Oh! The Fall John Peel Sessions box set! OH! you guys.

Speaking of which, does anyone have a high quality live gig from the 84/85 era they can share?

yeah, but only one, WOMAD from June 85. I'll msg you, it's in flac.

and o yes Gut Of The Quantifier on proper LP version is all time top ten for me.

"Words of Expectation" my favorite thing in the box.

thirded re Gut.

L.A. - Loving the tannoy intro! YES! THIS PLAYING! Already this session is better than 8. Dual guitars with purpose and bass you can chew on. And Brix having some kind of Krautgasm. And some lovely atonal shimmer. This is propulsive AND building. When all the guitars start playing the same thing and MES starts repeating 'L' and 'A' it gets intense. Now where? I'm eager to find out. Guitars go up the scale as Brix intones! It's all taut and chaotic at once. Then MES comes back in as Brix says "This is MY happening!" and it's all confluence of excellent things. Thumbs up. Oh and there's time for another go-round! With a FADE-OUT! Ladies and gentlemen, TECHNOLOGY.

The Man Whose Head Expanded - Haha, this is a weird interpretation of the keyboard riff. And now - HEAVY! Much heavier than the original. This one always had fine lyrics and they're delivered well. Breaks down into a sort of langorous pop midsection. If this breaks back to the original motif then it'll seem a bit formulaic. Well, it does, but there's a mental tannoy "Over! Over! Over!" in the background so it's forgiven, plus the guitars are being ruinous. Oscillating synths in the background are the bomb, and the song appears to be speeding roughly to a conclusion with everything going haywire. Overall, pretty excellent.

What You Need - This one's clearly the 'gritty' one of the set. Sheets of synth punctuate an industrial thud of nagging guitar and deep drums. Then a low and fiery bassline enters. This is mesmerising and has lost me in a GOOD way. The drum becomes a pulse, then a hi-hat, as guitars chug, and it's all very psychedelic. I don't know what the alchemy is this time, and I like that fact. I think the bass is getting steadily louder but this may be a mirage. Menacing and YES THE DRUM INTRO! With the tribal chanting and the handclaps! And MES lowing beneath. Brilliant, linear slice of Fall madness.

Faust Banana - I'm a big fan of DKTR. Faustus so this ought to deliver. And a fade-IN this time! Multiplicity of voices. The chorus was always the star in this song and it's done well. Hmm, maybe this song isn't as awesome as I remember. It's no Gross Chapel or Riddler. Or maybe the recorded version, woodblocks and all, is better. (Well, it is.) But this isn't bad at all! It's more drawling, more shambling. Oh wait, it DOES have a woodblock! Haha! Nice. And it's using it to slowly drag us into the quicksand. Marvellous. This has actually become really, really good in the last two minutes. Maybe the two versions are equivalent. Maybe this one's pulling ahead! Shit, this is a good final movement. The woodblock here might be even better-deployed! Awesome.

written last night while internet was down. gut of the quantifier is much better served by LP version obv

Next Session contains the single TRACK I've most been looking forward to, namely Gross Chapel - British Grenadiers. Words can't express my love for that song, and I am crackling with anticipation. It's getting put off until I'm fully psyched.

Having spent a long time only having heard the LP version of 2x4, that session version gets me every time - the way it blows through the wall at the end and keeps on going. Kind of a water mark as well, when they really started getting some snap, crackle and pop - it really f'ing moves. 'There's a new fiend on the loose, it's a fear of the obtuse' - damn straight.

Love Words of Expectation obviously, it really lopes along, amazing bass and guitar playing. Also thoroughly recommend the live version on the re-issued Room to Live. I quite like CREEP as well, prefer it to the single possibly, a little explosive savage music box.

Persevere with Spoilt Victorian Child, jaggedy pop, with those sudden moments of dirge-like delerium, dropping out, brilliant vocals.

What You Need (especially) and Faust Banana just incredible - one sparse, taut, every varying repetition w' brilliant commandments over the top, the other deranged Mittel Europ renaissance carnival stomp - 'sparse gartens in vinter' and 'fruits exotic' indeed.

