Fall Monday Playlist #16 - The Wonderful and Frightening World
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 as a 'bonus track' week...
4 1/2 Inch
Simon Spencer and Kier Stewart didn't last long as producers on Levitate. Most of what was recorded with them was wiped, although 'Inch' survived. (The duo later released a version of their own that featured a secretly-recorded piece of MES dialogue.) It may well be that Smith is the only member of The Fall that actually appears on the Levitate version, although Steve Hanley claims that it contains samples of both him and Wolstencroft.
It’s an insanely glorious mess: the sound of several genres being battered relentlessly against a wall until they’re bloodied and semi-conscious then being crushed and crammed forcibly into the mixing desk. The words are angrily garbled, frequently challenging to make out and beyond interpretation: ‘the house is falling in / ecstatic midges / cloud coverage’. It is, the Annotated Fall suggests, ‘a good example of MES letting the language take over… a pile of verbal imagery that somehow achieves sublimity without being mediated through the discipline of poetry’.
Black Roof
'Dudes' Tim Presley and Rob Barbato performed all the music on this piece of bizarre mayhem. It flings together about twelve unfinished ideas into barely 100 seconds, but somehow, inexplicably, it works. In places, Smith’s vocals on ‘Black Roof’ are reminiscent of ‘They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!’, a 1966 novelty hit for Napoleon XIV, pseudonym of American song-writer and producer Jerrold Samuels. Originally entitled ‘Black Door’, it retained that title on some digital versions. It was, sadly, never played live.
Sleep Debt Snatches
One of the b-sides on the 12" of 'There's A Ghost In My House'. After a sprightly opening, it evolves into a sludgy, industrial march with an assortment of clicking, tapping, scraping and other random background noises.
Kinder Of Spine
Another track featuring Tim Presley, ‘Kinder’ is a crazed piece of 60s-psych-art-garage-punk with a lurching, menacing rhythm. It may have been inspired by The Monocles’ disturbing 1966 single ‘The Spider and the Fly’. (There's an interesting outtake of the track here.)
Haf Found Bormann
Another 'Ghost' b-side, it was one of the songs that featured in the Hey! Luciani play. Fractured, ghostly and dubby; surprisingly, it stayed in the setlist for much of 1987, racking up 39 appearances.
Ibis-Afro Man
Loosely based around Iggy Pop’s racially dubious ‘African Man’, ‘Ibis’ is arguably the most deliberately difficult moment in the whole back catalogue. It’s a close relation of ‘Hurricane Edward’ (see below) in that it sounds like several unfinished versions of the same track edited together by chopping the tapes up with blunt scissors and binding them with Sellotape. There’s something both ridiculous and exhilarating about the way the different versions of its thumping, primal stomp barge into each other from either side of the stereo. The ‘chattering monkey’ section is tough territory though, no matter how committed you are. Stewart Lee commented that the track was ‘evidently recorded in a tin filled with seagulls’; City Life magazine called it ‘the worst song in The Fall’s 25-year old career’. Live versions were generally rather more coherent.
Hurricane Edward
An abrasive cacophony that, like '4 1/2 Inch', sounds like the rough ideas for several different songs tossed into a blender: spoken word segments (the opening lines are spoken by studio engineer Sebastian Lewsley), live snippets, Sonic Youth style guitar torturing, electronic squiggles, cut-up drum machine samples and fuzzy drone noise. In this case, live versions were no less messy than the album take.
Midwatch 1953
Inspired by Smith's appearance alongside Steve Evets in Mark Aerial Waller’s short film, it's five and a half minutes of warped, disorientating strangeness. Nothing fits; nothing is in tune or time; there is no sense of it being within a million miles of what most people would recognise as a proper song; it’s overly long and self-indulgent. Which is exactly what some Fall fans (including this one) love about it, although it attracts derision from many others.
Bug Day
Comprised of a gently undulating bass line and various atonal guitar clippings over which Smith rambles about insects (‘green moths shivered / cockroaches mouldered in the ground’). Its odd, lethargic meandering is rather appealing, even though Steve Hanley dismissed it as ‘a bit of a filler’.
Couples vs. Jobless Mid 30s
Arguably the most 'prog' of all Fall songs, 'Couples' is a sprawling mixture of sludge-rock, wildly oscillating synths, semi-operatic vocals and deranged cackling. Towards its conclusion, the song resolves into a taut, thunderous coda; the way that the group suddenly navigate themselves out of the dense, swampy chaos of the first six minutes into a focused gallop towards the song’s conclusion is utterly thrilling.
I Am Damo Suzuki
I imagine that many people, like me, on first playing this song checked to see whether their record player was working correctly, as there were apparently two different songs playing simultaneously. It was hard to believe that what you were hearing was real or intentional; it challenged virtually everything you’d ever assumed about rhythm or melody. John Leckie’s account:
"We did two takes and Mark liked the band on one tape but he liked his vocal better on the other. Now, on a computer you’d be able to edit that and stretch it to make it all work, so I said, “well, all we can can do is to take the vocal off here and put it on to a piece of tape”. The two takes had different arrangements, like the verse and chorus came in at different times, so the whole thing gives the impression of being completely random, but the reason being that the first take was eight bars of verse, four bars of chorus, eight bars of verse and the second take is twelve bars of verse, six bars of chorus, a different arrangement. Also Mark’s standing next to Karl, so the drums are coming through the vocal mix and every time the drums stop on the first take you can hear these ambient drums going on from the vocal mix on the second take and I thought it was fantastic and so did everyone else, but a totally unconventional way of doing it."
As always, many thanks to all of you who continue to support my Fall writing through your likes, comments, retweets and shares. Several of you have asked recently about when the book version of You Must Get Them All will be published. Unfortunately, the challenges brought about by the pandemic have slowed things down and it won't now be published before Christmas. It will be with you at some point in the new year, however. We'll get there...
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