Category: Fall

Extricate, the band’s first album of the new decade, was released to almost universal critical acclaim in February 1990.  Brix Smith was no more but the return of Martin Bramah had seemingly reignited MES and the rest of The Fall.  The live shows were also going well, and it looked as if the band was going through a stable and happy period, in complete contrast to the previous eighteen months.

It’s worth mentioning in passing that the live shows now occasionally involved an expanded version of the group as Charlotte Bill (oboe and flute) and Kenny Brady (fiddle), both of whom had made contributions to songs on Extricate, were involved in some of the tours in 1990.

The relationship with Phonogram seemed to have got off to a good start, and evidence of MES perhaps softening his attitude towards record company bosses can be seen from the fact that the next single, was a track that had been part of the recently released album, and added to the fact that Telephone Thing was also to be found on Extricate, made this (by my reckoning) the first Fall album from which two 45s had been lifted.

mp3: The Fall – Popcorn Double Attraction

Released in early March 1990, Popcorn Double Attraction would be left off many of the later compilations, such as 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong (2004), and with it not breaking into the Top 75, means that it is all to easy to forget it was released as a single.  It was a strange choice for a 45, but then again with all the previous evidence of The Fall only being able to enjoy hits when they did covers, then maybe it was the obvious one.

Yup, the original dates back to 1967, a flop single by The Searchers, a Merseybeat band who had enjoyed great success between 1963 and 1965, most often through cover versions of R’nB numbers previously recorded by American singers or bands.  MES at the time of the single paid tribute to The Searchers, saying he preferred them to The Beatles.

The single was released on 7″, 12″ and CD.  There was an additional limited edition version, of just 3,000 copies each, on 7″ and 12″ with different artwork and different b-sides.

mp3: The Fall – Butterflies 4 Brains (7″, 12″ and CD)
mp3: The Fall – Arms Control Poseur (12″ and CD)
mp3: The Fall – Zandra (7″ and 12″ limited editions)
mp3: The Fall – Black Monk Theme Part 2 (12″ limited edition)

This is a rather strange collection of songs, and in some ways of more merit than the actual single.  Butterflies 4 Brains, or least the opening minute or so, reminds me of the sound of  Inspiral Carpets….or maybe that’s just the strange wiring of my brain as MES would join with the band a few years later in creating a hit single, leading to his one and only appearance on Top of The Pops.

Arms Control Poseur was included on the CD edition of Extricate (it had four more tracks than the vinyl version) but it was a slightly longer, marginally faster and in some ways more commercially produced version which was included on the single.  I don’t think it’s as good as the album version, which has a brilliant guitar piece, reminiscent of Robert Fripp on Bowie’s Scary Monsters album, to the forefront, and which is tucked away on the single version.  See what you think….

mp3: The Fall – Arms Control Poseur (album version)

Zandra, which remember was only available on the limited edition singles, is a short number.  Almost upbeat in nature, and unusually for a Fall song, is named after and about a woman.  It seems kind of throwaway, as perhaps can be evidenced by the fact it was never played live.  The writing credits on this one are Smith/Beddington, but it is widely known that Beddington was a pseudonym used by Martin Bramah.

Black Monk Theme Part 2 can also be found on the CD version of Extricate, while Black Monk Theme Part 1 can be found on the vinyl version (as well as the CD version).  Unusually, these aren’t two takes on the same song…..

The Monks were an American garage rock band from the 60s.  Part 1, as done by The Fall, was in fact a cover of the song I Hate You, while Part 2 was a cover of Oh, How To Do Now, both of which had been released in 1966 on the album Black Monk Time.   More examples of MES being a human jukebox of the most obscure and occasionally magnificent type.

JC

So….we’ve reached the part in our saga where Brix Smith has exited (stage left) and to just about everyone’s surprise, Martin Bramah has rejoined the group.  Surely this was the cue for The Fall to cut out the pop music and return to the rough’n’ready stuff of the early days?

mp3: The Fall – Telephone Thing

Hardly.

Released on 7″, 12″ and CD on 15 January 1990, on MES’s own label, Cog Sinister, but as a spin-off from the newly signed deal with Phonogram, which meant that the band were now label-mates with, among others, Elton John, Dire Straits and Status Quo.  Not that it made all that much difference, as the parent label had given MES an assurance that he was simply to keep on doing what he had been doing his whole career.

Almost unnoticed amidst the chaos of 1989. MES had for the first time ever collaborated with musicians outside The Fall with a vocal on (I’m) In Deep on the Coldcut debut album, What’s That Noise.

Coldcut, consisting of Matt Black and Jonathan More, were a big part of the emerging and increasingly influential electronic dance scene in the UK.  The album went Top 20 and most of its songs featured a different guest vocalist.  One of the other tracks had been My Telephone, with vocals supplied by Lisa Stansfield, and in due course the suggestion came from Coldcut that MES might want to have a stab at it, which he did with great gusto. The tune was adapted and the lyrics re-written so that they became a rant about phone tapping; MES was convinced, at the time, that his phone was being tapped by someone out there as he said in an interview with Andrew Collins in the NME to help promote the new single:-

“I just think it’s topical – like all Fall singles. I think it’s good to have a go at things like that – British Rail and British Telecom. It’s a natural gripe. One time, I was using the phone a lot and I dialled a number and I could hear people munching sandwiches and talking about my last phone call. I actually rang up the operator and said ‘Look! I’m trying to dial a fucking number here and I can’t get through because people are talking about my phone calls! Have you got a bleedin’ license to do this?’

“Being staff, they get fed up, so what they do is tap into lines that they think are gonna be interesting. It doesn’t bother me, I’ve got nothing to fucking hide! But I said ‘Well, is it tapped or not? I can’t fucking get through because of your bloody lot!’ And she slammed the phone down on me!”

All the band members do play on the track, with Martin Bramah contributing the wah-wah guitar part, quite possibly surprised of what was asked of him on his first recorded song with the band after ten years.

My verdict?   It’s good fun in that it’s again something different, but maybe just too much on the quirky side to be an essential listen.

The b-side to the 7″ was another strange one in that Marcia Schofield‘s keyboards come across as an imitation of trumpets/brass while Simon Wolstencroft lives up to his Funky Si nickname on the drums:-

mp3: The Fall – British People In Hot Weather

It has a scathing but surreal MES lyric, reflecting (seemingly!!) on how folk from over here aren’t that great at coping when it gets particularly warm.  It’s a song I didn’t actually know until only a few years ago – I didn’t buy all that many of the new records by The Fall from the 90s onwards at the time of their release – and I haven’t ever really taken to this song.  Looking back on what had previously been a great, or at the very least, interesting, run of b-sides during the Brix era, this surely would have felt a bit of a letdown back in the day.

The 12″ and CD contained a different mix and a dub version of Telephone Thing.  I’m unable to offer either of them to you today, but I don’t feel it’s any great loss.

JC

“The Fall ended 1988 in triumphant fashion with a sold-out UK tour of larger venues than normal, including their largest ever Scottish show at the Glasgow Barrowlands on 17 December while six of the year’s songs had been voted into John Peel’s Festive 50.  But it wouldn’t be long before things unravelled.”

The final sentence of last week’s piece.

January 4 1989.  MES told Brix he was leaving her.  He moved to Edinburgh, having been driven there by Simon Wolstencroft, and within four months she was living in London, talking to lawyers about a divorce on the grounds of MES’s adultery. Musically, she began to concentrate on her own project, The Adult Net, although The Fall did get together in Cargo Studios in Rochdale in Spring 1989 to begin work on some new material, with Ian Broudie helping out on the production side.

It was in June 1989 that the next single and album appeared.  It consisted of a shortened version of one of the songs from I Am Kurious Oranj, while the b-side was a new song, credited to MES and Brix.  The two of them actually appeared on BBC TV to talk about the new music, and while there is a clear sense of unease and tension, it would have taken a real eagle-eye of casual fans to spot that they were no longer a couple.

mp3: The Fall – Cab It Up
mp3: The Fall – Dead Beat Descendent

The single had come out a week before the new album, which was called Seminal Live, which itself consisted of five studio songs on side A and five live tracks taken from gigs in Manchester and Vienna the previous year (the CD version of the album contained four additional live tracks).

Cab It Up didn’t crack the Top 75 and the reviews for Seminal Live were lukewarm, at best. The situation hadn’t been helped by a number of things.

The best of the new studio tracks was Dead Beat Descendent, but it was already available as a b-side. Of the other four songs, one was a rockabilly cover, and while two of the other songs would have made for possible b-sides of a single, the final track, Mollusc In Tyrol, must be among the most unlistenable and abstract of all Fall recordings,

MES’s head was not in a good place. Not only had his marriage dissolved, but his father, in May 1989, had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of just fifty-nine.

Finally, MES had informed Beggars Banquet that the band was to leave the label after five years and the marketing support from the label was minimal, not helped by the fact that The Fall, understandably in the circumstances, were shying away from live shows.

It’s all a bit of a shame. Dead Beat Descendent, which really should have been the A-side of the single, is a decent, upbeat song which fits in really well with much of the previous output from the Beggars Banquet years and in normal circumstances would likely have delivered, at least, another minor hit. Cab It Up, while not being a new song, is another toe-tapper and another example of the more commercial side of the band. There’s a few electronica pop bands who would have killed for this tune…..

There were two live tracks added to the 12″ of Cab It Up. Neither were available on the vinyl version of Seminal Live but could be found on the CD version:-

mp3: The Fall – Kurious Oranj (live)
mp3: The Fall – Hit The North (live)

Having got the contractual obligations to the record label out of the way, The Fall returned to live shows in July 1989. The replacement guitarist for Brix was a huge surprise to just about everybody, with founder member Martin Bramah returning after a ten-year absence.

The question is…..would he last long enough to be involved in the band’s next studio recordings? Tune in next week…..

JC

I mentioned last week how The Fall had kicked off 1988 with the release of Victoria, a cover of a song by The Kinks.  A few weeks later, a new album, The Frenz Experiment hit the shops.  Unusually for a Fall album, the earlier single could be found among its ten tracks, as too could a 30-odd second excerpt of Guest Informant, which had been one of the b-sides to Victoria. This meant just eight new songs on a record that seems to divide fans and critics, not to mention band members, with Simon Wolstencroft describing it as ‘a real mixed bag of songs with some half-baked ideas’, while Marcia Schofield feels ‘it doesn’t have as much of an edge as other Fall albums.’

