Having grown up with 'Live At The Witch Trials' and the crude erudition of this mumbling Manc buggerhead, the Fall mean a hell of a lot to me. Shambling and shambolic, it takes genius of sorts to consolidate an act through 352 LPs and still remain the anti-pop anti-charisma that the loveable bastards have in abundance.
Or so I believed, up to this gig. Although it’s great that the band are playing the Stanley Theatre and thusly enlightening the new studentscummers to the Fall’s Curious (oranje) world, as I stand there, sipping me White Russian and coughing up pustules of Duty-Free-Drum-Phlegm, I realise – for the first, and very depressing time - something incredibly, blindingly obvious. The Fall are shit.
Whereas the wordsmithery of Smith’s rantings swathe supreme imagery to stunning effect on vinyl, it dawns on me with laser certainty that live he wanders on, pisses about with microphones, looks like a fucked-up tramp-uncle who’s lost millions in the dot.com crash, and mutters some bass-tipup shite into whichever SM58 he decides to spit through, whilst the band behind him dross out some exceedingly dull riffage. Badly.
The only smile comes when some wiseass hurls a full bottle of WKD at the bassist’s head (well ya wouldn't wanna drink it eh?). As the four-string throttler is a ringer for the nuts Sicilian bloke off the Sopranos, this hardly seems the best idea in the world… and the thousand-yard stare he gives is worth the entry fee alone.
No doubt hardcore Fall fans would disagree, but the fact remains that live, the spiky and sardonic musical wit is replaced by dross of the highest, stinkiest ordure (sic). This self-serving legend must stop now. I love The Fall and everything the band means to me; but strip away the emotional involvement and all the rite-of-passage nonsense that used to mask the truth, and what you’re left with is something irrelevant, filthy and desperate.
I'm going for a cry. Haven't felt this bad since last Christmas Eve when my dad told me I couldn't have a PS2 cos Santa was dead.
