Putting together a forty minute mix of songs by The Fall is the easiest one I've ever done.
Go into the folder marked The Fall and start selecting songs.
Sequence them into an order that is pleasing.
Note that this process could be repeated three, four , five more times over and the quality would not dip.
Mark E. Smith famously said that 'if it's me and your nan on bongos, it's The Fall' but there's no doubting the musicians who came and went through the ranks over the years added a significant amount to the songs the group wrote and played. The songs here would sound different if Brix Smith, Steve Hanley, Craig Scanlon, Simon Wolstencroft, Karl Burns, Marc Riley, Martin Bramah, Spencer Birtwistle and all the rest hadn't been members of The Fall. Mark E. Smith may have been an intolerant and difficult person to be in a band with as time went on but he was also a singular and endlessly electrifying presence, as the songs below demonstrate. The lyrics and vocal delivery are of course central and the ones here find room for the Kennedy assassination, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Frank Zappa, Australians, Oprah Winfrey, Nelson, Tolstoy, Jeanette Fletcher, forty year olds in coloured shirts, the Flintstones, Star Wars, Nietzsche and the hip priest.
Cruiser's Creek is a single released in November 1985, one of the first songs written and recorded for This Nation's Saving Grace, when Brix joined the band and upped the ante a little in terms of sound and melody. John Leckie produced. The intro, MES shouting through a megaphone or over a tannoy, 'What really went on there? We only have this excerpt', is a brilliant way to open any song/ mix/ compilation tape.
Australians In Europe was a B-side to Hit The North, released in October 1987. Hit The North is a great single, 80s indie/ alternative night dancefloor gold.
Free Range came out in 1992, on the album Code: Selfish and a single in the same year. There are dance/ techno influences finding their way in to The Fall's sound, partly brought by new recruit on keys Dave Bush. At some point in the mid- 90s Andrew Weatherall was lined up to produce a Fall album but it became clear to him that his way of working ('You will give complete control of songs and production over to me and I will turn the vision in my head into a wildly expansive album') and Mark's ('I am The Fall and I say what it sounds like') would not be conducive and he backed out. A Weatherall produced Fall album is one of life's great What If's....
Oswald Defense Lawyer is from 1988's The Frenz Experiment, my first Fall album and hence one of my favourites (I think it ranks fairly low among The Fall's cognoscenti). There are Fall fans who say the cover of The Kinks song Victoria (also from this album) and There's A Ghost In My House are the worst songs The Fall did. Similarly there are Clash fans who hate Should I Stay Or Should I Go and Rock The Casbah because they sold in large quantities and were hits. Generally, I distrust these views. A good song is a good song regardless of how many or few people bought it.
Touch Sensitive came out in 1999. I'd drifted from The Fall by this point and this single bought me back, a dancefloor friendly, catchy as you like, thundering rumble of Mancabilly, filled with MES one liners. It opened the album The Marshall Suite, the 20th Fall album and last one in the 20th century.
Two Librans came out on 2000's The Unutterable, the first Fall album of the 21st century, and proof that the band and Smith were as vital as they'd ever been.
Big New Prinz is a contender for my favourite Fall song, the first song on October 1988's I Am Kurious Oranj (either my second or third Fall album purchased I think). The album was conceived as the soundtrack to a ballet performed by Michael Clark and Company, a performance based on William of Orange's ascension to the English throne in 1588, the so- called Glorious Revolution. Big New Prinz is based on 1982's Hip Priest. The album also contains their cover of Jerusalem which is priceless.
Blood Outta Stone was on 1990's The Dredger EP, a four track 12" led by the cover of White Lightning. It was later on added to CD re- issues of Shift- Work.
High Tension Line is another favourite of mine, also from 1990, a period when they seemed to release 12" singles almost weekly. It was produced by Grant Showbiz who did a lot of good work with them around this time.
Dead Beat Descendant is prime late 80s Fall, the B-side to Cab It Up. The title apparently comes from an episode of The Flintstones, Fred, Barney, Wilma and Betty sent into the 21st century by The Great Gazoo. The four of them are chased out of Fred's company by George Slate the 8000th, Fred's $4 loan from prehistory now ballooned into a $23 million debt, Slate shouting 'come back here you dead beat's descendants!'