Next up was something I really should have got myself along to, especially as it happened in the city I was living in at the time.

I Am Curious, Orange was a ballet devised and produced by Michael Clark which had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival on 15 August 1988. It was based on the events exactly 300 years earlier, when the Catholic King James II was overthrown and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange. It was a typically flamboyant, extravagant and wild production that everyone now expected from Michael Clark and his troupe. It was performed for six nights at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, a building which is quite close to Coasters, a more traditional gig venue where The Fall had performed back in 1985.  The ballet would then transfer to Sadler’s Wells in London on 20 September 1988 for a three-week run.  The Fall provided the live soundtrack on each occasion and in due course released the album, I Am Kurious Oranj, in effect the soundtrack to the ballet, with some songs recorded live during the Edinburgh run while others were recorded in the studio with Ian Broudie in the producer’s chair.

There were certain elements of the album which captured this period of The Fall at the top of their game, not least Big New Prinz, a radical re-working of Hip Priest complete with a glam rock soundtrack. There’s also a take on Jerusalem, the popular hymn written by William Blake in the early 1800s, with MES updating the lyrics to have a go at the modern-day government.

It was the government’s fault
It was the fault of the government
I was very let down with the budget
I was expecting a one million quid handout
I was very disappointed
It was the government’s fault
It was the fault of the government

The album contained ballads, more glam rock, weird electronica, some pop and of course many songs which could only be the work of The Fall.

Brix Smith would later look back on the ballet and album as the pinnacle of her creative world, thanks to the mix of high art, ballet, history, rock music, surrealism, performance art and fashion, all this despite that fact she was well aware that her marriage was disintegrating and that it was only a matter of time before she would no longer be part of the group.

Beggars Banquet wanted something else from the album and so the decision was taken to release a limited numbered edition single of 15,000 copies of a 7″ box set and, in a first for The Fall, a CD single; in fact it was a double 3″ CD housed in a numbered limited edition of 4,000 in a distinct orange box.

mp3: The Fall – Jerusalem
mp3: The Fall – Acid Priest 2088
mp3: The Fall – Big New Prinz
mp3: The Fall – Wrong Place, Right Time No.2

The album version of Jerusalem had been segued onto an original MES composition called Dog Is Life, and ran to over eight minutes in length. For the single, Dog Is Life was removed entirely, while the MES/Blake co-composition was edited to make it a bit more palatable for radio play.

Acid Priest 2088 is a dance remix (of sorts) of Big New Prinz, which, as I mentioned earlier, is itself a stunning remake of Hip Priest, and as far as I’m concerned is up there as one of the very finest moments in the band’s history. It should have been a huge hit….

Wrong Place, Right Time No.2 is a different mix of one of the tracks to be found on I Am Kurious Oranj, and I’m assuming was chosen for the single release given it’s another upbeat almost glam rock composition which might have somehow convinced anyone not otherwise familiar with the group that this was typical of their wider output.

Despite the limited edition nature of the release, Jerusalem/Big New Prinz entered the charts at the end of November 1988 at #70, before climbing eleven places the following week. The Fall ended 1988 in triumphant fashion with a sold-out UK tour of larger venues than normal, including their largest ever Scottish show at the Glasgow Barrowlands on 17 December while six of the year’s songs had been voted into John Peel’s Festive 50.  But it wouldn’t be long before things unravelled.

JC

1987 had come and gone, very unusually, without The Fall releasing an album, albeit much of the year had been spent in the studio writing and recording what would be released as The Frenz Experiment in February 1988.  Prior to that, the new year began with a very early release, on 11 January, of a new single, and once again there were a number of formats – 7″, 12″, 7″ box (with a badge and lyric sheets) and cassette.  The good thing, unlike Hit The North, was that is that fans didn’t have to get all the formats to obtain all the new songs, with it being the more traditional 2 tracks on the 7″ and the 7″ box, while 4 tracks were available on the 12″ and cassette.

mp3: The Fall – Victoria

I’ll cut to the chase.  I think the Fall’s cover of Victoria, a minor hit single for The Kinks back in 1966, is a tame and mundane effort, albeit the band sound as if they enjoyed how it turned out, with Simon Rogers again on production duties.  The fact it was also very much a part of the live set lists, is an indication that it was something everyone – MES, Brix, Craig, Steve, Marcia and Funky Si – were happy with.  It reached #35 in the UK singles charts, and thus continued the strange situation whereby covers brought hits, but originals seemed to flop.

But what of your b-sides?

mp3: The Fall – Tuff Life Booogie
mp3: The Fall – Guest Informant
mp3: The Fall – Twister

Tuff Life Booogie is common to the 7″ and 12″. It is one of the most accessible and almost pop-like tunes ever recorded by The Fall, and while the lyric back in 1988 would have probably seemed strange and rambling, in later years you can piece together some subsequent details and facts to conclude that it was MES having a dig at his wife. Nobody knew back then that their relationship was on the wane, nor that she was unhappy living in what she considered to be squalid conditions in the north-west of England. Her dream of becoming a bona-fide pop star was fading with each passing month, no matter how much the critics loved the band.

Talking of Brix, hers is the first voice you hear on the brilliantly bonkers rocker of a tune, Guest Informant. It’s nearly six minutes long, and the first 60 seconds are taken up with the chant of “Bahzhdad State Cog-Analyst”.….well, that was the lyric written down by MES within the script for the Hey! Luciani play, with the song being part of the show every night. Brix, on the other hand, has long said she was chanting ‘Baghdad State Cog-Analyst……

Whatever the chant is, there can surely be no argument that Guest Informant is another great example of the way The Fall offered a quite unique post-punk take on rockabilly.

Twister is another longer song, extending to five minutes in length. There are a number of tempo changes throughout, and it veers occasionally towards the sort of chin-stroking artistic musical nonsense that I can’t be bothered with. It’s not among my favourite of the band’s songs. And while an earlier version was recorded for a Peel session in May 1987, it was never part of the band’s live shows at any time, so maybe MES also got bored with it quickly.

Tune in next week for the first Fall single to be released on CD. You won’t regret it.  But before then….a PS to last week’s posting on Hit The North.

A huge thanks to those of you who got in touch and who attached files with the songs missed out last week.  Some of you sent me Part 2, sourcing it from various places where it has been described as such, but in fact it was actually Part 3 as found on the 12″ single.  The easiest thing to do is actually use the files sent over by Joe via the 5 albums CD box set, issued by Beggars Banquet in 2013.  Part 2, as below, has a slightly different opening than any other version, and it also comes in some 15 seconds longer than Part 3 (which is sometimes mixed up with Part 2)

mp3: The Fall – Hit The North (part 2)

The CD box set also contains that fairly elusive mix that had been kept back for the cassette version of the single, as well as a previously unreleased instrumental version:-

mp3: The Fall – Hit The North Part 6 (the double six mix)
mp3: The Fall – Hit The North (instrumental)

As I say, thanks to all of you who got in touch after last week. Hugely appreciated.

JC

I’m being lazy/cheeky this week as Part 22 of the series is being given over to a guest posting, but without the author being asked if it is OK to do so.

Tom Doyle is an acclaimed music journalist, author, and long-standing contributor to Mojo and Q. His work has also appeared in Billboard, The Guardian, The Times, and Sound on Sound. Over the years, he has been responsible for key magazine profiles of Paul McCartney, Elton John, Yoko Ono, Keith Richards, U2, Madonna, Kate Bush, and R.E.M., among many other artists. He is the author of The Glamour Chase: The Maverick Life of Billy MacKenzie, for which I will always hold him in the very highest regard.

It was for Sound on Sound, back in March 2015, that he composed what must be the definitive piece on the Fall’s 22nd single. I’m providing an edited version, leaving aside many of the technical aspects around the recording process, but there is link to the full article provided at the end.

————————

In 1987, the Fall, a band who were 10 albums into their career, producing challenging, hall–of–mirrors post–punk, suddenly made a lurch for the dancefloor. October of that year saw the amorphous Prestwich troupe, fronted by their inimitable and unpredictable ringmaster Mark E Smith, release ‘Hit The North’, a rousing groove–based anthem which is now regarded by many as both their ultimate statement and best single.

For this most underground of bands, this seemed like a very conscious effort to go commercial. “Nah, it wasn’t a conscious effort,” Smith stated to this writer in 2006. “It was just trying to get it a bit more punchy. I always like it very clean and simple. A lot of groups are swamped with sound.”

The beginning of the Fall’s slow creep towards the mainstream, which culminated with ‘Hit The North’, had begun three years earlier in 1984 when, before signing to a new label, Beggars Banquet, Smith had seriously considered quitting music altogether.

“I thought, fuck it,” he admitted. “Nobody liked us. We always got good reviews, but that doesn’t put food on your plate, does it? I was thinking of packing it in. I was gonna sell pool tables. It was a bit heavy for me that time. But then I got a bit of the old writing impetus and I carried on with it. People forget all this, y’know. They forget that the Fall wasn’t really appreciated until the mid-’80s.”

Along with Smith’s change of attitude, the addition of two new members to the Fall was to significantly change their sound. The singer’s American wife, guitarist and vocalist Brix Smith, had joined the band in 1983. She admitted that she felt that, in many ways, the Fall were undervalued and that she had designs on upping their commercial potential. “It was definitely a conscious thing on my part,” she said, “because they were so, so underground and so unappreciated and unknown. I just thought they were such an important band and it needed to be broadcast all over the world.”

Then, in 1985, came Londoner Simon Rogers, a multi–instrumentalist who was initially brought in to play bass with the band, before moving to guitar/keyboards and then going on to produce many of the Fall’s records, including ‘Hit The North’. His connection to Mark E Smith was first made when progressive ballet dancer Michael Clark asked Rogers to score an orchestral arrangement of ‘The Classical’, from the Fall’s 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour.

“Which I tried to do,” Rogers remembers today. “But looking back on it, it’s not one of those things you can just arrange. It needs a real concept and real time and real skill, which I don’t think I had at the time. So that wasn’t a great success. But I phoned Mark up in the process of trying to arrange ‘The Classical’ and said, ‘What do you think about using horns on the chorus?’ And he said, ‘I dunno, cock. I don’t know anything about music. Do you play bass?’ I said, ‘I have played bass, yeah.’ So he said, ‘D’you wanna come on tour with us?’”

