The best albums by The Fall
In the cantankerous and dismissive fashion that endeared fans to him so greatly, Mark E Smith once declared, “If you’re going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.” It might have been a throwaway line from the Prestwich poet, who seemed to conjure up quotable lines on an hourly basis, but that quote is reflective of the musical revolution that The Fall started, from their initial formation in 1976 right up until Smith’s passing in early 2018.
Punk rock acted as the trigger for The Fall’s formation, with Smith cobbling a group together after seeing that infamous Sex Pistols gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. However, the band never quite fit into the city’s punk scene – alienation and a sense of being outsiders would go on to become recurring themes throughout their time together.
After all, Smith and the early line-up of the band took a greater deal of influence from the literary world of Camus, Yeats, and HP Lovecraft than anything that was going on within the sweat-stained walls of The Roxy Club down in London. They weren’t quite punk, but they weren’t exactly anything else, either.
Defining the sound that would, years later, become known as post-punk, The Fall set themselves apart from every other group in the north of England. Smith’s innovative songwriting and sneering attitude were always at the forefront of the band’s appeal, lending them a sense of importance and profundity that made virtually every other band seem obvious.
While this kind of searing experimental art rock meant that mainstream success often eluded the band, Smith always stuck rigidly to his artistic principles, and The Fall amassed an extensive legion of cult followers as a result. For the uninitiated, though, breaking into that cult can seem like an impossible task.
How can one begin to tackle a discography spanning nearly 40 years and incorporating 31 studio albums, 59 live records, and countless groundbreaking singles, without facing the wrath of The Fall’s ageing 6Music-dad audience? It is a treacherous task, but your pals at Far Out have graciously collected a selection of the best Fall albums to give you the greatest start in your quest to conquer the subversive post-punk mastery of one of Britain’s greatest bands, The Fall.
Far Out’s list of the best albums by The Fall:
The Fall’s most accessible album: ‘The Frenz Experiment’
Release Date: February 29th, 1988 | Producer: Simon Rogers, Grant Showbiz, and Dian Barton | Label: Beggars Banquet
From their very beginning, The Fall acted in staunch defiance of the musical mainstream; the visceral sneer of Mr. Smith was never going to become a regular feature of Top of the Pops alongside the likes of Duran Duran or Cliff Richard. Still, the band had their brief moments of accessibility, when Smith turned down the subversive dissonance of their output to create something with a typically broader appeal. The 1988 masterpiece The Frenz Experiment is certainly among the more accessible moments in The Fall’s discography, as is reflected by the fact that it reached number 18 in the UK album charts upon its release.
Capturing the productive genius of that late-1980s period in The Fall’s repertoire, the album is awash with creativity and an expansive range of influences. Deviating from the norm of the group up until that point, the album has a distinct sense of optimism in its output, which adds another dimension to the dulcet Mancunian tones of Smith. In addition to the multitude of bona fide Fall favourites included on the album, the band also performed two cover versions for The Frenz Experiment, in the form of The Kinks’ ‘Victoria’ and R. Dean Taylor’s ‘There’s A Ghost In My House’.
In their own distinct ways, these two cover versions typify the sonic diversity of that period in The Fall’s history. ‘Victoria’, with all its satirical snark and nsotaliga-criticism of the Victorian era seems naturally suited to Smith’s vocals, while ‘There’s A Ghost In My House’ (a track not included on the original vinyl release of the album, though it did feature on the CD) is a truly bizarre effort. Nevertheless, the offbeat Fall rendering of the northern soul classic is telling of Smith’s ever-expanding repertoire of influences, which acts as the predominant driving force behind this particular triumph.
