ILX Artist Ballot no #33 : Fron Witch Trials to Ersatz it's THE FALL (Albums, Tracks, heck why not Members also?)

http://www.venturemag.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/thefallpromo2005.jpg

"Northern white crap that talks back..."

So again identical set-up to the last thirty two and I'm also copying the header rules verbatim (cheers):

Right, here we break in for an importatn message:

Some helpful words, hopefully. It's a large and wide ranging set of tracks, most of them well known to your granny from back in her bongo playing days. Some (if not all) of you will be tired to the point of overfamiliarity with a large number of their 'nailed into fundamental history' tracks, so this is about nominating your favourite songs at this moment in time. You want to be obscure? Go do it. You want to praise the canon? Be my guest.

There are very few remixes in here. (don't larf, read on...) The only ones I can think of regard two songs: Love Me Do (exists in two different recordings), and Revolution (three, sort of..). With LMD, safe to say, it's a vote for either version. Revolution exists in "single b-side" (noisy), Album track "Revolution 1" and 'collage' Revolution 9. For this one, even though 9 has been proved to be the 'second part' of a long recording of 1, we shall deal with it as a separate track.

OK, quit cheating/copying the header from the Beatles poll/ballot. Here we go:

The remixes? It's basically "Hit the North", isn't it? A few "extended versions" I believe, but as before, if you want to nom a specific version then that's fine but they will all go towards the one song's total and variations will be notified as before.

In summary: Votes are for the 'song', and specific versions will be given an addendum where necessary, sort of like this:

60. TWO STATES (1995) [115 points, 6 votes, 1 Number1, Specific versions:2="Slanted and Enchanted"

Right, here we note the polls we are running:

1. Tracks - Top 20 tracks please. 1 for best, 20 for 20th best. None of this "Can't choose" nonsense, man up yeah?
2. Albums - Top 10 albums, yeah? Same deal..
3. Fall members: Your top three. All members past and present are eligible.

Choose your top twenty tracks and they'll score as follows:
1:40, 2:36, 3:33, 4:30, 5:28, 6:26, 7:25, 8:24, 9:23, 10:22, 11:21, 12:20, 13:19, 14:18, 15:17, 16:16, 17:15, 18:14, 19:13, 20:12.
All tracks eligible, covers, one-offs, if it's "The Fall" then it's OK. (So, no solo or 'other' projects / guest spots / AdultNet et al.)

Please send your ballot to: beatlespoll (at) hotmail.co.uk by midnight gmt April 14th (that's a long time)

In the meantime, use this thread for bigging up tracks you want people to vote for and asking any questions..

And remember: I heard the news today, oh boyaaaaaarrgggghhhhh!!!

Can't vote in this poll as I only know their albums up to 1991

... or thereabouts

http://www.visi.com/fall/discog/singlesalbums.html

Just thought I'd add this brilliantly formatted discog.

If you only know a limited amount of Fall, that's fine...

Yes! Been looking forward to this one. Narrowing this down to 20 tracks might be impossible, though.

Unfortunately I can't do Youtubes from here, but I have to rep for the following off the top of my head:

"New Puritan" Peel Session
"Weather Report 2" (and actually the entire Our Future Your Clutter album, but really, this fucking song.

Another one I really love that probably doesn't stand a chance: "Spinetrak"!

No, 'cos it's not properly representative (xp)

Yes, because I say so!

srsly, if you loved the Beggars days only, vote away: It might be tough to get a lot of ballots otherwise..

.. and "up to 1991" that's still a lot of albums, yeah?

A five week voting period? That's, uh, that's a real long time.

If it's not super clear what I'm getting at, it's that these artist polls have had voting periods of approx. 2 weeks each as a politeness to the line of folks waiting to do theirs. Five weeks seems too long, tbh.

hey! it's happening!

three members is not enough *whinge*

do live albums count on the the albums part of the ballot?

Agree with WilliamC - I've been excited for this for a long time, but I wouldn't want to torture those who've been waiting for the other 200 polls and couldn't GAF about MES.

While I'm opinionating, the results thread has got to be called Fall Heads POLL. (Or at very least POLL Art Threat.)

PS someone get Jagger out of retirement to rep for "Bonkers in Phoenix."

he shd be around here soon, but I def voted for BiP

cwkii, weather report 2 will be in my top 5, probably. it's astounding.

remember to googleproof, bentelec

think I'm going to have a ballot that's two-thirds post-1995

tragically I only had three from the 90s, and nothing from the 00s, though I repped for those two decades in the albums part

If it's not super clear what I'm getting at, it's that these artist polls have had voting periods of approx. 2 weeks each as a politeness to the line of folks waiting to do theirs. Five weeks seems too long, tbh.

Hmm, you have a point,

The reasons were:

1) It seems a quiet part of the 'season', I wonder how many ballots might miss out
2) There's no reason why #34 can't run whenever they want it to (#32 is rolling out the results about now..)

If the gencon is that it should end sooner, that's fine. April 14th? Mods? Any?

MG

The best thing about these polls is that they go bang! bang! bang! right after each other. Springsteen took longer than usual because Jamie was busy, but I agree with WilliamC that the whole process from first thread to final result should be about two weeks.

xpost lol Gen Con has a quite diff meaning to this old D&D nerd.

Anyway. The poll I was born to vote in! But are we really to submit our ballots to

beatlespoll (at) hotmail.co.uk

Just checking...

Yes, I am reusing that address, for practical reasons not just "conceptual" ones..

awes thx

also

STATE COG
BAZDAD
ANALYST

3. Fall members: Your top three. All members past and present are eligible.

Have a feeling Your Granny (bongos) is going to sweep this.

I was gonna say

and I had an inkling

this is gonna be toooooough

He asked Scanlon to come back to The Fall and "after three hours in the pub with him I realised I was better out of it".

Yeah, I don't know if I should go for the better known tracks or for the obscure ones I like (he says listening to 'C n C'- Mithering').

if I'm going to rep hard for one 'classic' track, it will surely be the peel session 'winter'

Winter as a whole got my vote, I couldnt split it up

That's an important ruling, actually. Can we please vote for 'Winter' as one track?

just vote for the peel session! it's better for a start

it's better vocally; the band is better on the LP vers

well I guess you can vote for the LP composite then

I've been sitting these polls out for a while, but I foresee some time-sucking ahead for this one.

does "fall members" exclude mes?

He'd be pissed off if he was eligible and came fourth. <--let's do this

Is twenty tracks enough to get sufficient overlap between ballots? Just thinking they have about 450 songs to choose from. Be quite easy to do a ballot where no-one else has voted for any of the songs on it.

Yeah I def expect 2/3 of my ballot to not make it

Thirty days for the poll would give everyone time to listen to one album a day...which everyone should do at some point anyway.

remember to googleproof, bentelec

Apologies, I will donate a high vote for "Weather Report 2" to the G00gl3pr00f Memorial Fund! It is so evidently The Last Fall Song that it was kind of a bummer when Ersatz GB came out; MES getting ground up in his own misanthropy.

It is so evidently The Last Fall Song

NEVER

Off the top of my head, the only semi-obscure track of theirs that's likely to crack my top 20 is "Mark'll Sink Us," partly because it's both great *and* a little unusual for the band. There used to be a youtube of it (studio version), but that seems to be gone, though it is on Spotify.

Apologies, I will donate a high vote for "Weather Report 2" to the G00gl3pr00f Memorial Fund! It is so evidently The Last Fall Song that it was kind of a bummer when Ersatz GB came out; MES getting ground up in his own misanthropy.

― bentelec

The last album was really awful in every way. Even Mark agrees http://entertainment.ca.msn.com/celebs/mark-e-smith-hates-the-falls-last-album-1

I get the Last Fall Song vibe from "Weather Report 2"; it feels like it was written from his deathbed.

Re Ersatz GB: I liked it when it first came out but I really never feel like going back to it. "Greenway" was fun, I guess.

I did get a vote in for Hurricane Edward which is one of my favorite of the 'reality rupture' Fall tracks

^^^will be in my top 10

Ersatz GB wasn't that bad! Taking Off, Greenway and Monocard were the standouts for me

Oh lord. After cramming hard for the Miles poll, I just don't have the energy for the Fall. As a longtime casual fan, I'll just look forward to the results.

I like "Hurricane Edward", but if anything from Levitate makes my ballot, it will be "4.5 Inch".

I have my ballot narrowed down to 30 tracks, and they're pretty much evenly distributed throughout the history of the group. Some difficult decisions ahead. I definitely know my #1, but that's about it.

i wanna rep for this track, i put it high in my list

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbMG1v7qDqs

THe 'straightest' fall track?

I voted for 4.5 Inch too; Levitate has become one of my favorite albums of the 90s

I really should do this one, shouldn't I?

with you on those DAM, unsurprisingly! Levitate's in my all-time top 10

For #1 I'm leaning towards the earlier "big" songs: Garden, Tempo House, Classical, Hip Priest. Especially Garden, which is funny because for the longest time it just struck me as the kind of thing you'd play if you wanted to turn someone off from the Fall. They did have a scope (if that's the right word) or ambition maybe, early on, that I think tailed off as they went along, even though I do like them straight through to the end.

It's a shame that Shift Work and Code: Selfish are out of print. That's my favorite period.

yeah garden is great ... stays in my head long after hearing it.

does "fall members" exclude mes?
― sleepingsignal, Monday, March 25, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He'd be pissed off if he was eligible and came fourth. <--let's do this
― Jeff W, Monday, March 25, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

or if he came behind marc riley.

'Garden' will sure as hell be on my tracks ballot. And Levitate on my albums.

They did have a scope (if that's the right word) or ambition maybe, early on, that I think tailed off as they went along, even though I do like them straight through to the end.

I hear this; lyrically, "I am a psychic haunted by the grim past" is a better hook to hang your obscurities off of than "I am a bitter goblin who hates Mumford and Sons." Out of all the forms of the band, though, it's the creeping, monolithic vein you cite ("Tempo House," "Hip Priest") that does the least for me; I think "Garden" is better when it's condensed into "Hotel Bloedel."

The second Fall, the Riley/Scanlon/Hanley/plus group, was pretty ambitious and fairly experimental. I've got a little musicological piece I wrote years ago about some of the things they did - counterpoint, dissonance, key and tempo changes, etc. These are the songs it focuses on:

How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'
Putta Block
Pay Your Rates
Middle Mass
An Older Lover, Etc.
Prole Art Threat
Fit and Working Again
Iceland
Marquis Cha-Cha
The Man Whose Head Expanded
Kicker Conspiracy
Wings

I should try to put it up somewhere.

Whittled down to 23 tracks at the moment. Having a real hard time trying to lose three, let alone rank them beyond my #1.

Tim, most of those tracks are in my top 20. That's the period of The Fall that still transfixes me

'Palace of Swords Reversed' has almost all of these tracks and is a good place to start with exploring early-ish Fall.

Favorite obscure Fall track: "Ludd Gang"! It may make my list, which will skew 90s/00s as that material isn't as played out as 70s/80s Fall.

Ok, there is no Fall material that's played out for me, just some that's less played.

Tim, put that up. A bunch of those songs made my ballot. 79-83 Fall are p much my personal paradigm for what makes a great band

OK, I've got to type it out. Not crazy about the whole piece, but I guess now I can fix it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D150aOFgOsk

Probably a wasted vote, but I love this gem at the end of the Peel Sessions box. Kind of a companion piece to Dr. Bucks' Letter (fried-sounding, friendship, implied DJ insults, "recompense").

Thought I'd just put up the tunes one at a time as I edit them. Here's the first one:

"How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'" (fourth single, July, 1980) - A fairly lengthy single at 4:22, this has four verses that are all different lengths, all of which feature irregular measure groupings (10 bars, 14 bars, 21 bars, and 25 bars). Verses three and four both have spoken word introductions (or, in the case of the fourth verse, switching from spoken word to text that's sung on the line "The only thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes"). Features a one-chord rockabilly groove in the verses and a dissonant, all major chord progression in the chorus (C# major, A major, C# major, B major, G# major, E major, G# major, F# major).

Implicit point in a lot of this stuff, of course, is how unusual it is.

Man, listen to the guitars and bass on "Putta Block" and tell me that is not a serious Sonic Youth precursor.

The rabbit killer did not eat for a week
And no way he can look at meat
No bottle has he anymore
It could be his mangled teeth
He sees jawbones on the street
Advertisements become carnivores
And roadworkers turn into jawbones
And he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime
The villagers dance round pre-fabs
And laugh through twisted mouths
Don't eat
It's disallowed
Suck on marrowbones and energy from the mainland

other tracks I would stan for:

Before The Moon Falls
Your Heart Out
Neighbourhood Of Infinity
Gut Of The Quantifier
Sing! Harpy
Spine-Trak
Sparta FC (Peel version)
Totally Wired (A Part Of America Therein live version)

&c &c

anyone got a link for putta block? I can't remember it. I'm intrigued....

Just slsk'd it. An incredible collage of the NWRA, New Puritan and a shifting, restless Fall at the peak of their powers. May have to go on my list now.

"Putta Block" (b-side of fourth single, 1980) - A fairly experimental b-side, this track begins with a 1:22 extract from a live recording of the band playing what sounds like the beginning of their song "The NWRA." The studio recording of the band then begins with a sloppy, chordal guitar riff that seems to be centered around some voicing of B major. Harmonically, this is entirely unrelated to the key center of D major that's subsequently established. The verse section involves a very proto-Sonic Youth guitar and bass counterpoint over a D chord (minor thirds played in the guitar, major thirds played in the bass line). A tempo change occurs in the chorus, where they modulate down to C major (once again the only chord that is heard). Two verses and two choruses are followed by a repeat of that strange guitar riff and then they're done. Quite an abstract little piece.

you know sy recorded a peel session of just fall songs?

their version of "My New House" was blistering.

