Liverpool Carling Academy, Friday, 7th March 2008

Bang fucking bang the mighty Fall

Another fine performance

Set list you may well ask

Exploding Chimney
Wolf Kiddult Man
Latch Key Kid
Reformation
Mountain Energie
Fall Sound
I've Been Duped
50-Year Old Man
Tommy Shooter
Pacifying Joint

What About Us
Wings
White Lightning

There were more - drink sort of numbs my memory I'll update this post as I remember

ditch wings mark
one old song per gig please
(a different one)


in the fall tradition

I really liked Tommy Shooter, I Been Duped and Mountain Energei.

Shooter & Duped are great new tunes. Energei was great to hear again, nice long version, band got it wrong and got it right to great effect.

I liked the guy at the start, too, after lengthy Panda! Pander! Panzer! intro tape - got past the fucking duck joke

We are the Fall, from the long, long days!

The rest........................................
.....................I think I would prefer a nice cup of tea

I'm glad I heard the Fall do Wings
I'm sad the version I heard wasn't exactly inspired

The drummer (Eagle?) is an excellent musician, but where's the light and shade? Bam bam bam through song after song gets a bit dull

Dermot O'Leary is great at presenting Big Brother's Little Brother, but playing bass for the Fall........?

Wings was immense I thought, those cheepo airline snobs and all.

Good gig, first time I'd seen the new band and they really held it together, lead guitar quite sparse, bass solid, the drummer going like a train for most of the night and Elena bringing elegance, grace and a little subtlety to the proceedings. Tracks where it really worked for me were Exploding Chimney, Reformation, Duped (Elena's vocals are oddly compelling I think), Strange town, Tommy shooter and Wings - they should sack pacifying joint though.

It was great to meet up with everyone form the board - hopefully see you'se in Salford or Morecambe. Anyway I'm off to bed.

A great slab of live Fall, far far better than my last gig at Bolton, and thankfully not the disappointment reviews from earlier in the week suggested. Knob twiddling but no silencing. Band and MES looked happy.

They are a competent band, but there is no real danger or invention in their playing, especially the drummer which meant that Mountain Energei was easily my favourite.

6/10

Oh and I Ludicrous were on just long enough, far preferable to Safi!

A good night - nice to see some absent forum members too!

I counteracted effects of beer by writing the set down, I find there's still a train spotter element to my following this band for 30 years. Anyway:

Exploding Chimney
Wolf Kiddult Man
Reformation
Fall Sound
I've Been Duped
50-Year Old Man
Tommy Shooter
Mountain Energei
Pacifying Joint
----
Latch Key Kid
Strange Town
What about us?
---
White Lightning
Wings (full version)

About 70 mins - a rep of the Consortium was in attendence too, which is good news.

I thought it started flat but picked up from Tommy Shooter onwards so prob 6.5/10 and up to 8 by the end.

I Ludicrous were splendid. They finished with Preposterous Tales - and I had two friends called Ken with me - neither have Ken McKenzie tendencies tho. Any footie fans there may have noticed reference to 1990 FA Cup semi where the mighty reds somehow got beat by Palace in that Ken saw Palace score 4 goals away (semi-finals don't count). Droll. Although I wasn't too happy at the game at the time of course.

Great show last night, a VAST improvement over what I saw at Bolton.

Firstly, let me just say, I, Ludicrous were utterly fucking awful. How anybody could find that dross acceptable is outrageous. It's like if Mitchell & Webb formed a band; but stoned. Yuk.

I hated to be "that guy" but I just felt compelled to shout "You're fucking shite" at the end of their set.

Anyway, onto the real business:

Loved most of what I saw last night. The band were in fine fettle. The new songs sound shit-hot. Especially Tommy Shooter and I've Been Duped. I have a feeling the new album is going to surprise some people.

It's a shame Blindness was omitted, but we got Reformation instead. I'm glad Sparta was left off, this band's version at Bolton was a nightmare.

Any criticisms I have are aimed at two things: A decent but not great version of Wings and Greenway's playing. Somebody get him a lesson, he looked lost 50% of the time and made a hash of the verse/chorus transition of Mountain Energei.

This was my fourth Fall gig and by far the best.