Rikki Turner has a past. He is a former Paris Angel, a veteran of Manchester bands The New Southern Electrikk and The Hurt and more recently San Pedro Collective. He has been working on a project recently that he says will be his last, that once it is done he will retire from music. Rikki always knows who to work with. His previous groups seen him write and play with among others Wags (a Paris Angel who went on to Black Grape), Suddi Raval (of Hardcore Uproar fame), Simon Wolstencroft (The Fall, pre- Stone Roses Stone Roses).
His latest and last musical outlet is Unknown Territories, a collective based in Manchester's Spirit Studios, with Martin McLaren and bringing ex- Inspiral Carpet Tom Hingley on board along with Sean Crossey and Esther Maylor (from Heavy Salad) and with production courtesy of Callum Croston and Lewis Jones. Rikki wears his heart on his sleeve and has been sending me snippets of the forthcoming album for some time, always with the promise that it is for Isaac. The first fruits of Unknown Territories came out yesterday, a single called Broken...
Broken is heavy duty 21st century music, the lead vocals of Esther front and centre, underpinned by deep electronic bass and the tsk tsk tsk tsk of hi hats, skittish bleeps and crunching drums. There's more to follow with an album forthcoming featuring both singers and spoken word pieces, and a one off gig at The Eagle Inn, Salford, in December.
Back in 1990 Paris Angels caught the wave of interest in Manchester bands following the explosion of 1988/ 89. The group were from east Manchester, the unfashionable side of the city, out in Guide Bridge and Ashton- under- Lyne. Regulars at The Hacienda and the Boardwalk they were soaking the influences that were in the air- 60s guitars, sequencers, dance rhythms, New Order's late 80s marriage of all those- kaleidoscopic sounds that saw them sign to Sheer Joy and release three singles, All On You (Perfume), Scope and I Understand, before they signed to Virgin for the album Sundew. 1990's All On You (Perfume) is the one everyone talks about (and rightly so) but Scope, released the same year, can also hold its own, both at the time and now, thirty three years later.
Jesse Fahnestock and Emilia Harmony's new musical outfit Electric Blue Vision release a four track EP today on Brighton's Higher Love label, making a late dash for those lists that people are busy compiling at this point in the year. Jesse sent me a version of the original mix of Other Skies a while back and I was smitten from first play, the swirly organ intro and warm thud of bass joined by Emilia's whispery vocals, everything a lovely hazy shade of blue but tinged with some yellow and amber.
Jesse has said he was aiming high with Other Skies, looking to Higher Than The Sun and One Dove's Fallen for inspiration. Other Skies has that widescreen, wide eyed ambient/ psychedelic feel, the drums and bass pushing it along but it has a sense of drift and yearning in the vocals too, Emilia singing, 'Can you help me to find my way? Do you know the way back home? I'm ready to go, I said I'm ready to go...'. It's late at night, the venue's closed and moved everyone left at the bar out onto the pavement, the streets are cold and lonely, home is calling. It's a lovely song and I can't recommend it enough.
If you're not convinced by all of that, there are three remixes to turn your head. Balearic Ultras give it some heavy bass, drums and FX, filtering everything through a heat haze stripped back and minimal. The Tambores En Benirras remix goes for shimmer and shimmy, a slo mo thud of kick drum, twinkles of guitar and echoes all over the voices, a few lines isolated, 'up down spin me round', nodding in New Order's direction, and there's a piano line near the end that sends shivers up and down the central nervous system. Sean Johnston and Duncan Gray join forces again as Hardway Bros Meets Monkton Uptown, a dubbed out, melodica led stomp, percussion rattling round and Emilia looped into infinity. The bass of Wobble and the ghost of Augustus Pablo battling it out in other skies.
You can (and should) buy the Other Skies EP is here.
Every Wednesday for the last five weeks my friend Stevie at the Charity Chic blog has posted songs under the title Brothers, Sisters... and every Wednesday morning when I open up the internet and see his posts I hear this running through my head...
'Brothers, sisters, one day we will be free/ From fighting, violence, people crying in the streets...'
The warm pulse of bass and 125bpm drum track follow, running through my mind, the tom tom fill at the end of the 8th bar crash in, the synth strings start to play, the Roland handclaps and cowbells dink in and I'm swept away by Joe Smooth's 1987 single. Promised Land was/ is the song that, as much as any, suggested house music was an open invitation to all, that the dancefloor was a place of inclusivity and openness, where colour, sexuality and differences were swept away by the power of dance music.
