THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

“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