The Fall In Fives

  In 2020, I had a go at the daunting task of pinning down the exact number of Fall albums. At the time, I came up with the magic number of 158 .  I need to revise that now, partly because a couple more live LPs have subsequently been released; plus there's one compilation I didn't include first time round. The two live albums are  Out Ferroviarios (recorded at the OUT.FEST Festival in Portugal, 12 October 2013) and  Rock Against Racism Xmas Party (recorded at Stretford in December 1977).  [I'm doing a new post rather than amending the old one because WordPress - where I did the original - is now horrifically un-user-friendly.] Out Ferroviarios is a straight repress of a  bootleg ; you can hear the (middling quality) recording here . The front cover of the new release features the same cover as the bootleg; I don't know if it still has the same chronologically inappropriate photo from 1978 on the back.  Rock Against Racism Xmas Party is simply a vinyl version of Li

  I did a series of posts a while back about The Fall's album covers and have finally got around to considering the singles. I haven't attempted to rank all of them, just pick my favourite dozen - and I say 'favourite' advisedly, as I have no experience or expertise in art or graphics or anything like that! With the albums, most of my  top ten came from the early part of the group's career (only two were post-Brix's first stint). This is not, of course, a reflection of my taste as far as The Fall's music is concerned - as anyone who's read any of my stuff will know - but perhaps has more to do with the fact that cover art became arguably less important in the CD age. Whatever the reason, it's a pattern that repeats itself here... 12 Slippy Floor (2009) Slips (ahem) into the top dozen not because of any exceptional aesthetic merit, but due to the beautifully obvious simplicity of using a photo of an ice hockey team (Blackburn Junior Hawks Under 16s