#docshanley

[diasyrmus]

SH always includes The Infotainment Scan as one his favourite albums. which is a bit of a surprise in some ways. the top rank songs on it are ladybird, lost in music, glam racket, paranoia man & service. the others are v good of course, esp fireworks/light. anyway, more important is that the FIRST FALL GIG I went to was IS era Fall at the clapham grand. my friend and I got there SO early (we were 16) we walked in, with very fake IDs, just ahead of Scanlon and Hanley. "That's Steve Hanley" my friend said, we furtively looked behind us. "Jesus it is" I said. We knew we were in the presence of ROCK GODS.

[diasyrmus]

a quick set of Hanley Hits, starting with this musically astonishing classic. also several takes required for the musicians to get the long-horn lowing right because they kept pissing themselves.

[diasyrmus]

OK so it’s #stevehanley day cos I’m going to buy his new book The Big Midweek and see him interviewed this evening.

and for those of you who don’t know and the subset of those of you who know but DONT CARE, Steve Hanley was a bass player with #TheFall from their first truly grebt LP Dragnet thru to the also-grebt disjecta membra of Levitate.

The Fall have of course continued since and have released some amazing stuff (ymmv) but they have never been quite so GREBT as they were with Hanley on bass.

I’m going to post some of my favourite Hanley trax thru the day starting with THIS because… well mainly because I forgot to load the fall albums id intended to on my phone and I’ve got to go and get my bike that I left in ealing last night after a really quite enjoyable work drink.

(now I know NOTHING about how music is made so this is basically going to be a series of FUCK YEAH STEVE HANLEY posts.)

but also starting with this not bcos it starts with Hanley playing Jerusalem but because the driving insistence of the main bass riff and the death-dance variety of rhythmic tension he finds within that insistence. he seems to find time and space where others cannot.

that variety in repetition is a fall characteristic and is exemplified by Hanley, showing his centrality to the FALL SOUND.

by the second half of this song, he is imperious, locked in with Simon Wolstencroft’s relentless beat, to instil a motionless tension in the listener - as with many of hanley’s riffs I find myself holding my breath - so that you accumulate the energy within you that they have created within the music.

(incidentally I picked the Jerusalem off the I Am Pure As Oranj live recordings, which I believe were the masters for the I Am Kurious Oranj LP. it just locks into the groove a bit better I think)