The Fall's peak: Grotesque and Hex Enduction Hour

Grotesque offered a modern-day hallucinatory equivalent to Hogarth's caricatures of the English lower classes taking their pleasures, an idea pursued further on such singles as "Lie Dream of the Casino Soul", a critique of the Northern Soul scene.

The Fall - Lie Dream of the Casino Soul 1981

On "I'm Into CB", for instance, Smith method-acts the role of a hapless radio ham (codename Happy Harry) who still lives with his parents: "My father's not bad really/He got me these wires and bits/Apart that he talks to me hardly".

The Fall - I'm Into CB 1982

For the NME's Barney Hoskyns, this era of Fallmusic - bookended by Grotesque and the mini-LP Slates - threw the listener into deraging 'wastelands of sound without themes, messages, or politics. These records were politics, living conjurations of the crass and the grotesque in Northern prole life ... What The Fall's music implied was that the whole bastion of comfortable working-class traditions - the institutions of barbiturates, boozing, and bingo - could be transformed, could even transform themselves, into a deep cultural revolution". 

Smith had broached this notion in the sleevenotes to Totale's Turns, a sort of live greatest hits. Alluding to the Northern circuit of working men's clubs where The Fall played early on for lack of other opportunities, he speculated wildly: "Maybe one day a Northern sound will emerge not tied to that death-circuit attitude of merely reiterating movements based in the capital".

This fantasy scenario inspired Grotesque's epic closing track 'The N.W.R.A.', which stands for "North Will Rise Again". 'It's just like a sort of document of a revolution that could happen - like somebody writing a book about what would have happened if the Nazis had invaded Britain', Smith told the NME.

The Fall - The N.W.R.A. 1981

Reading speedfreak science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick gave Smith concepts like like 'pre-cog' and 'psychic time travel'. The latter informed the song "Wings", during which he recruits gremlins and goes back through a 'timelock' into the 1860s.

The Fall - Wings 1983

A teenage phase of bumping into ghosts while out walking inspired songs like "Spectre Vs. Rector" and "Elves", in which Smith shrieks, 'The fantastic is in league against me!'

The Fall - Spectre Vs. Rector 1979


The Fall - Elves 1984

The culmination of The Fall's fascination with the supernatural came with 1982's Hex Enduction Hour, half of which was recorded in Iceland, a country where most of the population still believes in elves.

The track "Iceland" was improvised in a Reykjavik studio with lava walls, the band oozing out a drone of two-note piano cycles and banjo that sounded like sitar, topped with incantations from Smith about casting 'runes against your self-soul'.

The Fall - Iceland 1982

Hex is The Fall at their most forbidding and primordial. On "Just Step S'Ways", the group's two-drummer line-up brings a new polyrhythmic tumultuousness to the band's juggernaut rumble.

The Fall - Just Step S'Ways 1982

"Hip Priest" has an almost jazz-like swing, while the guitars on "Who Makes the Nazis?" sound like flint shards hewn from a mountain face. And in case you are wondering who makes those Nazis, it's 'intellectual halfwits'. Ouch!

The Fall - Hip Priest 1982


The Fall - Who Makes the Nazis? 1982

The Fall's peculiar brand of social surrealism

It's hard to imagine The Fall and Joy Division coming from anywhere other than 1970s Manchester. Something about the city's gloom and decay seemed to seep deep into the fabric of their very different sounds. Although he didn't identify the place by name, The Fall's singer Mark E. Smith immortalized the pollution-belching Trafford Park on "Industrial Estate", an early classic of the band. "The crap in the air will fuck up your face", he jeers. 

"That song is a very funny take on Manchester's history of having been the cradle of capitalism and then, by the 1970s, its grave", says Richard Boon, who funded the recording of The Fall's first EP but then couldn't afford to release it on his label New Hormones.