Gross Chapel... (crosses self)

Hahaha, now I'm truly psyched! Well, more or less. Yeah, I didn't quite realise where Faust Banana was going, but the end put the whole thing in context - it may WELL be better than the eventual version. Really REALLY wish there'd been a Peel Session of Riddler! but you can't have it all.

2x4 did get better towards the end, yeah. I think it got simultaneously more tuneful and more intense. Just as I was having my doubts it emerged as a super li'l pop song.

That version of "Man Whose Head Expanded" is colossal. They almost never looked back in Peel sessions but that was a great call, and as much as I love the studio version I pull up the Peel take when I want to hear it. You'll find a few other re-visitations towards the end of the box that are equally wonderful.

Couple of things - here's the Peel Sessions poll, for added commentary and reference fun.

And also - I was just bumbling around the Fall website:

In 1980 The Fall released Fiery Jack (January), Totales Turns (May),
How I Wrote Elastic Man (July), Totally Wired (September) and
Grotesque (November).

I mean I knew this, but, wow, just... wow.

I have trouble writing a sentence some days. Including today. Dreadfully hungover.

Spoilt Victorian Child is one of my fave Fall songs, pls to relisten.

Been tearing through this box for the last 4-5 days, just moved on to disc 6. Weak start to this one. Really looking forward to seeing acoleuthic continue.

via lj

Hot Aftershave Bop - Awesome little wistful riff to open! And then we plunge into the garage body of the song - a second guitar is doing lovely seagull-slide things in the background. The bass is exploratory and the mix is lush. I really, really like this already. Chord-change! He loves somebody a lot, and the melody has bent sinister. This song is like a cupped handful of mercury sloshing around in a pleasant and slightly poisonous way. MES even screams. His hands shake and we end on an almighty garage rave-up. Super.

R.O.D. - Galloping drums, whispers. Promising. Then - oh shit it's the 1980's!! That keyboard tone! Finally, The Fall have stepped out of the inexplicably ancient. But they've taken their guitarist with them. And now the keyboard betrays a garish organ tone, which is only a good thing. Song uses tension deliciously, pulls back when threatening to explode. This is beautiful. This is MUCH better than the album version. I'd say so far this is one of the 2 or 3 best sessions, actually. But then I always loved Bend Sinister. I always thought that album had the right mix, the right sound, the right songwriting ideas, even if it didn't pull off the album itself as staggeringly as some others. This drones and rocks on like a sad thing in the grips of illness. Guitar begins to sound a *bit* like The Cure. Again, this is not an unwelcome development. And now the lead guitar lapses from notes to chords and it's sweet as. All is ending gauzily, hazily, perfectly...

Gross Chapel - British Grenadiers - OK, this is the one. One of the greatest songs ever written by man. And it's started excellently, stereo panning effects fitted as standard, MES spoken intro backgrounded and menacing. Guitar enters! And it's curter, brighter somehow than the album version. A little more garage. The lead guitar is crazed with the same poetry that informed previous Peel Sessions monsters. MES is quiet. This is a song which demands that he be quiet. He can't overcome this mood his band's instruments are creating. The drums create such forward momentum. This song, while moody and slinky, is really fucking driving too. This is a slightly faster, more vicious version of the hypnotic original, but it loses barely any of that song's qualities while adding a few of its own. Guitars mirror each other, then back to the riff of riffs. Where did they come up with that riff from? I think it might be perfect. Lead guitar is trying hard not to lose it. This is not a song to lose it entirely in. It is a song about a riff and intimations therefrom. And all of a sudden it's completely enveloped me. It holds on, then gracefully retreats. Its point has been made articulately. A fever-dream heatstroke nightmare of a song. And then MES howls the final words. Out of key.

