RIP Mark E. Smith

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.

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.

loll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2euHrKaRW4

Beautiful. Are those saucepans in the foreground part of the instrumentation?

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...'"

probably not - this was for Ginger Wildheart's album and probs a home studio lol

xpost

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 just ordered "The Fallen", looking forward to it

The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.

omg haha

how many posters in this thread have played in the Fall

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."

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.

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.

grooving really hard on Extricate & related tracks this evening

with your daft African pop
and the wine that you call Bull's Blood
Hillary
oh oh Hil-uh-ray

Keep me away from the fest-i-val....

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?

oh the etc is on 'Slags, Slates', whoops

Anyway, this is possibly his most tender moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VUnbPG8i3A

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

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)

obviously i don't want to make light of domestic abuse, but it was definitely a single aberration. not that kind of player guv

Maxine Peake
Every 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.”

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

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

29 Truly Excellent and Typically Weird Stories About Mark E. Smith

so now I sleep in ditches

hoooow bad are english musicians?

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."

um, yeah?

damon got his terrible revenge by naming the next gorillaz album 'the fall'

"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.

As a huge Pavement fan, can anyone point me to the most obvious lifts?

as a fan of both i always felt like the whole thing was pretty overplayed honestly

i don't think i've ever thought about the fall listening to pavement.

I think the most commonly mentioned is "Conduit for Sale" and "A New Face in Hell".

to me the most "Pavement" sounding Fall album is Middle Class Revolt but that's from 1994 when Pavement was well established already

Right yeah. How can I how can I xp

xxp yep, that one for sure, there's a couple more as well but it's been years since I listened to Slanted & Enchanted

I think the most commonly mentioned is "Conduit for Sale" and "A New Face in Hell".

― 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

Our Singer has kinda a Hip Priest beat happening ... the similarities between the two bands are overstated though, yeah.

There are more, if you want to hear it. 'Hit the plane down', 'Chesley's Little Wrists', arguably 'Two States'

'No life singed her'

Compare the artwork of say "Slanted & Enchanted" to "This Nation's Saving Grace"...

i feel like pavement was a much more conventional band than the fall ever was, though they had their idiosyncrasies they ultimately (esp in their maturity as a band) wrote rock songs

ultimately, so did The Fall

i can't remember what pavement's actual fall cover sounded like. i used to have that single. probably sounded like pavement.

sure you aren't thinking of their REM cover, "Camera"? I don't recall an actual Fall cover

They’re pretty different sounding bands, Pavement loose and ambling, The Fall more tightly wound, but no doubt Malkmus and co. lifted occasional musical bits and the influence in song/album titles, artwork, lyrics seems fairly clear.

Even these kinds of freakish fantasies have their roots in the world from which Smith came. My friend, the writer Steve Hanson, once told me his Lancashire high school classroom was “full of little Mark E Smiths” evolving their own bizarre slang and tall tales. This collective propensity to daydream and experiment with language has a long working-class history. It’s an implicit challenge to the pressure of speaking “properly” and settling into the drudgery of your expected role.

https://theconversation.com/northern-white-crap-that-talks-back-the-falls-mark-e-smith-spoke-for-weird-manchester-90710

Enjoyed this appreciation from David Wilkinson.