"We don't beg. We just take." Yeah, love Putta Block.

Unfortunately Palace of Swords Reversed doesn't appear to be on Spotify so the link below is missing the last section that is a tape edit going from them starting up what sounds like the drum beat from 'Rowche Rumble' and MES talking about how much money they raised playing for a "charity of spastics" to another tape edit where I pulled my username: "Hail, new puritan, Righteous maelstrom. Have you ever heard a Bill Haley LP?" And then they go straight into 'Cary Grant's Wedding' with the word: "Everybody...!" and the song ends.

http://open.spotify.com/track/0SG2QfMNJrArA60s29asop

Putta Block is the bomb, but Elastic Man is like my sixth favorite song of all time

Sent my ballot last night and already regretting all the stuff I had to leave off, like Psychomafia, the above-mentioned Cary Grant's Wedding, Marquis Cha Cha, Look Know, Fantastic Life, Middlemass; not to mention Martin Bramah and Una Baines in greatest Fall members.

I wish I couldve vited for Yvonne Pawlett. Playing keyboards on Rowche Rumble = coolest person alive

...she's still alive right?

Yvonne Pawlett is an art therapist who helps people to recover from mental health problems and overcome learning difficulties through visual arts and crafts.

Nice!

Any rules on versions? Is a vote for a song a vote for the song, regardless of the fact that one might love a Peel session version but hate the official version?

In summary: Votes are for the 'song', and specific versions will be given an addendum where necessary, sort of like this:

60. TWO STATES (1995) [115 points, 6 votes, 1 Number1, Specific versions:2="Slanted and Enchanted"

Doh. Sorry.

my first shortlist is 35 songs, this is gonna be hard.

"Pay Your Rates" (from Grotesque, 1980) - This one also has a one-chord (F# major) rockabilly groove on the verses and a tempo change for the chorus. As with 'Elastic Man', the chords in the chorus are all major and not harmonically related. This time, they're even more dissonant, moving from E major to A# major and G# major. One of the guitars (the one in the right channel) takes particular liberties with this progression and sometimes plays notes from the F# major chord! There is also an overdubbed guitar picking at dissonant string sounds from behind the bridge. (The version of this song played by a different lineup of the group on the Seminal Live album nine years later is quite different.)

Her mother from the circus
Put her on Junior Show Time
Her father was much worse
Can't put why in this line

I always loved this song and found it an intruiging lyric, even more intruiging now. Can't even remember what I thought it was at the time.

Now this is a POLL. This is the one group/ artist which is hardest for me to work out a consensus on. Is that some special quality The Fall have or would that be the same for any persons favorite group?

i think this is definitely a thing with the fall. aside from many regarding hex album of choice i have no idea how anything else would place in this poll. i'm particularly interested in how the tracks rollout.

*as the* album of choice

steely dan seem to be another such band. the album poll for them here showed remarkably close voting across all their original albums.

Split voting for "Shoulder Pads 1" vs. "Shoulder Pads 2" or can we just vote for "Shoulder Pads?"

it's all one song really. like winter.

This one's a little complicated! Just trying to explain what the bass does:

"Middle Mass" (from Slates, 1981) - Harmonically unrelated major chords yet again here with a progression of G# to E. The bass part is particularly interesting as it includes three-note chromatic lines that anticipate the coming chord. When the underlying chord is E, bassist Steven Hanley plays a run of C-C#-D and then lands on the G#. This almost spells out the first, third, fourth and fifth of that G# major chord (C being the enharmonic equivalent of B#, the third of the chord), outlining the triad, but Hanley chooses to play D instead of D#. He does this perhaps because, as a minor seventh, D is more consonant to the still underlying E major chord than D# would be; in any case, there is still dissonance in the tritone interval when D descends to G#.

When the underlying chord is G#, Hanley plays the same three-note chromatic anticipation, this time of the impending E chord, with the notes G#-A-A#, landing on E when the chord changes. As with the other phrase, this comes close to spelling out the E major triad, but includes the flattened fifth (A#, or Bb, instead of B). Same issue here of perhaps a greater consonance with the underlying chord, but a dissonance in the tritone descent from A# to E.

A contrasting section begins with a phrase modulation to a quite remote key, with a chord progression of C major to D major.

Forgot to include - there's a two-note keyboard line of B-F# that runs over the E and the G# chords. It's somewhat dissonant; they're consonant pitches except for the B over the G# chord, but they don't spell anything out with regard to the chordal tones.

There's a character in Dickens - Our Mutual Friend? - who has taught himself to read solely by reading Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I don't remember how much of this is worked over in the book, but that kind of hard coding of a single work into the fabric of linguistic perception and expression is a decent description of how i feel about The Fall. I'm not trying to claim any elect authority of insight, just saying that they were pretty much the accompaniment and sacred book of the expansion of my horizons in my teenage years. Out of them came everything. Even now, when they play a much less important part in my cultural life, I still listen to them far more than any other single group.

Going to my wildly inaccurate last fm stats I see the following for the last month:

The Fall 151
The Impressions 73
Culture 50
Silver Jews 48
Haim 43
Gunplay 23

I didn't even think I'd been listening to them that much! And looking at that I'd say at least three of those entries aside from The Fall I'm listening to because of The Fall (Culture, Haim, Gunplay fwiw). (Of course Silver Jews could hardly be disassociated from that as well, there's just not a personal Fall link - more like a peel/words thing going on).

All this means two things for this poll, help and hindrance.
Hindrance: better/worse is more or less an entirely meaningless concept for me, for the vast majority of their output. It just is. And by vast majority I mean everything apart from Fall Heads Roll, Post TLC: Reformation!, and Imperial Wax Solvent, all of which I think problematic for various reasons. The return of the fulfilment of that mysterious quality of 'Fallness' with Your Future Our Clutter and Ersatz GB is very pleasing, but feels precarious. This makes me a shit critic.
Help: I really don't have to worry about choosing favourites. Meaningless as I say, so I'll be trying to pick songs according to criteria other than better/worse, hopefully a bit non-canonical, trying to discover structures, waymarks, guiding lights - uncover street signs and entrances as it were.

I know nothing about chords.

fuck you and your 'cultural life', fizzles, imaginative life.

fuck, i seem to have lost my glasses, and my flat really needs tidying up, then I've got to go to my mum's. this is also all the fall's fault. still - first choice (and these aren't in final polling order - I'll do that later - and the choice of subject is more or less random as well):

The Aphid

So, a quick one this, covering the category Fall Dances. These are those versions of songs like The Twist, where the dance moves are described in the song. So, in Dead Beat Descendant, you've got the whole act like you've just got out of jail/and you've got a man on your trail/Come back here! Come back here! stuff. Instead of doing the hitch-hike or w/e you are instructed to dance like you're descended from a vicious criminal. These also impose comic or dance-like mechanisms on the world/daily behaviour. Dance as formal interpretative mechanism of human behaviour to put it theoretically, but it's just kind of feeding on the old satiric thing of removing spiritual agency from people, making them look comic because they are not in control of their physical movements, which are dictated by the bizarre details of fate or the world. That's a world view you can see throughout The Fall of course, but the specific dance side of things feeds in a lot of songs as well - the insane/impossible choreography of Oswald Defence Lawyer for instance, or the melancholy Faustian descent of Sinister Waltz.

Here the instructions around about how to catch an aphid are turned into a dance called The Aphid.

It isn't necessarily hugely musically distinguished in one way, but they do this sort of punky pep so fucking well. It's fucking catchy basically. How they conserve and maintain that catchy and tense momentum in their songs is a mystery to me, cos I'm no musician, but even apparently simple songs, like The Aphid manage it. So there's a kind of Part 1 (this is where I need tim!) of propulsive descent Part 2, treading water, holding the momentum up, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 tense pull up of energy, drums scratching guitar, Part 1, Part 2, and that's The Aphid. And of course Smith's great at just catching those shifts in momentum with his voice, hence the reason I can have 'The Aphid!' as a catchphrase from the song, cos there's a couple of times where it rly kicks, acting as punctuation to the more prosaic delivery of the instructions. On Cerebral Caustic this sound is almost generic (you don't really hear it again until Wolf Kidult Man), but on this specific song the scratching, patting and sawing feels appropriate. Smith's voice is crisp and clipped, as is appropriate for this instructive song. Smith as unbending dance master here.

Also, #insects! Have kind of always felt the whole insects/spiders and The Fall thing is tapped into the junky's/alcoholic's tremens mainly from Burroughs. (But by god there's that terrifying reptilian scene in Le cercle rouge). Smith's notoriously fascinated by the detail of belief systems as well, and as well as that junky thing, there's the whole 'insects as spiritually alien representations of death and regeneration'. They're definitely sinister in The Fall and flit around the corners of the mind in a v unappetising way (bug day's the locus classicus for this isn't it? - you've got the giant moths in Neighbourhood of Infinity and the screwed up tattoo'd butterflies in The NWRA), but they're also a bit incongruous, not part of the spastic human dance. In this, you're just left wondering what sort of fucking creature requires such a complex set of apparatus and instructions to catch!

Catchphrases and hook lines (I'll try and do these for each song, cos in a fairly reductive way, you can kind of get a sense of how good a song is by the number of musical and lyrical things that just f'ing get stuck in your head, even though you have no idea what they mean, other than the fact that they really seem to mean something that is v pertinent to the world, and you find blurting them out while wandering about)
And who can ever forget this one?
The Aphid!
Retrieve..... chill frame.
And that's the Aphid.

Also regretting leaving off CnC Hassleschmuck, possibly MES's most hilarious rant.

You wouldn't even know the sun was up
Unless there was a press release on it
Oh dear friends
I can't continue this
Arthur Askey's just been shot
Maybe we should do a tribute
And we'll do "You Got to Hassle Schmuck"
Will you let me play
If I patronise you today

There might be a connection between The Aphid and the beginning of Scanner Darkly

great posts, fizzles. this part:

they were pretty much the accompaniment and sacred book of the expansion of my horizons in my teenage years.

very closely mirrors my personal experience, except that I was 18 when I really got into them (the year This Nation's Saving Grace came out). my high school (ex) girlfriend turned me on to Wonderful and Frightening World that summer, and I quickly started exploring the back catalogue - this was around the time that Line Records did those nice white vinyl reissues of Hex and RTL.

lol @ me writing "catalogue" like a Britisher, this poll is already rubbing off on me.

thanks sleeve - yeah, don't feel it's unique. feels like there's something total and compelling about The Fall - perhaps especially if you haven't been following from 70s - that leads to a sort of metanoia.

I have no interest in any "greatest band ever" conversation (any more) and no wish to convert. quite the opposite in fact. but I think that's where those fairly common fall fan compulsions come from.

forget the start of ASD, DAM - what's the link?

first chapter devoted to the drug casualty who hallucinates (?) that he is covered with aphids that are constantly biting him, and how he kept putting them in jars

the Scanner Darkly connection occurred to me as well

having less than 30 spots is KILLING me, arrgh.

TS: "Bury" vs. "Smile", answer = IMPOSSIBLE

hahah missed this in the OP"

None of this "Can't choose" nonsense, man up yeah?

If you'll allow an interloper who's only tried once to "get into" the Fall, that "Job Search" track is awesome.

Unfortunately the amazing resource of Fall Youtube (all their albums and peel sessions at least) curated by user 'fallfanuk' has been taken down recently

good to see snow on easter sunday obv.

finding it hard to get into this tbh - tend to go through an elliptical orbit of listening these days, and have passed a perihelion. just listening to a load of skip spence right now, which isn't rly conducive. however, had numbers radio station stuff in the background all afternoon, which reminded me of the genius of

Haf Found Bormann

HAS to be the Janice Long session version, which is nuts. scree of scrambled electronics, Brix vox, delivering co-ordinates and crazed report of discovery in monotone punctuated with her screaming HAF FOUND BORMANN, becomes increasingly incoherent and desperate as reaches its conclusion.

Nazis, numbers codes (Smith's obsession with strings of numbers & code/identity), slabs of noise and electrics, interference, disruption &c. part of the hey luciani papal/nazi conspiracy package. top 30 stuff 4reel frenz!

G3: Gong I.S. (R5) (2 samples) ** ACHTUNG! 03246/16 38146/14 75153/26 (R x5) * ACHTUNG! 03246/16 03246/16 (16 x 5F pairs) = 67972 ....

TRANSMISSION END. TRANSMISSION END.

Is the Janice Long version on CD yet or does that have to wait for the perhaps never-to-occur next Beggars Deluxe Ed.?

not on cd as far as i know, Jon.

boo...

Impression of J Temperance

not sure this rly needs any description cos it's near the dead centre of Fall horror canon. A possible narrative - there was a slightly weird fracture near the start of the 20th C. the tentacle from MR James' Count Magnus and Machen's Novel of the Black Seal made its way across the atlantic and proliferated under HP Lovecraft, then later in horror film, comics and rock n roll. it was the vivid horror side of the. in the uk, as far as I can tell, the ghost story stayed the ghost story, more psychological, it didn't really seem to become, from my limited knowledge, all that embodied in tangible horror. most of the stuff i've read seems to have kept its Victorian impedimenta - the upper class, stately home side, as that was the only place ghosts could exist. some of its very good (like Elizabeth Jane Howard/Robert Aickman early ghost stories in We Are For the Dark). those super-generalised narratives always make me feel slightly uneasy - there's got to be loads of exceptions, and i'd love to know about them. Nigel Kneale feels important.

