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
16 – The Infotainment Scan
15 – Your Future Our Clutter
14 – Live At The Witch Trials
3 – This Nation’s Saving Grace
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?