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The first time I heard the Fall ...

1978, Shrewsbury: I'm with unsuccessful g/f ES, and we're driving along Smithfield, past the "new" multi-story carpark and the Riverside shopping centre, with John Peel on the radio. So it must be between 10 and midnight, Mon-Thur. Can't imagine where we were driving from (pub possibly, tho I had a MAJOR ideological problem with pubs in those weird year-zero days, and not just pubs — yes, let's just say, ES is rather more entitled to dub me "unsuccessful b/f")...

Anyway, on the radio, his new find: The Fall, something off Live at the Witch Trials, my guess "No Xmas for John Quays", which JP liked a lot, but it could have been "Rebellious Jukebox", or actuall anything. In the cool but imaginary version of te story, I have to pull off the road, but in truth I'm fairly sure it's ES's car, and she's driving, and doesn't respond the way I do.

Respond to what?: the clammy tinkle of Yvonne Paulette's keyboards (whatever happened to Yvonne Paulette?); and just the general clatter and oddness — and of course MES sneering like a thousand-year-old wiseass child. Peel is wild abt them, so are a coupla NME bods I sub- worship, so I'm ready to listen, but nothing has prepared me for this sense of *being called*, of a sound made just for me.

I maybe say something to ES; she's maybe non-committal, perhaps even even hostile (unlikely: our "relationship" was built on NEVER TELLING THE OTHER ANYTHING). Probably I keep my response to myself. I certainly don't tell any of my nearby male friends: most of them I consider idiots anyway. I know they won't get it: actually I don't want them to get it — to share it would be to devalue it.

I don't think the Fall changed the way I heard music (I find "Fall- type" bands X-tremely boring: but Smith changed the way I saw the world. Or — actually — I think confirmed my then-instinct: that when it was allowed to emerge (as punk maybe allowed it to emerge), True Prole Poetry [with all the obvious grown-up caveats abt such a notion: I was a peculiar, quite sheltered kid then], was stranger, cleverer, more cantankerous, more embattled, more demanding-terrifying- exhilarating than anything I would discover — in any sense, from drugs to movies to Great Canonic blah-blah-blah — at, for example, college (which I had either *just* started, or was just about to start.

His sense of being trapped in a milieu that just didn't get it, and just didn't get HIM — some horrible Prestwich estate choking his gifts and freedoms and insight — and his will to escape through reading and writing and music: hey, this just BLARED out at me. My milieu was "nicer" — Shrewsbury's a pretty town, in its way — and less apparently hopeless: but it was like, *He Knew*

Others sometimes said: What's Smith on about? And OK, some things he's sung have taken me years to come at from the right angle, but (basically) he understood Fright, and how to use it.

"I've had shears, pointed, straight at my chest-ah!"

I haven't, obviously, but the specifics are just the specifics.

-- mark s



late80s...down south and A REAL GONE KID....was persuaded to go see an indie band(I ONLY HAD EARS FOR ROCK) by lurvaz best mate, missed the support, came back from bar ( yes, i do buy rounds, E ) and heard ominous synth with fuckedup adamant drumming - it was The Fall doing 'Hit The North' - planets spun into alignment - went back to NE1 envigorated, confused, armed with secret knowledge - made 1st steps on shining path to become Dole Art Threat.

-- Andy



I really liked Mark's story about the Fall - I hate it when people don't include personal bitterness when they write about impersonal stuff; the Fall are still one of my favourites too so just briefly . . . I live an hour out of town when I'm 15 and can only just hear student radio but I like the Fall and go into town and buy 'Hex Enduction Hour' (late, this was in about 1990) and I come home and get off the bus with my new record thinking that now I'm really cool and the boys that hang around the dairy - my teenage boyfriends, we all met up at the dairy - are there and they say 'Ooh she's got Sex Education Hour' and think I'm a pervert

-- Maryann



Late '85/early '86, listening to Radio U (as was) ("student radio", Christchurch, NZ): "Cruiser's Creek". Know how I know? I wrote down the name of the band and the song on a piece of paper. (Also on the list, from memory: Bauhaus "Telegram Sam" (saw their clip (for what I then didn't understand was a cover of that song) on the Max Headroom video show) and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five "The Message".) I still had that piece of paper until recently - may still have it - in one of those manilla  folders where I keep stuff like that (probably the one with "records" on the front which includes all the notes that if I ever got around to sorting them out would make a definitive 'wants list'). Interpretation  of this anecdote is unnecessary, right?

-- Jon Bywater

Went on tour (ON TOUR!!!!) with band whose singer I have adolescent crush on. I grew up in nowheres-ville (see book "Downers Grove" to get the picture - that's a real place too in NJ, USA) and there were of course no signs of art/culture, so I think I kinda hoped I was gay 'cos that seemed like an easier way to be 'interesting' and 'artistic' without actually having to do anything over than fuck which is pretty much it when you are a teen. So anyway there is this heady atmosphere and he is giving me pot and we are driving round the south island and it is summer and beautiful and he puts on this great music and its obviously early UK punk and I had heard the Gang of 4 and Wire so I take a stab in the dark and guess the Fall thus looking cooler than I possibily am and that leads to more er stabs in the dark (romantic stabs) and yeah now he is famous and making dance music and maybe I should tell this to a womans mag for $?

-- Ross Logan



(The 1st 3 of the above articles were ripped off without permission from our FAVOURITE WEBSITE IN THE THE WHOLE WORLD.)

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