“This is the history lesson in our set. We’re bringing a bit of culture.” So Mark E Smith introduces ‘Various Times’ on this new collection of vintage live cuts. It has been seven years already since The Fall‘s figurehead and prime mover shuffled off to make trouble in the afterlife. In that time extensive reissues, books, podcasts, and related musical projects have turned over and sifted through the legacy and meaning of his and the band’s work providing a wealth of material for Fall fans to enjoy.
Famously, a lot of people have been in The Fall but Marc Riley, Craig Scanlon, Steve and Paul Hanley are what you might call core members. The Steve Hanley/Craig Scanlon backbone throughout the 80’s and most of the 90’s is for many of us as essential to our idea of The Fall as MES himself. Popstock is a project designed to allow them some measure of quality control and recompense over material they were involved in creating and they’ve been patiently sorting through old live tapes, assembling releases from the best bits. So far they’ve compiled alternate versions of Grotesque and Slates.
Beginning after Bingo Masters Breakout (the first EP recorded by the first line up), this new instalment runs through the next four singles, with B-sides, in order. Puzzlingly it stops short of the magnificent ‘Totally Wired’, the final single of 1980, but I dare say Vol 2 will eventually emerge to continue the story. The Fall always played the new material, in later years throwing in one old tune as part of the set. Yet, despite its restricted setlist it seems impossible they ever played a show like this. There’s a straightforward cataloguing aspect to the arrangement of things here that it’s easy to imagine provoking Smith’s disdain.
On the other hand, there’s no doubt he felt The Fall were important, worthy of preservation and study. He just wasn’t going to be the one to do it. Always moving forwards, always focused on the now and the next it hardly comes as a huge surprise that Smith was not a particularly meticulous archivist of his own work. The absence of this wild spirit is felt in the vague museum aura of these releases, in the no nonsense title and art work. It contrasts with the more mercurial sense of earlier Fall comps like Hip Priest and Kamerads or Palace of Swords Reversed. The orderliness of it in calm opposition to the weirdness in these songs.
This is the early Fall, fascinated by apparitions and spectres, shivering in the grey north, haunted by “the madness in my area.” Now it is Smith’s mischievous spirit that lingers over the north. The sleevenotes are by Jarvis Cocker, one of the many whose young life was changed and bettered by the work of The Fall. Writing about them is, to a degree, preaching to the choir. Fall fans probably already have versions of these songs and can compare and contrast at their leisure. These are all good performances although none seem radically different and interestingly none of the songs here made it onto contemporary Peel sessions. Of course it’s good, there are no bad Fall records, you just have personal favourites. “You must get them all” as the man said. This one then, is a history lesson, part of a continuing examination of an extraordinary cultural contribution. It awaits your curiosity.
