Brass Trax

It’s hard to like the Fall, but it’s easy to love them. The first thing that you need to know about the band is that you are not going to understand half of its songs. Even when bandleader Mark E. Smith’s lyrics are crystal clear, they are riddled with in-jokes and asides, jibes at his band mates and excoriations of British public figures from twenty years ago.

The second thing that you need to know is that it’s Mark E. Smith’s show. In the oft-quoted words of dearly departed BBC DJ John Peel, the Fall are “always different, always the same.” Despite a roster of more than 40 former members and despite the fact that Smith, the band’s only constant, doesn’t play any instruments, a Fall song is a Fall song, no matter the era, no matter who was fired that week.

Nonetheless, people love the Fall. Rabidly. There is something in Smith’s denunciations and declaration—or perhaps in the way he ends every line with the syllable “uh”—that drives people to devotion. The band’s music, an aural embodiment of anxiety, bores its way into brains and makes converts. Without the Fall, we wouldn’t have Pavement. We wouldn’t have LCD Soundsystem. Independent music on both sides of the Atlantic would have a lot less piss and vinegar.

It’s not quite true that the world is divided into people who hate the Fall and people whose devotion to the band verges on the religious. It’s an axiom that Fall fans repeat to each other, an article of faith. I have met enough people who kind-of-sort-of like the Fall to realize that this is one of the many walls that Fall fans throw up against the world.

The Fall first performed in May of 1977. The band consisted of Smith, guitarist Martin Bramah, bassist Tony Friel, and a drummer known variously as “Steve” or “Dave,” who was the first Fall member to get the boot. Many would soon follow. In fact, according to Guardian scribe Dave Simpson, who tracked down all of the band’s former members, the Fall had gone through 11 members by 1981 alone.

In many ways, the Fall is more like a soap opera or a professional sports team. (Smith, a soccer fan, has compared his frequent and sometimes violent line-up changes to a coach sacking his lagging center-forward.) If you follow the band long enough, you will see a show or hear a recording that will make you feel like the Fall won the rock championship. But then, your favorite player will get traded to Kansas City, you’ll endure years of ranking third in the division, and you’ll see your fellow fans dwindle in number, until the brilliance returns once more. The Fall is very rarely mediocre. It is often terrible. But, given the chance, many people wouldn’t listen to anything else.

Despite the nearly constantly changing line-ups, there are four major Fall eras. The first, roughly between Dragnet (1979), the second album, and Perverted by Language (1983) bore the indelible imprint of guitarist Marc Riley. It’s the angular, post-punk incarnation of the band that turned out near-hits like “Totally Wired” and “Fiery Jack.”

Listen to “Totally Wired”
Listen to “Fiery Jack”

If any record typifies this period, it’s the EP Slates (1981). Between the epic “An Older Lover, Etc.” (a pointed taunt at the Fall’s manager (and Smith’s girlfriend) Kay Carroll, who presumably told “old stories of teenage sex from the early sixties”) and the relatively even-keeled “Leave the Capitol,” a rant about London, “a Roman shell,” the record showcased the bizarre range of the band in a relatively tidy space. Never mind the kazoos.

Listen to “An Older Lover, Etc.”
Listen to “Leave the Capitol”

The second era was dominated by Mark E. Smith’s first wife, Brix, an American whom he married in 1983 and who made the band go pop. Although Brix performed on Perverted by Language, her influence was not fully evident until This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985), one of the Fall’s poppiest (and most popular) outings. If you aren’t sure how to become a Fall fan, start with that album. It’s accessible, but it retains the kernel of pop experimentalism that kept the Fall weird during this period. It’s the Daydream Nation of the band’s oeuvre.

After Mark E. Smith divorced Brix amid acrimony (according to Dave Simpson, members of the band were forbidden from using her name), the Fall released Extricate (1990), one of its strongest and most beguiling outings. It’s a break-up record that belongs on the shelf next to Blood on the Tracks. Highlights included a cover of “Black Monk Theme” that dripped with fury, “Sing! Harpy” and “Chicago, Now!,” both of which explicitly referenced Brix. The album saw the return of guitarist Martin Bramah and launched a period of wrecked and uneven, if sporadically danceable, albums that culminated in 1998 when Smith was arrested in the United States for beating up his band.

Listen to “Sing! Harpy”
Listen to “Chicago, Now!”

Then came the young guard. The period that began with Are You Are Missing Winner (2001) and the addition of punky guitarist Ben Pritchard marked the Fall’s first landmark era of the 20th century. It lasted through Fall Heads Roll (2005). These albums returned the Fall to brass tacks: rockabilly, Can, and what Mark E. Smith calls “the three Rs”: repetition, repetition, repetition. The latest record, Imperial Wax Solvent (2008) shows a lot of promise. It restored faith to Fall fans disappointed by 2007’s Reformation Post TLC, and it might mark a new moment in the band’s ever-evolving career.

Ultimately, it’s no surprise that record collectors love the Fall. It’s fronted by a man who cannot play music himself, but who needs it to get by. A man who stacks up influences, from Link Wray to Prince Far I, and claims to have “a good ear for music.” A man who discards musicians he no longer finds compelling, who both follows and disdains musical trends, whose persona depends on his continued disdain for others. If Mark E. Smith hadn’t cursed the “self-copulation of your record collection,” you’d think he was a record collector himself.

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