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@markechacha
I got another copyright infringement notice today. This time for stuff I posted years ago when I was an admin on FuckYeahTheFall. Again it was a post with a credit to the photographer and a link to their site but… Anyway, one more and my account gets wiped. That will mean goodbye to SLANG KING, GLAM RACKET, MARKECHACHA, FEHTO and PERFOFF.
So, a new SLANG KING will soon arise …
Be seeing you.
Be seeing you
The Fall to play two New Zealand shows . . .
Mark E Smith Q Magazine July 2015
Forgotten Frenz - 15 Overlooked Fall Songs (Shock Mid-Season Finale!!): No 15 - Look, Know
We’re going seriously off-message here. I mean, apparently, allegedly, rumour has it…MES “hates” this song. I mean, he had it taken off the “Hex Enduction Hour” reissue. The booklet of the 1976-2007 box set says he hates it (so quite why it appears on the latter is unclear). Surely this is bordering on heresy, to even posit the slightest suggestion that MES might not be 100% right about everything.
Well fuck him. Seriously, fuck him. His conduct towards some of his ex-colleagues has been appalling of late. Describing Brix and the Hanleys as “subhuman” for getting together to play MUSIC THEY ACTUALLY WROTE was almost within normal parameters but getting that Hex LP listening party pulled was just childish. His recent suggestion that he should have sacked the whole band after “Kurious Oranj” is laughable - Smith’s assertion that the group couldn’t keep in time is especially offensive to the superb Simon Wolstencroft and, lest we forget, within 2 years, he’d stripped the group down to 3 of that very line-up and was calling it the best Fall ever! He’s even taken to posting crude drawings seeming poking fun at Steve Hanley’s justly celebrated book - these can be found on Ed Blaney’s (awful) official website. This can only be the sourest of grapes given the more muted reception afforded to Smith’s own books, firstly the one that drove poor Mick Middles round the twist and then the one that was blatantly ghostwritten from a bunch of unrevealing pub interviews. At least Hanley properly credited his co-author, eh? Anyway, let’s assume for a second that Daryl Easlea is right and that MES really does hate “Look, Know”. I think it was largely assumed at the time that MES had actually withdrawn it from the Hex reissue because the tracklisting leaked before he had signed it off. So he spoiled it. To prove he could. But maybe he really does. Why?
Well, first of all, there’s the prominent countervocal from Marc Riley, who had the temerity to actually experience some success as a DJ and presenter after his time in the Fall was cut short. We know MES didn’t like that. You’re supposed to just fold up and go away once he’s finished with you. More currently, there’s the fact that it was written by his present target, Steve Hanley;how much this would have influenced him in 2004 is unclear but he was typically uncomplimentary in the BBC documentary made that year. In “The Big Midweek”, Hanley recalls that this was the first song he’d written all the music for, from beginning to end. He also says that he’d envisaged it as having a bit of a Dexy’s Midnight Runners feel, maybe with some horns (he shares this affection for Dexy’s with his brother, of course). Of course, given that it was essayed in a single take in Iceland, there was neither the time nor the budget for such musical indulgence but it’s actually not hard to imagine the appropriate brass flourishes and maybe the bass being doubled with some piano. In the event, the sound is very empty during the verses, with a characterful, powerhouse bass matched to insistent drums and those complimentary vocals lines from Riley and Smith. The only other element in the verses is some attractive glittery keyboard - this is a bit too in tune to be Smith and a bit too random to be Riley so answers on a postcard (if it was cut as-live, it could even be Scanlon, given his later turn on “The Man Whose Head Expanded”). By the time the guitars arrive, there’s a pent-up tension which Riley and Scanlon release with delight; there’s even a bit of the desired soul inflection in some of the more rhythmic guitar parts. It works a treat, collapsing back down to the more simple design of the verses at exactly the right moment. It’s an attractive, idiosyncratic brew and whilst the arrangement might not be exactly what Hanley wanted, it sounds properly considered and rehearsed. It’s possible that some of Smith’s distaste is born of his decision to marry this music to a lyric about what would at the time have been called fashion victims (today’s equivalent - “hipster”). This was too easy a target for a sniper as acute as MES was in 1981/82 and one which maybe came back to bite him a few years later when he started wearing Armani at Brix’s behest.
