In September of 1980 The Fall released another classic single, "Totally Wired" b/w "Putta Block". While most critics recognized the amphetamine-paced A side as one of the band's best, NME"s Danny Baker wrote "Totally Wired is ugly, and terribly produced – yes it does matter!" and "I can't see there's an audience for he Fall's constant verbal battering.
"Totally Wired" peaked at #2 on the UK Independent singles chart.
On January 29, 1980 The Fall released "Fiery Jack", their fourth single. Produced in Wales, with Mark E Smith recording his vocals outside in the studio courtyard, the three-song single was selected as 'Single of the Week' by Sounds. According to Mick Middles the song saw the band "perfecting pomposity, the Fall jump into the rough and raw world of rockabilly with confidence in excess. 'Fiery Jack' sees the band at their painful best, a number that glides on and on and on."
As Smith tells it, Fiery Jack is about the kind of middle aged pub regular he's see around Manchester who ate hot dogs and pies and complains of a bad kidney:
I sat and drank
While my dreams decay
I'm 45
Cause I am Jack
In his autobiography, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith, Smith wrote of early 1980:
“That whole pre-Grotesque period was a phenomenal learning curve. It’s horrible how much people try to shape what you do. At the time I was very sensitive about this; I still am, but I don’t beat myself up about it as much. I had a lot more untapped anger back then. And hearing other people’s silly verdicts on what I did just made me worse.
I wrote about what was around me; that was the whole point – to get down the experiences, scenes, people, etc. But some people are so daft they don’t understand that writing about Prestwich is just as valid as Dante writing about his inferno.”
"Fiery Jack" came with a double B side ,"2nd Dark Age" and the Dragnet track "Psykick Dancehall #2".
The single entered the UK Independent Chart on 23 February 1980, peaking at number 4, and spent twenty weeks on the chart. "Fiery Jack" was voted by listeners to John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show at number 38 in the 1980 Festive Fifty.
In July of 1979 (more likely in October) , The Fall released "Rowche Rumble", an updated version of "Mother's Little Helper" that scored the band a #21 on NME's year end list of the best songs of 1979. The myth behind the song is that Mark E Smith worked for the Roche pharmaceutical company and, thanks to a clerical error, he wound up with a huge unwanted delivery of barbiturates that he hid all over Manchester. Smith never mentions this in his memoir Renegade : The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith so I can't vouch for it.
The lyrics concern the Swiss company's distribution of valium all over the world:
Loads of wives around the world
Are given them by doctors, who think they're little girls
The doctors need prescriptions
The wives need their pills
So Rowche Rumble
In his review of the single for Smash Hits, XTC's Andy Partridge wrote:
What a starter--I wonder what made my hand land on this one? Sounds like the cover, cheap biro lines, bad relationships. Is this the theme of the medication? Great chemist's organ sound. Not one for young girls to make zips or brassieres mindlessly to on the factory floor. Good sound, bad song (down with pills). B side "In My Area" suffocating ill music, felt like I had flu, blanket over my head.
On March 16, 1979 The Fall released Live at the Witch Trials, a debut album recorded and mixed in a Camden studio in just two days. On the album's second track, "Crap Rap 2/Like To Blow" founder Mark E. Smith declares "We are the Fall, Northern white crap that talks back." The band, an instant cult sensation, would be talking back for nearly 40 years before Smith's death in 2018.
The album begins with "Frightened", a creeping five minute tune that takes us into the dark streets of Manchester with Smith explaining why he'd rather go home than interact with girls on a dance floor: "I feel trapped by mutual affection /And I don't know how to use freedom/ I spend hours looking sideways/ To the time when I was sixteen." (NOTE: Trying to interpret any Mark E Smith line is a huge gamble. If Smith were still alive, he's tell me I was full of shite.)
The early reviews of the album were mostly positive. Record Mirror giving it a full five stars and describing the album as "a rugged, concerned, attuned, rebellious jukebox". Sounds reviewer Dave McCullough also gave it five stars, calling it "an album of staggeringly rich, mature music, inner questioning hand in hand with rock and roll at its fiercest, its finest, its most honest, rock and roll at its naked, most stimulating prime." The Village Voice's Robert Christgau gave it a B+ rating, writing " in this icky pop moment we could use some ugly rebellion."
We'd be hearing a lot of ugly rebellion from the Slang King and his come and go troop of band mates. They would average two to three releases a year, evolving into an almost pop band when Smith fell in love with a California girl named Brix. Time has been kind to Live at the Witch Trials, which was released on Miles Copeland's Step Back label.
A legendary band's first album is almost always a fascinating listen, just to hear how fully formed they were at the stop. Here, Smith is already enunciating those "Ah's" at the end of words, forming rhymes where there were none just so that he could continue his cantankerous diatribe against the music industry or other powers that be. Some bands never make a better record than their debut. I believe The Fall did, but here is where the search began for the real thing to fill their rebellious jukebox.
On August 11, 1978, The Fall released its debut EP, Bingo Master's Break Out, introducing the world to Mark E. Smith , a Manchester dockworker who would become one of rock's most tireless and most prolific wordsmiths. Already present here : the singing/shouting, the ending of phrases with a nasal "ah", and an amphetamine amped race through the song.
The title track is about a bingo hall caller who, after wasting time in numbers and rhymes, has lost his will to live. The third track, "Repetition", offers Smith's introduction to what would be coming : "Repetition in the music and we're never gonna lose it",