But The Fall took the American, comic-book side and replugged it into a Victorian landscape. Not the Victorian landscape as it was, preserved in literary aspic but the decaying Victorian northern industrial landscape of Manchester and Salford - docks, canals, derelict houses - as well as the content of the song the covers feel important here, like City Hobgoblins.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ymWj-QmtyTQ/SP-ArxtBfWI/AAAAAAAABBM/VTB-yru2he8/s400/hobgoblinsbig.jpg

that transformation of popular American horror back into specifically English working class landscapes feels like a unique achievement, literary or musical, to me. again, that's probably not the case - Fogwalking by Pete Hammill, set in a futuristic decaying London feels both non-melodramatic and legit scary, mind you, that's the same year as this, so hardly a precedent. How does James Herbert stack up on the lit side? (Only read Rats). Old Play for Todays?

difficult to describe the menace in this song. that rhythm section is so dank and sparse. not so much here, where it feels militaristic and creeping, but often the rockabilly 'death dance' beat taps primitive rock n roll and spiritual trance - obv Can big influence on Smith here. there's trademark sounds, like the needling guitar, that scrapes and slides at the beginning, and mockingly echoes Smith on lines like 'only two did not hate him' and 'in the town of the ports', plus Smith's seagull screech on the 'hideous replica' part.

love typical commentary on own song - 'there are no read outs for this part of the track'. despite feeling this is both literary and musical, there's always a strong sense of the found object in early Fall (all that stuff on the back of the Fiery Jack single, with this being the only recording of an experiment in the Welsh hills etc). And Smith's voice and commentary is everywhere. The auditory margins of Fall songs are as crowded as the visual margins of late medieval MSS, teeming with voices and characters. Sometimes they are muttered or inaudible, sometimes forthright. There are sarcastic asides, snarls of fiendish satire, inarticulate expressions of sets of emotions, rather than the usual television set of commonplaces. the psychic infra and ultra emotions you might find in a JG Ballard story, revealed by dripping the sour lime of Smith’s voice/corruscating etching fluid. In fact to take a phrase of Ballard’s that seems especially descriptive, Fall songs are ‘a claustrophobic focus of suppressed aggressions’. All this forms a sort of musical knorpelgroteske, the 17th century Germanic artform where ornamental foliage intertwines and melts into the half-seen faces of animals, monstrously distorted or assimilated into the vegetative surroundings, so that the viewer can never be quite sure what exactly is being portrayed, other than getting an impression of the primal fears of man, peering into the darkened forest that surrounds the rational spaces of the mind.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kx45zc4Lh21qabj6to1_250.jpg

also great example of his ability for coining the new proverbial - 'cos peasants fear local indifference', 'overpaid leisure'.

album version needs more Smith telephone impressions that you get on the live versions.

love the grand terror of little England. god, his lyrics are so stripped down and vivid. 'knorpel' is the word - gristle, strange, not afraid of ugliness. plus narrative! minimally linked, confused because seen mainly in darkness - that darkness between objects, or scenes, or understanding a key feature of The Fall generally. love the fact it is the replica that is telling the story. ('Never seen dog breeder'). This has got to be top 5 or something hasn't it?

memorable bits - whole song? but particular favourite bits not already mentioned:
'only two did not hate him'
''Yes!' said Cameron, 'And the thing was in the Impression of J Temperance'

Awesome witchhammer of a post, Fizzles. If you don't mind doxxing yourself a bit, may I ask if you write about this stuff somewhere and if so, where?

J Temperance doubtless in my ballot when I get to filling it out. I feel like I prefer the Fall in a Hole vers but I will have to do a new a/b on it.

knorpelgroteske, the 17th century Germanic artform where ornamental foliage intertwines and melts into the half-seen faces of animals, monstrously distorted or assimilated into the vegetative surroundings, so that the viewer can never be quite sure what exactly is being portrayed, other than getting an impression of the primal fears of man, peering into the darkened forest that surrounds the rational spaces of the mind.

You have also made me think of Grillen, the grotesque little things drawn into the margins of manuscripts beloved of the first-wave german Romantics.

I recall being excessively proud of a dn of mine a few years ago: "Yes," said Cam'ron, "and the thing was in the impression of J Timberlake"

ha! I think I remember laughing at that dn.

i don't really write about this stuff really. did have a (non-fall) blog but have mothballed it - not v good at that sort of thing tbh (not fishing btw, i just get all irritated w my tone and end up in spiral of self-irritation, + lack of time). don't hang round fall forums generally, prefer ilx.

wd like to see the Grillen (gis amusing but pointless). Grotesque clearly the crucial element of early/mid Fall - horrific but also comic, the dark/light of Dragnet as well as Grotesque. It's one of the big other things they achieve I think - that fusion of horror and satire. Not that they're exactly incommensurate, but humour plus horror is hard. Grotesque does the satiric thing of revealing the inner in a transformed outer - 'a spotty exterior hides a spotty interior', but also repellent and frightening. Guess Perverted by Language vid good for this? Leave the Capitol as well - a line like 'when the maids smile in unison' is both alarming and indicative of London as place of automatic non-politeness. He does this thing so well.

Probably could have specified the In A Hole version, it's magnificent.

It's Monday, post vids of Fall tunes why not?

Big New Prinz

Cruiser's Creek

Container Drivers

darkness between objects, or scenes, or understanding a key feature of The Fall generally

Fizzles killing it itt. This goes right back to the metanoia, right? The Halifax copter of "Words of Expectation" flying over "My New House." Come for the beat, stay for the hermetic study.

gotta love Tony Wilson in that Big New Prinz clip. "What can you say about the Fall, as in barbed wire..."

Fizzles u have seen this thread yeah?

"Hotel Bloedel" by the Fall

ah, yeah, was gamaliel ratsey back then.

Come for the beat, stay for the hermetic study.

yeah, this, absolutely. though I also feel slightly uncomfortable at getting too mystical about it all. it's hard not to - partly because they're so encyclopedic that they're effectively an i ching for late 20th C alienation. hermeticism from sheer populousness, apophenia from an accumulation of hogarthian detail - something like Hex is so dense (and Hogarth's a rly good Fall analogue). feel like i need to resist it a bit though as well - resist the metanoia - because it can minimise the physical attributes. just what smith and co are doing - his/their agency in producing the physical attributes of the songs. the depiction of highly specific time and place - 'I took a walk down W11, I had to wade through 500 European punks' sort of thing (overemphasising the horror a bit at the expense of that side of things - Smith as powerful portrayer of modern world), plus that super-dense accumulation of powerful minimal elements - whether words or sound.

love that Big New Prinz - barbed wire fence is a ref to T Wilson's hand-gliding incident on Granada isn't it?

Well, for some reason I thought it was MES' own intro to The Fall on Totales Turns, but I played it recently and it's not there..

(In a Hole maybe?)

Just saw this thread. This is tough. Don't forget to vote for 'I'm Into C.B.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnunhozizjM

I seriously considered it, but I don;t think it's gonna make a list of 20. Will reconsider though.

I am voting for 2 tracks from the Kamera singles but not C.B. I regret to say.

I am sure the majority of my entries will only get one vote (i.e. Mine)

Has there been any decision as to what consitutes an "album"? Like, what about live albums or comps, etc?

xpost

"My family's a weird lot
My stepsister's got a horrible growth
Listens to all this muzak shit
Reads Smash Hits while she's eating her tea
To me it sounds like bad CB"

Yeah, I'm voting for that.

do like their forays into the suburban gloaming:

It happens
It happens: instincts lost
It happens: lust through purple blossoms
It happens
The desire will turn rotten!
We are The Fall in the Neighbourhood of Infinity!

Petty Thief Lout too, with that swinging refrain

Suburbia holds more than you'd care for

at the end.

I guess a lot of their songs are descriptions of the wild technical/mental journeyings of the apparently populace behind apparently innocuous and indistinguishable front doors.

new face in hell, but also the domestic interiors of Flat of Angles and Shake Off ('you are stuck in the room you cannot find', one of a Fall sub genre of songs about bad plumbing, and a larger one of things going wrong.

re live or comp albums..

Nothing is banned, but I'd advise against as there's a lot of them, but some may get consensus so..

e.g. Palace of swords rev, In A Hole, Totales, as opposed to 2G+2, fiendwViolin, etc

Is Slates eligible for the albums poll, or is it too short?

slates is an album.

yes

my #1

excellent :)

Slates is crazy good.

This poll is too hard!

Yay it's Fall poll time!

Please, you must also remember:

City Hobgoblins
Fantastic Life
Smile
Lay of the Land
Riddler!
Guest Informant
Bremen Nacht (esp. the original LP version)

The Fall have several different versions of some tracks (ex. Bremen Nacht, Bremen Nacht Alternative, Bremen Nacht Run Out). Are we counting them all as one track like we seem to be doing for "Winter?"

Sorry re-read the original post regarding alt. versions. Ignore my query.

OK I got my 20, while ranking them (good lord what an exercise in ruthlessness) I popped a few others in and out of the lineup, list feels pretty good to me now.

don't forget Karl Burns when voting for favorite members!!!

A Bremen Nacht will definitely be there with Slates, Slags, Etc... in my top twenty.

Wolstencroft is my favorite Fall drummer.

Def up there with Burns easy.

Hanley and Scanlon will be fighting for the top of MY Fall members rankings. Weird to pick one of them though, as they always seemed a team to me.
SO fucking good together.

Gotta rep for The Steak Place

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc10tUfD8wo

after sending many Fall songs on mixtapes to a friend, this is the only one that stuck. It's one of the few MES lyrics that pins down a little nook of America as vividly as he does for his native drudgery. A road in, for outsiders.

"The most original aspect of The Fall is Steve...I've never heard a bass player like him...I don't have to tell him what to play, he just knows. He is The Fall sound."

They had been in the band for a long time, but I still think both of those guys really came into their own after the Brix period. That's when they were doing more of the songwriting.

Yeah shanley is basically the lead instrument from Frightening World through Kurious Oranj.

definitely in my top 5 as well. the only time I got to see this band live was on the Middle Class Revolt tour (after Brix had rejoined) and his bass was so aggressive and physical, very memorable.

I will somehow submit an entry for this but goddamn I love this band so much, , even the recent stuff. The Peel box is something I could live with for ages without getting tired or needing any other music.

I voted for Martin Bramah for Fall members but thats as much to do with The Blue Orchids than his stuff with The Fall tbh

The Steak Place is a brilliant song, never heard that before. cheers.

That's my favorite song off Frenz Experiment

Don't forget to include "Blindness" in your poll, the best 21st track bar none! Er, well, a couple off "The Unutterable" would give it a run. Damn, I could easily come up with 20 top notch tracks from each decade!

Why New Puritan is the essential Fall song. (I mean the Peel session version, not the foggy, half-apologetic demo on Totale’s Turns.)
“Hail the new puritan, righteous maelstrom…. Your decadent sins will reap discipline”
There is none of the musical sophistication the same band showed on Slates a short time later, just an insistent atonal riff and shotgun-blast drumming. New Puritan is relentless anti-music, for “hardcore fiends” only - guaranteed to alienate the casual listener.
All this is topped with a merciless diatribe - Smith at his most unforgiving, sarcastic and downright terrifying. “Whaddya mean, what’s it mean?”
The lyric sheet hardly helps. There’s the familiar caustic eye cast over Britain; keg beer and strippers for the workers, coffee table LPs and white dreads for the middle classes. Then there’s that “dinosaur cackle” in Hollywood as someone desecrates Gene Vincent’s memorial.
Who is the New Puritan? Is it Smith himself, the anti-fashion, anti-romantic icon, or the Thatcherite government about to call time on the 60s and 70s? (the “grim reefer, the smack at the end of the straw.”). With hindsight it looks like the latter, but it could equally be another Smith mask, born of his obsession with 17th century horror. The Specials’ Ghost Town was mere social comment, this track something else, a glimpse from the 1600s into the abyss that was the 1980s….

New Puritan was a Luther Arkwright ref originally? Still, lots, of what you are sayinf resonates deeply, Dr X

Lots of immense posts itt

fuck I forgot about Man Whose Head Expanded, need to reorganize ballot now.

Thanks once again Drug A Money for the steer on MES's comic book influences

Learned it from the Hotel Bloedel thread linked above

Who is the New Puritan? Is it Smith himself, the anti-fashion, anti-romantic icon, or the Thatcherite government about to call time on the 60s and 70s? (the “grim reefer, the smack at the end of the straw.”).

The encrypted identities of MES in The Fall is a tough one. There are all sorts of reasons to identify Smith with his creations - the didactic moral pronouncements so in accord with the general tenor of The Fall's approach, the theatrical self-configuration/mask wearing, the use of first person. Becomes a lot more difficult where there is no identified character - straight singer first-person song - but Smith specifies that it is a song in character. Hey! Student's a good example. You enter a bit of a hall of mirrors, but it is possible to wonder whether the interest in people who have lost their marbles and interpret the world around them according to a particular kink has restricted an understanding of Smith's range as a writer and vocalist (snarling/curmudgeonly hater of modern society).

The problem is that Smith in the media, and as portrayed in the media, seems to have become a first-class bore, a boor even. Amusing as the 'autobiography' was in places, it was just lengthier version of his reactionary opinions tediously insisted upon in magazines and interviews at that time. It's a shame because when he has written his own prose it's been excellent I think: Hot Dogs in the Far-Out Zone for instace. It becomes hard to split the Art Prinz from the Pub Bore, and then if you manage that, even harder to work out the nature of his still successful creative well. (It was less hard at the time of the book because although performances were good, the albums were shit).