In the 2009 book The Fallen: Life In And Out Of Britain’s Most Insane Group, author Dave Simpson’s search for the more than 60 members who have passed through the band since their formation in 1976, he names Simon Rogers as “the least likely musician ever to end up in the Fall”.

Even if their backgrounds were very different, Mark E Smith and Simon Rogers bonded quickly when the former invited the latter to come and stay with him in Prestwich to learn the basslines to the key Fall songs. “Mark would have piles of papers and plastic bags full of notes and stuff,” he says. “We’d sit up all night and we’d listen to William Burroughs and Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Lots of speed, lot of fags, lots of beer. We became pretty good mates and he stayed with me in London nearly all the time when he came down.”

But even after joining the Fall and touring extensively with the band, Rogers realised that his heart belonged in the studio, forcing him to choose to quit the live band and concentrate on recording. “It was tough touring with the Fall,” he admits. “‘Cause we used to go to America and do 20 dates or more in a month. You’re on stage for an hour and the other 23 hours of the day, you’re just dicking around. And it wasn’t enough music for me.”

In approaching the making of the Fall’s next album, The Frenz Experiment, the sessions for which would yield ‘Hit The North’, Simon Rogers suddenly found himself promoted by Smith to producer for the whole project. “There was this idea that I was the guy that could ‘handle’ Mark Smith,” he says. “But it wasn’t that at all. We were just matey at the time. I think he trusted me as a musician to pull something together. Rather than having an engineer/producer, why not have a musician/producer? So it was like having another useful band member.”

The Frenz Experiment was recorded over the month of July 1987 in Abbey Road Studio 2. While The Frenz Experiment is a very live–sounding album, ‘Hit The North’ was a far more programmed affair.

Meanwhile, Rogers laughs when remembering the moment he got to the end of his rope in his dealings with Smith. One day, the frontman walked into the studio while Steve Hanley was fooling around on his bass with the riff of Spinal Tap’s ‘Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight’. Smith decided this was great and it became the basis of the track ‘Athlete Cured’. Rogers couldn’t believe what was happening. “I said, ‘What the fuck? It’s a 100 percent lift’. I knew the track, I was a big Spinal Tap fan. So after a bit of pointless persuasion by me, they recorded it. I thought they’d get done for it basically. But then I suppose a bass line in those days… That was kind of before the massive sampling trials. Mark said, ‘Don’t care. I like it.’”

Simon Rogers was to go on to produce two more albums for the Fall, Code: Selfish in 1992 and The Infotainment Scan in 1993, before he and Smith had an irreparable bust–up in a studio in Manchester.

Looking back on his time working with the Fall, Rogers admits that it was a period which taught him a lot. “Just that there’s other ways to do things,” he says. “After coming out of the Royal College Of Music, I realised there’s more than one way to skin a cat. For sure.”

As far as ‘Hit The North’ was concerned, although it is now considered a classic track for the Fall, upon its release, it actually failed to chart, struggling to number 57. As ever, Mark E Smith had a theory about this.

“We lost half our fan base with that,” he pointed out, “‘cause everybody thought it was disco. Everybody was like, fucking hell, they’ve sold out.”

The full article can be read here.

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Hit The North was released across a ridiculous amount of formats in October 1987. There was a 7″, a 12″ (with a gatefold sleeve), a 7″ picture disc, a 12″ with remixes and a cassette single which included a mix otherwise unavailable.  I’ve done my best to bring you the lot but failed on the ones with the *:-

mp3: The Fall – Hit The North Part 1 (as found on the 7″, 7″ pic disc, the 12″, the 12″ remix and the cassette)
mp3: The Fall – Hit The North Part 2 (as found on the 7″ and 7″ pic disc)*
mp3: The Fall – Hit The North Part 3 (as found on the 12″)
mp3: The Fall – Australians in Europe (as found on the 12″ and the cassette)
mp3: The Fall – Northerns in Europ (as found on the 12″)
mp3: The Fall – Hit The North Part 4 (as found on the 12″ remix and the cassette)
mp3: The Fall – Hit The North Part 5 (as found on the 12″ remix)
mp3: The Fall – Hit The North Part 6 (the double six mix) (as found on the cassette)*

Australians In Europe is another of those superb songs sneaked out as a b-side. So good, it was voted in at #2 in the Peel Festive 50 of 1987, while the a-side came in at #9. It was a regular part of the live sets throughout the year and was also aired in the band’s sole Peel Session of 1987, broadcast on 19 May. Come 1988, it was rarely played and indeed, disappeared completely from any future setlists by the time 1989 rolled around. It may, or may not be, about The Bad Seeds or The Triffids. MES never said……

Northerns in Europ is a short, cut-up/live version of Australians….I suppose it fills up a couple of minutes on the 12″ if for no other purpose

Simon Gallup, bassist with The Cure, was the guest singles reviewer in Melody Maker the week Hit The North came out. He liked it…..

“I’ve hated everything they’ve ever done but this is great – sounds like Van Der Graaf Generator. They usually whinge and moan a lot because they come from up north, but we won’t get into that. This is really good – it’s got a nice tune and a party mood, Luvvie. It sounds like The Glitter Band too which is great because, in the past. Mark Smith has claimed his lyrics are really important because he’s a Northerner, but you don’t hear what he’s on about here.”

Seven musicians played on this one. The usual six (at the time) of MES, Brix, Craig, Steve, Marcia and Funky Si, were added to by Simon Rodgers contributing on guitar and saxophone.

Up until writing this piece, I hadn’t ever heard Parts 4 and 5, which are the work of German producer, Zeus B. Held.  Can’t say that I’m too fussed about them.

JC

This weekly series has been running for almost six months.  When it started, I had no idea that Halloween 2021 would fall on a Sunday, far less that when the time came, it would provide the spooky coincidence of featuring the most successful chart hit for The Fall.  Here’s an extract from the book Hip Priest, written by Simon Ford, and published in 2003:-

Part of The Fall’s new commercial strategy included the release of carefully chosen cover versions, exemplified in April 1987 by ‘There’s A Ghost In My House’, an old Motown standard recommended by Beggars’ press officer Karen Ehlers. The combination of a classic song plus the added quirk of Smith coming close to singing stunned the critics. Don Watson made it NME’s single of the week, while James Brown in Sounds felt overwhelmed by the ‘forceful disco inferno’.

The critics’ positive reviews and a hilarious video of Smith and Brix pursued by poltergeists, helped it become the Fall’s most successful single, reaching number 30.  Normally a new entry at that level ensured an appearance on Top of The Pops, but the call never came and Brix was left bitterly disappointed: “The Fall were never asked, I mean that was one of the biggest crises in the history of the band…me and Marcia were going, “What will we wear, what will we wear?” It was like, failure, we didn’t get on”.

mp3: The Fall – There’s A Ghost In My House

The reference to ‘me and Marcia’ gives the game away that there had, in the five months since the release of Hey! Luciani, been another change in band personnel, with Simon Rogers taking his leave to be replaced on keyboards by Marcia Schofield.  The other players on this 7″, 12″ and cassette release were MES, Brix, Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanlon and Simon Wolstencroft.  The producer was the returning Grant Showbiz, last seen with The Fall at the time of Hex Enduction Hour, but who had busy since then as the live sound engineer for The Smiths.

Before turning to the b-sides, it’s worth mentioning that 1987 was a year when The Fall just about became mainstream.  The year had begun with a lengthy tour of Germany along with dates in the Netherlands and Belgium.  A UK tour was arranged to coincide with the release of the new single, and the set lists from the period indicating a level of consistency each night not normally associated with the band – they even threw in some old favourites!

In July 1997, The Fall played their biggest gig to date, as support to U2 at Elland Road, the home stadium of Leeds United FC. It should be pointed out that they were a late replacement for World Party, but there is no way that U2’s management would have asked for The Fall if they weren’t confident of a tight, consistent and upbeat set being delivered. A few weeks later, and they were playing at Finsbury Park, London, as the special guests of Siouxsie & The Banshees.

This was followed up with a return trip to Germany as part of two shows in Hamburg and Bonn where they shared a stage with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Swans, Butthole Surfers, Die Haut, and Holy Toy, before being third top of the bill on the first day of the 1987 Reading Festival, with The Mission as the headliners.  It’s accurate to say that the band’s profile had never been higher, and yet it was their quietest ever in terms of new material, with no studio album and just one more single after Ghost (which I’ll look at next week).

As I mentioned earlier, the hits single came out on 7″, 12″ and cassette. Indeed, the 7″ came out in two different formats, with a limited edition hologram sleeve, while the 12″ gatefold had a totally different sleeve altogether.

mp3: The Fall – Haf Found Bormann

This was the b-side on the 7″, as well as being on the 12″ and cassette.  A rather bizarre offering, it had been written for, and performed during, the Hey! Luciani stage play.  It’s an MES composition, but the shouty vocals are delivered by Brix and Marcia.  In the play, the duo had played the roles of Israeli commandos tracking down Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary (don’t ask!!!).

mp3: The Fall – Sleep Debt Snatches

As found on the 12″ and cassette.  It’s more than six minutes long, and the first forty seconds lull listeners into a false sense of security as MES jauntily sings his lyrics over an upbeat but minimalist tune.  The rest is instrumental and, I’m being kind here, experimental.  Approach with caution.

mp3: The Fall – Mark’ll Sink Us

This absolute gem of a track was only made available via the 12″ single.   It’s an MES lyric over a tune co-written by Steve Hanley and Craig Hanlon. It’s a reflective and initially slow number, with an initial bassline very reminiscent of Joy Division, and before long there’s some prominent and occasionally jazzy piano being thrown in.  It’s a beguiling track from start to end, which speeds up with a chanted chorus of ‘Mark’ll Sink Us’ that fades out before the music, faster than ever, comes back in before coming to a halt a little short of five minutes.

Was MES sending out a coded message to the band members that they better be careful?  After all, as I said earlier, they were, in 1987, on the fringes of the mainstream, a position that Brix more than anyone wanted but which was anathema to MES.  It’s also been rumoured that, given how sparse the guitar work is on the song that Brix didn’t play on it…..

