Slags, Slates and Apes

The Fall : Fit And Working Again

On April 27, 1981 The Fall released the six track EP Slates, which became my introduction to the band thanks to the song "Fit And Working Again". Neither long enough to be an album  nor short enough to be a single, Slates was marketed by Mark E Smith at least as a release for people who don't buy records.

 There's a song here called "Prole Art Threat". That's what Smith and his band were to the upper class art college kids trying to create a clean new new wave sound for the 80's.

As Smith told a reporter for Smash Hits:

"I have a theory about production. I believe that good production is one of the things that's sort of killed off music. I'm not saying that all good production is bad, but I think there's a lot of thing that could be covered up by good production--personality I suppose.

"Personality in music is not coming through any more and our ears are becoming dulled because we're looking at everything through rose-tinted glasses.

Photo by Martin McClenaghan

"Every studio The Fall go in we have a huge battle every time, trying to convince guys who're, like, ten years out of synch that there are other ways of doing things. But they try to dazzle new band with all of their flash equipment. And it is a bit awesome, so young kids get frightened and hand over the reins to these blokes who used to be musicians ten years ago and want to lay their sound on everyone else.

"That's the mockery of the whole new underground music scene in Britain, I think, that its all run by acid-damaged hippies really. It's not a youth movement at all. Basically I'm fed up with the whole thing."

The EP peaked at #3 on the UK Indie Singles chart and ranked #13 on NME's album of the year chart.

 

The Fall get Grotesque

The Fall : The N.W.R.A.

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On November 17, 1980 The Fall released their third album , Grotesque (After the Gramme). Mark E. Smith yelps and drawls in his own peculiar tone-deaf style over ragged, lo-fi, two chord riffs that Smith described as "Country and Northern." 

Some of the songs, like "C'n'C's Mithering" and "The N.W.R.A.", ramble on for seven + moments while Smith takes on subjects like the music business, amphetamines, middle class liberals and on the final track (The North Will Rise Again), the rise of Northern England.

Smith wrote about the Fall's album in his memoir Renegade: 

Grotesque is a very English album. It’s written from the inside, from experience; the real thing. Pub men can tell you a lot about the English way. But it’s tricky, because it wasn’t a defence either. It wasn’t some sort of kitchen-sink apology; or even one of those crap salt-of-the-earth things, where the working class are delighted with their lot, trudging around potless and pissed. 

I don’t really write from a solid idea. It’s never that certain at the start. You get to what you’re saying through the writing, the process; and then you move on. 

But the place for Grotesque certainly wasn’t indie music. 

Even though it wasn’t respected at the time, it won us a groundswell of support. That was the great thing about it. People of a certain age, say twenty-five and upwards, said that it was their record, they related to it – not people in groups who heard it as nothing more than a naff LP recorded by a bunch of pony musicians, and certainly not the critics.  But the most telling aspect of that period was the fact that I realized there’s a lot of ambitious people in this country without the talent. It’s a disease.

 

"Totally Wired" races The Fall back up the UK Indie charts

The Fall : Totally Wired

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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.

With The Fall's "Elastic Man", Mark E Smith again bites the hand

The Fall : How I Wrote Elastic Man

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In July of 1980 The Fall released the UK Indie #2 single "How I Wrote Elastic Man", which perfectly summarizes how Mark E Smith must have felt about fans and critics and reporters asking him about his craft: 

They'll stop me in the shoppes 

Verily they'll track me down 

Touch my shoulder and ignore my dumb mission 

And sick red faced smile 

And they will ask me 

And they will ask me 

How I wrote "Plastic Man"

“1980 was a bad year," Smith would write in his memoir Renegade."“New decades tend to make people fragile and more unsure than they’ve ever been, but 1980 seemed to be particularly barmy.” 

It's a hell of a bitching session, that book. In the following pages he takes on his record labels, The Smiths, Aztec Camera, Scritti Politti, Duran Duran, Gang of Four, Bob Geldof, Bono and Joe Strummer.

“Anybody who came up to me in America asking about the British music scene, I’d just tell them it was dire – stick to what you know, stick to driving music. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been proud of where I’m from. I’m just not into that musical imperialism that so many bands suffer from. You need a bit of it, but when you start crusading into America with that sort of attitude you just end up looking potty. They’re not as vapid as you think, Americans. They concocted their entire history from lies, so they’re not going to buy into some limey’s glorified head-trip.” 

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

The Fall : New Puritan

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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."

The Fall's pub inspired 'Fiery Jack' named Single of the Week

The Fall : Fiery Jack

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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.

Just Take For Instance

The Fall : Your Heart Out

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On October 28 The Fall released their second album, Dragnet, which was recorded in three days.  The traditionally mercurial lineup of The Fall has already shown itself. Only Mark E Smith and bassist-now-turned guitarist Marc Riley remain from the Witch Trials album.

In his memoir Renegade, Smith wrote:

Dragnet was so opposite to Witch Trials - which I think is still a powerful LP. But Dragnet is the other side: the horror of the normal. I like that sort of stuff; with writers like M.R James and Arthur Machen the stories are right there on your doorstep...We recorded it in three days. Most of it is purposefully out of tune...I don't know why people found the album so objectionable . With the journalists, I think it was a simple case of them expecting one thing, having written the copy for that one thing, and then getting something else and thinking "Fuck! I've now go to think about this". 

Menopause Wives Are Hard to Handle

The Fall : Rowche Rumble

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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.

Northern White Crap That Talks Back

The Fall : Frightened

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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.

Wasting Time in Numbers and Rhymes

The Fall : Bingo Master's Break Out

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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", 

#6 The Fall "Fit and Working Again" 1981

I'm fit and working again
And I feel like Alan Minter
I just ate eight sheets of blotting paper
And I tripped out on the Alka Seltzer

Alan Minter was the Middleweight title champ until he met Marvin Hagler at Wembley Arena in London. After the fight was stopped in three rounds, Minter's supporters caused a riot, throwing beer cans and glass into the ring and both boxers had to be ushered away by the police.

Prior to the fight, Minter made the blatantly racist statement on the BBC that "no black man is going to take my title away". He later retracted this statement and said he meant "no man" is going to take my title away. Previously, Hagler refused to shake Minter's hand, claiming "I don't touch white flesh."