such consistency means Smith was largely responsible for their music, but he didn’t play an instrument! Though he had his fair share of solo writing credits, those claims must have been fits of resentful pique towards sidepeople, or “based on original melodies whistled” like on Garth Marengi’s Darkplace. Not that Smith’s vocals were particularly melodic. Despite this dependence on musicians willing to both contribute considerably and tolerate his unapologetically abusive manner (he was not above dressing people down on stage or even fucking with their amps mid-song), the two most famous members of the band not named Mark E Smith, ’79-’82 guitarist Marc Riley and ’83-’88 guitarist/then-wife Brix Smith, are far better known for their respective radio & tv hosting gigs in England than their music. No disrespect to offshoots like Riley’s Creepers or The Blue Orchids, but you have to really know your British underground rock to even say “oh, they were good!” 

Those are just some of the reasons it wouldn’t be unfair to suggest Mark E Smith was like a cross between Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson (sans flute) and James Brown. Verbally profuse, bafflingly important bandleaders with idiosyncratic ideologies and sensibilities, making noise that barely even qualified as music to a lot of ears in their day. The Fall also mixed Tull’s arch galumph with Brown’s taste for irrepressible, patience-testing groove. This might sound at odds with being one of the premiere “post-punk” bands in music history, but “post-punk” just means you clearly heard the Sex Pistols or the Ramones before making art-rock. Smith’s snide declarative style would have been unthinkable without Johnny Rotten’s precedent, but Smith probably thought he had a better bookshelf and record collection from day one.

Another quirk: despite owning almost their entire 20th century discography in college (I never got my hands on 1991’s Shift-Work), I now believe they were best right out of the gate. Unless you have a real penchant for esoteric artistry, the first album I’d throw at the curious is a compilation usually called Early Fall 77-79 or 77-Early Years-79, containing their first five singles. They weren’t fucking around when they named their first song “Repetition,” announcing it’s “in the music and we’re never gonna lose it!” One might be able to notice when original guitarist Martin Bramah leaves halfway through the compilation, Riley moving up from bass and Steven Hanley taking over the four-string (where he’d stay until an on-stage brawl in 1997). The sound gets a little groovier, and less thrashy. Or you might not. After all, that’s Bramah on “Various Times,” a tribute to Jimmy Castor’s “Troglodyte” that goes back to 1940 Berlin to consider inhumanity, instead of prehistory to get down. And that’s Hanley on the chaotic “Rowche Rumble,” which I only recently realized was about hating the pharmaceutical industry (“while condemning speed and grass/they got an addiction like a hole in the ass”). I’d make sure you get a version of the comp with “Last Orders” and “Stepping Out” from a ‘78 live various artists 10-inch, as “Stepping Out” might be their best garage-pop number, even better than the Paul Revere & The Raiders hit of the same name! With atypically simple anthemicism, Smith declares this bookworm’s gotta boogie over a “96 Tears” chug, joyfully adding “wowowowowowow-WOW! Wow wow WOW!”

If you can’t find Early Fall, the 2CD reissue of their studio debut full-length, Live At The Witch Trials, includes their first two singles, “Last Orders”/“Stepping Out,” two John Peel radio sessions (Peel adored them) and a ’78 live gig. It’s more than I need, but a worthy portrait of the band that grew from Smith, Bramah, and keyboardist Una Baines’ book club after they went and saw the Sex Pistols. Trials’ five minute opener “Frightened” makes clear they’re no mere punks (on the finale, Smith shouts when they’ve hit six minutes of an eventual eight), though the scathing speed of “Rebellious Jukebox” and “No Xmas For John Quays” confirms punk’s still in their toolbox. Some make a lot out of Smith calling his verbiage a “rap,” but that’s just a reminder “rap” used to mean talking a lot. Plus, “Crap Rap 2” says The Fall are “Northern white crap that talks back/ we are not black,” the kind of gratuitous announcement of racial identity that would occasionally bite them in the ass.

The Early Fall singles not on Witch Trials have since been tacked on the band’s second 1979 album, Dragnet, along with some wack alternate takes. Dragnet is essentially the debut of The Fall as Mark E Smith’s art-boogie band, new members (and ex-roadies) Hanley and rhythm guitarist Craig Scanlon not even 20 years old. It’s solid, if murky, stuff, but blurs with Totale’s Turns (It’s Now Or Never), their first (mostly) live album and first release for Rough Trade. Totale’s gives a welcome, manic twist to some of Dragnet’s more middling tracks, bracketing them with choice renditions of singles and a nearly 8 minute blast through “John Quays.” Which album you prefer likely depends on whether you like Dragnet’s near-goth “Before The Moon Falls” or the boisterous, kazoo-graced “That Man” on Turns more.