I also had a hoarse voice afterwards, by virtue of shouting along to all of White Lightning.

Am contemplating catching another gig on this tour.

Ahead of last night's gig, I wasn't that enthused by the prospect of it. I saw this line up at the Ritz last summer and had the flavour of the experience akin to drinking water from taps in an old school - the flavour was slightly metallic, but otherwise insipid, and there was a fog of ennui suffocating all the senses, with only some faint clanking sounds audible in the background.

En route to the Academy, I informed the wife that I was really not looking forward to hearing Pacifying Joint, What about Us, and Sparta AGAIN. They have really been done to death.

So, to the gig. Bobbie Peru: Ding is a great bass player, but this has all been done before, and so I don't have any time for it. They reinforce the idea of 'rock music' as a dead art.

I loved I, Ludicrous. Anything that involves two fifty year old blokes unashamedly telling crap jokes on a jolly from their office jobs is fine by me. Give me incongruity over identikit every day.

The Fall. Great start: really enjoyed the daft ranty poetic bloke who set the scene well with his invigorating exposition of ridiculousness. This was reinforced by the first number, largely instrumental, which combined a sort of childish pub rock with joyously incompetent keyboard playing and the hi-hat breakdown from 'War Pigs'. I laughed out loud - I'm not sure if it was supposed to be such a hoot, but I loved it.

Thereafter it continued to be a fine riot. True, the songs are largely worryingly short on invention, other than a few pleasingly cheesy tempo changes. But this was more than compensated for by the blistering sound the band achieved at times. I guess the question is whether this compensation will also be in effect on the new record.

Funnily enough, the songs I liked most were those I thought I'd heard too much of. 'Pacifying Joint' had real bounce and 'What About Us' was a million times better than I've ever heard it before - Dave has done a great 'less is more' subversion of the bassline, and there was a near-perfect balance of space and growl. First time I've seen 'Fall Sound' nailed with a single-bass line up too. Shame no STSR though.

I also thought MES delivered things with a good deal of intent throughout. It was far from going through the motions: 'Mountain Energei' was particularly beautiful (as was 'Wings', in a more frantic way) due to the sense that there was something significant being conveyed, albeit one couldn't put words to what it was - and this, of course, is the great thing.

So, to sum up: few tunes; not very dextrous (I must say I do miss Orpheo); but The Fall are intent on making a loud, clattering, shouting, grating, aesthetically ignorant, insistent noise. We might not like it, but the trump card that makes them sound great is that they don't give a shit.

After years of unaldterated joy it feels churlish to have a pop at them but last night's Liverpool Academy gig was one of the worst Fall performances I've ever seen. The last time I saw them was about 4 years ago at the same venue when Mark was in a wheel chair, and they were magnificent, as good as I've ever seen them with some great moments like the 'I Can Hear the Grass Grow' duet (this was despite my concerns at that time that Mark had surrounded himself with more conservative/conventional musicians than in the past).

Last night however I thought, with the odd exception, they were dull. The band are a bunch of plodders who seem to find it hard to play as a unit and at times only have a rudimentary grasp of the material they are playing. Over the years the Fall have had a variety of musicians of differing abilities but usually with a strong sense of cohesion and musical invention (sometimes amazingly so, considering their age) - Riley, the Hanleys, Scanlon, Burns, Wolstencroft, Brix, Nagle, Bramah etc - I didn't see anything like that last night. A bunch of plodders.

I really rate Smith as a creative force in British culture but I wonder if the only people who can stay the course around him these days are yes men and therefore anyone with a strong creative compass won't get a look in - hence the current state of play. To hear one of my favourite Fall songs, 'Wings' (infact, one of my favourite songs by anyone) dismantled last night was painful. I like 'horrible noisy music' but that was a mess.

To be fair I had played most of the 3rd and 4th Peel sessions before I went out last night and was struck by how amazingly fresh and striking they still sound - so maybe I was expecting too much. But I don't really think so.

By the way, I'm sure I Ludicrous are nice blokes but their set last night was like watching a turn from an SWP Christmas party by people who are no where near as funny as they think they are.

last night's Liverpool Academy gig was one of the best Fall performances I've seen in recent times.