US 80s-90s - More roly-poly than the album version, more...slinky! This 10th session has a real fucking groove, a liquid constitution. The bass especially has been poured into my ears, brutally poured. Iron slag but fluid. The artificial-sounding drumbeats are a lovely touch, especially as this appears to be a comment on rap production. There's even record static in the background! The bassline, in its fluidity, has an upbeat funk. Counteracting this are the guitars, droning (and fairly liquid themselves) but harsh enough to coat everything in lysergic bile. Need I add, but this sounds huge. And MES, while he's been calm in this session, is as authoritative as he's been. Lead guitar begins to scratch and spit towards the end, as if to remind us that it can. And that it really likes it. In fact, the ending is a sort of surreal tech-vision-groove-battle. Breathtaking fucking session.

Oh thanks!

this is one of my favourite sessions too. i like the way they distilled the essence of whatever lp they had out at the time and made it better

More, please!

yeah!

Did our kid get banned again?

Can't believe I just referred to lj as "our kid", sorry everyone.

He self-banned so as to get on with some uni work, I believe.

Yeah I heard he was doing this David Blaine-ish stunt where he is like living for six months (possibly frozen in ice? possibly in a cage over the Medway? possibly just in his pants? I dunno) and during that time he's not posting to ILX. People keep baiting him by posting stuff about the Fall etc but through the power of mind alone he is managing to hold out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/entertainment_living_with_david_blaine/img/1.jpg

Hey Louis have you heard the new Cardiacs record?

Truly, lj is like a modern day Jesus, suspended in a perspex box for our prog rock related sins.

apparently, 20 mins....

FROM A FACEBOOK WALL:

The Fall - Peel Session 11 ReviewShare
Today at 11:25am

Athlete Cured - Heavy bassline, ever so slightly distorted, drum flourish. Call and response MES. Weird and wonderful, panned helicopter beats. Dark fire from guitars. This is not the poppy post-Bend Sinister burbling I expected, this is monstrous and mashsome. It sounds like some techno beast is trying to free itself from prostrate bondage as a troupe of performing witches growl in laughter. This is really quite minimal as far as song-structure goes, even by Fall standards, and of course it works beautifully. When the helicopter beat malfunctions, the effect is supreme. Multitracked vocal layers give the song a druggy sheen, as MES' unhinged necessaries are buried, put back into the soil they came from.

Australians In Europe - Holy hell, so catchy! And there's a subtle chord-change. This IS the poppy post-Bend Sinister burbling and it's AWESOME. And wow, that vocal echo thing! Playing with content AND form here. I'd not expected something quite so righteously joyful! It's still heavy; the bass and drums ensure that. But it's also a romp, a blast, perhaps the blinding chords of the Ketamine Sun shining onto our damned forms. I can't quite explain how bizarre this song's alchemy is. OH SHIT! The power-chord middle section!!! What's happened to The Fall?! This is completely insane! And then the guitar builds beneath, the bass changes, and MES comes back in...it's maybe one of my favourite 5 Fall moments so far? Hahahahaha, this band NEVER fails to amaze me. WOW. This has rapidly become one of the best pop songs I've ever had the privilege to hear. And there's still over a minute left!!! It's all going a bit Complicated Game. I ain't complaining. FUCK. I have no more rational argument about this. Why isn't it automatically mentioned every time the Peel Sessions are brought up? Beautiful solo during the fade-out too. YES

Twister - How to follow that up? With a REALLY MENACING AVANT-GARDE BASS DRONE and then some austere 4th-interval (I think) keys! Which suddenly hammer down amid building beats, manic strumming, catatonic Brix and -silence-...reset. Dual guitar this time. I don't know what the drums are doing. No longer are The Fall trying to take your head off. They're charming it from your shoulders. And as straight-up linear as Athlete Cured had been, this is ALL OVER THE FREAKING PLACE, losing nothing by comparison, clearly the work of the same band in the same place. The jarring effect of those keys+those tribal builds is phenomenal. This is pop Fall fed through Hexen vortex. Brix taunts and is taunted. Spirals into careen. Delirium. The most delirious session.

