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

Cabaret Voltaire's classic first singles

The group's debut record, Extended Play, was released by Rough Trade in October 1978. Somewhere between 1977 and 1979, the classic Cabaret Voltaire sound took shape: the hissing high hats and squelchy snares of the rhythm-generator; Chris Watson's smears of synth slime; Stephen Mallinder's dankly pulsing bass; and Richard Kirk's spikes of shattered-glass guitar.

Everything coalesces on singles like "Silent Command" and "Seconds Too Late" to create a stalking hypno-groove feel somewhere between death disco and Eastern Bloc skank.

Cabaret Voltaire - Second Too Late 1980

On other singles - "Nag Nag Nag", "Jazz the Glass" - there's an almost charming sixties garage-punk feel, the fuzztone guitar and Farfisa organ vamps recalling ? & The Mysterians or The Seeds.

Cabaret Voltaire - Nag Nag Nag 1979


Cabaret Voltaire - Jazz the Glass 1981

You can hear the chill wind, the icy silver-machine whoosh of Kirk's guitar sound emerging on "The Set Up" on the debut EP.

Cabaret Voltaire - The Set Up 1978

Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was dehumanizing Mallinder's vocal via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being. On "Silent Command", for instance, Mal's vocal bubbles like molten glass being blown into distended shapes.

Cabaret Voltaire - Silent Command 1979

Visiting USA for the first time in November 1979 inspired the sophomore album The Voice of America: the band caught wind of the impending shift to the right with Reagan and his born-again Christian constituency.

"A big novelty for a bunch of kids from England, where TV finished at eleven o'clock and there were only three channels, was the fact that America had all-night TV and loads of stations. We just locked into this televangelist Eugene Scott, who had a low-rent show that was all about raising money. And the only reason he wanted money was to stay on the air", says Kirk. Scott's voice ended up on the Cabs' classic single "Sluggin for Jesus".

Cabaret Voltaire - Sluggin' for Jesus 1980

1980's mini album Three Mantras was an oblique response to events in the Middle East.

Its two tracks "Eastern Mantra" and "Western Mantra", contrasted the evil twins of fundamentalist Islam and born-again Christian America, beloved enemies locked in a clinch of clashing civilizations.

Cabaret Voltaire - Eastern Mantra 1980


Cabaret Voltaire - Western Mantra 1980

"It kind of culminated with the third album, Red Mecca. It's not called that by coincidence. We weren't referencing the fucking Mecca Ballroom in Nottingham!", recalls Kirk. 

Purely through its sonic turbulence and tense rhythms, Red Mecca also seemed to tap into closer-to-home issues: the urban riots of summer 1981, unrest stoked by mounting unemployment as Thatcher's deflationary policies kicked in, then ignited by insensitive policing in inner-city areas.

Pere Ubu's first singles

Pere Ubu formed from the ashes of singer David Thomas's and guitarist Peter Laughner's previous band Rocket from the Tombs, a less obviously art-warped proposition modeled on the raw power of the Stooges and MC5. Pere Ubu's inaugural act was recording one of Rocket from the Tombs' least characteristic tunes as a single. In Ubu's rendition, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" - an attempt to create the "total sonic environment" inside American bombers as they set off on their World War II mission to flatten Japan's capital - became even more eccentric. It starts out like some loping, rhythmically sprained hybrid of Black Sabbath and reggae, speeds up a bit, dissolves into free-form splinters, flips back to avant-skank, lurches into a sort of doom-laden canter, then expires in a spasm of blistered feedback. Over six minutes long and almost prog in its structural strangeness, "30 Seconds" sounded about as far removed from the Ramones as, say, Yes did.

Pere Ubu - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo 1975

The band's next two singles, "Final Solution" and "Street Waves", sold very well in the U.K. and Ubu's first tour there in the spring of 1978 was greeted as the Second Coming. Emerging bands like Joy Division and Josef K were in the audiences, assimilating Tom Herman's fractured guitar, Tony Maimone's baleful bass-as-melody approach, and the ominous atmosphere of song like "Real World" and "Chinese Radiation".

Pere Ubu - Final Solution 1976


Pere Ubu - Street Waves 1976


Pere Ubu - Real World 1978


Pere Ubu - Chinese Radiation 1978