sorry that was mean, music nerd hand-wringing does seem kinda pointless tho, the fall had plenty of catchy tunes
― Well bissogled trotters (Michael B), Thursday, 25 January 2018 21:16 (six years ago) link
if someone didn't know where to start i would tell them to buy i am kurious oranj. so much fun and such an awesome rock record and tons of hooks/great songs. it's like the last great post-punk record. r.i.p. 1980s.
― scott seward, Thursday, 25 January 2018 21:24 (six years ago) link
it's weird but the fall were never a band that i ever really picked apart or analyzed or dissected. i never wondered what MES was listening to. i knew he liked krautrock and 50s rock and garage rock and i guess that's all i needed to know! the clang was there. the beat. the roughness. pretty self-explanatory. it DID take me years to realize what a good writer he was. which is strange. but i just let the words wash over me and for a long time it never dawned on me how hard it must have been to write stuff like that. i just saw him/them as a force of nature. raising a ruckus. such cool sounds.
― scott seward, Thursday, 25 January 2018 21:34 (six years ago) link
“If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.”
somehow never ran across this quote
This was, IIRC, in response to being challenged about a Reading festival performance where they pulled up backstage, MES having drunkenly sacked the drummer halfway up the motorway, and asked if anyone knew how to play drums. The Chemical Brothers' manager had not played since he was a teenager, and didn't know any of the Fall's songs, but went on and played them to tens of thousands of people.
― Haribo Hancock (sic), Thursday, 25 January 2018 21:45 (six years ago) link
the chemical brothers should have played drums! they had that big beat.
― scott seward, Thursday, 25 January 2018 21:51 (six years ago) link
xp that's amazing, never heard the backstory there
― sleeve, Thursday, 25 January 2018 21:52 (six years ago) link
i should also say that ned has a lot of reviews of fall albums on allmusic and they are great reading again
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, 25 January 2018 22:32 (six years ago) link
I think that Reading festival show was one of the 2 times I saw the Fall, although I only watched a few songs before wandering off because it was pretty bad.
― Colonel Poo, Thursday, 25 January 2018 22:48 (six years ago) link
xpost Too kind. As always I'd probably like to rewrite them but I'd like to rewrite pretty much everything I've ever done anyway.
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 25 January 2018 22:52 (six years ago) link
loll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2euHrKaRW4
― kurt schwitterz, Thursday, 25 January 2018 22:55 (six years ago) link
Beautiful. Are those saucepans in the foreground part of the instrumentation?
― mick signals, Thursday, 25 January 2018 23:18 (six years ago) link
J0hn D0lan:
"MES meant a lot to me. A reckless courage that was beyond my imagining, bloody-minded persistence immune to attacks of conscience, and muttered backhands that could floor a target while barely brushing them with a knuckle:
'She consigns them all to Hell,She's the Littlest Rebel...'"
― etc, Thursday, 25 January 2018 23:22 (six years ago) link
probably not - this was for Ginger Wildheart's album and probs a home studio lol
xpost
― kurt schwitterz, Thursday, 25 January 2018 23:25 (six years ago) link
That Reading/Fall story shows up in that Guardian piece from 2006 where the writer tries to track down every single former The Fall member:
One of the strangest entrances is that of Nick Dewey, who attended the 1999 Reading festival as the manager of the Chemical Brothers and ended up on stage with the Fall. "This drunk man [guitarist Neville Wilding] came backstage asking if anyone played drums," he says. "The band had had a fight and left the drummer at motorway services." Dewey hadn't played for 10 years, but once a Chemical Brother put his name forward, Wilding refused to take no for an answer. Dewey was led to a darkened tour bus to meet Smith, "passed out with his shirt off. The guitarist had to punch him in the face to wake him up. Then they began fighting over whether or not they should teach me the songs. Mark said no!" With a blood-covered Smith offering occasional prompts, Dewey pulled it off.I tried to ask Wilding about this incident but his neighbour said he was "in Guadalajara". The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.