That's probably enough for now - he can still be charming and funny, preferring mischief and disruption to didactic moralism (I liked that Mystery Jets interview), but the unusual pallette of the Fall's emotional tones (and, that which is not quite indistinguishable, Smith's voice) are still a greater, more interesting and important expression of Smith than Smith himself, than even those who like The Fall seem to allow sometimes.

Think I want to write a bit more about... hmmm. stuff. Smith's first-personae being versions of himself were it not for art (still in interviews he stresses the important of art and imaginative creativity).

Did a census on Grotesque:

debtors, lower class, clever ones, psychotic big brother, middle class, people in bands, people who condescend to black men, wear cheque shirts, peter cook, gay, red, roundhead, army career, grim head, wireless enthusiast - nearly a new face in hell, muscular thick-skinned slit-eyed neighbour (hunter), [government] parties who knew of wireless operator's forthcoming revelation, the people (who enthusiast and hunter would wish torture on), servant of government, the dead, the living, Big A&M Herb, English groups, five whacky English proletariat idiots, Californians, peasants with free milk, rapists, carloads of negro nazis, fausts with beards, hyrdrochloric shaved weirds, the upstairs jewish girl, bastard dentist, his surgery, residents that keep wild dogs, fathers, their children, Gary Bushell, journalist acquaintances (become bog writers), smart hedonists, conventional rock bands, engineers, johnny rotten, not Harry, container drives, customs bastards, Fiery Jack, Communists, the loading bay ranks, J Temperance - dog breeder, his replica, vet Cameron, lovers, spouse, girl, policemen, neighbour, brown monk ghost, lust-rockers, proletariat, people who live in kitchens and halls, Hitler, Dr Morrell, Robinson Speedo, the Queen Mother, kids, Joe Totale, DJs, criminals, Roman Totale XVII (in ostrich head-dress, covered in feathers, orange-red with blue-black lines, that draped down to his chest, body is a tentacle mess), Tony - business friend, men with besom sticks, drunken Highland men, Culloden dead, a man with butterflies on his face, his brother, Sam Chippendale, shop staff, security guards, the English clergy.

(had to go to the lyrics parade for a couple of those, and I never quite trust what i hear there, tho i'd never heard the 'brown monk ghost' in In the Park, and that sounds right, so it can be enlightening)

The contents of that list alone do an awful lot to explain what's great about early Fall. Density, keen eye, a concern with the people around, not as a political or sociological or historical block, and not a concern with their 'everydayness'. the ONLY writer who can do this - and he can do it because its rock n roll. the music embraces the primitivism of rock. sees original rock n roll as anti-authoritarian, aggressive, scary - something for parents and moral gatekeepers to be frightened of, something for those outside the nets of authority, outside in all sorts of ways, to congregate and have a good time round, to derive energy and insight from - and pushes that side, intensifies it, rather than 'developing' or elaborating upon it the music, makes it harder, sparser, bleaker, more offensive, something to ward off demons.

Hex of course is SUPER dense lyrically, with types and masks and new and strange ghouls and entities creeping out of every angle of the music ('fat Captain Beefheart imitators with zits, who is the King Shag Corpse?'). The music is dense as well of course, there's space in the sound, which goes with a greater expansion of Smith's psychic topography, maybe. (One of the great lyrical things in Winter for instance is the way he handles space - not just the entrances uncovered and street signs you never saw of a new psychic/urban landscape, but the way 'two white clouds cross the sky, look like Krakens' (<-- incredible line) which makes you feel like you're almost on an alien planet, looking up at the depths of the deepest ocean. Or the gravekeeper, in the hills, at night, above the valley of mud, amongst many other places (the Anthrax Isle, the Broken Brothers' Pentacle Church), in Jawbone, which is also situated in a place where roadworkers and advertisements become jawbones etc.

Thereafter, and not at all in an even line I think Fall songs start to depopulate. I'm not going to do a census for all the albums, and obviously they're still full of people, Older Brother Gert, The Littlest Rebel, Writer in bed insane, Latch-Key Kid etc, but there is a reduction I think.

It was X O'Skeleton's post on New Puritan that also made me think about what are not strictly people or types, but the entities in Fall songs. Early on these are often typical... Christ, got to go - wanted to skip over the '80s stuff to have a look at what happens to that early vision in the '90s. Fall periods seem to be made up of fractures - periods or moments when they lose old listeners, gain new ones - 78-80, 80-Brix, 80s, post Brix/90s, post Brownies, 2000s etc... but later!

MES 1-0 Thatcher

gonna calculate a zealful ballot tonight for sure

keep on failing to mention how much fun it all is. dour male northern rock image extremely unhelpful. misses the sense of theatre, carnival, misrule, stories and the past.

when's ballot due imago/mark?

end of 14th apparently

great post up there, of course :)

holy crumbs, nice posting fizz

Had a great listen to the session version of Athlete Cured earlier today - it's punchy, with Hanley's bass twanging like a bow string, the short, choppy and v exuberant guitar, and the drums, like all Fall drums seeming both to be an engine of perpetual motion and having to force that engine along by heavy weight of manual effort. And Smith's ammo - all megaphone and telegraphic journalist style, with the detail that is considered pertinent in journalistic pieces replaced with apparently whimsical or peripheral detail (perverted newspaper style crucial to Smith's lyrical method - with perhaps relatively undistinguished albums like Cerebral Caustic the effect was still like getting a psychic/mystical newsletter on the state of the world/nation).

Speaking of FUN, the listens I had to Hot Aftershave Bop (Smith likes writing about places where people dance). Love the uncomplimentary 'Are these your English friends?'. Like Australians in Europe, a song in session form particularly distinguished by the reverb'd repetition of Smith's screeching at the end.

Still, the song that most insisted it shd be on my ballot was Gross Chapel: British Grenadiers, but I haven't really got anything to say about it other than it's great. Heavily gothic - military entrenchment in malevolent church. The muttering is particularly good - I can only ever make out 'They were as frightened as I was', before frightened diary merges into the snatched fragment of the British Grenadiers, normally jaunty, but doom-laden and full of non-human anger.

And that reminds me what I was going to post about New Puritan and inhuman entities earlier. Feel the supernatural forces & avatars of vengeance are present in Fall songs as the punishment of vice or stupidity (or ill-advised curiosity), and Smith will periodically embody them (New Puritan) or fight them (Spector vs Rector - another ballot certainty).

The spectres that crept out of early Fall were urban-industrial spectres, city hobgoblins in fact, Anglicised versions of Lovecraft, with something of Machen’s seedy suburban horror and MR James’ fables of curiosity undone. The Fall replaced bell, book and candle with repetition, repetition, repetition. But with the destruction of the manufacturing base in England in the '80s and the regeneration of those Victorian landscapes in which early Fall songs had been set, those spectres and hobgoblins lost their environmental niche. Under the auspices of Thatcherism and Blairism - the stones and damp in which they were embodied were destroyed.

The spectres that haunt '90s Fall are those appropriate to Regeneration - Temperance (an auld Victorian sin), Youth (as aspirational concept), Nostalgia, Reformation, and in particular, Finance, or the financification of culture, Management, the encroachment of Office Time upon Lifestyle Time. These become the transformative avatars of vengeance, and are altogether airier spirits than the hobs and elves of before.

Nostalgia and FInance in particular become obsessions: From the 90s onward, Fall songs are thick with complaints and confusion about the mystical nature of finance and financial structures ('the Palace of Access, leads to the Palace of Excess' or 'to get a mortgage, you need an income lid' - followed by the mordant 'I thought it was free'). You suspect this was as much because Smith was skint through poor business management and ill luck (plus there's a helluva crowd of shady figures around The Fall), something he clearly bitterly resented. It also plays into his love of encoding, abbreviation and numeric confusion.

And although the recurrence of history has been part of The Fall's world from the beginning, the contrived refurbishment of the recent past for reasons of cynical gain or feeble-minded nostalgia/youth fixation was only explicitly a theme, more correctly an obsession, since 1993's Infotainment Scan. Here and in print Smith attacked the revival of '70s culture, seeing in it the apotheosis to power of the children of that generation; baseball-capped bald men, selling their money to retrieve their youth. The only generation that wanted to be like their parents, said Smith. Certainly their values are not his: nostalgic, comfort-seeking, meritocratic, meretricious, devoutly materialistic, subject to a spiritual and aesthetic atavism - 'forgetting the endless drive against nature' - that was anathema to Smith ('ours is not to look back, ours is to continue the craft). Set against this is Smith's modernist and urban-industrial creative creed, part of the English anti-authoritarian tradition; mocking, frame breaking, antinomian, anti-system, punk.

(Which reminds me - if you blur the lines and generalise things enough, you can almost justify the lineage described in a first paragraph to a thing I started writing for a Machen fanzine once:

Visionaries: the medieval age made them saints or heretics and venerated or burnt them accordingly, they were the Renaissance's philosopher-mages, whose robes were incinerated in the crucible of the 16th Century as they shed their magic and became scientists of the Enlightenment, avatars of the rational and forgers of the modern era. The Romantic age, with its emphasis on the individual and faith in subjective experience, saw the revenge of the mystical visionary - now anti-rational, anti-system; artistic frame-breakers, proto-punks. They take various forms whenever they appear; theologian, demagogue, astronomer/prognosticator. They alienate the majority and inspire to the point of fanaticism the few. In this damp, northern archipelago of Europe they become our most unusual artists, penetrating the mists that wreathe and haunt these islands, from Roman temple to Industrial manufactory until, in Arthur Machen's mystical imagery, they come up against 'the flaming walls of the world that put bounds to all our inquisitions.’)

Feels like Smith felt that this nostalgia was not just bad in itself (I think he does think that) but that it had a bad effect on creativity: There's the wonderful coiled rage in U-Pep:

I heard there's a new drug out
It's called 'speed' I wrote a song about it,
Conceptually a la Bowie,
But it's been lost in the bowels of the record company,
By our manager,
So instead our new '45 is:
GIRLIES.

Also, rather than attempting to ward off the new evils with scary, abrasive music, The Fall go a lot more to the other form of satire, imitative mockery. Their songs clothe themselves in the sounds of the times much more. The most obvious example of this wolf-in-sheep's-clothing approach is Idiot Joy Showland, but you've also got the baggy beat of The Birmingham School of Business School (Smith's vox here almost platonic the ideal of that particular method of one of his most well-publicised tones of voice - disappointed scorn, cynicism at the sheer inevitability of it all). It's a difficult trick to pull off, but there's always something not quite right, something mildly deranged about it that gives a feeling that The Fall are tearing this cloth to pieces, perverting it like Smith perverts language. Maybe it's not that. Maybe it's a concerted effort to update, time for change, be more popular. But given the subject matter it feels like there's something else going on here, especially as they still used sparse abrasion (session version of Lot of Wind!) as a tool, but less often. Songs like Glam Racket and Lost in Music, or I'm Going to Spain are deliberately playing content off against form, without losing core Fallness (<--- don't ask me what that is ffs, might try more of a definition if I have a look at What Went Wrong in the 00s).

Incidentally, Idiot Joy contains two very good examples of a really potent lyrical technique Smith uses, where he breaks the internal sense of metaphor: 'The locusts are all queuing in' and 'Looking what they are, are a pack of worms'. I think this sort of thing is effective, because you sense the force of loathing? irritation? need for clarity? that breaks them. The need to specify both the human and the animal metaphor, that ends up transforming what's seen into a single image or landscape of grotesque animals. It's something at the core of another separate topic - Fall Slop (copyright Lydia Lunch), so I won't deal with it here, other than to say that you get it again in their v sloppy version of Jungle Rock. Hank Mizell's relatively perky jungle scene transformed into pub chucking out/club going in time in Manchester ('I saw some ugly little rat do the rang-dang-do).

With this change in focus a few other things were also happening

There was a reduction in obvious or sustained narrative, almost amounting to a disappearance, tho I think narrative is submerged beneath the surface of a lot of the songs, possibly.

In line with this there was a much greater concision. Sometimes this produced a lyrical simplicity of quite striking, unaffected beauty - Edinburgh Man - more generally it made the content of songs fractured to the point where, for some people, meaning or the difficult interplay between meaning and striking, surreal, or disconnected imagery was lost.

The song Frenz seemed to mark a point where Smith started becoming a much more important subject in his songs, tho I think he'd deny he's the main character (ie narrator) in a lot of songs that are generally taken to be 'his opinion' (which is kind of where I wanted to go with the post about the nature of Smith's persona and the depopulation of Fall songs). There's also a whole post about Mirror Psychosis, as he calls it in Panda Pander Panzer that yokes some of the themes of personal identity and finance and Fallness together.

the confusions of domesticity and of the municipal, become more important (again, domesticity is nothing new - Flat of Angles, My New House OBVIOUSLY, Craigness, that wonderful bit in I Feel Voxish -

'I've been
Sharpening
A knife in
The bathroom
With a brick I found in the garden
NO ONE WILL FUCK WITH ME AGAIN.')

