![]() We're used to hearing his meteoric imagination plugged into that inimitable voice, wrestling with the terror and hilarity of life out there in the raw sprawl of the city, thorns and all. He is separate from the forces around him. There is a fire and a hardness to MES that is all his own. 'Birthday Song' - The Marshall Suite (1999) Beyond the shock of Smith writing a love song and singing about orgasms, the music and production's gorgeous too – from the opening guitar intro to the lush organ and sexy rhythm, it's as close to an audio hug as I've ever heard. They never really did bother the charts, but I remember John Peel announcing that his listeners had voted this number one in his 1990 Festive Fifty and he was so overjoyed that he might have even cried. It's a tranquil, beautiful moment in a career of mostly noise and chaos, recorded at a time when The Fall almost went mainstream. But that just makes 'Bill Is Dead' all the more surprising and significant: it's an extremely rare case of Mark E Smith dropping his guard for a few minutes, not just being warm but actually, genuinely romantic. I'm always drawn to the quieter moments of albums, the tender, introspective slow jams, but of course there's not a lot of them in The Fall catalogue. ![]() Smith lays out the band's mission statement - "I must create a new regime, Or live by another man's", a maxim The Fall adhere to to this day. Steve Hanley's bass-line battles Riley's atonal guitar over the scraps of the devil's interval. 'Before The Moon Falls' is the finest example of this measured approach and stands shoulder to shoulder with 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' and 'Release The Bats´ as one of the most deliciously horrific gothic rock tracks of all time. The latter sees them slowing down, swapping the aggression of original guitarist Martin Bramah for ex-bassist Marc Riley's more patient approach and settling on the more foreboding sound they've largely stuck to since. The former is the most straightforward of the band's releases, an 100mph punk album with nary a hint of 'post' to be found across its 17 tracks. Though The Fall's first two albums Live At The Witch Trials and Dragnet were both released in 1979, they could not sound more different. So read on as we celebrate four decades of invention and reinvention, and six of the life of the great man himself. But when did The Fall begin? I've long nurtured a theory that Mark E Smith's militant approach to the group is not to do with his own ego or control freak psychology but because in its earliest years he spotted the magical potential of what it could be: Mark E Smith has always served The Fall, the hip priest for a greater power. ![]() Smith this weekend we decided to ask our writers, friends and favourite musicians to pick their favourite Fall songs and write about them. So to celebrate the 60th birthday of the great Mark E. We've written so much on The Group over the years that for a while we had a section devoted to them to keep things simpler. ![]() Even today, after a day of weary mithering at the rubbish music that turns up in the postbag claiming it is extraordinary, we have Perverted By Language on in the background. Indeed, perhaps that flash of inspiration occurred when, psychically-refreshed, we leapt around to 'Hit The North' in the pub at ATP in December 2004. ![]() I am fairly sure that on the afternoon late in 2007 when John and I first put together the idea of what The Quietus would become on a few bits of paper, we had The Fall on in the background. This article was originally published in March 2017 to celebrate Mark E. ![]()
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