The Riley-led combo (Steve Hanley’s brother Paul now on drums) came into its own on the 1980 singles “How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’,” possibly the first rockabilly song about a has-been sci-fi writer (“The Observer just about sums him up/ e.g. self-satisfied, smug”), and “Totally Wired,” hardly the first punk song about chugging coffee and pills, but a great one. The concurrent Grotesque (After The Gramme) has more great punk (“Pay Your Rates”) and rockabilly (“The Container Drivers”), and more lyrics that could easily include an “e.g.” “The NWRA” is a triumphant, hypnotic, 9-minute climax, if you can forgive the glib co-option of naming one’s fantasy of a failed uprising against the Queen “The North Will Rise Again.” And Smith would only get more glib.

The Slates EP (which I got on CD in the ‘90s, combined with the dandy Chicago show A Part Of America Therein, 1981) is a tighter take on the same sound; “Fit And Working Again” doesn’t come off like an ironic sentiment at all. Annoyed by Rough Trade, Smith took the band to the far less known Kamera Records, who were probably quicker to kiss his ass.

Karl Burns, the band’s drummer on Witch Trials, initially rejoined for that ’81 US tour, as Paul Hanley was too young for a work visa. The pair wound up playing side by side afterward, giving the Fall an even more mighty rumble. The new line-up first dropped the “Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul” single, a top 20 hit in New Zealand! Then came Hex Enduction Hour, a massive feast of percolation, jangle, rattle and clatter highlighted by the epic “Hip Priest,” the racing, contemptuous blitz of “Mere Pseud Mag. Ed,” and “Winter,” a magisterial portrait of streetside mundanity split over both album sides, worthy of Astral Weeks. It also has Smith asking "where are the obligatory [REDACTED]" on the otherwise tremendous intro “The Classical,” ruining the song for me personally (and allegedly costing them a contract with Motown!), even if it’s just a “joke” about backing bands from the POV of the ignorant. “Who Makes The Nazis” blames “balding smug [ALSO REDACTED],” among others, and there could be easily be more hate speech flung around elsewhere in the discography that I never noticed. Even skipping those songs (and the redaction-free but filler-full “Iceland”), Hex stands as my favorite Fall full-length. But I do skip them, and that keeps it from being the monumental accomplishment it would otherwise be. If resenting puerile shock tactics that stain subcultural touchstones and only serve to further alienate the alienated makes me a soft-skinned snowflake, so be it. I’d rather do that than cover “The Classical” while leaving out the [REDACTED], like Pavement did, white-washing Smith’s cavalier scabrousness in the name of trebly guitars or whatever. Harumph!

The Room To Live sessions were intended for a single, until Smith chose to experiment with unrehearsed songs and be a dick about who was invited to jam each night. Unless you care about Smith’s perspective on the Falklands, it doesn’t really cohere into more than Another Hex Enduction Half Hour, but I dig the horn appearances. Hip Priests And Kamerads, a collection of singles, album tracks and live renditions from that productive year (just one year!) on Kamera, would be a lot easier to endorse if it didn’t have both [REDACTED]s on it. Accepting Rough Trade was better run, if less deferential, Smith returned to the label. Further proof of Smith’s mercenary nature came from Marc Riley’s dismissal: Smith said he did it at Riley’s wedding, Riley says Smith told him a month later, suggesting he skip a European tour to see if the band actually needed him. Notably, neither tells a story where Smith isn’t a huge asshole.

The ‘83 band didn’t need Riley, though, releasing two singles (containing more barely scrutable tales of politics, time travel and footy) and Perverted By Language, technically the debut of Smith’s new American wife Brix, though she only appears on two tracks (one gleefully interminable, the other just grating). As such, Language, their murkiest album since Dragnet, is the one chance to appreciate the Scanlon/Hanley/Hanley/Burns chemistry in isolation. “I Feel Voxish” such a groove I’m pretty sure LCD Soundsystem stole it for “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” Unfortunately, the “Winter”-esque meditation “Garden,” where the interplay between Scanlon and Steve Hanley is so simple yet endlessly bewitching, ends with Smith screaming “Jew on a motorbike!” for over a minute. It arguably doesn’t require redacting, but provides another sad reminder of the guy’s commitment to dull provocation. Admittedly, addicts of this kind of goth-adjacent lurch and holler are used to overlooking such things.