FINALLY. I sort of half jokingly see the early 90s as the Fall's Brechtian phase. Mainly on the basis of a thread that runs from Shift-Work through to Cerebral Caustic (does it also appear on Light User? Can't remember) - Which is the 'before the grub, comes the moralist' (a phrase used in Brecht I think? Or is it Nietzsche maybe?), plus an obsession with mitteleuropa and the Balkans, Prussia and Pomerania (in that wonderful reworking of the Ladybird Ladybird nursery rhyme in Ladybird Green Grass). The music-box waltz in Sinister Waltz and the So What About It? theme echo through these albums so with this slender lyrical or thematic echoes that they seem to mirror each other and belong as a group. There is also a trippy Verfremdungseffekt to the most characteristic songs on Shift-Work - So What About It?, Shift-Work, The Mixer, Edinburgh Man, and especially You Haven't Found It Yet ('Life is nothing more than a disposable facial tissue in a brass bin at dawn').

I know I know. really sorry it's so long. i guess it's the place for it is the only excuse.

Oh

Kimble

Feel need to rep for the non-programmatic

Also Arid Al's Dream is just f'ing great and might not be as well known as album stuff (was on the label on the Ed's Babe 12" but not the actual record). Some great lyrics on it:

It had a brain with a weight of 4oz
Its psycog was very advancèd

It was floating, on the floatarium, of its love, baby

It was hectoring him
It was shouting at him
It was lying to him
It was lighter than him
It was telling him things
It was singing to him
Sweat envelopes him
Psycog dream

ha ha. no idea what happened there. think i need to go for a lie down.

It was on the cd single, wasnit?

ah might've been. I only ever had the 12" and it was a source of mystified frustration for some time until that edition of Volume with it on came out.

Yeah, I'm sure that I bought it for that reason

.. and after checking Discogs, it seems I'm wrong

long since ceased trying to keep track tbh. sometimes think their discog is more frightening than any of their songs.

Well, back then it was reasonably straightforward...

I know! bit of minor kerfuffle around Jerusalem versions, hit the north remixes etc, coloured-in Fiery Jack covers, couple of flexidiscs, Marquis Cha-Cha 7"s, some UK/US anomalies, some live peripherals. nothing like compilation/early release/gig only release version hell you have to wade through now. one for high temple priests only.

fuckin dredger ep. spent SO long looking for the dredger ep. wasn't worth it of course.

Great posts Fizzles, I am now lost in their density

This in particular about the early years...
"the music embraces the primitivism of rock. sees original rock n roll as anti-authoritarian, aggressive, scary - something for parents and moral gatekeepers to be frightened of, something for those outside the nets of authority, outside in all sorts of ways, to congregate and have a good time round, to derive energy and insight from - and pushes that side, intensifies it, rather than 'developing' or elaborating upon it the music, makes it harder, sparser, bleaker, more offensive, something to ward off demons."
First time I heard the Fall I was 14-15, under the bedclothes with a small transistor radio, and Peel played No Xmas for John Quays. It was terrifying but completely compelling.

In line with this there was a much greater concision. Sometimes this produced a lyrical simplicity of quite striking, unaffected beauty - Edinburgh Man

Exactly. This period is the Fall's most humanist music, even to the point of an actual-maybe-heartbreak song in "Gentleman's Agreement." And the most moving thing, to me, that they ever did is that fantastic Hank Williams cover on Code: Selfish.

It's a difficult trick to pull off, but there's always something not quite right, something mildly deranged about it that gives a feeling that The Fall are tearing this cloth to pieces, perverting it like Smith perverts language. Maybe it's not that. Maybe it's a concerted effort to update, time for change, be more popular.

I've always thought it was neither of those things and that it was musicality plain and simple. Maybe "Lost in Music" and "I'm Going to Spain" were ironic; they were and they weren't at the same time. But there's nothing ironic about "Just Waiting."

Fizzles if you ever come to the west coast of the USA the Fernet Branca is on me.

really wish this was top 30 picks, Mark is that out of the question at this point? I just envision tracks 40-50 in the rollout as having one high-ranking vote apiece and it makes me sad.

so 'discography' is now one of the commands recognised in google

it turns out

the rollout should have fizzles commentary on each track imo

hope you're not too busy i guess

lol, was gonna say Fizzles, you've made this thread an incredibly compelling read w/o taking any advice from me so far, (and it seems like you've already touched on the death of Thatcher above) but I was wondering, if you had any thoughts about Room to Live? Obv "Marquis Cha-Cha" and the accompanying support for the Falklands War that MES voiced in the music mags during that time was probably the archetypal reactionary right-wing gesture that Smith's rep has never really quite recovered from. In a way, one could look at it as sort of a GB equivalent to Neil Young's fumblings towards conservatism which occurred roughly at the same time (though perhaps it was just one more way to troll Geoff Travis). And yet, the album/EP/10"/??? as a whole seems to deconstruct the whole idea of going 'right wing': for all his cheerleading of the Falklands War, the song just prior to MCC, "Joker Hysterical Face" seems to re-cast Thatcher into another one of MES's grotesque modern goblins ("the sweetest sounds she had ever heard were the whinging and crying due to the recession"), and would probably fit in with any celebrant's The Witch is Dead playlist. "Hard Life in the Country" is interesting. As an American who has never been to England, I have basically little to no grasp of the nuance of the political landscape there, but at least in my experience here in the US, one of the main things that helps keep conservatives in power is by masquerading as the voice for the rural uneducated, thereby convincing them to oftentimes vote against their own interests. The will of the 'locals', their political currency, is treated in HLIC as sort of a spectral entity, to be fussed with at your own risk, and at the end, when the provincial downtrodden come to get their due, the implication may be that they may someday exact a price for their support...? Again, that's not something I am really sure about...

The chorus of the title track may perhaps suggest an alternative motive for MES's political contrarianism, "room to live" not necessarily being an aversion to being pigeonholed or boxed in as much as a vehement desire to shed their post-Hex buzz band status, an attempt to try to force some people to stop paying attention to them...as I said, I'm just throwing out wild conjecture, 82 GB is pretty remote from any kind of direct experience of mine, but there are certain moments with profound resonance, such as the recurring phrase in "Joker": "There's no cause so find a case for it"--surely that could point to the universal condition of lazy leaders relying on scapegoating and demonization as a substitute for remedying socioeconomic problems. Smith put his funhouse mirror to nature and mankind and it still speaks volumes across the ocean thirty years later...

Does anybody know what the deal is with the marquis cha-cha / room to live single? It's just two album tracks, which seems weird (and Fall singles at the time never had any album tracks), and it was released like a year after the album. Does it have something to do with Kamera?

seeing how much fall my head will hold, esp cuz i haven't listened to the 90s stuff in ages. not likely to upset my top 20, but it's the principle of the thing...

Kamera were in the process of releasing it as a single (originally with "Papal Visit" as the b-side), it seems they changed their mind and made it a double-a-side, and during the manuf run (and before they fixed the artwork), the label went bust. Which would account for the single being locked in storage for a year, then 'released' / 'escaped' or whatever..

All that is pure guessing, mostly.

I always assumed Room to Live was named after Hitler's Lebensraum policy. Which certainly fits with the right-wing flirting/trolling thing.

I always assumed his stuff was character POV rather than his own, certainly then anyway.

Late in the game, I am realizing Room to Live will get onto my albums ballot and "Hard Life in Country" on my trax. Thanks for the memory jog, guys.

especially especially ESPECIALLY the Sanctuary version of RTL with "Words of Expactation" at the end

Words of Expectoration?

j-j-jon L-lewis had a sp-PEECHimpediment

Ballot completed and sent, fuck! The only albums to get multiple placements for me were:

3 tracks from This Nation's Saving Grace
3 from The Peel Sessions

(and of course the Peel votes count toward 'the song' and not 'the version' anyway).

On my albums ballot, predictably enough there are 6 albums from the 80s, 2 from the 90s, 1 from the 70s and 1 from the new millenium. I'll say no more so as not to spoil.

Ah man, no way I'm gonna be able to do a proper ballot for this, but might throw something together. C'mon The Infotainment Scan!

oh shit, i've been super busy and now i've only got a couple of days to sort this out? gonna have to go with my gut and make some ruthless choices.

So fuck yeah I'll read this:

added 11 April

Very welcome news from Booktrade.info:

Route Signs New Book On The Fall

Route Publishing is delighted to announce that it has signed the world rights for Stephen Hanley's memoir, the first insider's account of life in seminal British rock band, The Fall.

Stephen Hanley is an Irish-born English musician, based in Manchester. He is best known for playing bass guitar in The Fall from 1979 to 1998. He is described by critic Dave Simpson as 'one of British music's greatest bassists'. Second only to founding vocalist Mark E. Smith in longevity in the group, Hanley co-wrote over 100 songs on more than a dozen albums. Smith spoke publicly of his admiration for Hanley, telling Melody Maker in 1983, 'The most original aspect of The Fall is Steve... I don't have to tell him what to play, he just knows. He is The Fall sound.'

Hanley's story unfolds like a novel; from 1979 when he joined The Fall with his schoolmates Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon, up to and including an infamous on-stage fight in New York in 1998, he puts us right in the heart of the action: on stage, on the tour bus, in the recording studio, and up close and personal with an eccentric cast of band mates. These vividly drawn scenes give unprecedented insight into the intense, highly-charged creative atmosphere within The Fall, and their relentless work ethic which has won them a dedicated cult following, high-art respectability and a unique place in popular music history.

Route publisher Ian Daley said of the acquisition, 'From our vantage point, there isn't a band in the world with a story and output to match The Fall, and there isn't a man in the world who could tell that story as well as Stephen Hanley. He has created something quite remarkable and we're looking forward to sharing it with the legions of fans who are no doubt eager to get their hands on it.'
The Big Midweek, written by Stephen Hanley with Olivia Piekarski, will be published in hardback in Spring 2014.

That sounds amazing! Wish we didn't have to wait a year for it though.

Yeah I'm totally down to read that

aw man. hanley is a hero. that's v interesting.

bloody werk means haven't been concocting gigantic screeds on the fall for ilx, but, great half-assed tracklist for forthcoming LP:

1. No Respects (instrumental)
2. Sir William Wray
3. Kinder Of Spine
4. Noise
5. Hittite Man
6. Pre-MDMA Years
7. No Respects rev.
8. Victrola Time
9. Irish
10. Jetplane
11. Jam Song
12. Loadstones

my word.

anyway:

Fizzles if you ever come to the west coast of the USA the Fernet Branca is on me.

― sleeve, Monday, April 8, 2013 11:29 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks sleeve - a dangerous offer, and one I'd love to take up.

the rollout should have fizzles commentary on each track imo

― attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or (thomp), Monday, April 8, 2013 11:59 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

theories/opinions here tendentious enough + fall invite projection of different types, so wdn't want to be doing a 'commentary' as such, but looking fwd to the results conversation.

Exactly. This period is the Fall's most humanist music, even to the point of an actual-maybe-heartbreak song in "Gentleman's Agreement." And the most moving thing, to me, that they ever did is that fantastic Hank Williams cover on Code: Selfish.

― timellison, Monday, April 8, 2013 10:52 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's a difficult trick to pull off, but there's always something not quite right, something mildly deranged about it that gives a feeling that The Fall are tearing this cloth to pieces, perverting it like Smith perverts language. Maybe it's not that. Maybe it's a concerted effort to update, time for change, be more popular.

I've always thought it was neither of those things and that it was musicality plain and simple. Maybe "Lost in Music" and "I'm Going to Spain" were ironic; they were and they weren't at the same time. But there's nothing ironic about "Just Waiting."

yep agree, with some of that anyway. rockabilly/country has a special value for Smith, right? alienation of outsider in desert, out of town, tragic hero who loves a driving tune (rather'n melancholy) - he's used it as a theme on both Marshall Suite and Your Future Our Clutter. 'They were and weren't at the same time' - yes, agree again, i think that's my point, if I've expressed it properly. They do both at once - expressing how can be difficult tho. As with satire, there's clearly a love of the thing that's hated or that's being destroyed - it's what the subject matter consists of. I think Smith knows that. His voice often expresses glee when engaging with these things - is clearly stimulated by things that annoy.

interested in the point about humanism/musicality. I'm not sure why they became more musical (esp since what many people wd regard as the main 'pop' person - Brix - had left) - wondered if you had any theories. I've never felt entirely happy with my 'imitation as mockery' theory - why change the sound to something you do not like? Smith certainly not averse to a bit of 'need some money' pop chasing, possibly some self-loathing with regard to attacking other bands for it. Humanism is a dangerous word, esp with Smith I suspect, but yes, if it were to be applied, relatively speaking, to any period, the early '90s wd be it. I'm not sure I necessarily see humanism, as I've said, but a sort of internalisation of the ghouls and spirits of earlier Fall - death, fear, love, critical moments of disorientation and change still seem to be present, but present in a quotidian way (that 'life is nothing more than a facial tissue in a brass bin at dawn' is clearly different from Leave the Capitol, say, but the title You Haven't Found It Yet, suggests someone looking for symbols and guidance in the everyday around them - the gap between the bedroom brass bin with makeup tissue in and the maids smiling in unison in your hotel room may not be quite as large as it can seem.

Also v pleased you mentioned Just Waiting! Need to put something down about the (shit compilation alert) Oswald Defence Lawyer version cos i find it fascinating.

Having a difficult time listening to remastered/reissued Fall albums on Spotify. I can't wrap my head around a release of Wonderful and Frightening World without CREEP, Pat-Trip Dispenser, God Box and Clear Off! in the original running order. I think I purchased that album in 1989 and those songs were definitely there, not shuffled onto a second CD or tacked onto the end of a cassette.

Also this is my quick chime-in for Brix as one of the most important Fall members. I think she pushed them more into a "pop" direction than anyone else. Songwriting moved from single riff parts with a second section (that is not a chorus) or a bridge to actual verse/chorus/versus arrangements but yet not losing any of what makes The Fall "The Fall." It's a strong four album or so stretch when she was with them.