The great thing about The Fall is that you can actually have it all. I wrote very positively about “The Remainderer” and yet, I still think “Look, Know” - 31 years its senior - is a peach. I neither need nor want to pretend that the first 30 years of The Fall just didn’t happen - hilariously, the discography on the new official site starts with “Imperial Wax Solvent”! This nasty revisionism is spoiling one of the greatest discographies in the history of everything. So yes, MES, bring on “Sub-lingual Tablet”, please. But don’t dare try and tell me what records I can and cannot enjoy. The Fall’s history is not yours and yours alone. And you’re pissing off lifelong fans with this unnecessary meanness. Myself absolutely included.
Over and out.
So this week I’m launching not one, not two, but SEVEN new card designs!
I know, right? That’s one for each day of the week! It’s like an advent calendar at a completely inappropriate time of year - HOORAY!
Who’s behind door number one? Well, actually there is no door, just a marquee and an angry man who shares my dislike of Mumford & Sons. Available now from my Etsy UK shop!
Chicago fanzine 1979 - 1983
Forgotten Frenz - 20 Overlooked Fall Songs: No 14 - Get A Hotel
I’ve said a wee bit about “Get A Hotel” before and how it represents what was missing from most of “The Frenz Experiment”, that being the sound of an integrated unit really working closely together.
Sitting in between the more obviously catchy “Carry Bag Man” and their jaunty, chart-tailored cover of “Victoria”, “Get A Hotel” occupies a challenging position. It pitter-patters gently to life on some light, delicate Wolstencroft snare action; he comes in like a cadet practicing quietly. A thick, almost twangy Hanley bass arrives at 0m 10s and ushers in the rest of the group, at which point we have the delight of hearing The Fall getting into position - Schofield marks her territory with a high organ drone, and Scanlon links up with Hanley, carefully complimenting him in the midfield (a headphone listen paying particular attention to Scanlon is highly recommended). Meanwhile, Smith heads to the front to announces the title and addresses his faithful and, finally, Brix arrives with a shiny but subtle lead riff as Schofield moves on to punctuate the sound with almost percussive chordal stabs and Wolstencroft presses his toms into service. The precision is a delight - this is the musical equivalent of a well-drilled football team and its worth noting how this contrasts with the more improvisational material the group had been generating just a few years previously - in particular, the dynamic changes of “Get A Hotel”, handled superbly by Wolstencroft, could never have been a first take of the type MES favoured as recently as “Bend Sinister”. “..Frenz..” is heavy on Smith-only compositions (although, see entry 13 - “Guide Me Soft”…) but this Smith/Scanlon song has clearly been properly rehearsed and evolved by the group as a whole and is massively the better for it. The transitions between sections work perfectly against some of the album’s more linear pieces - the first switch at 1m 17s feels genuinely exciting and is even more so at 2m 36s after Smith has double tracked himself to a climax of sorts.
It’s not quite clear *why* we should get a hotel. It may be a dig at New Order and Factory re: The Hacienda and Dry (a hotel being the logical next step after a club and a bar?) but only a reference to a “broken warehouse” really bears this out as the lyric is in a more reductionist style than that usually found in the late 80’s. Alternatively, it may be of a piece with the more-direct “Living Too Late”, our protagonist finding out how time seems to accelerate with age.
This is The Fall at their most, well, Fall-like - taking something simple and rendering it strange and robust. 1987/88 was a curious time - Smith singled himself out on the back cover of “TFE” and the front of “IAKO” (actually the front of “Bend Sinister too, kinda…) and, musically, the group switched amongst 60’s covers, synth and drum machine experiments, 50’s acoustic fingersnapping, reduxed hymns and cod-reggae. A recent poll on The Fall Online forum put “TFE” and “IAKO” down at the bottom of their 80’s output. “Get A Hotel” forms part of the case for the defence, a low-key but strong reminder that this was a group in full control of their powers - the fact that not every new way of deploying those powers found its target should not lead today’s listeners to assume that The Fall were in any way diminished. “Get A Hotel” should prove that.
