The Fall In Fives

  MES was a musical magpie, and The Fall's back catalogue is littered with tracks that are indebted (sometimes rather heavily) to the songs of other artists. I wrote three posts on this subject for the You Must Get Them All blog: Part 1 (1984-88) Part 2 (1988-97) Part 3 (1999-2017) This playlist features ten of the more notable examples: Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist Gut of the Quantifier The muscular riff bears a striking similarity to ' The Changeling ', the opening track on The Doors' 1970 album, L.A. Woman . In turn, Jim Morrison and co. may well have been inspired by Jr. Walker & The All-Stars' 1965 single ' Shotgun '.  Crop-Dust The strongest feature of 2001's patchy and difficult Are You Are Missing Winner , 'Crop-Dust's churning riff is lifted virtually wholesale from The Trogg’s ‘ I Just Sing ’, a track from their 1966 debut album From Nowhere . The snake-charming lead guitar fuzz is all The Fall's own, however. Athlete Cured...

  Apart from the odd exception , cover versions didn't play much of a part in The Fall's repertoire in the first decade of their career. This changed in the mid-80s, when 'Rollin' Dany' (a Gene Vincent  song) was released as part of a double A-side and 'Mr Pharmacist' appeared on Bend Sinister . Thereafter, the 'obligatory cover version' gradually became a familiar sight on Fall albums, all but a very few containing at least one. Of course, there were also several Fall tracks that weren't quite  covers, but certainly leaned quite heavily on other artists' songs, but we'll get to them in subsequent posts... Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist Black Monk Theme Part 1 Monks were an unhinged 60s garage rock band who had previously gone under the unlikely moniker of The Torquays. ‘Theme’ is a cover of ‘ I Hate You ’, a song from their 1966 album Black Monk Time . Good as the Extricate  version is, it's surpassed by the Peel session take, w...

  The title of The Fall's 1984 album , the first of a trio they recorded with producer John Leckie , has been used frequently over the last 36 years as a form of shorthand for the unique space that the group occupy in musical history. The BBC, for example, used it as the title for a 2005 documentary . To be honest, it has become a bit ubiquitous, and some articles and books tend to overuse the phrase. Nevertheless, it does capture the strange 'otherness' of the group well. I have used it here to celebrate The Fall's most peculiar and  sui generis moments; those tracks that the uninitiated or only casually acquainted might find a bit of a challenge; those songs that cause our friends and loved ones to furrow their brow and say 'and you actually enjoy this?' Confession time: it's most undisciplined of me, but when I came to write this up, I realised that I'd actually selected 11 songs rather than 10, but couldn't bear to drop any of them. Think of it...

  The picture above captures one of MES's most notable appearances on the small screen ('Tottenham Hotspur postponed; West Ham United one H'). This playlist, however, generally concentrates on Fall songs that took TV and film as their lyrical inspiration. The Twilight Zone  was one of Smith's favourite shows (covered in playlist #3 ), but many other TV shows and films found their way into his lyrics. Some - 'A Lot Of Wind', for example - have appeared in previous lists (I'm trying to only use songs once) but there are still plenty that remain... Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist Touch Sensitive Unlike the rest of the playlist, 'Touch Sensitive' is here not because it's about  TV, but because it appeared on  TV. Other songs that made regular TV appearances include 'Sparta' (used on BBC's Final Score , hence MES's appearance above) and 'Jawbone' (which Frank Skinner used as the theme tune for his 90s chat show). In addition...

(When you're writing a piece that's actually about The Fall, it's pretty easy to find a suitable picture with which to head it; a bit trickier with a post that's deliberately about 'not The Fall'. The picture below is the first image result I got on Google for 'That's Not The Fall'.) Welcome to the second instalment of this random little side project in which I root around in Spotify searching for songs with the same title as Fall tracks. It's a frivolous undertaking, no doubt, but I found the first one a rewarding experience, and it received quite a bit of positive feedback. In most places, at least: on one site where I post my writing from time to time, I occasionally get a 'you have too much time on your hands' reaction. This always puzzles me a little, as this type of comment is never directed at posts along the lines of 'I binge-watched the box set of xxx last weekend'; it's as if sitting inert on the sofa watching TV is...

  Many artists have one or two songs dotted about in their back catalogue that, despite their quality, never made it onto a 'proper' studio album; ' Love Will Tear Us Apart ' is a notable example. The Fall's back catalogue is littered with such moments. It was not uncommon for some of their best material to be relegated to b-side status whilst apparently inferior songs were bafflingly promoted to full album status. This is a round-up of the best (or at least the most interesting) examples... Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist New Puritan The Fall's third Peel session , recorded and broadcast in September 1980 represented a remarkable paradigm shift in the group's sound; 'New Puritan' was its astonishing highlight. An odd, scratchy lo-fi version of the song had appeared on Totale's Turns four months earlier, but here it was transformed into a lacerating diatribe, a ‘righteous maelstrom’. Not only did it never appear on a studio album, The Fall nev...