Also, the remastered Fall on Spotify is all on Sanctuary, and Sanctuary is a UMG label now, so the files all have UMG's weird-sounding pernicious watermarking on them. Even on a sound as non-hi-fi as The Fall's it ruins the listen for me.

haha i'm kind of drunk and want to vote for Legend of Xanadu 20 times.

that's a great fucking song.

THAT BLACK BARREN LAND THAT BEARS THE NAME OF XANADU! {SYNDRUM NOISE! SYNDRUM NOISE!}

A World Bewitched was a rly great and valuable odds and sods comp that had that on it iirc.

of course I am not going to do that & will instead enter a high-canonical ballot + blood outta stone + xmas with simon.

such a joy to see fizzles at work in this thread. I'll try to bring… something when the results roll out.

just listened to xmas w simon yesterday by chance. It's kind of great. There were so many delightful B sides and throwaways during that era...

The old cog sinister Listening In comp = essential purchase

yeah, it's my teen meet-the-Fall era, so a lot of those B-sides and oddities are burned into me from taped singles and peel shows. God the hunt for MORE FALL felt difficult then.

I can't wrap my head around a release of Wonderful and Frightening World without CREEP, Pat-Trip Dispenser, God Box and Clear Off! in the original running order. I think I purchased that album in 1989 and those songs were definitely there, not shuffled onto a second CD or tacked onto the end of a cassette.

yeah, it has the original UK track listing. When it first came out, the US edition added CREEP and No Bulbs, with Pat-Trip, God-Box, and Clear Off on the cassette (they were UK singles & B-sides). I seem to always prefer the versions of albums with extra tracks, like the Line reissue of Room To Live that adds Lie Dream and Fantastic Life, which turns it into a great record instead of a frustrating footnote (just my opinion there, go easy on me RTL lovers).

(see also the IRS version of Witch Trials, which subs Various Times for Mother-Sister and Industrial Estate)

When it first came out, the US edition added CREEP and No Bulbs, with Pat-Trip, God-Box, and Clear Off on the cassette (they were UK singles & B-sides)

^^^this cassette my first ever Fall purchase, bought at Musicland in Har Mar Mall after reading a sidebar article in lol Musician magazine

Listening to No Xmas for John Quays and the drummer on the first album is shit hot.

was listening to it yesterday and the rhythm section was reminding me (strangely) of the soft boys

no great shock, but i'd never made the connection before

Again, no great shock but I've only really been listening to Phallus Dei properly for the first time recently and damn, The Fall took some fine ideas from ADII as well.

Gonna try and vote in this, but somehow when I'm sober MES rubs me up the wrong way. I'll have to get some bottles of Holsten Pils in and go for it.

I failed didn't I?

Anyhoo - when is the last date for email votes?

It's midnight gmt April 14th.

Just sent in my vote. The tracks were hard. Basically I was able to rank my top four or five. Everything after that feels like a fifteen-way tie for sixth place.

Karl Burns was the drummer on the 1st album

Everything after that feels like a fifteen-way tie for sixth place.

yup!

A World Bewitched was a rly great and valuable odds and sods comp that had that on it iirc.

This record is soooo insane. I think before I heard it I underestimated the sheer perversity 90s Fall was capable of.

just listened to xmas w simon yesterday by chance. It's kind of great.

Was talking on another thread about how they have to be one of the few bands to have a song starting with every letter of the alphabet (if you're charitable to "The Quartet of Doc Shanley"). Why are there so many Fall Christmas songs, anyway?

well it fits in with many of their themes - dark pagan roots, Xtian theft, terror of Krampus revised into middle class myth, the undercurrents of discontent bubbling up through half-understood family ritual, winter, clinging to tradition as the world passes you by.

pleas to list all krampus-related fall songs as i will vote for them

Somewhat xpost, but the "missing track from reissues" that freaks me out the most is no Cruiser's Creek on Nation's Saving Grace. That was my first Fall album, must have gotten a US vinyl copy that subbed Cruiser's for Barmy, which just makes so much sense. For a very long time, I thought of Cruiser's as the defining Fall song from the defining Fall album. Don't feel that way any more, but it's still very hard to accept that it wasn't even on the original. Also, musically its descending riff worked well right after Bombast's ascending one.

dark pagan roots, Xtian theft, terror of Krampus revised into middle class myth, the undercurrents of discontent bubbling up through half-understood family ritual, winter, clinging to tradition as the world passes you by
Yeah, that'll do!

(You kind of have to dig for all that in "Jingle Bell Rock," though. Definite Scrooge vibe to MES, staring out the window at the chained spirits in the night.)

haha i'm kind of drunk and want to vote for Legend of Xanadu 20 times.

― woof, Thursday, April 11, 2013 9:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

love that song so much. his voice has a sort of negative intensity to it when he does that line 'in that black barren land that bears the name...'. it's difficult to do justice to the negative qualities of his voice - it feels pure and abstract, like electricity or something, unencumbered by habitual humanity, but as a consequence its emotions are conveyed with absolute clarity. it's somehow mixed up with how he conveys meaning in the apparently meaningless. it also means when he does love, nostalgia or vulnerability, and acknowledgement at his own failings, it has a pathos that more needy voices do not have. I was listening to Dr Buck's Letter the other day:

I lost my temper with a friend
Marked him and treated him with rudeness
And though I tried to make amends, still I miss him,
And walk a dark corridor.

Woke up one morning
Dr Buck's Letter

Of my own making I walk a dark corridor of my heart.
Hoping one day door will be ajar
At least so we can recompense
Our betrayal of our hard-won friendship
In vulgar and arrogant abeyance
To what was untrue underneath our parlance.

I opened the envelope
Dr Buck's Letter

(This is a good example of how difficult it is talking about notions of Smith and 'character'. Yes, it's a character, or seems to be, but Smith chose that character/this scenario, because he is interested in the emotional content of the character and their situation, usually a dark one - he knows these places and stalks their terrain himself. Incidentally in that whole discussion of self-presentation, so beset was i with theorising that i forgot the whole thing of Smith actually presenting himself in songs everywhere to mock or belittle or rep for himself - a very rap thing - Shoulder Pads, Mark'll Sink Us, Reckoning, Slang King, it's everywhere, like the constant advertising that 'we are The Fall', huckster and showman style)

Back to Xanadu, is that this was the time when he seemed to be using Xanadu as code for 'where people want to go on holiday' - usually Spain, also sometimes Ireland (Glam Racket gig intro tape has 'Why don't you do us all a favour and bog off back to Xanadu, in Ireland'). So I get Legend of Xanadu as holiday romance in Malaga song (or 'Malagna' as he has it in Glam Racket), and love the way he uses the song to transform sun n sex brochure landscape to a black, barren land of existential despair and ghost love.

This landscape generally is a good one, and I associate it with the dark, sparse parts of The Fall, possibly because of the great bit in Sons of Temperance- so you have the street-level circus style chorus and clotted bass electronics bit:

Roll Up! Roll Up!
Sons of Temperance
Present
"Crypto-Moralist Nation"

and then you have the swirling, swooping and glittering black expanses of the spiritual landscape in which this deceptively cheery carnival of temperance exists:

Over the mountains,
Lies the vale
Of sweet silence,
Darkest oceans
Of the past
And the restructure
Of your new life.

The way he positions his landscapes, lyrics and people in a sweet spot between allegory, the nuggety mundane detail of the world, and some sort of psychomachian spiritual world is very effective at latching in to all sorts of parts of you, plus your body's caught in a the tense mire of the music.

Didn't answer Drugs A Money's question about Room to Live last night, cos was a bit pissed n having difficulty accessing cogency, but general feeling about Smith's politics goes something like this:

Was into extreme politics ie Fascism and Communism at some point just before or during Live At the Witch Trials. After, his political views are probably that which are perhaps typical a) of mystics (worldly things are not where the battles are fought) b) one strand of anti-political working class thought, which might come out of strange religious/left-wing undercurrents but ends up at a sort of total cynicism to politics and politicians, and ultimately the concept of politics as a meaningful thing.

He'd also perhaps say there's as much meaningful news in a mis-spelt local newspaper column as there is in that which is considered editorially important on a national or international level. In fact he has p much said this - see that Hot Dogs in the Far-Out Zone piece.

One side of this plays into the right - people are unimprovable, responsible for their own souls regardless of the toughness or luxury of their surroundings, they are also unimportant relative to their own opinion of themselves. Satire generally is an unpleasant form, it doesn't like or trust newness, and change, likes long blood lines and provenance, ie conservatism.

On the other side, Smith is not a materialist, loathes the management class, aspirational behaviour, London, the countryside.

Like Dugs A Money 'Room to Live' always made me slightly uneasy. Not necessarily the content of the song itself, which is more or less one of their 'list of things/irritations' pieces, but just the 'Lebensraum' allusion, and I've never quite accounted for it.

Marquis Cha-Cha - again, this seems more to do with individual folly and fetishising of abroad than any specific politics.

As an American who has never been to England, I have basically little to no grasp of the nuance of the political landscape there, but at least in my experience here in the US, one of the main things that helps keep conservatives in power is by masquerading as the voice for the rural uneducated, thereby convincing them to oftentimes vote against their own interests. The will of the 'locals', their political currency, is treated in HLIC as sort of a spectral entity, to be fussed with at your own risk, and at the end, when the provincial downtrodden come to get their due, the implication may be that they may someday exact a price for their support...? Again, that's not something I am really sure about...

I think it probably works slightly differently from the US. Here rural areas just not traditionally v left wing - landed aristocracy + comparatively apolitical/dislike-of-change rural classes. That in itself has changed to something else - rural England now feels like 'second-home', stockbroker belt England. There's still obviously a lot of farming (traditionally conservative), and in fact the increase in wealth has meant that what rural labour there is has often become slightly more valuable (got a friend who's a woodcutter) + you still need people to manage estates and large areas of private land, and european subsidies around countryside management have meant that there's more money than there might have been in the past. Still, I increasingly get a sense of the 'preserved in aspic' gated community around rural England (that which is not scrub or caravan park etc). So that's v conservative as well.

Hard Life in Country is obv a GREAT song. But I think my reading of it is fairly simple. Smith hates the country - it's boring, atavistically muddy, you get a terrible urge to drink, and the locals are weirdos, long in the arm, thick in the head, and probably likely to worship obscure local gods to which you will be sacrificed. And listen to D Bowie. And there's no escape.

Oh, one final thing:

In terms of general political stance, Smith's line about the House of Orange - 'You name it, they were against it' - seems to contain amused admiration, but amongst those named things I wouldn't include Christmas. Agree definitely with sleeve's description of Smith's fascination with Xmas, but I don't see him as a Scrooge, and I think The Fall in general like festivity and fun. (There's that wonderful story about a Christmas gig in Berlin, I think, where they got in a huddle at the end of the gig, and turned round to scatter rose petals over the audience). Jingle Bell Rock has what is probably one of the few Wyndham Lewis references in pop music - the novel Rotting Hill.

Now I've really got to go to work. Kinda need to call in sick to do my ballot. Not sure that'll wash.

oh and in terms of supporting Falklands - probably would couch that in terms of being cynical about human nature, and war being both inevitable and an appropriate solution to political ills. he also loves military history. as i say, Smith can be f'ing funny, and speak a lot of sense, but he is also, as he said about W Lewis, 'a funny old stick', to put it mildly. I mean, I like Céline, so I'm used to this sort of moral ambivalence. They were all f'ing cunts, using 'imperfectibility' to mean on occasion 'deserve what they/we get', and i just don't agree.

Yes, and before I forget - Fall cover art is great!

Dragnet - The party-per-pale sable and argent, yin and yang blazoning insects/spiders thing feels archetypal
Claus Caustenskiold's new hogarthian grotesque for PBL and WaFWO and his Blake-style TNSG were great, and loved Pascal le Gras electronically/geometrically stylised figures. Also like the group photo ones - particularly Frenz.
All that plus that notes, messages to listeners, stray fragments, blurts and jottings etc.

Still would love to know how I lost my Cerebral Caustic t-shirt. I loved that t-shirt.

I once bought a Dragnet T-shirt on eBay, but it never came! And I haven't been able to find another one since :/

I had a Fall shirt bought at the tour for Nation's Saving Grace that had a fucking awesome Savage Pencil drawing of a wolf staring you down with one normal eye and one eye with a zillion pupils in it. The rock shirt I most wish I still had.

This one!

http://i243.photobucket.com/albums/ff265/givescaca/t_shirts_5/P1070159.jpg

oh man almost forgot to vote for this - will take care of that this weekend, though unfortunately i'll be reliant on memory far more than immediate revisitation

in college i had every album (except shift-work oddly) through The Unutterable. Loved these guys so much.

So many regrets since I filed my ballot. Unbelievable to me that I had to leave out [titles redacted]. Some of the rejects have their riffs stuck in my head for days now going 'why you braek hart?'

We've got until Monday, right? Better get on this.

I think Sunday midnite GMT? Doesn't that mean like 4 in the afternoon on Sunday for the West Coast of the US?

that savage pencil shirt is awesome!

Agree definitely with sleeve's description of Smith's fascination with Xmas, but I don't see him as a Scrooge, and I think The Fall in general like festivity and fun.

I guess I meant less that he's Scrooge as a Christmas hater (or a reconstructed Christmas lover) than Scrooge in the action of the story, hanging between moral positions, haunted.