In 1987 Joe Smooth was on tour in Europe with Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk and was blown away by the way European audiences had taken to house music. He wrote the song inspired by this and wanting to capture something of the spirit of Motown's classic singles, music as a call for unity and brotherhood/ sisterhood.
'As we walk hand in hand/ Sisters, brothers, we'll make it to the promised land...'
The song was re- released in 1988 and 1989 and as the tide of history turned in Eastern Europe and then South Africa, Promised Land seemed to offer a soundtrack to those events. Lyrically it can't help but reflect Martin Luther King's famous I Have Reached The Promised Land speech too, the one he gave in Memphis the day before he was assassinated. The utopian dream of early house music.
As a song it's a tempting one to cover, dance floor friendly, with two rousing chords, a pumping bassline capable of moving feet and vocals that provide a warm, misty eyed glow. Paul Weller caught the house music bug at the tail end of The Style Council and recorded a cover in 1989. The Style Council's cover is exactly the sort of thing mods in the late 80s should be doing, Paul and Mick on twin pianos, all slicked back hair and loafers while Dee C Lee stomps and dances centre stage. It was their final single- the house inspired album Paul presented to Polydor was the end of the road for them.
In 2006 Findlay Brown covered Promised Land. Findlay's laid back, dreamily nostalgic and melancholic music was based in folk, ambient and pop- his cover of Promised Land was released as a single with a variety of mixes, versions and edits in 2010 including this one by French producer/ DJ Pilooski.
I've been meaning to post this pair of tracks, original mix and remix, for some time and one of the songs mentioned in yesterday's David Holmes post- specifically something he played during his DJ set at The Golden Lion- has given me the nudge and a link to it. See if you can spot it.
MSOM's Disco Renegade came out in October, a five minute slice of dance floor action courtesy of MSOM's Michael Mikkelson, slowed down cosmic disco from the top drawer, with pulsing synths and timbales.
Rude Audio's Mash Up remix stretches the fun out for an extra few minutes, pushing some of the sounds to the fore and giving it more echo, more space and room. Both versions are available here for just £3.
I was back at Todmorden's Golden Lion on Saturday night for the launch party for the new David Holmes album Blind On A Galloping Horse, the man himself DJing for four hours to what was once again a packed and enthusiastic pub. I've said it before and it never fails to strike me, the absolute wonder that is The Golden Lion. From the outside, a fairly ordinary looking pub, standing by a canal in a northern town nestled in the hills where Yorkshire meets Lancashire. On the inside, another world. Holmes arrives and begins slowly, some floaty sax easing us in, the red lights already bathing the pub in a warm glow and the mirrorball throwing sparkles round the room. Things heat up fairly quickly, the heartbeat thump working its way in. This thumper courtesy of Golden Bug and The Liminanas is played...
... and is followed by David's own remix of Jo Sims' Bass (The Final Frontier), a record I've played on repeat this year. David then drops in the instantly recognisable riff from Sign 'O' The Times and Prince's Fairlight synth and lyrics about Aids, the space shuttle and Hurricane Annie filling the pub.
Holmes pitches things more and more for dancing with tracks from Khidja, Roe Deers and Pete Shelley and then, a slight easing up with the appearance of Senor Coconut's Trans Europe Express (I should add here I'm indebted to Martin and his Shazam app- my memory would not have recalled much of this amount of detail). There are tracks by Soft Rocks, Decius, Rich Lane's edit of Sinead O'Connor, Patrick Cowley, there is She's A Rainbow (I'm not sure about this, it wasn't the World Of Twist cover but didn't sound exactly like The Stones either), and this slinky disco chugger with happy/ sad house piano chords from 2012 by Roberto Rodriguez...
It went on and on, The Human League's The Things That Dreams Are Made Of provoking much joy, and there was much more music besides, a proper night out with a lovely, friendly crowd and everyone there to dance, culminating in the ten minute epic from this year, Radio Slave's reworking of Audion's Mouth To Mouth, intense, rumbling, ecstatic techno with an irresistible ascending synthline that buzzes like a jar of wasps.