Defining track: ‘Carry Bag Man’
The album that captures the spirit of The Fall: ‘Totale’s Turns (It’s Now or Never)’
Release Date: May 5th, 1980 | Producer: Geoff Travis and Mayo Thompson | Label: Rough Trade
If you have ever spoken to a Fall fan for longer than five minutes, they will probably have told you that the band had to be viewed live to be truly understood. If this is true, which, let’s be frank, it probably is, it would certainly give some form of explanation as to why The Fall released nearly 60 live albums during their tenure, not including the countless bootlegs on top of that. The greatest of these live albums came in 1980, with the release of Totale’s Turns. An amalgamation of live shows from Doncaster, Bradford, Preston, and the band’s hometown of Prestwich, the record perfectly captures the spontaneity, aggression, and innovation of The Fall, as well as the indifferent reactions of the masses.
Typically, if a band decides to record a live album, they do so at a venue that is significant or impressive, but The Fall chose instead to record theirs at various barren working men’s clubs and failing clubs in run-down areas of northern England. The adoring cheers and chanting you might expect to find on a live album are not present, instead replaced with audible indifference and, at points, confrontation. “The difference between you and us is that we have brains,” Smith can be heard telling the audience at one point.
Musically, the album includes various material from the band’s early period, including tracks from their debut album Live at the Witch Trials, which had come out the previous year. That debut could easily have featured on this list, too, but the rough-and-ready, raw power of the live recordings on Totale’s Turns blows any studio recording out of the water. With Smith’s passing in 2018, the world will never experience another proper Fall gig, but this LP gives an unparalleled insight into the energy, violence and unpredictability of the band’s live shows.
Defining track: ‘Fiery Jack’
A cult classic: ‘Perverted by Language’
Release Date: December 12th, 1983 | Producer: Steve Parker | Label: Rough Trade
John Peel played an essential role in spreading the sounds of countless independent groups over the course of his extensive career in radio, so it is telling that The Fall always remained one of his absolute favourites. In fact, the late Radio One DJ selected the opening track of The Fall’s 1983 stormer Perverted by Language, ‘Eat Y’self Fitter’, as one of his Desert Island Discs. A core part of its appeal, both to Peel and to everybody else, lies within its inventiveness, and that certain sense of humour that permeates throughout virtually every lyric Smith ever wrote. The album’s opener is a prime example, but this album is chock-full of indisputable masterpieces.
Perverted by Language marks a pivotal point in the tenure of The Fall, one of old friends and new beginnings. For instance, the album saw the band return to their old friends at Rough Trade, who they had previously parted ways with in 1981. Most notably, however, this is the first Fall album to feature guitarist and Smith’s then-wife, Brix Smith. The American musician had a colossal impact on the band during her tenure, bringing with her key songwriting contributions and a litany of incredible performances. As such, this record marked the beginning of a bold new era of artistic expression for the band.
Aside from this feeling of renaissance, the album is also renowned for the conflict at its centre. The Fall might have rejoined Rough Trade, but this album drove an unavoidable wedge between the band and their label, owing largely to the independent label’s prioritisation of The Smiths, who were earning them a healthy pay packet thanks to their entries into the pop charts. Seemingly, even an independent label like Rough Trade was too mainstream-oriented to cater to The Fall.
Defining track: ‘Eat Y’self Fitter’
Another new era for The Fall: ‘Extricate’
Release Date: February 19th, 1990 | Producer: Craig Leon, Adrian Sherwood, Coldcut, and Mark E Smith | Label: Fontana
Just as Perverted by Language marked the emergence of a new era for The Fall, their 1990 effort Extricate reflected the end of that particular era. Constructed in the immediate aftermath of Smith’s divorce from Brix Smith, the album adopts a vastly different sound from the band’s previous efforts. The loss of Brix Smith’s accessible vocal style and guitar playing is notable, and the reintroduction of original guitarist Martin Bramah gives the album a strange feeling of being torn between the group’s past and future. You could call Extricate an outlier within the band’s discography, but then every album they ever made was an outlier in some form or another.
In addition to the typically abrasive post-punk sounds that the band had become synonymous with by this point in their history, the 1990 album also opened up their musical repertoire into a few new, unexpected avenues. Namely, the influence of dance music starts to creep in on this record, owing to the lead single ‘Telephone Thing’, which features production work from Coldcut and appears to reflect the growing Madchester movement dominating the music scene of The Fall’s home patch.