Maybe I'm being too literal about the "This is your vessel MES" business in “Xyralothep,” but I think there's an important tie between the queasiness of his politics (at least for upstanding liberal types) and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque Fizzles is pointing out. Those blithe lebensraum allusions, the slurs that crawl in – casting MES as a “Legion, for we are many” figure doesn’t make moral or literal sense of them, but it does (imo) make sense in terms of the work and themes in play. (And sure, this is play, this is fun, but this is Krampus-fun.) He doesn’t just speak about the hobgoblins and phantoms: they speak through him. The Fall: “ESP medium discord.”

Seems reasonable too to link that to the vocal polyphony that's present in the work. For a band so immediately identifiable by its unmistakable lead voice and its tics, how often that voice is 1. without a clear I or referent in its text, 2. “channeling” texts (from the Blake rips in “Jerusalem” and “W.B.” to the ephemera in “Dr. Bucks’ Letter” and “The Re-Mixer”) 3. doubled against itself, interrupting itself, or 4. interrupting or mocking other voices (“Bonkers in Phoenix,” throughout The Unutterable).

This gets even better when you think of how that polyphony fucks around with time – from the sampling of the absent Brix on “Masquerade” (“This is NEW”) to MES’s omnipresent tape recorder highlighting the blunt magic of recording, and how it juxtaposes swatches of time (“An Older Lover,” of course “Paint-Work”). Magnify the time scale there, and you’re right back to “Various Times,” or, say, “Hotel Bloedel,” as the Smiths do Vico over each other.

oh cripes i hope i have time to make a ballot :(

^^ otm :-/

Mark G, can I change one of my album votes if I email u? My conscience will not rest!

casting MES as a “Legion, for we are many” figure doesn’t make moral or literal sense of them, but it does (imo) make sense in terms of the work and themes in play.

reminds me of Whitman's "I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes" (paraphrased from memory)

For a band so immediately identifiable by its unmistakable lead voice and its tics, how often that voice is 1. without a clear I or referent in its text, 2. “channeling” texts (from the Blake rips in “Jerusalem” and “W.B.” to the ephemera in “Dr. Bucks’ Letter” and “The Re-Mixer”) 3. doubled against itself, interrupting itself, or 4. interrupting or mocking other voices (“Bonkers in Phoenix,” throughout The Unutterable).

This gets even better when you think of how that polyphony fucks around with time – from the sampling of the absent Brix on “Masquerade” (“This is NEW”) to MES’s omnipresent tape recorder highlighting the blunt magic of recording, and how it juxtaposes swatches of time (“An Older Lover,” of course “Paint-Work”). Magnify the time scale there, and you’re right back to “Various Times,” or, say, “Hotel Bloedel,” as the Smiths do Vico over each other.

ah man, great post. the transference or cathexis of mechanisms (say of storytelling) into other areas of the music is definitely a thing.

Several things occur to me all at once that I want to think out loud about:

1) Add to that list of presentation-in-a-single plane of mutliple voices from different levels the instructions to the group (whether it's 'round it up, round it up' or 'all right turn the keyboards up all right' etc). How this frames extreme strangeness in normality. Fits into that excellent line about Smith highlighting the 'blunt magic of recording', his whole Johnny Burnette approach.

2) Cathexis of mechanisms (time-travel into verbal or musical transposition, say) into other areas of the music --> The submerged/surfacing production on Reformation Post TLC, but also feed into that massive topic of Smith's song-writing technique and What (i think) Went Wrong in the 00s. (as does the first point in fact - using deliberate 'badness'/amateurishness to try and isolate the 'small fraction that is sometimes the most important', does this work?)

3) Smith's tape recorder, megaphone, mechanised voice. Does this play a special role? Happi Song.

So much to think about, so little time.

(Speaking of which, going to see Pere Ubu this evening - Musicians are Scum off the latest LP almost a Fall song (parallels in media reviews otherwise exaggerated) - with the title plus its repeated refrain of Time! Time! Time! Time!)

An I voted bump-My #1 is a very atypical Fall song.

Voted! Happy with my list but I didn't really do a lot of revision for this one, which means I probably missed something really obvious.

AAAH! Let me do this now...

OK, sent.

I can treat you to visit to coastal pillboxes
I like to delve in destruction, lust and debauches
And I am the one who stamps on all ages
From 16 to 40, over and under
I'm monolithic, and the black ice on the corner

Hiss...hiss...hiss

As all is as one, as all damp on all stone
I hold all time and can induce at once
Jet trains, lead paint, stamps on border forms
Misread Easter Island, put butter on plague style
Spin complete revolutions and not bat an eyelid
And alter tree-rings so that what you are after
You will not ever find with a surfeit of number
And make you imagine from hunger
Bread trees spinning, dripping with butter
Just 6 inches higher than your upstretched middle finger

History of the...

I place minute dust in your microchip vessels
For daring to think all science is immortal
I am the one who'll strike you down at once
For stretching time-bracket, and assuming that what is
Can be maladjusted. A rigid adoption
Of codes you had concocted
I can treat you to visit to coastal pillboxes
And show you all hideous microscope thingies
And Hovis set-up in London's psoriasis

Stockings, jokings, 1780's

History of the wo...

Is going on my ballot. I mean fucking hell. With that wonderful stop-start bass that carries MES prose of the strange warper of historical evidence entity. (Lyrics from lyrics parade - had always assumed it was 'my new dust' - it's a wonderful set of lines.

Incidentally, the emphasis on The Fall's northernness is fairly misleading for music which travels around the world and is jam-packed with international places to an extent greater than any other music I can think of. The delusions of pan-European megalomania in Barmy, fireworks/light splitting Chinese sky open, Balkan tracks in early '90s, Faustian pact in Zagreb, before the blue figure/sprite goes 'off round the world' (love the bit in that song - 'my neophyte, my sweetheart, my liebchen, my librium, my lover, my friend - you get five minutes with me, then I'm off round the WORLTTTTT' (t to indicate that way he has of splitting out sounds in single letters and syllables ('can't find my way arow-wownd' etc). Those are just the first songs that spring to mind. Going the other way and denying any sense of the Salford/Manchester in The Fall would be completely wrong as well of course, so I tend to use the notion of the Salford docks as local portal to the world when I'm thinking about the notion of place in The Fall. Practically of course Smith's in the fortunate position of being a writer interested in local detail who as part of The Fall who has more or less continuously toured much of the world in his life.

wrote this in the sessions thread about session #22:

It came after the group had collapsed in America, amidst uncertainty about both The Fall's future and the quality of what they would produce. The session that The Fall came up with - #22 - to announce their return was remarkable for this reason alone.

However, it was exceptional in other ways. It was incredibly raw sounding, as Peel said at the time it was like they had gone back to a Dragnet sound. Smith has never recorded sourer more rancorous vocals; the incredulous stuttering anger of Bound Soul, the impenetrable pained howling on Antidotes, the thin misanthropic nihilism of the Saints cover This Perfect Day, and the deranged Shake Off, the lyrics of which sound like they're being delivered in a fever or delerium.

The black void behind the music is palpable, a feeling increased by the way Smith's pre and post tune instructions are left in - you are aware of the alchemy of The Fall, the something out of nothing, the something strange out of the perfectly ordinary. It's a dreadful, sinister, corruscating session and sounds timeless because so primitive.

It has the characteristics of the best Fall - sparse and dense at the same time, detailed but primal, mundane and magical.

Not since early versions of The Hip Priest has music sounded less like music and more like invocation, incantation and exorcism - 'bad unafeared art'.

I remembering listening to it through headphones as it was broadcast - I still think that's the best way to listen to it - the hairs on the back of neck bristling because it was so intense and exciting, implicit in the whole session was the statement of intent from Fantastic Life -

Ours is not to look back, ours is to continue the craft.

Wd want to add some stuff to that I think - it is, as i said, a very deranged and rancorous session. everything's detuned, monochromatic, the aural landscape of these songs reminds me of tempo house, which in turn reminds me of the setting for Wyndham Lewis' excellent play Enemy of the Stars, somewhat like an early form of Beckett:

http://htmlimg3.scribdassets.com/2iuc6ncn4nvqep/images/65-0723989931.jpg

Shake-Off is v brief so that it feels almost a sculpted object, the capture of an early moment of explosion, with Smith smearing words and grammar and meaning in energetic impasto.

Smith sounds like the victim of electrical torture being applied interminttently in Antidotes, as the incoherent fragments of his disgust are extracted:

And the big fat bodies, in the class that tolerate their dads, on teams. It's a Carry On circu..... [howling]

or this bit

And in the back shed
His shotgun
Killer[?] dog's bone [barking dog]
Had scales on his face
Before he even reached
The sports minister
Thanks to a country that's
SECONDARY <----difficult to do justice to the level of pained scorn he puts into this word without listening to the song.

And then at the end he curtails it all with a brisk 'all right'.

These songs, the heavily fragmented nature of recent Fall songs generally in fact, remind me of a phrase of Danto's in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace about Breughel's The Fall of Icarus:

"a story the painting not so much tells as presupposes in order to integrate the elements."

I mentioned the session version of Hip Priest (and wd include the Leeds gig version of HP included on the Perverted by Language bis dvd), and Papal Visit, and wd like to borrow Scik Mouthy's phrase he used about a recent Swans gig about these songs: "Unrecognisable as a product of music."

Smith has also said he considers rock n roll to be 'the abuse of instruments to get feelings across'. The notion of 'music' in The Fall feels like a cloth this primal spirit wears, it is that spirit being fashioned to look like music. Were it not for for sessions like this, or the rawness of something like Weather Report #2 the sentiment would be a meaningless statement. But having that approach also helps explain how, even when they are 'going for a hit' (always a somewhat wry concept when it comes to The Fall) they remain indigestibly Fall-like. (Not entirely aside from the fact that Smith's rebarbative voice usually provokes incredulous dislike when many people first hear it).

after extensive research I've decided that all versions of Guest Informant are better than each other.

^^^ totally, and one reason I was relieved that we didn't have to vote for a specific version of any particular song

i want to mention how much I love 1973 marillion album cover in that song, like his contempt for them is so great he can't even be bothered to remember what decade they existed in

not gonna make it in under the wire on this one...

I voted a little while ago. Almost everything is from the 80s but whatcanyoudo

just threw mine together in the last five minutes! sent!

sent!

I have a whole thing to write up but I will save it for the results thread.

Ran a ballot off the top of my head and snuck it in.

"Service", people, "Service"!

okay, i lied, ballot sent

I voted for "Service."

Sent!

I included one 90s track and a couple from the late 80s, just for balance, but I could easily have chosen everything from 1980-2

I voted for "Service."

So when are we doin this hassle schmuck?

I am regretting not voting for Cosmos 7.

Briefly considered Monocard, decided against it

You decided against song about an abstract and protean tyranical force governing a West London overrun by Prussia, with trenches in Hounslow and gangs in Chiswick, at the bottom of which lies a central question of the notional quintessence of a symbolic substance that might be bread or yeast and where, after several minutes of lumbering, wheezing and grinding toil, Smith amusingly goes 'ba-ba-ba' a couple of times? (conflating single and LP somewhat admittedly.)

Showbiz and Apprentice kneel before
O Monocard
Their Lord, Monocard.
His grace.
His perfect station.

Shame on you.

:(

It's more that I decided for the Peel version of Hexen Definitive/Strife Knot. Others fell too. It was with great heaviness that I control-exed (Jung Nev's) Antidotes and its beyond-greatness-and-everything-else Peel shredding

None of you voted for Midwatch 1953 though, pretty sure I'm alone on that one

Just been listening to The Unutterable and you know which track just absolutely blew me away? Devolute. Completely-unheralded Devolute, and I tell you what, it contains more multitudes than certain religions

ha, am imagining yr ballot solely consisting of stuff like "Crew Filth", 'Fireworks", "Papal Visit", "Symbol Of Mordgan", "Ibis-Afro Man", etc.

Devolute and Midwatch both great (Geiger counter tempo fluctuating, nuclear-campfire strumalong)

Ibis-Afro Man was also briefly considered. Ah-ah ah-ahh!

My #1 should be fairly easy to calculate from all of this

When will you roll out the results Mark? (no pressure....)

Who, me?

Results thread suggestions:

Hey, Mark, you're POLLing all the paintwork
The Fall Heads POLL
if you wanna catch us, you need a POLL and a line

POLL Art Threat

^^^

While I'm opinionating, the results thread has got to be called Fall Heads POLL. (Or at very least POLL Art Threat.)

― bentelec, Monday, 25 March 2013 16:44 (3 weeks ago) Permalink

I'm good with either :)

POLL Art Threat

this must win

otm

Pink POLL Threat

I got a heck of a lot of ballots over the final weekend.

This'll take time, but.

Anyways, I shall attempt not to be swayed by your poll guess result titles, either way.