Any thoughts Fall fans??

Oh, I forgot to mention in the above narrative that the cassette version of the single did itself have four tracks, but Mark’ll Sink Us was replaced by Hey! Luciani.

JC

From the closing sentence of last week’s entry in this series:-

“John Leckie was on production duties for The Fall on this occasion as he would be for the album Bend Sinister released just three weeks after Mr Pharmacist.  But by the time of the next single, he would have been usurped……”

…..as the next single by The Fall would end up being produced by Ian Broudie, lately mentioned on the blog via posts about Lightning Seeds.

But, as David Byrne might have said, how did we get here?

October 1986.  Bend Sinister, the band’s third album with John Leckie involved, is greeted with a degree of bemusement as it sounds like nothing else the producer had ever worked on over the years.  It was only years later that Leckie would reveal that Mark E Smith wanted the album to be mastered from a chrome cassette and had also insisted on having the final say when things were being mixed, often taking out contributions from members of the band which Leckie and indeed Brix Smith felt were crucial.  The reviews were mostly negative, with the producer coming in for a great deal of criticism, all of which led to the inevitable ending of the creative partnership.  Three years later, and Leckie was being lauded as a genius for his work on the debut album by Stone Roses.

The twisted way that MES’s mind works is that, having sabotaged the efforts of a slightly mainstream producer for the album, he would agree to have Ian Broudie come in to work on the next single, which was actually recorded before Bend Sinister was released and the critical savaging had taken place.  It was almost as if he’d planned the whole thing with the intention of coming back with a great pop song, almost to spite John Leckie.

Hey! Luciani could have been included on Bend Sinister. It had been written in early 1986, and featured regularly in the live shows throughout that year, including UK, US and European tours.  Indeed, a version recorded with John Leckie would surface sometime later.

MES, however, was pursuing things beyond songwriting and was working throughout the year on completing a play about the death, in 1978, of Pope John Paul I, who had been born Albino Luciani, after a reign of just 33 days.  It was almost immediately after Pope John Paul II was chosen that the conspiracy theories started flying.  Hey! Luciani was therefore, and understandably, held back for inclusion in the play.

Hey! Luciani: The Life and Codex of John Paul I opened on 5 December 1986 and ran for two weeks at the Riverside Studios, London.  A mixture of established actors and creatives who were friends of MES, such as the dancer Michael Clark and the performance artist Leigh Bowery took to the stage, and there were parts for everyone in The Fall at the time, including  keyboardist Marcia Schofield who had come in to help on a short tour of Austria a couple of months earlier when Simon Rogers was unavailable.

The play itself was well-attended over the two weeks, despite some scathing reviews about it being impenetrable and badly acted. A few songs by The Fall featured during its 90-minute duration, including the song that had been held back from the previous album and instead re-recorded at Abbey Road Studios with Ian Brodie adding his touches of magic:-

mp3: The Fall – Hey! Luciani

It was released on 8 December 1986, timed to coincide with the opening of the play. It’s an absolute belter of a single, one that really should have received extensive daytime radio play, but the negativity surrounding the play, allied to the controversial nature of the subject matter, almost certainly played its part in it being ignored.  It didn’t help, mind you, that the single was released in the run-up to Christmas when the airwaves are filled with the perennials.  But I’m thinking it was all part of MES’s master plan to deliver another flop.

Hey! Luciani was released on 7″ and 12″ vinyl. It reached #59, which was easily the best chart position of all the singles to date.

mp3: The Fall – Entitled
mp3: The Fall – Shoulder Pads #1B

Both of these were produced by John Leckie and date from the Bend Sinister sessions. Entitled, a slow, ambling gentle song appears on both the 7″ and 12″. Shoulder Pads #1B was the bonus track on the 12″

Shoulder Pads had originally appeared on Bend Sinister, spilt into two, with #1 fading out at just under the three-minute point early on the album and #2 fading in as the album closer, and coming to a gradual halt after less than two minutes. The version on the Hey! Luciani single is an alternative take and runs to over five minutes in length with a few additional lyrics. The contrast in production values between the A-side and the two songs on the B-side are quite marked.

The next single wouldn’t appear until April 1987, and I’ll look at that in the next instalment of this series. But in February 1987, thanks to a 7″ single giveaway with Sounds, one of the UK’s main music weeklies, everyone got the chance to hear the John Leckie take on the single from the play:-

mp3: The Fall – Hey! Luciani (original version)

Quite different in many ways…far less polished and nowhere near as obvious as a potential hit single. But still well worth a listen.

JC

This week, a single that made it into the Top 75 in September 1986, thanks to a song that could and did pack the floor at indie-discos.

mp3: The Fall – Mr Pharmacist

The first Fall song which Mrs Villain ever admitted she liked, thanks to me constantly including it on all the mix taped we would pack into a suitcase to take with us when we went away on holiday.  It’s amazing to think back and realise how much space was needed for a box of 24 cassettes, and how often the batteries would need replaced on whatever cheap version of the Sony Walkman was being taken down to a beach or pool.   I don’t miss those days now that there’s almost 50,000 songs each on a couple of i-pods which quickly charge up in a matter of hours overnight.

Enough of me wallowing in nostalgia. Here’s the press release issued by Beggars Banquet:-

The 1st of September heralds the release of The Fall’s version of MR PHARMACIST, a superb break-in taster for, and from their next LP.

Recorded straight onto master tape at Abbey Road Studios, MR PHARMACIST is the first record by THE FALL to contain new ingredient ‘JOHN’ S. WOLSENCROFT (ex-Weeds) on the drums who replaces much loved Karl Burns (now of the group ‘Thirst’).

MR PHARMACIST was an afterthought during the recording, being one of Mark E. Smith’s FAVOURITE songs by The Other Half – coincidentally, M.E.S. was ill with a chest infection during part of the recording.

HEAR live bass of Super Hanley on vinyl! NOTE phlegm vocal rattle! WITNESS earscorch of Brix Guitar, unfettered by tedious modern mixing methods. If only all cover versions were like this.

Companion track ‘LUCIFER OVER LANCASHIRE’ would not fit onto (blank space) but it is too good to store. The subject of much debate, ‘LUCIFER OVER LANCASHIRE’could refer to:-

A. Recent Commie cloud and complaints of aching bones in the health-conscious Fall camp.
B. The Erasure of good manners and good groups in that holy county or
C. A trailer for Pashion Religious Whodunnit due December
‘I tell you no lies.
Completely blind/are the Sentinels
Eyes/At the back of his mind/
This demon’s hip.

Bonus track ‘AUTO TECH PILOT’ features horror machine FX by Simon Rogers, and offers weirder territory in THE FALL legacy – where delirious commentary meets modern classical at the Eighties Trash-Gate.

Get It.

Regards,
Edward M. Cohort II
Hotel Cohesion
Hampstead
M/CR

There’s no point in adding anything to that is there??

mp3: The Fall – Lucifer Over Lancashire
mp3: The Fall – Auto Tech Pilot

I love Lucifer Over Lancashire. Another example of the weird and wonderful stuff that was stuck away on b-sides over the year (and yes, I’m thinking that’s a subject matter for a future ICA….). Auto Tech Pilot, on the other hand, I can happily live without.

Mr Pharmacist entered the charts at #75.  It dropped out after one week.  The song was, in due course, played more than 400 times at Fall gigs, the first being on 9 November 1986 in Birmingham and the last being on 23 October 2017 in Newcastle, the second to last show they ever played, and was, by far the song most aired. Maybe an indication that MES wished he had written it?

For those who are interested, The Other Half was an American psychedleic/garage band from San Francisco in the mid-late 60s.  They were largely unknown at the time, but the inclusion of Mr Pharmacist, a single back in 1966, on a Nuggets compilation in 1985 from which it is likely that MES picked up on it, finally got them noticed.

mp3: The Other Half – Mr Pharmacist

John Leckie was on production duties for The Fall on this occasion, as he would be for the album Bend Sinister released just three weeks after Mr Pharmacist.  But by the time of the next single, he would have been usurped……

JC

The sixteen-month period from October 1985 – December 1986 was a busy, yet reasonably stable one for the band.  They were being well-supported by Beggars Banquet and seemed to be happy with the label.  There were sell-out tours of the UK. The core of the band remained the same – Mark E Smith, Brix Smith, Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley and Simon Rogers, with just the drummer’s chair becoming a touch on the hot side. Karl Burns left the band, again, in April 1986 shortly after a month-long tour of the USA and Canada, and was replaced, but only always on a temporary basis, by a returning Paul Hanley, proof again that even those who had left before under the darkest of clouds were always prepared to help out whenever the need arose.

But, come the summer, a new drummer, in the shape of Simon Wolsencroft, was drafted in. ‘Funky Si’, as he was commonly known, was a familiar figure in the Manchester and wider indie-scene having been a contemporary of the likes of Ian Brown, John Squire, Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke, as well as being a member of The Colourfield, the group formed by Terry Hall after the break-up of Fun Boy Three.

Over the course of the final six months of 1986, there would be three 45s and the album Bend Sinister, and while Wolsencroft drummed on most of the songs, some of the material completed prior to his arrival was issued, meaning Paul Hanley got a few final credits with the band, including the tracks on the next flop single in July, released only on 12″:-

mp3: The Fall – Living Too Late
mp3: The Fall – Hot Aftershave Bop
mp3: The Fall – Living Too Long

Have a look at the cover of the single at the top of this post, and you’ll see a man who has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.  Combine it with the downbeat nature of the lyric and the almost funerial pace of the music on the a-side, then it was no surprise that at least one interviewer thought it might be a sign that MES, with his 30th birthday just a year away, was beginning to plan some sort of exit from the music industry.  In response, he said it was really his attempt to write a song about upper-class suburbia and how pissed off folk must be about the routine and dull way it was all panning out. Not exactly the sort of things that make for a good single is it?, albeit it remains a song I still enjoy all these years later.

The b-side, Hot Aftershave Bop, is a faster-paced number  that wouldn’t sound out-of-place down at the local indie-disco, albeit not when the DJ really wants to pack the floor out. It’s more than worthy of a listen, albeit it does have an almost throwaway near-nonsensical lyric in which the song title, or a slight variant on it, appears regularly.  The extra track on the b-side, Living Too Long, is an extended yet different version of the a-side, with a lot more going on in the playing.