Even more captivatingly, though, the album features one of Smith’s most intimate, vulnerable moments in the form of ‘Bill Is Dead’. A slow, strangely romantic number which clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the songwriter’s recent divorce, the song quickly became a favourite among Fall fans, despite sounding completely unlike anything the band had ever recorded prior. Typically, this ethereal atmosphere would not last very long, as Smith sacked two of the band members during the album’s tour, and they quickly moved on to Shift-Work, which sounds completely different.
Defining track: ‘Bill Is Dead’
The Fall’s 21st-century masterpiece: ‘Fall Heads Roll’
Release Date: October 3rd, 2005 | Producer: Mark E Smith, Simon Archer, and Tim Baxter | Label: Slogan
Typically, when discussions around The Fall’s greatest work arise, the conversation is dominated by the raw power of their early efforts, like Live at the Witch Trials, or the unnerving pop potential of their most successful works, such as The Frenz Experiment. It is worth noting, however, that the band released 11 albums after the turn of the millennium, and many of them are deserving of a spot in that conversation, namely the 2005 album Fall Heads Roll. The last album released by the band before – yet another – major line-up change, Fall Heads Roll was largely and unuustly ignored upon its initial release, but it features some of the strongest songwriting efforts from throughout Smith’s career.
Inarguably, the album’s stand-out moment comes on ‘Blindness’ – of which two different versions were released, one for the UK pressing of the album, and one for the US. Featuring one of the greatest basslines ever recorded, the album is imbued with all the moodiness and conforational attitude that Smith could muster (which is quite a lot). Even if the album isn’t typically one of the band’s most renowned, ‘Blindness’ remains one of their most recognisable and beloved efforts, particularly from the modern age of their output.
In addition to the profound modernism of ‘Blindness’, the album is also notable for its cover of ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’, originally recorded by Roy Wood’s The Move in 1967. These songs came one after another in the track listing, perfectly reflecting the album’s unending mixture of old and new musical influences. Sure, it might not be as accessible as Frenz or as raw as Totale’s Turns, but Fall Heads Roll stands out as one of the band’s most innovative and well-rounded efforts.
Defining track: ‘Blindness’
The definitive best Fall album: ‘Grotesque (After the Gramme)’
Release Date: November 17th, 1980 | Producer: The Fall, Geoff Travis, Grant Showbiz, and Mayo Thompson | Label: Rough Trade
Every album recorded by The Fall was so vastly different from the last that to cite any one of them as the ‘definitive best’ invites no end of debate and conflict within the band’s extensive following. If we may be so bold as to pop our heads above the parapet, however, the 1980 masterpiece Grotesque (After the Gramme) takes some beating. Boldly capturing everything that made the post-punk period so enduring and infectious, The Fall demonstrate the incredible extent of their innovative genius on this record. With an unnerving country twang injected into Smith’s endearingly mirthless vocal performance, the album subverted all expectations, not just of The Fall but of every other post-punk and independent group in the process.
Unjustly, the album is often best remembered for the singles that preceded it, in the form of ‘Totally Wired’ and ‘How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’’, neither of which appeared on the original version of the album in 1980. These songs do feature some of Smith’s all-time greatest lyrics, but their quality is certainly matched by the material that was included on the track listing for Grotesque, including the storming opener ‘Pay Your Rates’, and its follow-up, ‘English Scheme’. Smith takes aim at everybody and everything over the course of the album’s runtime; it’s brilliant.
When casual listeners think of The Fall, this tends to be the album and inherent sound that they think of, and there is good reason for that. Not only does it feature some of the band’s most groundbreaking work, but it arrived at a key moment in the development of both the band and of independent music in general. Rough Trade were at the forefront of that early independent music scene, and Grotesque remains one of the most important, influential, and beloved albums the albel has ever produced, so it is no wonder that the sounds of The Fall from this period can still be heard in virtually every modern indie and post-punk band in the world.
Defining track: ‘Pay Your Rates’