(If you’re not interested in picking up 2CD reissues padded with live shit, the Rough Trade singles before and after the Kamera year can be found on Palace Of Swords Reversed. Most are also on disc one of the nearly career-spanning 500,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong compilation from 2004, but so is “The Classical.” The 2CD Totally Wired: The Rough Trade Anthology smartly uses A Part Of America, Therein to include some Kamera klassics - and thankfully not “The Classical”! Unfortunately, it doubles down literally on Palace’s lack of chronological logic and arbitrary inclusion of album tracks). 

If you’re sick of hearing about alternate versions, too bad! The following albums for Beggars Banquet uniformly featured different tracklistings in their LP, cassette and CD versions, attaching concurrent As and Bs as space allowed. Ex-Abbey Road tape operator and XTC producer John Leckie helmed The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall, helping Brix Smith unlock an unprecedentedly psychedelic palette for the band. “Oh! Brother” - their first single on Beggars and the first Fall song I ever heard - must have scandalized the pop-phobic, with the next, “C.R.E.E.P.,” too cutesy even for me. Similarly, side one of Wonderful is a gas, but Mark E Smith gets lost in the often annoying swirl of the B. Ironically, the CD perks up at the end with an 8 minute song about trying to find one’s belt. The Fall, ladies and gents. The Fall.

Mark sounds far more assured on This Nation’s Saving Grace, the highlight of the Brix/Beggars era. Losing Paul Hanley on second drums, but gaining an all-purpose 6th man in Simon Rogers, the album deftly hops from familiar raucous rockabilly (“Spoilt Victorian Child”) to sinister trance-dance (“L.A.”) without feeling like a grab-bag of tracks. Oddly, a slice of “experimental” art-loop twaddle where Mark quotes house painters complaining about him might be the album’s adorable peak, and proof he’d learned how to weave around the less spartan, more melodic soundtrack. Once a raconteur working himself up into a shriek, Smith was now capable of covering Gene Vincent or reducing himself to a sound effect without losing steam.

Bend Sinister provides a mid-80s twist on the gloom of Dragnet and Perverted By Language, thin drum programming bringing them awfully close to Sisters Of Mercy territory. Not that goths would want two takes of the synth-whistle-hooked “Shoulder Pads” (one’s fun, but plenty) and a five minute stomp where Brix caps her off-key background vocals by shouting “banana!” (a bridge too far). Despite six people on the cover (Rogers - though producing - replaced by Marcia Schofield, and prodigal drummer Karl Burns replaced by pro drummer Simon Wolstencroft), The Frenz Experiment opens with Mark ruing he has less than five “Frenz.” The sound is thinner (Leckie’s gone), but still pop: covers of the Kinks and R. Dean Taylor hit the UK Top 40! The uncredited Spinal Tap cover, with new lyrics about spying on a German athlete’s brother Gert, was not a single. In fact, the album might be a concept album about having paranoid fantasies while on tour. That or Smith found little lyrical inspiration beyond touring (“The Steak Place,” “Get A Hotel”) and paranoid fantasies (“Guest Informant,” “Bremen Nacht”). Nonetheless, for an album where the band chants “Oswald defense lawyer embraces the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain,” The Frenz Experiment - their first UK Top 20 album - is quite lively!

Going pop despite being The Fall, the next logical step was to score a ballet. Future CBE Michael Clark had already used the band’s music in performances (see that video clip above), but now Clark and his company would be performing alongside the group for a whole show, as they celebrated the rise of William Of Orange, covered William Blake’s “Jerusalem” and basically acted like The Fall. "Big New Prinz” and “Wrong Place, Right Time” are hard rock highlights on I Am Kurious Oranj (naturally, because ballet!), and the experiments with reggae are surprisingly fun (again, ballet!). The other tracks sound like Mark dutifully nattering over Brix songs, because that’s what they are. Seminal Live, not remotely seminal and only half-live, exists primarily to let the band leave Beggars Banquet, and suggest why Brix left the band (and Mark). 458489 ASides is a proud one disc testament to the band’s unexpected second (third?) phase, with 458489 BSides two discs of occasionally redundant but enjoyable apocrypha, peppered with a hidden classic or three (“Australians In Europe,” “Sleep Debt Snatches”).

Next time (someday): the band slows down, taking over twenty-five years to record another twenty albums.

Early Fall and Hex Enduction Hour are respectively at 166 and 219 on my Top 300 Albums of All Time, ah. I'm telling you this because I've found people are more inclined to discuss and share reviews if there's a quantitative element, ah, at the top or bottom they can easily debate. Prove me right, ah! Direct correspondence-ah can be shipped off to anthonyisright at gmail dot com, ah.