Fun fact 1: There was actually a limited edition 7″ promo single issued, omitting Living Too Long but offering a miniature bottle of Hot Aftershave Bop aftershave.  I’m guessing MES wouldn’t have been best pleased with the marketing folk

Fun fact 2: Living Too Late was reviewed in Smash Hits magazine, possibly the first (and last?) time that the Beggars Banquet promotional folk got a 45 into the pages of the UK’s biggest selling music weekly.  There was always a guest reviewer, who that week happened to be Samantha Fox, whose initial claim to fame had come through regular appearances on Page 3 of the tabloid papers in which there was a daily photo of a woman with her tits out, but who had, in early 1986, embarked on what would become a successful, if short-lived, career as a pop star.

Cutting-edge criticism, indeed.  MES, many years later, would look back and laugh at it all:-

“That’s as good as it got inside Smash Hits: Page 3 birds airing their views. I think it’s great, actually — better than being harangued by Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill.”

Living Too Late reached #97 but was voted in at #15 in the Peel Festive 50 at the end of 1986.

Next up……an actual appearance in the Top 75, thanks to a song that could and did pack the floor at indie-discos.

JC

Another song that I only picked up on a few years after its release as a single in October 1985.  My excuse being that I had graduated from university a few months previously, moving almost immediately to Edinburgh to start my first job in July 1985.  Money was tight, and much of my salary went on the rent for a room in a shared flat, albeit in a very nice part of the city.  The three of us all worked – mine was office based with regular hours, but the flatmates worked in hotels and bars, often on night shifts, which meant there was little opportunity to play records or tapes without causing a disturbance.  It proved to be the beginning of my drifting away, for the most part, from music for a few years.

I was also not yet familiar with the alternative scene in Edinburgh, and so wouldn’t know the clubs or places that would likely play The Fall or indeed any of the music I liked.  Besides, most other folk in my office (i.e 100%) were a tad more straight-laced when it came to music….something that only changed when Jacques the Kipper appeared on the scene some five years later.

Why am I telling you all this?  I suppose it is partly confessional as Cruiser’s Creek is up there as one of my favourite of all the songs written and recorded by The Fall and I really wish I had been aware of it at the time of its release, and not a few years later when I got my copy of The Fall 45 84 89 compilation. I have, however, danced to it loads of times over recent  years as I always made a request for it at the Little League nights when they used to take place, and John was always willing to indulge me.

Cruiser’s Creek is brilliant.  It’s also bonkers.

Putting the backstory together nowadays is much easier, thanks to the internet and the various fan sites devoted to The Fall, but trying to work it all out back in 1985 was a very tough task. Mark E Smith, in a contemporary interview with one of the music weeklies, said ‘it’s a party lyric with a party twist’.  I’m thinking he was referring to the utter danceability of the song, with a pacey riff and sing-along-chorus, albeit so many of the words in the verses are hard to pick out or fathom.  Reading them written down many years later and there’s confirmation that MES is having a sly dig at two of the year’s biggest happenings in the music world – Red Wedge and ZTT Records.

One of the most astonishing things to emerge in later years is that Cruiser’s Creek was the name of a library on a ship on which MES had spent time with Brix’s family after her grandparents had taken all the relatives on a fiftieth wedding anniversary cruise.  It seems that MES, in trying to escape all the fuss that was happening throughout, retreated to Cruiser’s Creek where he did some writing, seemingly using the location for the title but making the narrative about an office party.  Whether he was comparing the agonies of an office party at one of his former places of employment on Salford Docks with having to spend days at sea with the extended Salenger family, we can only make an assumption……

mp3: The Fall – Cruiser’s Creek

The version on offer today is taken from the compilation album, and it is a couple of minutes shorter than the original single, which ran to over six minutes in length, released on 7″ and 12″ vinyl, with the 7″ playing at 33 ⅓ RPM.  But never fear, I’ve the promo video to provide the full version:-

Here’s your b-sides:-

mp3: The Fall – L.A.
mp3: The Fall – Vixen

The former, which is mainly an instrumental with a few snippets of lyrics/dialogue thrown in. The tune was written by Brix, as a homage to her home city. It seems that MES leaned on the TV series TJ Hooker, starring William Shatner as a cop, for inspiration. Unusually for a Fall 45, it wasn’t a new song, as it had been one of the tracks on the album This Nation’s Saving Grace, released the previous month.

The latter, only found on the 12″, is a Brix song on which her vocal is very prominent….it becomes a Mr & Mrs Smith duet in due course….and while it’s harmless and inoffensive enough, it doesn’t stand up to repeated playings. I do wonder if any other member of the band had presented it as a tune whether it would actually have seen light of day.

Fun fact, specifically, for JTFL-Ahh.

Vixen was never played live, but seemingly a snippet of it was played by Brix during an in-store appearance by The Fall at Texas Records, 2204 Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica on Saturday 23 March 1985.

Your musicians on this one were Mark E Smith (vocals), Brix Smith (guitar, vocals), Craig Scanlon (guitar), Steve Hanley (bass), Simon Rogers (bass, guitar, keyboards) and Karl Burns (drums).  John Leckie could again be found in the producer’s chair.

Cruiser’s Creek reached the giddy heights of #96 in the UK singles chart.

JC

Those of you paying attention will have noted that The Fall had enjoyed a couple of years of stability in respect of all six members staying together.  Things changed dramatically at the beginning of November 1984 during the UK tour to promote The Weird and Wonderful World Of….

On 1 November, the band returned to their hotel after a gig in Cardiff.  For whatever reason, they don’t follow the usual practice of empting the tour van and taking the instruments into their rooms. The following morning, they return to the van and discover it has been broken into with almost everything stolen.  By the time of the next gig, two nights later in Brighton, the record label has managed to get everyone temporary replacement instruments.  The gig turns into the worst of the tour, with all sorts of mistakes, missed cues and cock-ups, after which Mark E Smith loses his temper with everyone.

It proves to be too much for Steve Hanley who was already struggling to keep things going after his first child, a boy, had been born prematurely and was seriously ill for the first few months of his life.  Steve goes back to his hotel to think about things and after making a call home to his wife, he tells her he’s quitting the band and coming back on an overnight train back to Manchester.  But he hasn’t told anyone in the band of his decision, nor that his intention was to get out of the music business altogether.

The next day, he gets a call from his brother who tells him that he had just informed MES that he was leaving, deciding that he would take up an offer from some old friends to start up a new band, one free of the control-freakery of MES.

The tour continues onto Europe, with The Fall now being like most other bands and having just one drummer. A call is put into Simon Rogers, a classically-trained musician who had become a friend of MES and Brix, and he replaced Steve as the bass player for the rest of the tour.  In due course, things did calm down a bit but not enough for Paul Hanley to change his mind.  Steve Hanley was officially put on an extended period of paternity leave, and although he helped out by playing bass when the band appeared on BBC TV’s Old Grey Whistle Test a few weeks later, he is absent when the band returns to the studio in early 1985; he would also miss a UK and US tour in the first half of that year.

So, it was a five-piece band who met up again with John Leckie early in the year, the fruits of which lead to a new double-A single that was duly released in June 1985, just around the time Steve Hanley was about to officially re-join.

mp3: The Fall – Couldn’t Get Ahead
mp3: The Fall – Rollin’ Dany
mp3: The Fall – Petty Thief Lout

I’m not going to offer too much on this one.  It’s not that I dislike Couldn’t Get Ahead, but it doesn’t quite resonate with me in the ways that many of the previous (and later) singles managed to do.  It’s kind of perfunctory if you really want my take on it.

Rollin’ Dany, not that I would have known it if I hadn’t looked at the sleeve notes in the The Fall 45 84 89 compilation that I picked up a few years later, is a cover version. I’ve never take to it as its opening notes somehow remind me of Shang-a-Lang by Bay City Rollers, a song I had been trying to forget for many a year going back to my early teens.  Having said that, given it was the first ever official release by The Fall of a cover version, it is of historical significance.

Petty Thief Lout, which was made available only on the 12″, extends to over five minutes. It is a quiet-loud-quiet sort of number, but at no point does it come across as anything but the band somewhat going through the motions.  Maybe everyone was missing the Hanley brothers…..

It reached #90, which at the time was the highest chart position achieved by any 45 released by The Fall. Brix’s dreams of being a bona-fide pop star were becoming increasingly distant.

JC

12 October 1984.  A date on which The Fall again defy convention by insisting that the record label issue a new album along with a new single.  But not just in any bog-standard way as the new single was to come out on 12″ vinyl, accompanied by a free 7″ single.  Oh, and if you chose instead to buy the new album on cassette rather than vinyl, then you would also get just about all the music that was available on the new single, as well as the tracks that had made up the previous two singles…..

The new album was called The Wonderful and Frightening World Of….and it contained nine tracks with a running time of just over 40 minutes.  Three of its tracks were co-written by Mark E Smith and Brix Smith.  Of the other six, Brix was credited on three of them, which is some achievement given that her only previous contribution to a Fall album had been to co-write one track on Perverted By Language, released some ten months earlier.

It has to be said that the other band members were quite relaxed about it all.  Steve Hanley is on record as saying:-

“She was good for the band. We’d reached as far as we could with fifteen-minute songs like ‘And This Day’ battering the audience.  She did commercialise the band, she helped convince Mark to go that way. She was like a breath of fresh air for five miserable blokes from Manchester’

I’m not sure if MES, newly married and seemingly enjoying himself on stage like no other time previously, was all that miserable in 1984.  The other four blokes were still those who had been making music together for the past couple of years – the duel drumming efforts of Karl Burns and Paul Hanley (who also played occasional keyboards), Craig Scanlon on guitar and Steve Hanley on bass, whose musical contributions were becoming even more increasingly important and influential.

I came quite late to this, and indeed, subsequent periods of The Fall, so I can’t really comment on how I felt about it all at the time.  My excuse is that the new flat that I had moved into didn’t really have what you would call any other fans of the band, and so between the six of us there were just a handful of previous singles kicking around, and they weren’t on heavy rotation.  Nobody bought the new album or the Call For Escape Route package.  It would take until the early 90s, and me picking up a CD compilation album bringing together the singles that had been released on Beggars Banquet between 1984 and 1989 before I actually heard any of these songs. In this instance, it was No Bulbs, but it immediately became an instant favourite, and remains so all these many years later.