Guest Informant - Starts with muffled MES, echoed drums. Then he yelps a mantra, perhaps the clearest he's been in this session. But the keyboards soon return, and they're inspired. This chorus is great; I can really feel the songwriting in this session. I can sense it being worked out, worked towards, an instance of truth as hell marries heaven somewhere along the decline of England. No wonder the dude set Jerusalem to music around this period. He set it to The Fall. Here is another hymn to the damned nation, perhaps more straightforward than the other session tracks, but still guttural, still mysterious. The box-set blurb claimed this was one of the best sessions. I didn't believe it. Hell I do now. And look, there's a really fucked-up guitar solo, as if to confound me further. Slips s'ways out of time. Chaos. Chaos! As if that's the only way this song could have ended.

Australians in Europe might be the single greatest Peel sessions moment ...

The whole sci-fi narrative of Twister is ace.

build a tunnel, cross Britannia

IT FALLS TO ME ONCE AGAIN...

The Fall - Peel Session 12 ReviewShare
Today at 2:03pm

Deadbeat Descendant - The opening riff is disarmingly simple, and after a couple of run-throughs plunges us into a complex, urgent pattern of pop-punk, complete with moody keys/what sounds like a vibraphone. The riff then returns, but contextualised by the unerringly heavy drums it sounds nothing like itself. This is what's known as a 'low-key vamp', maybe, and it's pretty good. The alchemy from the previous session is still there.

Cab It Up - Again, the 'simple riff into confusion' trick, except this time OMD's Enola Gay has leapt into the fray in the form of a vibrakeyboard refrain. It works rather nicely. The guitar is nicely splayed, even though there's less of an instinct to really integrate the pop into what makes The Fall tick. Less exposition than rendition. Having said that, the atonal guitar-blast-during-Enola-Gay bit after two and a half minutes is sublime. I think this one will reward relistens. There's subtlety, if not mindsplitting fury in fear or in pop. It also sounds maybe a tiny bit too professional? Perhaps 'calculated' is what I'm searching for. Closing trawl is again excellent, though, so my reservations are few. MES gives a good performance.

Squid Lord - Haha, for the third time! There's definitely formula at work here. The depth of sound, the slightly blurred sophistication, is appealing, and this one's certainly a bit more arch than the first two. Grand marching keys, less guitar exploration, drama generated by the drawl of it all. Again, there's plenty of subtlety, as the high whistling keys effect mounts behind MES, and the drums briefly drop out to relaunch the unfolding reportage. This feels like a giant news story, as reported from MES' armchair.

Kurious Oranj - Slight alteration to the formula this time. Or not, if horn-driven garage reggae was what you expected. This is certainly poppy, certainly intriguing, and yes, drawling. Although the offbeat guitar-strum that develops is slyly one of the more open concessions to musical form that the Peel Sessions have thus far revealed. There's even a heroic rotary organ in there somewhere. Suddenly, the rhythm goes out of whack, wordless babbling, thenthe synthesised horns begin a kuriously strident reattempt at nailing that reggae vibe. It's very listenable, even catchy, and manages to be lucid in its unexpectedness. One can sense what is being tried here, which isn't necessarily a good thing, but at least it is not a disaster in a bad way. It's not a disaster at all. Will I count that against this song? Probably not. Closing section meanders briefly until MES remembers who his band are and throws in a final, open-ended chord-change by means of punctuation.

This is like when you found out that Blaine had taken a pee bottle with him in the box. Good job of staying off the internets LJ ;)

(Also good posts!)

It's only fair that he do this.

nb: The "best" version of Guest Informant is on the "Backdrop" bootleg--Totally storming.

Enjoying this - consider these ones v lyrically strong too:

Squid Lord - comedy Lovecraft - In the Squid Hospital, his head will be in a draught, a geriatric germ-well

KO - Stuyvesant smoking, made the Jews go to school, sent missionary girls to arab states, spat on the Belgians, built the world as you know it (all systems you traverse), made Hitler laugh in pain, they were anti-Semitic, anti-Gaelic, hey shit man you name it, they were against it.

Smith at some kind of lyrical zenith - a goddam pop song about The House of Orange forchrissakes.

