The Fall: Greatest Hits Compilation

Article published in Melody Maker, 8th May, 1982

MM Rock Writer Contest | Working Man’s Fall | SQUABBLING with our usual tetchy zest about the kind of question that would have you scrambling in more directions than a shotgunned Argy, we finally came up with the following wheeze — compile an imaginary greatest hits album by your favourite artist or band, we asked, and write the sleeve notes for the collection.

One or two of the artists you selected had us well stumped. Who, for instance, was Anthony Phillips and when did he ever record an album called “The Geese And The Ghost”? We were scratching the old syrups over this for some time, until we stumbled upon the answer in one of the entries on Genesis: seems Tone was their original guitarist. Whoop-dee-doo.

Some of the entries were singularly predictable.

Writing about Bruce Springstein, for example, most of the entrants seemed doomed to poor imitations of the dullard Yank’s heavy-handed outpourings. Similarly, the Jam were usually written about with the kind of dourly earnest seriousness that some of us think afflicts Paul Weller’s songwriting.

The best entries were controversial: compilation albums are notoriously personal, and one of the most entertaining aspects of judging this category was reading your selections and howling with disapproval.

MM Rock Writer Contest | Working Man’s Fall

The essays that were finally left were the ones that made us want to rush to the old rack and actually play the tracks that you’d listed. Compiling a best of Dave Edmunds, Gina Morris from San Francisco displayed a canny ear and a shrewd sense of judgement; so did 19 year old Joanna Gilbey, writing about Tim Buckley. She knew exactly what she liked about Buckley: the sex in his music.

The best of the entries on Elvis Costello (the most popular target for hypotherical compilations) was from 17 year old Alexandra Nicholls. But the winner of this section is David Grigg of Eastbourne Road, St Austell, for his vivid selection of tracks by the Fall.

David will be paid at MM’s usual freelance rates and the overall winners (£1000 first prize; £250 for second; £150 for third) will be announced shortly. More next week . . . can you wait?

MM Rock Writer Contest | Working Man’s Fall

Working Man’s Fall

IN the darkness something moves. From out of the shadow-filled chasm erupts a fizzing, splintery mass . . . The Fall! Slam! Real Pop for YOP people?

THE FALL: a band that have taken the whole working class hero schtick, and, like some old black and white movie, have spliced it up and re-edited it. The result has been with us for five years now; a fusion of vitriolic pop/rant and scrawny rhythm.

In the midst of it all stands orator/writer Mark E. Smith, drawing on his Northern heritage and reinterpreting it in sharp jarring images — bingo halls, casinos and young drinkers’ clubs, the endless tapeloop of proletarian culture . . .

FIERY JACK: One of The Fall’s most wry and cohesive tracks. Mark Smith’s scathing rhetoric rides the spring-heeled rockabilly beat, his deadpan tones cleverly off-setting the more conventional backing. Mutated Duane Eddy guitar jabs needle-like into the structure, which jerks and twitches like an electric-shocked corpse.

The song’s potent images of self-destruction might well be an epitaph to dear old punk, that adrenalin-fuelled farrago of politics and shock tactics racing downhill to oblivion. Skulking through it all is the debauched, pill-popping figure of Jack, the leprous refugee from the council estate.

This is the song that marked the beginning of the R. Totale mythos in which the ex-MI5 agent delivers cryptic missives to the audience. Smith seems to envisage Totale as a kind of high-powered Joe Public, or a detail from an H.P. Lovecraft work. Humanity Can Either Eat That Grenade Or Face The Second Dark Age.

A FIGURE WALKS: A ghost story. An awake-dream nightmare which has the story’s character followed by a shadowy something (“Eyes of brown watery/Nails of pointed yellow/Hands of black carpet”) of which there is no doubting its sinister aspect. Against a chilling rhythmic background, Smith’s words construct a pyramid of vague and uneasy terror.

A sub-tribal drum pattern thuds relentlessly away like a vampire’s heartbeat while a lonely, prowling guitar scrapes out the song’s atmosphere. The character appears to escape from his pursuer but the listener is left wondering as the guitar takes on a curious phantom Arabian quality, spiralling away into silence. A document of melancholy menace.

C ‘n’ C-S MITHERING: In which Mark Smith is revealed as the anarchic schoolboy gleefully letting off stink-bombs in the class room of the listener’s mind. Here the singer gives opinion on a whole host of subjects, including the American Way of Life, and in particular Smith launches an attack against the AOR morass of US pop/pap.

The sterile complacency of many home-grown groups does not escape the indignant tongue either. Smith seizes upon the playpen rebellion gestures of modern punk outfits and strips them naked. The music is rather minimal with an incongruous-sounding acoustic guitar proving the backbone for Paul Hanley’s steady-as-a-rock drumming.

The simple, monotonous music for this track is somehow the perfect non-committal score for the vicious diatribe. Like a great many Fall songs, there are murky twilight-zones lurking here that you could call “inaccessible”, but since when have journalistic labels ever cramped the Fall’s style?

FRIGHTENED: Vintage Fall from the album that established the band as purveyors of dislocated dance music. Smith’s words are usually mocking and sarcastic, treating his target with contemptuous amusement, but here the mood is darker. Smith roams the architecture of his disorientated psyche, throwing up themes of paranoia and loneliness.

Personal relationships and introspective emotions fall under scrutiny, and Smith infers suicidal tendencies like tripping along a razor’s edge. Mark Bramah‘s guitar races to the fore to rat-scratch some nervous “lead” before retreating under the cover of Marc Riley‘s Gothic ground-level bass. The overall feeling is suitably intense and claustrophobic.

