The Fall In Fives

  There are already a multitude of articles describing what a terrible year 2020 has been (who would have thought any year could have blown 2016 out the water for awfulness?) so I'm not going to add to the list of miserable reflections. Instead, I'm going to stick with what I know, which is writing about The Fall. As we head into a hopefully much-improved year, here are ten tracks that make some sort of reference to newness (a couple of them, I must confess, simply contain the word 'new' in the lyrics). Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist It's The New Thing The obvious place to start: released as a single in November 1978 (with the excellent ' Various Times ' on the b-side), 'New Thing' was the first of Smith's frequent cynical swipes at the shallowness of the music business ('phoney advertising quotes that make you buy some'). The following year, MES used some of Ian Birch's  Melody Maker review of the single ('it's little mor...

  Someone on one of the Fall Facebook groups recently posted a link to a website that purported to be a complete list of the group's covers. Safe to say, the page was far from complete or accurate. I'm not aware that there currently is a complete and accurate list, so I thought that it was my civic duty to provide one! I have not included any of the 'semi-covers' or 'heavy borrows' such as 'Crop-Dust' or 'Athlete Cured'. I wrote about these tracks on You Must Get Them All ( 1984-88 , 1988-97 and 1999-2017 ) and on one of the Monday playlists (there'll be a part 2 and 3 at some point - links will be updated on the Fi5 main page when they appear). These are 'straight' covers, i.e. those that were credited to other writers. This would undoubtedly have been a little easier to read in table form, but unfortunately that's a bit beyond my IT capabilities. However, you can download my spreadsheet here should you be so inclined. Apart ...

  Christmas is nearly upon us, so here's the inevitable festive collection... Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist Xmas With Simon B-side of 'High Tension Line' and the only Fall track to begin with an 'X'. Simon Rogers received a writing credit for the song, despite having left the group three years earlier (he claimed he didn't even remember the song). One can’t help but wonder what committed Christians make of the notion that the messiah’s birth surrounded by animals led to ‘no set amount to the number of diseases’ or his death at 33 being ‘as good a time as any’. Ludd Gang The b-side to 'The Man Whose Head Expanded' saw MES express a surprising level of aggression at Shakin' Stevens, of all people: 'I hate the guts of Shakin' Stevens for what he has done - the massacre of "Blue Christmas"'. This was pretty hypocritical, given Smith's own tuneless mangling of the Elvis standard. Hark The Herald Angels Sing Has already appea...

 Over the last three years, I have churned out a lot  of words about The Fall. The original Fi5 blog came in at around 110,000 words; You Must Get The All  was almost twice as long; then there's been various playlist posts, I Prefer The Peel Session... , That's Not The Fall , etc. (If you haven't seen it already, I've put together a ' main page ' to pull all these links together.) Recently, I've taken a slightly less text-heavy avenue on Twitter and a couple of the Facebook Fall groups, compiling some montages of interesting pictures of the group in a chronological fashion. They've proved to be quite popular, so I thought it might be nice to collect them together. A couple of things before I start. I'm no graphic designer, and I don't possess any fancy photo-editing software; all of these montages were assembled using nothing more sophisticated than MS Paint. Consequently, don't expect any slick or aesthetically subtle designs! The old-schoo...

  'I’ve never looked at The Fall as a Northern group', MES declared in a  2015 interview . This was, of course, Smith fulfilling his role as curmudgeonly, contrarian interviewee; there is perhaps no other group that was more definitively Northern than The Fall, even when they were staffed by Californian 'dudes' and a Greek keyboard player. This is a selection of ten songs that are rooted, one way or another, in The Fall's Northerness ... Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist Hit The North I couldn't really start anywhere else, could I? The song's origins lie in a dislike of the South as much as a love of the North: the genesis of the lyric was Smith’s distain for Norwich – complaining on the way back from a gig there that he couldn’t wait until they 'hit the north'. The promotional video features some funky dancing (and even funkier shirt) from MES, and bemused but enthusiastic participation from the patrons of a Blackpool working men’s club. This versi...

You Must Get Them All: The Fall On Record Out now on Route publishing:  http://www.route-online.com/all-books/you-must-get-them-all.html You Must Get Them All  is the first book to capture the full, incredible story of The Fall, from  Live At The Electric Circus  to  New Facts Emerge . It covers every single release – album, EP, single, compilation, live album – every line-up change, every setback and every triumph. It is a comprehensive chronology of the life and times of Britain’s most remarkable group, based on contemporary accounts, the recollections of Fall members and the experiences of the Fall community – the gig-goers, the record-buyers, the reviewers, the forum contributors, the lyrical analysts and the factual obsessives. It’s a book that challenges the clichés, lazy assumptions and common misconceptions about The Fall. But above all else, it celebrates the astonishing and significant body of work that the group created over their 40 odd years of exis...

  And so, another Monday rolls around... The Fall's cover versions are a bit of a mixed bag, but there are certainly plenty of them, so it felt like one set wasn't enough. Spotify Playlist YouTube Playlist Kimble A loose cover of a Lee Perry tune, released in 1968 under the name The Creators . The Fall's version first appeared as part of their 1992 Peel session, but it wasn't played live until 1997, when it got two rather undistinguished runouts.  War A cover version of a Henry Cow / Slapp Happy song that was constructed from Smith’s memory because the nobody could find the original at the time.  As a result, it bears little resemblance to the original. Distinctly reminiscent of Martha and the Muffins’ ' Echo Beach ' in places.  The Legend of Xanadu This cover of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich’s 1968 number one was The Fall’s contribution to the 1992 NME 40th anniversary charity album, Ruby Trax . The group found themselves nestled between the unlikely ...