sweet effay

The Fall, eh? Great band no question, so I won’t labour the point here. My initial enthusiasm for them coincided with the acquisition of my first Walkman. Unhappily I came to the conclusion that, for optimal sound quality, stuff which would sound really good on a Walkman would be best purchased as pre-recorded cassettes. There was something so right about listening to the wrathful tones of Mark E. Smith whilst heading to work on a train that I now have a lot of Fall tapes which are deteriorating in quality, rather than a nice stack of vinyl I could tape from whenever I needed to. What can I say? I was young and the technology looked exciting.

A second upside of having lots of Fall tapes was the pleasure of playing them in the car: Who wouldn’t want to listen to ‘Mr Pharmacist’ as they drove back from a drug deal in North London, or ‘Hit the North’ as they headed up the A1? Well Mrs effay actually, but happily I used to have a strategy in hand to deal with this.

As the non-driving, music obsessed, record collecting sad-boy in the effay Tactical Nuclear Unit, I am the only one allowed to access the tape collection in order to choose what we will enjoy on long journeys. Being a loving husband, I would naturally include some material for my better half’s enjoyment, but carefully select stuff that you couldn’t hear very well over the noise of the engine (mid period Tangerine Dream, folk musicians with acoustic guitars, etc.). This would lead nicely into the following conversation:
“I can’t really hear this and it’s sending me to sleep. Put something else on”
Insert The Frenz Experiment.
“Oh no, not The Fall! What else have you got with you?”
“Um, not much; just a bootleg of Zappa in the rehearsal studios and my industrial compilation.”
“Oh God! Just leave The Fall on then.”
And I lean back and relax as we go zooming up the A1.

Still, with the advent of the Little effay, these simple pleasures are behind us. Long car journeys are now accompanied by the sounds of Stephen Fry and Jane Horrocks pretending to be Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that my Fall tapes are crumbling; curse them! So I am being forced to buy some of them again on CD. Happily this isn’t all bad news because of the marvellous reissues coming out on Castle with loads of bonus material. I picked up Hex Enduction Hour the other week, and whilst straining my eyes on the ridiculous small print of the fold-out cover thing, I found this by Daryl Easlea:

All Fall fans know that Hex fucking rocks. [The leap from Grotesque to Hex is] like the leap – and by now I now [sic] you well enough to say - from Obscured by Clouds to The Dark Side of the Moon.

Well you don’t know me as well as you think Daryl. Leaving to one side the fact that Grotesque fucking rocks as well, the idea that one could compare Hex to Dark Side is simply scandalous. One is a shambolic masterpiece, whilst the other has a couple of moments, but is mostly useful for seeing whether your speakers are working properly. I think that The Reaper has summed up all there is to be said for Dark Side (although, it must be said that we should probably be reassessing the musical credentials of the theme from Are You Being Served? now that we know it was the last thing Jhonn Balance sang on stage before his death). However, what is even more galling is that Obscured is much better than Dark Side. Okay, it’s rather bitty as soundtracks tend to be, but it’s the last album one can listen to all the way through without Roger Waters trying to make deep and meaningful statements with all the grace and subtlety of that later great prog rock lyricist: Neil Peart of Rush (I must confess that I haven’t heard the post-Waters Floyd because I was so sickened by The Wall, but my spies tell me I shouldn’t bother).

I rather like Pink Floyd (okay then, I really, really, like bits of Pink Floyd) but their best years were behind them after Meddle; which itself contained two tracks of absolute genius and a pile of dreck. Even if Hex Enduction Hour is the Fall’s finest hour (it isn’t, so there!) to compare it to Darkside of the Moon seems a very bizarre thing to do. Daryl proceeds to mention Radiohead as well, but let’s not go there shall we?