The Fall - Industrial Estate 1978

"This is the three "R"'s...Repetition repetition repetition", quipped Smith on The Fall's mission statement "Repetition". Scorning "fancy music" - the overproduced mainstream rock of the day - "Repetition" fulfilled Smith's early goal of "raw music with really weird vocals on top". The rawness was supplied by guitarist Martin Bramah's thin, wheedling guitar lines, keyboardist Una Baines' wonky organ jabs (played on the cheap 'n' nasty Snoopy keyboard, rated by Sounds as the absolute worst on the market), Tony Friel's capering bass, and Karl Burns' ramshackle drums. The freak vocal element came from Smith's half-sung, half-spoken drawl and wizened insolence.

The Fall - Repetition 1978

On Live at the Witch Trials, the group's 1979 debut, "Underground Medecin" and "Frightened" evoke the positive and negative sides of amphetamine abuse: the rush that lights up your nervous system ("I found a reason not to die", Smith exults, "the spark inside") versus the hyper-tense twitchiness of stimulant-induced paranoia.

The Fall - Underground Medecin 1979


The Fall - Frightened 1979

In 1981 Smith talked about the downside of "taking a lot of speed" over a long period: "you start looking in mirrors and getting ulcers". But The Fall carried on writing songs like "Totally wired" and covering sixties amphetamine hymns like "Mr Pharmacist".

The Fall - Totally Wired 1980


The Fall - Mr Pharmacist 1986

The "pharmacist" in that song is a drug dealer, a street punk peddling "energy". The Fall were obsessed with the double standards surrounding drugs - the way some chemicals are proscribed while others are prescribed. Training as a psychiatric nurse at Prestwich Hospital, Baines came back every day from work and disgorged stories about the mistreatment and neglect she'd witnessed - including the use of downers to pacify the inmates. 

Her talk filtered into Smith's lyrics: "Repetition" refers to electro-shock therapy (after you've had some, alleges Smith, you lose your love of repetition), while The Fall's 1979 single "Rowche Rumble" got its title from Hoffman La Roche, the pharmaceutical multinational who dominated the market for antidepressants.

The Fall - Rowche Rumble 1979

Pills feature in Bingo-Master's Break-out", the title track of The Fall's debut EP, not as a way of coping with soul-crushing mundanity but of escaping it permanently. A guy whose job is organizing other people's recreation - the bingo master - looks into his future and, seeing only encroaching baldness and years "wasting time in numbers and rhyme", opts to end his life with a handful of pills washed down with booze.

Macabre and hilarious, "Bingo-Master's Break-out" typified The Fall's peculiar brand of social surrealism.

The Fall - Bingo-Master's Break-out 1978

Equally important as subject matter was rock culture. Song after song skewered the platitudes and pieties of hipsters: "It's the New Thing", "Music Scene", "Mere Pseud Mag Ed", "Look Know", "Printhead" (the last about an obsessive music-press reader who gets 'dirty fingers' every week perusing the 'inkies').

The Fall - It's the New Thing 1978


The Fall - Music Scene 1979


The Fall - Mere Pseud Mag Ed 1982


The Fall - Look Know 1982


The Fall - Printhead 1979

One of Smith's most famous pronouncements was his description of The Fall themselves as 'Northern white crap that talks back' (in "Crap Rap 2" from Witch Trials).

The Fall - Crap Rap 2 / Like to Blow 1979

"Fiery Jack", the Fall's fourth single, offered a coruscating portrait of one of Manchester's finest sons, the hard-bitten product of five generations of industrial life. Fiery Jack is a forty-five-year-old pub stalwart, who's spent three decades on the piss, ignoring the pain from his long-suffering kidneys. Surviving on meat pies and other revolting bar snacks, Jack is an inexhaustible font of anecdotes and rants. The music sounds stubborn, incorrigible - a white-line rush of rockabilly drums and rhythm guitar like sparks shooting out of a severed cable. Speed might just be another of Jack's poisons, judging by his refusal to go 'back to the slow life' and lines like 'Too fast to write/I just burn burn burn'. Based on older blokes Smith had met in Manchester pubs, Jack was 'the sort of guy I can see myself as in twenty years', he told Sounds.

The Fall - Fiery Jack 1980