Yvonne Pawlett‘s keyboards embellish the ringing waves of shrill-cry guitar with clinical austerity. The lyrics paint the picture of gloomy despondency; “In a dark room you see more than you think/I sweated a lot you could feel the violence/ I’ve got shears pointed straight at my chest/I feel trapped by mutual affection”.

SPECTRE Vs RECTOR: The Fall set the controls for maximum displacement. A tale of possession and religion infected by evil, it is a shabby, shanking random mass oozing subversion. Neurotic spidery guitar weaves a metallic web. At the same time, a throbbing, grumbling bass tears apart the scenery.

Smith sounds possessed himself as he spills out a barrage of abstract lyrics, occasionally mumbling as if speaking a rite. He exposes his story gradually, like uncovering a twisted nerve. “Spectre vs. Rector-start one/The Rector lived in Hampshire/The Spectre was from Chorazina/Evil dust filled the air/The Rector locked his doors.”

Like grotesque reflections in some eldritch mirror, it brings to mind the batrachian horrors of H.P. Lovecraft. The lyrics make compounds of our meaning of “reverse” and “opposite”.

“The Spectre” could be the Record Company and “The Rector” the band, “locking their doors” against its mercenary advances. Continuing in a downbeat vein, Smith speaks as The Rector; “I have saved a thousand souls/They cannot even save their own”.

Why not save yours for The Fall?

TOTALLY WIRED: The Fall secure a wide, lopeing sound; loose-limbed prole-rock chiselled out of the residue of the last six years’ music. The bass anchors the whole thing to the ground; like an iron bar up your back, it is cold and unyielding. Here the interplay between the instruments is particularly well-crafted, light as shed on new corners, revealing angles of depth and inquiry.

Smith’s song defines the sludge-grey Northern landscape and assaults its work/pub/TV consciousness with a series of angry metaphors, but still manages to keep the issue inside his own self-contained “reality”. Paradoxically, Smith’s arrogance alienates him from the working class mainstream. Like an unjust exile, he putdowns the blinkered life cycles of his own rank. The ungrateful peasant bites back!

TWO STEPS BACK: Mark Smith on as a stand-up comic slagging the audience in some dingy Northern club, while his backing group fill in his caustic monologue with a monochrome soundtrack, full of prickly shapes and raw energy. The Fall’s “up country” background becomes a fixture; its unemployment and deprivation is recounted in a tragi-comedy fashion instilled with the customary quasi-mystical leanings.

Smith transcends the banal cliches inherent in this type of rap and outlines the nerve-numbing boredom of factory life; youth on a conveyor belt to nowhere. Phrases jump out at the listener like ravenous lice; Smith practically sums up the whole situation when he intones “Re-habs for no-hopes/Pre-fabs for jobless dopes”, and later sticks in the comedy line “Free festivals are like cinemas with no films”.

The spaces are filled out by squealing fretboard torture and voluble piano. Sections of “Two Steps Back” prophesise the regression of the music scene and throw bricks at its attendant fallacies. Two steps back? The Fall fall forward.

ROWCHE RUMBLE: From out of the speakers crash the drums, amphetamine pulsebeats that propel the band onto new heights of boisterous cynicism. By this stage in their career, the Fall had shed some surplus weight and developed a more flexible spine, infused with a healthy dose of irreverent pop. “Rowche” is pop mis-spelled and this is the Fall’s vision of the new intelligentsia.

They pick their way through the rubble of incendiary-shocked post-punk, throwing over their shoulder the odd gem. And this track is odd in all the right places. Smith’s breathless tirade gets to grips with drug abuse. This subject of disintegration of the soul and flesh is a recurring one in Fall songs.

“Physician heal thyself/Why don’t you kill yourself?” The overall result is like a relentless factory machine, melodic where others would be leaden. A mesmerising swirl of textures enhanced by sulphate electric piano. A classic and invigorating slab of, yes, rock ‘n’ roll.

THE DICE MAN: Some of the Fall’s most acute and memorable lyrics can be found here against a backcloth of tinny underdog guitar and skittery drums. The song draws inspiration from the best-selling novel of the same title, written by American psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart. In the book, Rhinehart spices up his mediocre life by making decisions ranging from trivial to crucial all on the throw of a dice, much in the same way as the Fall play Russian Roulette with the conservative norms of the listener.

“Is this a branch of the tree of showbusiness?” asks Mark Smith, and later wonders if “all these musicians have a social conscience”. The words conjure up vivid imagery as the instruments come together in a collision of fractured noise. New options for old. Roll That Dice, Man.

PROLE ART THREAT: A frantic segment; oblique, jagged sound that nods to ’77 punk power. Smith galvanises the listener into an awareness of kitsch with its accent on the “pink press threat”. Smith uses the word “prole” to define the archetypal working class citizen and presents the latter’s culture as an espionage fantasy interwoven with social comment.

Buried under the layers of poison there is a send-up somewhere. “The Clan has got away with 108 years of sheer brilliance — up till now”. Up till the Fall, perhaps? The over-response to the band from certain factions receive the Mark Smith treatment. His prole-drone discourses brim over with all the sinew and vividness of drama.

Smith skilfully uses his bizarre tall stories to chip away at the idiosyncratic surface of everyday existence, and in turn creates a mythology all of his own; a semi-trash comic book environment, worlds removed from the crowd-pleasing deejay fodder that passes for so much of modern (rock) music.