The Rise And Fall Of The Fall

Val was up for the weekend and as a special 'treat' we'd got her a ticket to see The Fall who were playing at The Galtymore Club in Cricklewood. The Galtymore is an old style chicken-in-a-basket Irish club that has played host to Daniel O'Donnell in the past and forthcoming attractions include Finbarr & The Glensiders and Declan Nerney. As such is was a perfect venue for the fractious Fall. Things got off to a bad start as I was nominated to drive and got onto the wrond dual carriageway by mistake. We then spent several hours driving through most of the back streets of Harlesden before finally coming to rest on Cricklewood 'The Lights are always bright on...' Broadway. We were supposed to meet up with Matthew Wigglesworth, another old friend of Billie's, and long term Fall fan, but because we were so late we went straight to the Galty and caught The Snarls, a snotty bunch of Mancs, who tried a bit too hard to be aggressively disinterested. More of a Cliff Richard lip curl than a snarl...

Next up was John Cooper Clark, who I thought I may have seen a long time ago, but maybe not, he is similar vintage to The Fall, and was very very funny, best stand up since Bill Bailey. Here's a hiaku he did:
TO-CON-VEY ONE'S MOOD
IN SEV-EN-TEEN SYLL-ABLE-S
IS VE-RY DIF-FIC

Stick thin, and dressed in black with wispy backcombed hair he looked exactly the same as he did 30 years ago, close up he looked a little more haggered, not bad for an ex-Heroin addict of 57 though.

The last time I saw The Fall was back in 1981 at the Milky Way club in Amsterdam. A bunch of us just happened to be there, and found out they were on. They were at their peak then and had sort of settled into the line-up that would be fairly constant for the next decade - including of course Mark Riley (aka Lard). There have been over 50 members of the band since then, and it was no surprise when Mark E. Smith sacked the last version of The Fall in the middle of an American tour earlier in the year. Amazingly he managed to find some replacements and finished the tour, and it was this Americanised version of the band that took the stage last night. They were actually very tight and disciplined - not The Fall I remember - and were supplemeted by Mark's current Yoko/Linda; Elena Poulou, a cute young Romanian girl on keyboards. Musically it was recognisabley Fallesque, primitive, repeated rockabilly style beats, with totally indecipherable rants from Smith over the top. He used to be audible, but now is just a tuneless slur. I didn't know any of the songs which didn't help, that is apart from a grungy cover of I Can Hear The Grass Grow, but I was troubled by Smith the whole evening. Why was he still doing this, was he enjoying it (didn't look like it) did he still have any faith, any belief in the music (didn't feel like it). I think it's just become what he does, it's a job, a vocation. I guess it's good that some 50 year old piss head can still command this much respect (the place was heaving) but his sour demeanour and his annoying habit of changing the volume and tone settings of the guitar amps, randomly thumping his mike on the keyboard, or kicking the drums, seemed just a childish display of showing who's boss, rather than some kind of controlled sonic experimentation. I've wanted to see The Fall again for ages, and this was as good a setting as I could hope for, but I'll remember more fondly my first sighting of The Fall, a bunch of greasy haired teenagers, dressed in their C&A jumpers who turned up at The Stowaway in Newport back in 1978. Still very much a band, with Smith as the singer rather than dictator, they had already perfected the funny, literate and impassioned, angular outsider racket that MES has been re-hashing ever since, but there was a hint of genius about them then, and sadly there's more of a hint of fraud about them these days.