Call For Escape Route 12″

mp3: The Fall – Draygo’s Guilt
mp3: The Fall – Clear Off!
mp3: The Fall – No Bulbs

Bonus 7″

mp3: The Fall – No Bulbs 3
mp3: The Fall – Slang King 2

It’s another very fine collection of tunes, albeit more ammo to those fans of old who might have been a bit concerned about the band shifting to a sound which bordered on commercially friendly.

Draygo’s Guilt, co-written by MES and Craig Scanlon, has a tune which sounds as if it has been around since forever, with just about every kick ass rock’n’roll band having some sort of stab at it along the way. Indeed, The Fall had been playing this song, or at least a variation on it, as far back as 1980.

Clear Off! is, for The Fall, rather a light sounding track.  The tune, in places, reminds me of a slightly sped-up Hip Priest and at other times, like the sort of tune New Order would pull together a little later on in time. Oh, and it also features a guest co-vocal from Gavin Friday of The Virgin Prunes (as indeed did two of the tracks on The Weird and Wonderful World Of….

The full version of No Bulbs extends to a few seconds short of eight minutes while the edited down version, given the title of No Bulbs 3,  is around four-and-a-half minutes long.  It is this edited version which was included on The Fall 45 84 89 compilation I mentioned above and thus offered me my first ever listen to the song.   If ever you wanted to hear just how much John Leckie brought to the table in terms of his production skills, then take the time to give a listen to both, or either, versions of No Bulbs offered here today.

I still cannot get my head around it wasn’t selected as a stand-alone 7″ single, as I’m convinced it would have provided The Fall with a chart hit.  It is a truly magnificent and mighty piece of music, one which wonderfully disguises that it is actually about living in squalor and poverty, as was the case with the newly married Mr & Mrs Smith in a dingy flat in Prestwich, just north of Manchester and just south of Bury.  It would also justify an entry into the ‘Some Songs Are Great Short Stories’ series, with MES trying to get his hands on the one belt he owns as it is needed to hold his trousers up, only he can’t find it for the amount of junk and debris lying around the flat, and as he goes to switch on the light to assist in his efforts, the bulb blows, and they are so poor, they don’t have a spare.  There is also a truly inspired closing stanza, which drives home the miserable conditions of their habitat:-

They say damp records the past
If that’s so I’ve got the biggest library yet
The biggest library yet.

Slang King 2 is a different mix of a track which was included on The Weird and Wonderful World Of…., and seemingly was written by MES and Brix, but with a rare writing credit offered to Paul Hanley on account of MES liking the way he had improvised the keyboards into the tune.

The single came into the charts at #99.  The album got as high as #62.  In both instances, it now feels like an absolute travesty.

JC

Let’s get a misconception about this one right out of the way.

C.R.E.E.P. is not about recently departed band member, Marc Riley.

Brix Smith‘s book, The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise (2016) devotes a few paragraphs to the song, saying that she was excited by it, not least as she provides ‘bratty backing vocals that contested well with the darkness of The Fall’, and firmly believed it had a chance of cracking the singles chart. She also explains that the lyrics were aimed at another of the many hundreds of individuals who had upset Mark E Smith somewhere along the way, a German tour manager by the name of Scumech, whose name was turned into scum-egg as part of the lyric.  A bit of investigatory work by fans of the band later unearthed that the man in question was most likely Scumeck Sabottka, who would later make a fortune as the founder of one of the biggest online ticketing agencies in Germany – and looking at some of the photos of the man that can be found online, he does look something of a peace-loving, trendy wretch who was fond of ABC.  It would appear therefore that MES never gave him the look of love….

C.R.E.E.P. didn’t sound like anything the band had written, recorded and released up to this point.  It was even more ‘pop’ orientated than Oh! Brother.  It is very much a record on which the guiding influence of John Leckie in the producer’s chair is obvious, and the folk at Beggars Banquet must have been pleased at how it was all going.

Many years later, it would emerge that the tune had been written by the brothers Steve and Paul Hanley together with Craig Scanlon, just after The Man Whose Head Expanded had been recorded, but MES had hated it, throwing the cassette down in disdain, seemingly lost forever.  Brix, while doing a bit of serious cleaning in her new matrimonial abode, found the discarded tape and suggested that it would make for a good song if MES could come up with a lyric.  Still very much in love with his new wife, the cantankerous frontman didn’t let on what he really thought of the tune and in due course came up with the words. Oh, and Brix somehow manages to get a writing credit on the final version, possibly/probably because of the bratty backing vocal…..

I should at this stage owning up to having a real liking for C.R.E.E.P. but not buying it at the time of release, being content to hear it played on a reasonably regular basis at one disco or other in the Students; Union. The problem, however, was that the music critics weren’t all that keen, with some barbed comments that the new-look band, which had undergone a fairly radical image transformation, was now being fronted by the new wave equivalent of Dollar (click here if you need an explanation).  Many fans from way back didn’t care for it either, thinking it was clear evidence of the band selling-out to the man.

Similar to last time out, C.R.E.E.P., released on 24 August 1984, was made available on 7″ and 12″, with the latter being on green vinyl and containing a version which is almost two minutes longer, with particular prominence given to the bass playing skills of Steve Hanley:-

mp3: The Fall – C.R.E.E.P.
mp3: The Fall – C.R.E.E.P. (12″ version)

Despite Brix’s hopes, it stalled at #91, just two places higher than Oh! Brother. You might well be able to easily dance in the student unions to the music The Fall were now making, but it still wasn’t making any impact on the wider market of record buyers.

The b-side to the single was inspired by another individual whom The Fall had dealt with while on tour. Again, let’s turn to Brix’s book for the details:-

“The Fall’s American tour manager, Pat was a plump fellow from Hoboken, New Jersey. He was a fun-loving, beer-drinking kind of guy. Mark went to Pat and asked him for some pills. Pat removed a plastic bag full of colourful capsules.”

The capsules were emptied out and duly snorted, but instead of it being the anticipated speed it turned out to be nothing more than powdered caffeine….

mp3: The Fall – Pat-Trip Dispenser

It’s an absolute belter of a song…..one which benefits from the polish offered up by Leckie but without going down the truly commercial road. It seemed to bode well for the album that was being worked up……

JC

Do you remember a few weeks back when I highlighted that The Fall had just one entry in the Peel Festive 60 (as was) of 1982, and that none of the tracks from Hex Enduction Hour had gathered enough votes?  Well, 1983 was significantly better in that both of the year’s 45s, The Man Whose Head Expanded and Kicker Conspiracy, along with its b-side, Wings, were prominent, but pride of place went to a Peel Session version of Eat Y’Self Fitter, the track which had opened the album, Perverted By Language, with it being voted in at #8, headed only by songs from Billy Bragg, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and New Order.

MES, however, was disillusioned at Rough Trade, and he began 1984 on the look-out for a new home.  Some major labels were taking notice of the increasingly positive press coming the way of The Fall, and, let’s not pretend otherwise, the addition of an attractive female member made the band a much more marketable proposition.  The music weeklies, in the first week of May 1984, announced that the band had signed a deal with Beggars Banquet, and were currently holed up in a studio with producer John Leckie who had brought success to a number of other bands including Magazine, Simple Minds, XTC, The Skids and Public Image Limited.

One month later, and the first fruits of the new labour were unleashed on the listening public.

mp3: The Fall – Oh! Brother

It was The Fall, but not as we, or indeed anyone, knew them.

It was a pop song, one which would have sat easily alongside those that were being released on a regular basis by Rough Trade.  I’m sure that Geoff Travis would have been scratching his head and wondering just what he had ever done to upset MES to the extent that the thrawn bastard continuously refused to contemplate anything akin to radio friendly songs, only for him to come up with this absolute monster once he’d moved to a major label.

Right away, the music press suggested that it was the pop sensibilities of Brix Smith that had led the band down this particular path. After all, the line-up was still the same as it had been since the departure of Marc Riley, but with the addition of this American guitarist and vocalist who might have been a fan but had not been part of the rough and ready apprenticeship going back what was now six studio albums, an EP, ten singles and many hundreds of gigs in toilets all across the UK and further afield.

But……why let the facts get in the way of a good story?  It turned out that Oh! Brother, or at least a version of it, dated back to 1977/78, and had been resurrected as being a tune that Brix Smith could quickly get to grips with in the live setting and in the studio.   The person who was really most responsible for bringing about this change in sound and dynamics was John Leckie as his production techniques and fingerprints are all over the 45.

Suffice to say, some fans were horrified.  But at the same time, the Leckie name being attached to the band likely opened The Fall up to a whole new audience – I can vouch for that as, not withstanding the home recording of Hex Enduction Hour in advance of the 1982 gig in Glasgow, this was the first single of The Fall that I bought at the time of its actual release.  On 12″ vinyl, and I was completely unaware that this was the first single by the band that had been issued on that format, with everything previous being on 7″ only.  My copy from back in 1984 didn’t survive being constantly played on record players with needles in less than perfect condition, nor a few moves across student and workplace flats across the remainder of the decade.  But I’m pleased to say I’ve since picked up a second-hand copy in decent nick:-

mp3: The Fall – God-Box
mp3: The Fall – Oh! Brother (12″ mix)

God-Box was the first song on which Brix Smith received a writing credit for The Fall. In fact, it goes well beyond that with the lyrics attributed jointly to Mark E Smith and Brix Smith, but with the music and arrangement being solely in the hand of Brix. It was almost as if MES was announcing that she was here to stay, and far from being just a pretty face, was going to bring something concrete and meaningful to bring to the band.

Oh! Brother did what no other previous single had done in that entered the mainstream singles chart at #93. Thanks to it being on a major label, it didn’t qualify for the indie singles chart.

JC

The summer of 1983.  The Fall are signed to Rough Trade.  Their label mates included The Smiths, Aztec Camera, The Go-Betweens, Jazzateers and Violent Femmes, all of whom were recording and issuing what Mark E Smith regarded as bog-standard tuneful indie-pop, often with jangly guitars at the centre of the sound.  Rough Trade did not feel like a natural home, but hey-ho, a contract is a contract, and a single and album are required by the end of 1983.

