Trust In God But Tie Up Your Camus

The Fall, as you surely all know, are one of the most significant artistic endeavours of the past 50 years. Here's a review of a good gig. The Fall will never make the perfect LP or play the life-changing concert, and that's why they are great, they keep hacking away at their chosen paths, entangled and untrodden. I saw them in Oxford a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit of a mess. I saw them two nights ago in Leamington Spa Assembly Halls (amazing venue, Jesus the O2 Academies up and down the land look so drab by comparison) and it was just glorious. I will always prefer an act that alternately misfire and rockets, to one that smoothly zips slongs. This review was hard to write, as it was diofficult to keep a response to 30 years of The Fall out of it, and it's not one for the annals, but I do like the opening sentence.

THE FALL, Zodiac, 4/07

For over thirty years now The Fall has existed as a belligerently independent fiefdom jostling between the perennially warring kingdoms of Prog and Punk, with Mark E Smith as its twisted jester-prince. A new year brings a new tour and, not uncommonly, a new band, so it’s no shock to discover that Smith’s third wife, keyboard twitcher Elini, is the only person onstage surviving since The Fall’s last Oxford visit, fewer than 18 months ago. Perhaps more surprising is that the new lads are primarily American alt musos and not the sort of “unlearned “ musicians from which Smith has traditionally built his army: guitarist Tim Presley at times indulges in the sort of fiery, Sonic Youth rocking that would have earned earlier band members a severe dressing down. Probably between verses.

Odd frills excepted, however, this is still clearly The Fall as we know them, sludgily pummelling garage guitars, krautische Korg synth buzzes and relentless glam rockabilly drum patterns topped off by an impenetrable, yet oddly mesmerising drawl. Smith’s voice, a long way from his youthful yelp, is a worn piece of shoe leather, cracked and ugly, yet far more malleable than many fresher alternatives. A track like “My Door”, far more satisfying live than on the recent Reformation Post T. L. C. album, reveals just how subtly expressive Smith’s voice can be, once you’ve tuned into the cosmically unmelodic frequency on which he works. Mark may have sadly lost the psychedelic narrative impulse of yore, but it’s been replaced by a quiet vocal intensity.

The Fall is a notoriously uneven band, and one worries that Smith can no longer tell a good gig or a decent album from a bad one, so well drilled are the members into the group’s sound (despite Smith’s allegations that he only recruits non-Fall fans, recent line-ups have clearly done their homework). Ignoring twin basses and some American accents this gig still sounds exactly like The Fall, and the worry lingers that there’s nothing new left to do with the format. Then again “sounds exactly like The Fall” is one of the greatest superlatives in our dogeared critical lexicon, so who’s to complain? And when the band come on for an unsuspected second encore, with house lights up and half the audience already out the door, fuzzily reinterpreting recent favourite “Blindness”, doubts about the continued relevance of The Fall evaporate. And, hey, didn’t Mark audibly thank the audience at one point? Some things do change, after all…