Seriously, you can't quit now, man. As incentive, when you're done I'll upload the Complete Non-Peel Sessions. ;-)

That's godda be worth it!

ah GO ON THEN

yay

KO - Stuyvesant smoking, made the Jews go to school, sent missionary girls to arab states, spat on the Belgians, built the world as you know it (all systems you traverse), made Hitler laugh in pain, they were anti-Semitic, anti-Gaelic, hey shit man you name it, they were against it.

Smith at some kind of lyrical zenith - a goddam pop song about The House of Orange forchrissakes.

Have sad suspicion that KO led me to write doctorate on culture of the 1690s. & yes unbelievable lyrical brilliance.

Chicago Now - Dinky keys! Menacing bassline, jaunty but slightly wronged guitar-line. Momentary call and response. Mixture of light and dark such as this band has grown skilled at over years of rock. Faintly unreal chords in chorus - the sort of chords you'd expect from bagpipes. It's back. It's a slow kill. Scrap that, it's a tempo HIKE. As we spiralled beyond the point of no return into black ink, pop thrusts even the keel. This is deep, foul, graceful. Somehow the orchestra hits are the foulest of all - lessons have perhaps been learned from Foetus? Air on a damned string. TEMPO HIKE. Disorientation. Arch and confused all at once. Rewards close listening. Completely fucked. Superb.

Black Monk Theme - Luminous Fall! Vibrato ethereal goddamn LUMINOUS Fall! Again the chords have a sliding quality, a noble slipping. Violin madness but not like early Ultravox; this violin is subjugated. Organ is lovely. This session, so far: a lovely, imprisoned experience of triumph as seen from the POV of soon-to-be-discarded weaponry. Defeat shining through the translucent skeleton of victory. Spoken in MES' tongue and his bandmates' brawling ballerinas.

Hilary - This sounds more positive, almost like a love-song, and it has Brix's backing sighs, but there must be something awry. It's too elegant. Maybe it's exactly as elegant as it has to be. Maybe this session is about Elegance, and this third chapter is about an attempt to find pure elegance and not pervert it, for once. The songs have all had elegance, but successively with less violence. It's a musical project. Or a test. An experiment which is reaching its tipping-point as soon as this song ends.

Whizz Bang - Again, the violin, playing elegy! Piano and guitars weeping for a lost friend; THIS is even MORE elegant! Tragedy is more elegant than appraisal. The chorus is even beautiful, with no askance glance nor eyebrow cocked. Satan has gotten behind this band. The experiment is complete, and The Fall have achieved a state of unironic beauty. It's not their best song, or their crowning moment, but it does define a purge of sorts, and underlines that the act can examine itself.

"Whizz Bang" was never broadcast (well, certainly not at the time) and was never recorded until it was reworked as "Butterflies 4 brains" much later.

Indeed, I've always heard an early echo of The Monks' Shut Up in there as well ('Got a reason to laugh, got a reason to cry/got black cloud aura') but possibly imagining things.

Not actually one of my favourite sessions this - but I do like doomy synth stabs in Chicago, Now!

xxp: pretty sure Brix was out of the band at that point. back vox prob Marcia Schofield

It wasn't my favourite session at all and felt as I say like a sort of self-examination, but I liked the first two tracks a LOT, and thought that Whizz Bang had something really sweet going for it too. Chicago Now especially is great. Wondering what my favourite tracks so far have been...Australians In Europe, Gross Chapel, Hexen Definitive, Winter and a couple of others are definitely in with a shout...

oops :/

Haha oh wait Hip Priest obv, also Middle Mass

the insane thing is when Brix comes BACK in the band!

and Pat-Trip Dispenser, maybe ROD. That covers 'em all I think

I've got The Light User Syndrome which has Brix AND Nagle *head explodes*

I mean, it can't not be awesome, with them both there. I may be the world's biggest Julia Nagle fan, though, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Things kinda come to a head with the Chiselers single

^^^can't wait for the Peel Session of that...hope you can practically hear them fighting

2 weeks later?