The current five-man line-up of MES, Craig Scanlon, Paul Hanley, Steve Hanley and Karl Burns convene in a London studio to record the contractual new single. It’s a song they have played a great deal while touring throughout the previous six months, mainly in Europe, but also over in the USA on the tour when MES had first met Brix Salenger after a gig in Chicago. Brix had followed MES back to England, and as recounted in last week’s tale, the couple had married in July 1983.

It’s a song about football.  A sport which was at something of a low in England (and indeed Scotland) in 1983.  It was often a brutal watch, with skilful players all too often at the mercy of no-nonsense defenders, played in front of hostile and aggressive crowds.  Hooliganism was rife.   Fighting broke out on the terraces, in the surrounding streets, on public transport, at motorway service stations and was often at its worst when English clubs or the England national team played in European competitions.

It was as far from trendy as could be imagined, so there’s no real surprise that MES spent months crafting lyrics which had a go at those in charge of the sport, who were all too often and willing to do it down instead of looking for ways to bring about positive change. Oh, and as a reminder to Rough Trade that music wasn’t and shouldn’t always be instantly accessible and appealing to the masses, he came up with a tune which, for the early verses, leans on that rockabilly rift the band had used to great effect so often, but is mixed in with a degree of brutalism around the chorus and middle section of the song:-

mp3: The Fall – Kicker Conspiracy

It came out in September 1983 as a 2×7″ package with an original track on the b-side of Kicker Conspiracy, with the bonus 7″ having two songs taken from a John Peel session dating back to 1980:-

mp3: The Fall – Wings
mp3: The Fall – Container Drivers (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – New Puritan (Peel Session)

The writing credits on Wings are given to the Hanley brothers and MES. It’s one of those tracks which quite likely delighted most long-standing fans, but confirmed the prejudices held by the haters. I’ll hold my hands up…..it’s a song I didn’t discover until many years later and my first thought was that this was the sort of hard-to-take-in music I had experienced at the Glasgow Night Moves gig in April 1982, as mentioned a couple of weeks back. And sure enough, I’ve since been able to check and confirm that it was on the set-list that night, seemingly just the fourth time it had ever been aired. I’ve still never really taken to it……

Kicker Conspiracy reached #5 in the Indie Charts. MES wasn’t happy at how little promotional support was offered, despite it being the first Fall song to have an accompanying video, part of which was filmed at Turf Moor, the home of Burnley FC. He likely had a point in that Rough Trade was devoting resources to the charts and would-be chart bands, and not pressing enough copies of the records by other acts, which is why it is one of the rarer 45s of the era to track down with second-hand copies starting at £30 and going all the way up to £75 for a mint condition offering.

A few postscripts.

There are many fans out there who reckon that the Peel Sessions brought out the best in The Fall, and there’s plenty of evidence to back this up when you listen to the tracks collected on the compilation box set released back in 2005.  Marc Riley, in a radio interview in 1999 had this to say, specifically about the third Peel Session from which Container Drivers and New Puritan are taken:-

“The thing about recording a John Peel session is that you get in the van in the morning, in our case you drive two hundred miles, get out, unload the gear, and record everything in a pretty quick time.  I mean you would do four songs for a session. Now normally, even for band like The Fall, you would have to take two or three days to record four tunes.  In this case you have to get it all done and dusted by ten o’clock at night. So you would get into the studio, wheel everything down into the catacombs in Maida Vale, set up and do the deed. And I remember, I think it was the third session we did, we recorded the first track, made a right old racket, as we did, went in to start listening back to it, make sure we were happy with it, and I turned round to see the producer (John Sparrow), and his pipe had gone out. This is the truth, his pipe had actually gone out and he was asleep.”

As a bonus, here’s the other two tracks from that same session, recorded on 16 September 1980 and first broadcast 24 September 1980:-

mp3: The Fall – Jawbone and The Air-Rifle (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – New Face In Hell (Peel Session)

Mark E Smith – vocals; Marc Riley – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Paul Hanley – drums

I made mention last week that Kamera Records had hoped, in late 1982, to issue a 7″ single containing two tracks from the album Room To Live. The label was in its dying days when it arranged for the pressing and issuing of this single in September 1983 only to find itself in a position that it couldn’t afford to do so. My understanding is that just 200 copies ever found their way into some shops, and even then, it was a real peculiarity. It had which had Marquis Cha Cha on its a-side, and Room To Live on its b-side, but the sleeve and the actual info on the vinyl for the b-side states the track is Papal Visit. All of which means I’m not inclined to include it in this series.

Finally, the contractually obligatory album for Rough Trade was also recorded in the summer of 1983. Perverted By Language was released on 5 December 1983 and its credits revealed that The Fall had undergone another line-up change. The five who had made Kicker Conspiracy had been joined, on two of the album tracks, by an additional guitarist and vocalist.

Welcome to The Fall, Brix Smith. Things weren’t quite ever the same after you joined, were they?

JC

Taking up the story from where it ended last week with the release of Look, Now in the early summer of 1982.

The Fall were about to head over to Australia and New Zealand in July/August 1982 for a month-long tour.  MES pulled everyone back into Cargo Studios in Rochdale for what the rest of the band thought would be a new single, intended to keep up a bit of profile in the UK while they were gone. It turned out that the frontman actually wanted a full album out of the sessions, but one which would be in a totally different way from Hex Enduction Hour. The songs were all new, very few had been performed live beforehand (which was unusual), and furthermore MES kept everyone on their toes by using the occasional guest musician and arranging for recording sessions without telling key members of his band and keeping them off the actual record. Paul Hanley has since described the time in Cargo as “a fucking nightmare. You’d turn up and find Smith had only invited half the band, or brought in other musicians without telling anyone!”.

Room To Live was released on Kamera Records in September 1982 to less than enthusiastic reviews, with its seven songs seen as way inferior to the material from earlier in the year.  The tour down under had, unsurprisingly, been a difficult one for all concerned, with many fall-outs, particularly between Marc Riley and MES, with the former still smarting from being heavily excluded from the Room To Live recording sessions (it would later transpire that he played on just two of its tracks).

There were also rumours that Kamera was in a bit of bother, which may be why there was a decision, taken by the label, to release a single to accompany the album, consisting of two of its tracks – Marquis Cha Cha, backed with Papal Visit.  This wasn’t to MES’s liking and the single was withdrawn (there’s a postscript to this, which I’ll come to in a future edition of this series).

So, 1982 ended with a whimper, with a tour of some student venues in England….and as you’ll recall from the previous two editions of the series, not even much enthusiasm for The Fall among Peel listeners with just one track in the Festive 50.

MES’s solution?  To sack Mark Riley from the band, which he did in the first week of 1983 (and not, according to legend, on Riley’s wedding day which was 24 December 1982).  Oh, and to take his leave of Kamera.  Once again, having no label to call home, fate kindly intervened in the shape of Geoff Travis at Rough Trade who, despite having been ridiculed by MES some 18 months previously, re-signed The Fall.  The first new 45 of the post-Riley era appeared in June 1983, with its title, on the surface, being a dig at the departed musician:-

mp3: The Fall – The Man Whose Head Expanded

We’re back with the Casio intro again, but this time it goes into a wonderful bass-line intro which sets the tempo, initially for one of the most upbeat and easily danceable (at this point of time) of songs by The Fall….except it had a bonkers, almost ad-libbed lyric, which ensured nobody on radio (except the usual suspect) would play it.  Oh, and just as you might be getting into a groove on that dance floor, it slows down dramatically for a minute or so, at which point MES goes all shouty, before suddenly it switched back to the fast tempo.

It’s a real tour de force, driven along by the duo drumming of Paul Hanley and Karl Burns, with Steve Hanley on bass and Craig Scanlon on guitars and keyboards.  The song was credited to Smith/S. Hanley/Scanlon/Seaberg.  It seems that the latter was Sol Seaberg, a part-time van driver for The Fall; whether he actually came up with something for the song or not is unknown – it may well have been MES’s way of saying to Riley that anyone can write songs.

The b-side is just two-and-a-half minutes long, and in some ways is a throwback to the earlier rough’n’ready material, with pounding drums at the centre of a cacophony of noise and shouty vocals:-

mp3: The Fall – The Ludd Gang

But hidden away, at the exact halfway mark of the song, is one of the funniest lyrics anyone has ever penned:-

I hate the guts of Shakin’ Stevens
For what he has done
The massacre of “Blue Christmas”
On him I’d like to land one on

The Man Whose Head Expanded reached #3 in the UK indie charts. It had been released on 27 June 1983.  Three weeks later, Mark E Smith married his American-born girlfriend whom he had met just a couple of months previously, in Chicago, while The Fall were on tour in the States.  I think you all know what comes next….

JC

*With thanks to JTFL-Ahh for prompting the change to the name of this series…

As mentioned last week, none of the tracks on Hex Enduction Hour made it onto Peel’s Festive rundown at the end of 1982, although this later single did scrape in at #58 (one place ahead of Happy Talk by Captain Sensible).

The second 45 to come out on Kamera Records was released some five weeks after Hex.  I mentioned in a previous edition of this series that Mark E Smith had a tendency to get any finished songs down on tape in a recording studio almost as soon as he’d written the final word and hated hoarding or stockpiling material for the future.  Look, Know was no different, although its eventual release would be some seven months after its recording…..and while it would find its way into the Peel Festive 50 of 1982, it had in fact had its very first airing back on 15 September 1981 as part of a Peel Session:-

mp3: The Fall – Look, Now (Peel Session Version)

This was broadcast while the band were in Iceland, initially playing a few gigs and then recording some tracks intended for what would become Hex Enduction Hour. It was while in Iceland that a rather different version of the song emerged from a studio session, seemingly in one take which MES decided wouldn’t be improved on.  From the same Casio-keyboard intro that would soon make temporary superstars of the German group Trio, into giving space for other members of the band to take the mic up front, it was unlike any other Fall song in their canon at this point in time:-

mp3: The Fall – Look, Now

Steve Hanley has since said that there was a sense of astonishment when MES decided to go with the first take and that nobody knew at that point whether it would appear on the album.  There was also a belief that they might return to it again, perhaps looking to record it in a way similar in style to the Peel Session, for future use as a b-side.  There was certainly never any thought that it would be suggested as an actual single, especially on the back of Hex Enduction Hour, as its sound was very much at odds with the tracks which made the cut for that album.