I tried to ask Wilding about this incident but his neighbour said he was "in Guadalajara". The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.
― ヽ(´ー`)┌ (CompuPost), Thursday, 25 January 2018 23:39 (six years ago) link
I just ordered "The Fallen", looking forward to it
― sleeve, Thursday, 25 January 2018 23:42 (six years ago) link
The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.
omg haha
― Patton Oswalt Defense Lawyer (Hadrian VIII), Thursday, 25 January 2018 23:43 (six years ago) link
how many posters in this thread have played in the Fall
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Friday, 26 January 2018 00:54 (six years ago) link
MES quote from the liner notes to the 2CD reissue of Shift-Work:
"I'm trying to chop off all the esoteric bits, the unnecessary bits, all the time."
― sleeve, Friday, 26 January 2018 00:55 (six years ago) link
been a fan of the fall for nearly 30 years and only realizing there are barely any songs about girls in the trad rock sense. and it’s hard to know the few that might be love songs. maybe none of them are love songs.
not a shocking thing generally — esp in darker genres — but for 32 albums?
when you’re driving around looking for parking, cursing non stop, there’s no more appropriate soundtrack than pretty much any fall album.
― barreras, Friday, 26 January 2018 01:07 (six years ago) link
I remember working as a temp first few year and a half when I finally got out of college in the mid-90s working in the bowels of telephone, insurance and local government offices usually in big monolithic file rooms, cleaning up and filing with a discman listening often to The Fall. While now it seems some guy with a set of headphones doing some dead end job is kinda normal now, I think it was kinda strange to the stiffs at the time. The Fall seemed to really fit the circumstances, stop MITHERING.
― earlnash, Friday, 26 January 2018 01:39 (six years ago) link
grooving really hard on Extricate & related tracks this evening
― sleeve, Friday, 26 January 2018 02:06 (six years ago) link
with your daft African popand the wine that you call Bull's BloodHillaryoh oh Hil-uh-ray
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 26 January 2018 02:32 (six years ago) link
Keep me away from the fest-i-val....
― Fine Toothcomb (sonofstan), Friday, 26 January 2018 14:50 (six years ago) link
MES, the New Puritan after all, could have been mistakable for a second-wave feminist. No lechery whatsoever in his words, and plenty of criticism for 'male slags' and those with overactive libidos in general. I guess there is that 'An Older Lover etc' song, but isn't that sarcastic?
― imago, Friday, 26 January 2018 14:55 (six years ago) link
oh the etc is on 'Slags, Slates', whoops
― imago, Friday, 26 January 2018 14:56 (six years ago) link
Anyway, this is possibly his most tender moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VUnbPG8i3A
― imago, Friday, 26 January 2018 14:57 (six years ago) link
MES, the New Puritan after all, could have been mistakable for a second-wave feminist
well there was the hilarious time he punched and strangled julia nagle but let's not talk about that eh
― faust apes (NickB), Friday, 26 January 2018 14:58 (six years ago) link
yeah and then he wrote her the above song
it was a chaotic and shitty time for sure (punctuated by some amazing music) but apart from that fight i think he showed generally good credentials in that department. also iirc she fully forgave him (i know this doesn't absolve him completely)
― imago, Friday, 26 January 2018 15:01 (six years ago) link
obviously i don't want to make light of domestic abuse, but it was definitely a single aberration. not that kind of player guv
― imago, Friday, 26 January 2018 15:02 (six years ago) link
Maxine PeakeEvery Friday in my mid-teens, I used to go to a psych and 60s R&B night at a club in Manchester called the Brickhouse. I remember seeing Mark E Smith there on regular occasions propping up the bar. I never had the courage to go over and tell him how much I admired him; to approach him would take a lot of courage from the steeliest of nerves. Many years later, I went to see the Fall perform at the Cartoon Club in Croydon and I found myself in the tiny dressing room after the gig, face to face with Mr Smith. I was starstruck. Just as I was about to pluck up the courage to say something, Mark turned to Steve Trafford, his then bassist, and said: “What does that slapper want?” For a split-second my heart was broken, but then I thought, “Hey, at least he noticed me.”
