It’s not every band that gets their own dedicated thread on Bluemoon but there are a select few. Rush probably. Radiohead have several. And then there’s the Manchester bands. Not Simply Red, they are from Salford, or Trafford or somewhere. But Doves, Oasis, The Smiths. And of course the Fall. You don’t get much more Manchester than the Fall.
Noticed on the tunes thread there is quite a big fanbase on here. I've been exploring them for weeks now and find a new gem most days but there is just so much to get through so thought I'd ask BM to contribute their best and/or little gems. I'll kick us off with a couple.....
forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk
To be fair my engagement with that thread sort of mirrored my real life engagement with the band itself. An avid early fan but it became hard to keep up.
Mark E Smith, the irascible and dictatorial leader of the Fall is one of the many reported to be at the Sex Pistols infamous Free Trade Hall gig. This is probably true unlike many of the claims and assertions made in his highly entertaining but largely scurrilous autobiography Renegade.
I wasn’t at the Sex Pistols gig. I was around 13 so a reasonable excuse. It’s by chance that I first got to see the Fall at all, living as I was a fairly sheltered life in foster care but becoming gradually reacquainted with my father who lived shall we say an alternative type of life. So it was on one of our weekends I found myself taking in an afternoon at the Deeply Vale free festival and catching the Fall, as yet with no releases and Durutti Column. If my piecing together of the history is correct they were introduced on the day by Tony Wilson.
en.wikipedia.org
The Fall thrilled me with their primal sound. In spirit I’d have liked to have been a punk but I didn’t really have the chops for that and anyway history seems to tell us it was over almost as soon as it started. And double anyway the Pistols and the Clash and all the rest were already “owned”. (a slight disclaimer here in that the timings of any bands mentioned and their contemporaries can probably be taken with the same pinch of salt as the aforementioned Renegade- I’m not paying attention to detail). The Fall, barely discovered felt in some strange way to be mine. At a time I was trying to “find myself” and anything that I could identify with I felt like I was part of a pretty exclusive club.
So it was that I saw them live when I could at such glamorous venues as Bowdon Club near Altrincham, a suburb more synonymous with Premier League footballers but at the time I was at school in hale Barns so it was an easy one to get to. And needless to say I was an avid buyer of their records on the day of release probably up to and including the seminal Hex Induction Hour and possibly beyond, I can’t really remember.
It's those early release that stay with me most though, the
Bingo Masters Break Out EP, It’s The New Thing, both their brilliant b-sides and then the debut album Live at The Witch Trials. I don’t think this early incarnation could make any claims about the mastery of their instruments but they knew how to make an appropriate noise to accompany Mark E Smiths barbed, witty and cynical observations.
The LP had the following track listing
Frightened
Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow
Rebellious Jukebox
No Xmas for John Quays
Mother-Sister
Industrial Estate
Underground Medicin
Two Steps Back
Live at the Witch Trials
Futures and Pasts
Music Scene
(The vinyl version I have is an American copy that has Various Times instead of Industrial Estate)
For many of you I suspect that will be more than enough but the expanded version on Spotify also includes those early singles (and a host of live and BBC session versions of various songs) should your appetite not be sated.
I didn’t remain an avid follower of the Fall, I don’t know why particularly and when the best of thread was posted I made a bit of a commitment to catch up with all their sub sequent releases. I still haven’t done that but I’ll get round to it I’m sure.
For a while I had a correspondence with original member Marc Riley who indulged this fan boy and then recently through the course of work I had reason to call another from that first line up and business out of the way I asked if they were who I thought they were. Having confirmed that we had a nice nostalgic conversation.
The Fall are no more, Mark E Smith died in 2018 with the Fall having released around 30 albums and numerous live ones through multiple line up changes. No doubt there are some classics among them, probably some even better than Witch Trials but I doubt whether I would hold any of them in the same affection.
It’s not deliberate but following the Housemartins and the Strokes it feels like we are making some slightly logical steps backwards through time. You thought the Strokes were lo fi though….