Listening now, and I say this as someone who quite likes the single, but this was just another curveball thrown by MES, partly to ensure the label was sticking to its agreement to issue material in the shape and form he wanted, but also to further confound the writers on the music weekly papers, who were surely bemused when they played their promotional copy on the office stereo system.  It could almost be regarded as a novelty single, of sorts.

As for the b-side:-

mp3: The Fall – I’m Into C.B.!

It’s one of the funniest and most entertaining of the early(ish) songs by The Fall.   The writing credits are given solely to MES and one can just imagine him manically and frantically directing things in the studio – it was recorded at the Hitchin Cinema in December 1981 at the same time as much of Hex.

The subject matter may, on the face of it, seem a strange one for MES to take any great interest, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that, until late 1981, CB Radio was always an illegal form of broadcasting in the UK. There was no licensed frequency and its users were often referred to in the media as ‘bandits’ with the suggestion that they were lawless.  It surely would have appealed to MES’s sense of humour, not to mention justice, that a harmless individual, sitting at home with a form of self-entertainment, would be facing the full brunt of the law bearing down on them when there were real criminals out there getting away with all sorts of high jinks.

Oh, and with the fear of stating the bleedin’ obvious, the 4+ and 6+ on the front of the sleeve refer to the running times of the two songs.

Look, Now was another 45 which hit the top end of the Indie Charts, reaching #4.   The Fall, in 1982, remained a band not recognised by anyone who didn’t read music weeklies or listen to John Peel.

JC

I think it’s only fair that Hex Enduction Hour, released in March 1982, features as part of this series as it enables me to get a bit personal and nostalgic. It doesn’t actually show me in that great a light to be honest…..

The thing is, The Fall were coming to Glasgow on 1 April 1982, for a gig at Night Moves (the club recently referenced in flimflanfan’s wonderful ICA on Goth music). A really good friend at the time, and someone who I went to a lot of gigs with, was determined to go, partly on the basis of him liking what he had heard on the John Peel show, but also from the fact that the support band was an up and coming band from Scotland called Cocteau Twins.

My mate went out and bought the new Fall album and taped a copy for me onto a C90 cassette.

I listened to it. I really liked the opening couple of tracks, but then thought it became a bit of a droning dirge. It also sounded as if my mate had cocked up the recording as the tape faded out mid-song before halting altogether, but when I turned it over to Side B, the song which had faded out started up again. Both tunes appeared to be called Winter. Side B was a tough listen as the singer asked questions but seemed to give no answers about Nazis, while the final two songs were long-drawn-out affairs that were unlistenable.

My expectations for the gig weren’t high. But as my mate had seen a few bands that weren’t his cup of tea, it was only fair that I went along with him.

As it turned out, the support band were fine, albeit they didn’t play for long, with the incredibly shy and possibly terrified singer seeming as if she just wanted the experience to end. The Fall were very strange. There didn’t seem to be all that many songs in their set from the new album, and the lead singer seemed at his happiest when he was provoking a reaction from the audience. We had been down near the front to begin with, but we edged back in due course, worried about getting caught up in something we wanted no part of. The musicians seemed to be a decent lot, but it was hard to tell as the sound was quite muddied. The gig ended and we kind of shrugged our shoulders.

The next day, I taped over the C90.  Probably a mix for my then first serious girlfriend, who had just left school for a job/career as a trainee with one of our major banks.  Her tastes were quite conservative…..I didn’t know it then, but the writing was on the wall, and we would go our separate ways by the summer….and it’s quite likely that the tape would have been filled with ‘mood’ music for those few occasions when her parents weren’t home.

Now, looking back at things.  I was 18 years old.  I had been going to gigs for around two years, mostly at the Glasgow Apollo where the established acts with chart hits rocked up, although I’d been to a few smaller shows in other venues including the various student unions in the city.  I knew little of The Fall beyond some early singles, most of which I had enjoyed…..but the album just didn’t resonate for the most part.  I quickly dismissed The Fall, and it would take a couple more years before I took them seriously again, thanks to their songs being played every now and again at the alternative disco in the students union of Strathclyde University, my regular haunt in 1984/85.

Forty years on, and having all sorts of different reference points on which to now draw, none of which were the least bit familiar to me back then, I can appreciate that Hex Enduction Hour is a wonderful piece of work, probably my favourite of all the studio albums. I now have a copy on vinyl, not the original version, but a 2019 re-press by Cherry Red Records in which three slabs of 12″ vinyl contain the album along with live recordings and Peel Sessions from September 1981, with a bonus 7″ single also thrown in.  Oh, and it all comes on a fabulously eye-catching green and white splattered vinyl…

Some background if you’re not aware. Mark E Smith thought this would be the band’s final album before the band totally imploded. Two tracks were initially recorded in Iceland, in September 1981, as part of a trip to play three gigs in that country, The remainder came from sessions in a disused cinema in Hitchin, some 38 miles north of London, in December 1981. The band had the same line-up as had played on Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul, and following on from the success of the sessions for that 45, Richard Mazda was in the producer’s chair in Hitchin.

It came out on Korova Records to fairly enthusiastic reviews, and thanks to the band’s increasing popularity, became their first single or album to make the official as opposed to indie charts, peaking at #71. Rather incredibly, none of its tracks made it onto Peel’s Festive rundown, as voted by listeners, at the end of the year, although a later single (and subject of the next edition of this series) did scrape in at #58.

But returning to the subject matter in hand.

Hex Enduction Hour has many wonderful moments, including loads I despised back in 1982. Like this:-

mp3: The Fall – Hip Priest

Seriously, how was I meant to get this in 1982 when I was enjoying and dancing to New Order, The Jam, Scritti Politti, Associates, The Clash, The Cure, Simple Minds, Blancmange, Yazoo, Echo & The Bunnymen and Aztec Camera – all of whom feature prominently and regularly in the ’82 Peel rundown, whereas these songs are nowhere to be seen:-

mp3: The Fall – Jawbone and The Air Rifle
mp3: The Fall – Mere Pseud Mag Ed
mp3: The Fall – Just Step S’ways

Looking back at the Night Moves set list on 1 April 1982, all the tracks on offer today, except for Jawbone, were aired, which is at odds with my recollection that the gig was mostly stuff that I didn’t know. Which just shows that I really didn’t do my pre-gig preparations properly.

The joke is on me. I should be still been dining out on the fact that I had seen an astonishing double-bill, for probably less than £3, of a band from Scotland set to soon take the indie music world by storm, and a tremendous line-up of The Fall at the height of their early powers.

If I could find a time travel machine, and offered a fresh opportunity, I’d certainly approach things very differently. I’d still have that C90 tape, for one……..

JC

“We went into a studio in London just to do Lie Dream and Fantastic Life. This was the first thing we did with two drummers, though it’s mostly Karl on the single. I was demoted to percussion (both drummers were on Fantastic Life though). Lie Dream features Richard Mazda on saxophone, trying to emulate Dave Tucker’s clarinet part as per the Peel session.”

Paul Hanley, quoted in the booklet which accompanied The Fall boxset, released in 2007.

You’ll recall from Part 5 in this series that the then 16-year old Paul Hanley, brother of bassist Steve, had been brought into The Fall on drums to replace the Mike Leigh. One year on, and the latest change in the line-up didn’t involve any sackings or musicians walking off in a huff, but instead saw Mark E Smith decide the band would best be served by having two drummers.

The new bloke wasn’t actually new at all, as Karl Burns, who had been part of the band in 1977/78, became the first musician to return to the fold, and as you can see from Paul’s above recollection, was given a prominent role. I’ve occasionally wondered if MES had actually wanted to get rid of Paul altogether, but decided he couldn’t run the risk of antagonising Steve Hanley, whose contributions, on stage and in the studio, were becoming increasingly important.

Or maybe he was just being practical…..Karl Burns had answered an emergency call to help out the band when Paul Hanley, on the account of his age, was denied a working visa for a tour of the USA, and keeping him on afterwards was returning the favour.  In any event, the two-drummer line-up was cemented, for a short while anyway!

MES had cut ties with Rough Trade after the release of Slates in April 1981.  I can’t be entirely sure, but it may well have been the case that the band convened in the London studio to cut this new single in the summer of ’81 without having any record company deal in place.  I’m surmising this, as the next move was to a newly established indie label – Kamera Records – and that Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul/Fantastic Life was the first 45 to be issued on the label, in November 1981.

No matter what, it’s an absolute stomper of a song.  MES was at pains, a couple of years later in an interview with NME, to explain that far for ridiculing the Northern Soul scene and those involved in it, he was paying a tribute:-

“That song actually did create quite a bit of resentment in the North because people thought it was being snobby and horrible about the old soul boys, which it was never about anyway. Because I was brought up with people that were into Northern Soul five years before anybody down here (in London) had even heard about it. But they’ve all grown out of it, which is what the song is about, but it wasn’t putting them down at all. If anything, it was glorifying them, but not in the format of, where are those soul boys that used to be here?”

Richard Mazda, as well as contributing the saxophone parts, was also in the producer’s chair.  The other thing worth noting is that Marc Riley wasn’t required to contribute on guitar, being relegated somewhat to keyboards only.

mp3: The Fall – Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul

The b-side, Fantastic Life, has long been one of my favourite Fall tracks of them all.   It has both a rollocking tune and a funny, crazy and sing-a-long lyric, albeit it takes a fair bit of working out…..thankfully there are websites out there nowadays to confirm and/or correct things.   I’d never have worked out these lines, from just after the point in the song where it changes from the fantastic life stories to the fantastic lie boasts…..

The Siberian mushroom Santa
Was in fact Rasputin’s brother
And he didst walk round Whitechapel
To further the religion of forgiven sin murder
Fantastic lie!

It would, if you want my opinion, have been an excellent single of its own making, but MES wasn’t the type to hoard things for later on. Once it was recorded…bang….get it out there as quickly as possible and to hell with the commercial aspects of things.

mp3: The Fall – Fantastic Life

The previous single on Rough Trade had got to #2 in the Indie Charts, with MES firmly believing that the label didn’t work hard enough for the band.  Casino Soul got to #5. Would it have managed to crossover to mainstream success if he’d stayed put? We’ll never know…..

Next up for The Fall was album #4, released in March 1982 by Kamera Records.  Said album is going to feature in this series next week………

JC