^ escaped the pink POLL effect

I'm really curious about how many people will vote in this - hoping for at least 25.

expecting quite a few more

While we're waiting, I wanted to write some about the arc of lyrical themes using lines from the albums in rough chronological order.

first, of course, we have Repetition. call to arms, musical template.

the first phase is drenched with alternate identities, hallucination, time travel

the Bingo Master
all of "Various Times"
I have seen the madness in my area
they're putting me away, but it'll be back someday
this hideous replica

all of this reaching what I see as kind of an apex in "Wings", but just as key is the negativity, scorn, contempt, refusal to engage

no soul in the discos, no rock in the clubs
it's a second dark age
i don't dig their dead end options
we are frigid stars
we spit in their plate and wait for the ice to melt
US dirge, rock n pop filth
leave the capitol, exit this Roman shell

and, crucially:

hate's not your enemy, love's your enemy

when we get to PBL, Smith begins a guarded engagement with what I can only describe as "nicer" music, just as oblique/dense lyrically, but easier on the ears, possibly influenced by Brix's arrival but who knows.

hidden fragments, surface now

1st song with explicit un-ironic sentiment? I would argue Disney's Dream Debased. from then on, the negativity becomes even more defiant and absolute:

no never no never no more will I trust the elves of Dunsimore. feel the wrath of my bombast. try to wash the black off my face, but it's ingrained. my frenz don't add up to one hand. see you, in wrong place. i am the one who stamps on all ages. you make me hate you, baby. no no no pittsville direkt. got a big fat no no in my checkbook. it's a curse, it's a burden. shut up. don't call me darling.

one can easily imagine Smith as a crusty old wraith who seems to live on alcohol, cigarettes, and pure vitriol. heck, this is probably still true.

something changes with The Light User Syndrome, though. damn, I love that record, and not having Scanlon really changes the band (in hindsight). It seems like the lyrical themes retreat, become even more inscrutable, if I have the time, I'll try and trawl through the 1998-2012 years and look for some common themes. also worth noting that 1997 was the first year without a Fall studio LP since 1979, and everything changed after the band quit. this might have some crossover with Fizzles' theory about "what went wrong in the 00's", but I'lll have to wait for him to post that.

all of this reaching what I see as kind of an apex in "Wings", but just as key is the negativity, scorn, contempt, refusal to engage

Like the legend of the phoenix
All ends with beginnings
What keeps the planet spinning?
The force from the beginning

We've come too far
To give up who we are
So let's raise the bar
And our cups to the stars

Not 97, 97 is Levitate, one of the best albums of 97

87 was the first year they didn't release an album.

>25

OK, so much for that analogy, but I think it's clear that '96-'98 saw some big changes. Could have SWORN Frenz was from 87 but that's memory for ya - it's from February 88, Kurious Oranj is October. They released a lot of singles in '87 though, and I think the Domesday US comp was from then as well.

was there some deadline extension

Could have SWORN Frenz was from 87 but that's memory for ya - it's from February 88, Kurious Oranj is October. They released a lot of singles in '87 though, and I think the Domesday US comp was from then as well.

man i do so dearly LOVE the US domesday. was my intro to the fall, along with the wonderful (and frightening) palace of swords reversed comp. such a splendid and tragic, utterly misbegotten thing. you lose bournemouth runner, dktr faustus and living too late (!), but you get ghost in my house, hey luciani and haf found bormann. why? i had the cassette version. why not just put it ALL on there? bigtime, j'accuse.

Man, I can't wait to see the results of this.

Had to put "Slates, Slags, Etc..." on top, but wondering if poll love will find its way to "Chiselers" (Pink Floyd are short!), "Can Can Summer" (my fave off the last few - showed that they could do something I thought they'd forgotten how to do) and "Bremen Nacht..." (however long it is isn't long enough) too.

SO many valid choices here. Really, it'll just be a fantastic excuse to listen to a buncha Fall for a bit. Bueno!

this might have some crossover with Fizzles' theory about "what went wrong in the 00's", but I'lll have to wait for him to post that.

enjoyed that post, sleeve, and it definitely fits in with some of the things I was thinking about. I was also going to suggest Disney's Dream Debased as the track that marks the beginning of a different type of lyric - more 'human' to use tim's phrase, or perhaps 'more sympathetic to human sentiment'. Some care needed though - transcendental notions of 'naturalism' don't really fit in here. The heart is still treated with suspicion as being insufficiently articulate about the contextual details of each individual's emotional state. 'Love' is still never mentioned with approval even in songs that describe it, I think? Wonderful songs though!

Freezing, wheezing, got pasted in a bar

is a relatively innocuous line that is also one of my favourites.

or the bit in Ten Houses of Eve (i'll do the live version I heard once):

If only...
Identity arts...
If only the shards would relocate
back in place (despite the face)
In your blue green and grey heart (Fall)
Bedecked in lace
If only thoust could,
In a Snoop-Doggy-Dog sorta style
Understand
Will those shards relocate
If only...

He's really good at loss of love too - the great death/ghost/love song Birthday, which develops that rather conventional notion in homiletic bereavement counsel, of the dead only being in the next room:

And though, my darling,
There is another side you never see,
Another side.
And know, darling,
You know it’s there, on the right
I’m pointing to it now.
While you, your fragrance drags
It conveys me to the country

As if by flight, behold -
I am sat in a leafy winding spiral blaze
[...]
Trying to, like you, navigate without pains
And in dreams I stumble towards you,
Knees knock, as you evaporate
Though I am tee'd up
I am in the next room with you always.

Fall songs can be consolatory as well. I remember, in a period of despair, listening to To NKRoachment: Yarbles

Every day you've gotta cry some,
Every day you've gotta die some,
Wipe the tears from your eyes, son,
All the good times are past and gone.

And it was wonderful. They do not shirk the pain of solitariness or unhappiness, but rather include it as part of understanding of and comprising the concrete world. Edinburgh Man is obviously the great example of this, with its seasons and landscapes +:

I'm ok just by myself
Our miserable kinks won't protect us from ourselves

or

Don't give a toss about private wealth
And history just repeats itself

But On My Own is another great example, conveying well the lightness that loss bestows, as well as the sadness (with those wheezy synth stabs driving emphasising each syallable, as he walks the streets of Manchester):

I am on my own,
I am spoken for now,
Cos I'm on my own
Ag-g-gain

Love that he's 'spoken for' by himself.

(Also has that great sarcastic line at the end

DJ Voice: Say hey! It's a great day today...
Withering, dying scorn of MES voice: In the City of Equality...)

(also completely agree about LUS, sleeve, and would use it as my kicking-off point for late Fall difficulties, but am just having a quick chat with a friend, trying to recall the conversation we had about LUS a few years ago in a pub, before I post).

in the meantime i'll post same friend's observations he sent me a few years ago about Levitate - sure he won't mind - because I kept on promising to respond/comment, but never bloody well did, and feel I should use this thread as a place to do so:

Just a few ideas about "Levitate" I thought I should get down while they were in my head, having suddenly occurred to me for no evident reason this morning. No intention to flesh these notes out - don't have the time, and I doubt the album would really withstand a close analysis looking to tie everything in. Though I've used the word "theme" below, that's probably a bit strong - I'm not claiming that any of this was necessarily conscious on Smith's part, nor that it's a means to "understanding" the album - just that the recurrence and reflections of these motifs are one of the factors that contributes to the uniquely atmospheric and poetic quality of this fucking great album.

Theme of album: the strange feelings of unreality/detachment/ungraspability often characterising the apprehension (at the time or in memory) of great calamity and disaster or crisis. Hence the title: floating separated from the situation, regarding it from above. Disasters include natural ("Hurricane Edward", force 10 gale & house falling in of "4 1/2 Inch"), war (Hiroshima in "I come and stand..."), financial crisis ("Masquerade"). Always perceived/evoked with this sense of detachment, possibly even hallucination, separating one from the actuality of events: 2 of the covers concern dead spirits trapped in the world of the living unable to communicate ("I come and stand...", "I'm a Mummy"). "Ol' Gang": the frozen unreal moment before the reality of violence/injury kicks in, sudden confrontation with unfamiliar/threatening landscape after you've turned onto the wrong street. "10 Houses of Eve": inability to reconstitute fragmented memory into a real image ("if only the shards would relocate"), theatricality of past events/emotions when recalled ("in a rep sort of style"). Even "Jungle Rock" could be seen as a hallucinatory/fantasy perception of a situation which in any realistic terms would likely be fatal - imagination separating/protecting one from the dangerous reality of events. Music/production adds to/is informed by the strange atmosphere generated by these motifs (one very literal example - the fake Smiths/audience members at start of "Everybody But Myself").

First things first - p certain it's 'rap sort of style' (hence the Snoop Doggy Dog live crack), but I think I'd go along with this quite a long way.

In some ways I think Levitate can be seen as the first of the solo albums (Post Nearly Man is GREAT btw for anyone who hasn't listened to it). The band had completely disintegrated under the increasingly erratic, violent, drunken, pathetic Smith. Live performances were often a mess, with Smith not appearing or only appearing briefly. (Tho I should add this period had one of my favourite ever Fall gigs - at the Oxford Zodiac, in fact it had the Snoop Doggy Dog line in it - but also the venue shut off the power in the middle of the second encore, but they carried on regardless, and did a version of I'm a Mummy, with just Karl Burns hammering the drums, and Smith shouting 'Look what happens, when they pull the power on me - I'm a mummy!'. It was AMAZING.)

But yes, generally this was a period of catastrophe. Levitate itself was, as I understand it, almost entirely constructed by Smith from bits of what the rest of the group had done (as friend said on one occasion, 'The most significant bit in the liner notes is 'Produced by MES'' - he's right: it accounts for much of the album's strangeness I think).

The two bits from friend's analysis feel significant to me right now:

Though I've used the word "theme" below, that's probably a bit strong - I'm not claiming that any of this was necessarily conscious on Smith's part, nor that it's a means to "understanding" the album

This crux, or problem - intentionality of Smith, projected meaning of listener - is always present in the Fall but it comes under increasing pressure when you start talking about later Fall, I guess I'm just flagging it as a thing around which carefully chosen words are needed, and apodictic expression is to be avoided.

Music/production adds to/is informed by the strange atmosphere generated by these motifs

This is obvious on Levitate, but I think it also plays a very big part in that super-problematic album Reformation: Post TLC, but that's all probably for a different post, as I need to listen to the album again first.

Just wd reiterate that Levitate is an incredible album, an album of falling apart, of strange fragments in interference at a far higher level than any other Fall album, and Hurricane: Edward made my ballot cos it's damn great.

^^^another brilliant post, encapsulating why Levitate isn't just my favourite Fall album but comfortably one of my favourite albums of all time

Post Nearly Man is indeed an essential part of the Nagle-era jigsaw and a fine companion piece to Levitate

Birthday Song always struck me as MES' straightest love-song, but I may be wrong.

'Love' is still never mentioned with approval even in songs that describe it, I think?

There's that line "Our hero, deeply loved" in "Stephen Song."

ah fuck, meant to vote for Stephen Song. Great 'things' in it: the vendetta parchment, the adult net, the palace of conscience, and the way the whole song tumbles/impels you to the moment of release at the end where he says LIBERATION.

yeah that just missed my ballot, great song.

xpost*2 there's "Bill is Dead" of course

When is this rolling out?

Probably next Monday, there's a lot of ballots

xpost*2 there's "Bill is Dead" of course

yep, and it's a great love song - but not sure "love" is ever mentioned. in fact one of the distinctive features of that song is the way it uses the material/carnal images of happiness-in-grief, almost as a reassertion of v basic simplicity (getting pasted, that oddly trite sounding line - "your legs are so cool", came twice, you thrice) as relief from death.

"I hope I've got the number" always struck me as a very poignant line.

Bear in mind that "Bill is Dead" was the working title of the tune when it was a Smiths pisstake, until Mark decided the tune was too good to waste, and wrote different/better lyrics for it.

God, he does that all the time. Still, titles give the direction I guess, and the contrast between the title and the subject matter gives the song its slant (for me, anyway).

I remember someone once pointed out that the opening notes are like the PA announcement at some stations. I felt it was a bit of a long stretch, but whenever I hear that bong-bing-bing anywhere, have immediately got Bill is Dead in my head.

in other news, Sir William Wray = a better What About Us, but nothing special on first listens.
Hittite Man and Jetplane = good actually!

We warned the corpse of William Wray
Not to cuss and drink all day

i've never bought the "smiths pisstake" story. the track isn't particularly like the smiths, and since when do the fall make parody records? seems mark felt the need to excuse creating what is a touching song.

and, iirc, bill is dead refers to smith's father who had recently died.

have been listening a lot to William Wray 7" and ok, it's a *much* better version of What About Us. "this means nothing" but there's so much more exuberance these days than a few albums ago. Hittite Man also excellent - "the gibbous morons you unloaded on this earth".

Yeah, never bought "Smiths pisstake" song, tho Bill was not the name of his father either.

:)

http://youtube/yE-6xoh1khg

burns is the hero of this btw.

http://youtu.be/yE-6xoh1khg

awesome vid btw. my favorite line-up.

yeah, they just all look *amazing*. the intensity in their body shapes, The Fall physiology, bristling with electricity and power, with this still angle in the middle, all cornucopia-minded and with a voice so unnourished it seems to come through Auden's crack in the teacup.

holy clanking call to arms

I know thread is over but... Off top ofmy head:
New Puritan
Muzorewi's Daughter
No Xmas For John Quays
Mere Pseud Mag Ed
Copped It
Chicago Now
Idiot Joy Showland
Birmingham School Of Business
Why Are People Grudgeful?
You're Up To Much
The Joke
Feeling Numb
Cheetham Hill
Crying Marshall
Shake Off
Two Librans
Way Round
Jim's The Fall
Green Eyed Loco Man
Portugal
Blindness
Fall Sound
I've Been Duped
Bury
Taking Off
Nate Will Not Return
Noise
Dedicatiin Not Medication
Auto Chip
Second House
Gibus Gibson

did this ever happen? the search is failing me.

FALL RESULTS ROLL Post Tender Loving Care - PART ONE The Albums (Pre-mit)

"People get ready, strip down your houses because it's the FALL TRACKS BALLOT ROLL- OUT!" - PART TWO The Tracks (Pre-wray)

ta!

Kinda look back bore