― Agharta Christie (Ward Fowler), Friday, 26 January 2018 15:03 (six years ago) link
yeah ok i said second-wave haha
if anything, that anecdote adds deeper resonance to that eccentronic research council album she narrated a couple of years ago
― imago, Friday, 26 January 2018 15:06 (six years ago) link
sub-lingual tablet is sounding really good to me today
this picture also really got to me
http://thefall.org/news/pics/2017-11-04_MES-photo-sm.jpg
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 26 January 2018 15:10 (six years ago) link
29 Truly Excellent and Typically Weird Stories About Mark E. Smith
― sleeve, Friday, 26 January 2018 15:10 (six years ago) link
so now I sleep in ditches
― the girl with the rub-on tattoo (Noodle Vague), Friday, 26 January 2018 15:11 (six years ago) link
hoooow bad are english musicians?
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 26 January 2018 15:13 (six years ago) link
lol
In 2010, Smith guested on the great Gorillaz album Plastic Beach, despite having no clue who or what Gorillaz was. "I actually thought Gorillaz were some kiddie rap, like helping out Dizzee Rascal or something," the bandleader said in a subsequent interview with Clash. "Where I live in Manchester, Gorillaz mean jack shit, honestly."
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 26 January 2018 15:32 (six years ago) link
um, yeah?
― Mark G, Friday, 26 January 2018 15:43 (six years ago) link
damon got his terrible revenge by naming the next gorillaz album 'the fall'
― imago, Friday, 26 January 2018 15:55 (six years ago) link
"That's a fucking drum riff I wrote"
From the Newsweek(!) piece sleeve posted, talking about Pavement.True though, he/ the fall wrote drum riffs that were amazing - fantastic life, no bulbs, container drivers... loads more where the drum figure was the hook.
― Fine Toothcomb (sonofstan), Friday, 26 January 2018 18:27 (six years ago) link
As a huge Pavement fan, can anyone point me to the most obvious lifts?
― kraudive, Friday, 26 January 2018 18:48 (six years ago) link
as a fan of both i always felt like the whole thing was pretty overplayed honestly
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 26 January 2018 18:49 (six years ago) link
i don't think i've ever thought about the fall listening to pavement.
― scott seward, Friday, 26 January 2018 18:49 (six years ago) link
I think the most commonly mentioned is "Conduit for Sale" and "A New Face in Hell".
― jmm, Friday, 26 January 2018 18:51 (six years ago) link
to me the most "Pavement" sounding Fall album is Middle Class Revolt but that's from 1994 when Pavement was well established already
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 26 January 2018 18:53 (six years ago) link
Right yeah. How can I how can I xp
― kraudive, Friday, 26 January 2018 18:54 (six years ago) link
xxp yep, that one for sure, there's a couple more as well but it's been years since I listened to Slanted & Enchanted
― sleeve, Friday, 26 January 2018 18:54 (six years ago) link
― jmm, Friday, January 26, 2018 12:51 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
ha yeah wow that never occurred to me but totally
― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 26 January 2018 18:55 (six years ago) link
Our Singer has kinda a Hip Priest beat happening ... the similarities between the two bands are overstated though, yeah.
― tylerw, Friday, 26 January 2018 18:57 (six years ago) link
There are more, if you want to hear it. 'Hit the plane down', 'Chesley's Little Wrists', arguably 'Two States'
― ♫ very clever with maracas.jpg ♫ (Le Bateau Ivre), Friday, 26 January 2018 19:00 (six years ago) link
'No life singed her'
― ♫ very clever with maracas.jpg ♫ (Le Bateau Ivre), Friday, 26 January 2018 19:01 (six years ago) link