David and Raven Violet's album has been on repeat since arriving at my house on Friday. It's a proper album, a complete piece of work with lyrical concerns and themes that tie the fourteen songs together across four sides of vinyl and seventy five minutes. The four singles released from it so far have all been huge songs for me- Hope Is The Last Thing To Die and It's Over If We Run Out Of Love lit up 2021 and 2022 and Necessary Genius, a rollcall and tribute to those who have gone who inspire him from Weatherall to Samuel Beckett, from Angela Davis to Sinead O'Connor, has done the same to 2023. Recent single Stop Apologising too. The rest of the songs stand alongside those four from the long opener When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified, a song surely born in David's upbringing in Belfast and directly relevant to the world today. Scattered throughout are the voices of refugees, speaking in their own languages with gentle synths and FX behind them, the voices of the repressed and downtrodden given space next to David's words and Raven's voice.
Emotionally Clear and Yeah x 3 show a gentler, poppier side to the album. On the former Raven sings, 'Do you believe in the absence of evidence/ Do you believe in unjust punishment? Do you believe in cognitive dissonance?, and then the chorus erupts into a girl group swell of bells and synths. On the latter chiming synths and the sound of heads clearing and clouds parting, optimism and the word 'yeah', one of the oldest sounds in pop music.
There are several nods to Andrew Weatherall, David paying tribute to his friend and inspiration: the title of an instrumental called And You Will Know Me By The Smell Of Onions, lighter than air synths, piano and a pattering drum machine; a cover of Laugh Myself To Sleep with Timothy J. Fairplay's guitars adding some post- punk/ Mick Jones fire to Raven's voice and Weatherall's words (from Andrew's unreleased second solo album of the same name); and the repeated line in the song Too Muchroom, Andrew's comment about 'if you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much room'.
The album flows through to side four and the final three songs, that show the breadth of what David's created with Blind On A Galloping Horse. Tyranny Of The Talentless calms the pace, a slo mo drum track and lyrics about 'the ashtray of history'. It's followed by Love In The Upside Down, a tripped out monster led by fuzz bass and splinters of guitar, a giddy, swirling psychedelia filled with a sense of momentum, of other worlds, of awakening and possibility. Quite a rush.
That just leaves the title track to carry us home, the sound of the end of a journey and finding strength in song and community despite the horrors of the world outside. Over strings and padded bass Raven sings, 'They will push you out/ And pull you in/ Whatever happens now/ We mustn't mustn't let them win', and the track fades with another speaking voice, this time I think speaking in Gaelic- a song about personal resistance, completing the loop back to the start.
Blind On A Galloping Horse a beautiful packaged album as well, as all proper albums should be, with photos by Belfast street photographer Bill Kirk and artwork and text by British artist Jimmy Turrell, and a print of Sinead and the lyrics to Necessary Genius. As an album it feels like a statement, a personal account, a record that David had to make. Sonically, musically, philosophically, politically and emotionally, it feels very much like the album we need at this point in 2023, a response to both the inner and outer worlds, a call to action but one that also says we can still find hope out there somewhere, if we look in the right places.
Earlier this year Marshall Watson released an EP called Foothills. Marshall is nineteen years into a career as an ambient/ Balearic writer and composer and the five tracks on Foothills (four new ones plus a Seahawks remix) are just the ticket- long instrumentals, long synth chords that allow the listener to have that sense of drift, with textures added by pianos and guitars, everything covered in a warm glow. It's music that seems to be the very opposite of a grim Monday morning in November in North West England but maybe that's exactly why it strikes such a chord for me. The EP can be bought here.
Also this year Marshall recorded a track with San Francisco's Cole Odin, a DJ and producer equally fired up by dance music and life affirming rock 'n' roll. The song Just A Daydream Away was a perfect slice of sunshine indie dance, the sound of summer 1989 wrapped up for 2023. The Just A Daydream Away EP came with two versions of the song and three remixes, two from Sean Johnston's Hardway Bros and one from Joe Morris. Chuggy rhythms, chunky bass, glistening psyche- folk guitars and whispered vocals. This is the Space Flight version, seven minutes of blissed out magic. Buy the whole package here.
Last week's Psychemagik post prompted me to dig back through my folders and nudged slightly by Jesse I went back to this, a 2019 Psychemagik remix of Cole Odin's Dawn's Approaching. Almost eight minutes long and not a second wasted Psychemagik bring everything in their bag to this, gentle building, expansive, vocals drizzled in warm waves, a beautiful flow of synths and drums and then just when you think it not going to change Psychemagik press the button marked Rez and it all goes off in fine style. Buy it here.