sketch-ah MES
Forgotten Frenz - 20 Overlooked Fall Songs - No 12: Muzorewi’s Daughter
Now, this is an odd one. Credited to MES and Kay Carroll, it is a matter of public record that Carroll wrote the lyric, an impressionistic sideview of what life may feel like for the progeny of Abel Muzorewa who was, for a few months in 1979, Prime Minister of the country temporarily known as Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Anyway, the credit suggests that MES wrote the music. Which is just a smidge on the side of unlikely. Still…
Legend has it that Cargo Studios were so unimpressed with the overall sound of “Dragnet” that they wanted to remain uncredited, lest it damage their reputation. That Mike Leigh’s cymbals crash clear and mighty on several tracks certainly suggests that the album was designed to sound like it had been recorded in a cardboard box although the exact reasons for this are as lost and as obscure as the reason why there’s a capital “G” in “draGnet” on the sleeve rather than a “D”. It appears Smith didn’t want to repeat the clear, crisp sound of “Live At The Witch Trials” so he accidentally invented “lo-fi” several years before anyone really wanted it. Anyway, this is one of the tracks that benefits from the approach, giving the track’s off-kilter (possibly pseudo-tribal) thud a particularly sinister and occluded atmosphere. The tension between the foggy slow-crawl of the verses and the faster, more desperate choruses is handled with real confidence by a unit that had been playing together for less than 4 months before the recording - Mike Leigh maybe seems ready to shift down a few bars too early at 3m 04s but recovers quickly and either Riley or Scanlon mishits a guitar string at 2m 01s but it’s unlikely they had too many stabs at it, given that entire album was completed within 3 days. Smith, despite consistently pronouncing the protagonist’s name as “Muzoweri”, escalates matters with a shrieking delivery (“daugh-ta-AHH!”), first at 0m 56s, omitted in the second chorus but used routinely in the final extended chorus, setting the listener even further on edge.
This is actually the key - it is absolutely the all-round performance that raises the track from album filler to dramatic tour-de-force. Whilst far from the best “song” on Dragnet (that would be “A Figure Walks” IMHO…), this is where The Fall show their mastery of the inherent alchemy of their art - having already extolled the virtues of “Repetition” (repetition repetition), Smith knew how powerfully a few notes and a few lines of text could be rendered and, however cool he may have played things both then and now, he must have been pleased with his new charges and how successfully they were grappling with the task. Herein are the seeds of many of their best and darkest moments, rendered with a thrillingly unpolished drive, delivering a deserving side-opener that seems to audibly sigh as it abruptly ends.
Sorry, you’ll have to click the picture above again to actually start reading from the beginning. And just click ‘Next Post’ at the end of each one after that. Web design isn’t exactly my strong point.
for me The Wonderful and Frightening World will always be one of the top ten great Fall albums but then it was my first. totally agree that Kurious Oranj and This Nations Saving Grace are in the top five.
this series of posts have been a great read. thank you.
what next?,
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?
The Bard of Salford and the Hip Priest. hahahaha
Manchester’s finest.
Week Forty Five Point Five: The Fallen - Searching For The Missing Members Of The Fall, by Dave Simpson.
I finished The Fallen today after, what?, a month and a bit of bus reading? I pretty much only ever have time to read on the short bus ride to work lately, and only when I’m not being distracted by commute-sharing co-workers. Which is kind of a shame. But not too much of a shame, because hearing about Abi’s Tinder exploits is always endlessly entertaining. Anyway, I could probably count the number of books I’ve read this year on both hands. Tim Kinsella’s second novel, a fictionalised retelling of the life of Laurie Bird, is probably the best thing I’ve read recently. His first novel was the best thing I read last year, too. I read both of those pretty much solely on the bus.
There’s something about reading on the bus that feels more active than reading anywhere else – it’s more frantic, as you rush to devour more, to get to a convenient point to pause before you miss your stop. And that’s how I’ve read Dave Simpson’s The Fallen, in which he attempts to track down every single Fall member to try and make some fucking sense of everything and maybe succeeds but also possibly doesn’t.
I’ve actually had this sitting around for a while – my friends, who are also about fifty percent responsible for this ridiculous Fall-related quest of my own, picked it up for my birthday back in April. I’ve been dying to read it ever since, but was concerned about future Fall spoilers influencing the way I thought about any forthcoming records. Simpson’s quest started soon after Fall Heads Roll, and I think I started reading the book the same week as I was listening to The Real New Fall LP, so fortunately there wasn’t too much foreshadowing – the only then-current member he interviews in the book is Ben Pritchard, who appears on both of those records. I actually read the interviews with the other members who were fired after Real New Fall last week, a couple days after listening to Reformation Post-TLC for the first time, so it kind of wrapped itself up very neatly.
