Tuesday, June 2, 2020

The Fall hit #1 on the UK Indie charts with a noisy, grunting live album


The Fall : New Puritan


On June 2, 1980 The Fall's raucous, mostly live, lo-fi album, Totale's Turns (It's Now Or Never), topped Smash Hits' UK Indie album charts. Like The Stooges' Metallic K.O., the album is a document of a band at war with its audience."The difference between you and us is that we have brains", Mark E Smith declares in a a working men's club near Doncaster. When someone in the audience requests a song from 1978, Smith responds “Are you doing what you did two years ago? Yeah? Well, don’t make a career out of it.” 

(The track "New Puritan" was recorded at Smith's home and sounds like it but then everything The Fall did in this era sounded haphazardly recorded).


"Nobody wanted to release it", Smith wrote in Renegade. "because nobody played the sort of venues that you hear on it – places like Doncaster and Preston. The North was out of bounds; it might as well have been another country. We just pieced a load of tapes together. In the band's eyes it was commercial suicide releasing this dirge; they couldn't see the soul that lay behind it. That's musicians for you." 


Dave McCullough of Sounds gave the album a five star rating, calling the band "a living reminder of the failure of Punk and the almost solitary exponents of the directions in which it should have gone" while Robert Christgau gave the album a B rating, describing himself as "a sucker for the overall sound, maybe even the attitude". Trouser Press described the album as "Jagged, largely recitative and nearly oblivious to musical convention, Smith's witty repartee carries the show as the band lurches and grunts along noisily."



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