I don’t know Dave personally, but in the last couple of years he’s started teaching at my old university, so my friend Rob who bought me the book and is now studying his PhD is a colleague, and a handful of other friends have been taught by him. There’s one thing they’re unanimous on: he bloody loves The Fall. To the point that it’s a bit ridiculous. He is a huge fan, I’m told he brings them up in every lecture, and at times it unfortunately means his writing on them is a little bit too gushing, a bit too willing to rationalise genius in Mark E. Smith when there is only a dickhead. This is kind of another one of the issues that also inspired my stupid fucking impulse to follow through with this idea: there is not enough writing about The Fall that is all that critical, or cynical. Sure, Pitchfork have been comfortingly honest about some of their records, but it’s still hard to get a grasp of where to start with the band when pretty much everyone who bothers to write about the band treats them as a mythical creature. Fall fandom is so dense that ‘entry level Fall’ is not a concept that is ever really explored, even though I’ve found some obvious choices.
Yeah, this is a book intended for fans, which means it’s a shame that I’ve seen some really negative fan responses. The Fallen is not a book about The Fall, so much as it’s a book about one person’s personal experience of tracking down all of the members. Kind of like how this blog is not a blog about The Fall so much as it’s a blog about one person’s personal experience of listening to one of their records every week. I read a couple of reviews that completely shit all over the book because of how much he talks about his ex-girlfriends, even though they’re minor characters, really, and actually serve to flesh out Simpson’s Fall-obsessed life in a very real way. My guess is many Fall fans are only interested in hearing about The Fall through a very narrow lens – outside context and personal interpretations are not welcome if it gets in the way of enthusing about Mark E. Smith.
And this book does not enthuse about Mark E. Smith. Well. It does, because he’s Simpson’s hero. But it’s more critical of him than anything else I’ve ever managed to find, purely because some of his ex-bandmates have less than favourable things to say about him, and undermines his infallible image in the eyes of the Fall fans. Through the Fallen’s anecdotes, Smith very quickly comes off as a pretty fucking horrible person – you can try and rationalise physical violence and emotional abuse as tools to get the best out of people if that really helps you sleep at night with the knowledge that your hero is a total bellend, but honestly? Ditching band members at the side of the road in foreign countries, or choking them on stage, is a seriously fucked up thing to do, no matter how good (debatable) it makes the next record. Do I even have to justify that?
I’ll admit I occasionally found the book’s over-personal style a bit tiring, and I dislike Simpson’s interview-reproducing technique of slotting tiny snippets in to his own narrative rather than letting the interviewees speak for themselves, in their own words, for any long period, but it’s the price you pay for a more honest, balanced and critical look at The Fall. You just have to sift through Simpson’s occasionally blinkered love of the band to get to the Fallen’s truths. Still, the genuinely loving tone that the book is written in makes it a fun and compelling read, and reading praise of The Fall that isn’t sneeringly superior, esoteric, or written by Pitchfork in the mid 00s (i.e. all of those things, but with more big words) is genuinely refreshing. It’s helped me see what fans see in records like Dragnet more than anything else, for example, and it has given me a lot more insight in to Mark E. Smith’s background, lyrics, and sense of humour. Simpson doesn’t really assume too much Fall knowledge from the reader, and manages to fill in the details without being too pedantic, so it has actually been a really great accompaniment to my own project. Reading the interviews with, say, The Hanleys, Craig Scanlon, and especially Brix, for example, have confirmed some assumptions, corrected others, and have made me look back on certain records in different ways, which is not something any other Fall review, forum post, or interview with Smith, has ever really managed.
Another unfortunate criticism must be levelled at his failure to crack the mysterious case of Karl Burns – after banging on about him for the whole book, and building it up so much, it really feels disappointing that he doesn’t manage to track him down in the end. That he turns around expecting to see him standing in the middle of rural Lancashire but ends up staring at a sheep is a weird, Fall-like twist that I kind of like, but is ultimately a bit of a letdown. My favourite thing about the book, though, is that Smith apparently hates it so much that he ripped out every page and set fire to them one by one, and refers to Dave as “a twat from Leeds who lives in a cottage” (I hear he doesn’t actually live in a cottage). A dubious honour indeed, but I can only imagine the sense of pride I’d feel if this thing made Smith put his fist through the computer screen.
Writing The Fallen took Dave Simpson a lot further than writing this blog every week has taken me, and I can’t help but feel like a bit of an amateur in comparison. Still, he once started in a similar position to me – someone who’d never heard a single Fall song, and came to listen to every one. Maybe I’ll end up as wrapped up in the world of The Fall as he does. Maybe I’ll even find Karl Burns one day. Probably not. But you never fucking know. I do wander around Manchester a lot. I just hope, now that his quest is sort of over (if it ever can be over?), that Dave has found some peace. And if he’s at the Leeds show at the end of the month, then I hope I see him in the pit.
Mark E Smith
by Paul Stuart
where do you stand, huh?