Anyone who says otherwise can feck off

Hey, Cobweb eyes, your experience was mine in Sheffield. And Autotech's in Bilston.

But how can you square such divergent reviews?

The fervent, nasty response to criticism evident in these postings suggests to me that dissent is very much not welcome. Seems people are unhealthily over-invested...

Yet every night so far is producing very contrasting reviews.

I think you're right. This band is a mere shadow. Something's lost.

I think that many negative comments are from fans trying to compare this Fall to a Fall from the 'good old days'. There's no point even trying to campare to The Fall 12 months ago. Different band.

You have to take what you see on the night.

I'm always 'entertained' by MES and his Fall.

I have no problems with people having a different take on gigs / recordings that I like/dislike. Healthy disagreement on such matters is what being a Fall fan is all about. As far as the Liverpool gig on Friday goes, my comments are based on seeing past Fall performances going back nearly 30 years and it seems fairly natural to compare - especially when the last time I saw them they were on blistering form. The current situation reminds me of when Lydon got rid of everyone who was any good in PIL and ended up using a bunch of 'Holiday Inn Musicians' or when Hancock dumped Kenneth Williams, Sid James and finally Galton & Simpson - the baby has most definately gone out wiith the bath water.

I hesitated before adding to this post, as I said, it seems incredibly ungrateful to criticise a band who have given me and many others enormous amounts of pleasure over such a long period of time. However, given that the very ethos of the band has never been to shrink from pointing the finger or pretending that things are other than they are, it seemed necessary to say something. When I wrote the first contribution to this I had honestly not read the negative responses to the other recent gigs - now I have, I see its not just me. My mate from Davyhulme who has followed them almost as long as I have and who was with me on Friday, was far less delicate in criticisms than I was.

The question I ask myself is, if Mark E Smith was a fan insteasd of being in the band, what would he have said about Fridfay's gig?

People expect so many different things from this group. They've been around for over thirty years, and went through so many phases, tried so many approaches. Just read the album reviews on this board: "career high", "masterpiece", "worst ever", "uninspired" - about the same album.

Here is a band that never sounded like a normal band, and they made a career out of always having something wrong with them. Of course you're going to have contrasting views and people giving up on them. I sometimes wonder what some of you guys are after.

Anyway, I've never seen the fall play live before. I'll see them for the first time next week. If I like it, if I am entertained, if they make me jump around (i don't go to gigs to turn into a pillar of salt) - and I say if, I don't want to read no patronizing crap about how i'm overinvesting myself or somehow missed the fact that they were up there and sucked.

As someone who can no longer watch The Fall (unless they come to Aus), I love reading these reviews and I love the divergence of opinion. And I appreciate the effort that some posters go to, to explain the effect of the gig on them, what they thought of it, positive or negative.

Unlike the above post, and some of the bollocks on the Corporation thread, obviously

The beauty of an open forum is you can say pretty much what you like, and if you are a bit delicate and have trouble with opinions other than your own i.e. -

''I don't want to read no patronizing crap about how i'm overinvesting myself or somehow missed the fact that they were up there and sucked.''

- you can look away and not bother reading them.

And another thing - from what I gather from the reviews, most people go to these gigs to stand there arms crossed and stare at the band. I don't want to act all new agey, and maybe it's just cause it's the UK, but if you got off your arse and at least moved around a bit and gave a little something back to the performers, they might just be encouraged a bit more and play with a little more fire.

Hear, hear! I agree that makes a lot more sense than telling people they're dramatically overinvesting themselves or missing the suckiness of it all.

And yes, and this is probably what you're having trouble with, I should have added that I wouldn't want to be told to fuck off in case I didn't like the performance either.

Its obvious that some of the negative comments are coming from long time Fall fans who are quite upset about the current state of affairs. They are taking this very personally, which is not surprising when they may well have followed the gruppe for nigh on 30 years. I’m a long time fan and feel very positive about what I’ve seen and heard on this tour.

When you fall (no pun intended) out of love with anything that you have spent half your life following you are bound to feel aggravated – I do think there are a lot of people who followed the band in their teens who try to recapture that feeling now they are in their 30’s, 40’s and maybe 50’s. This ‘aint gonna happen – they are what they are, accept them for that, but don’t try and compare them to what they meant to you a quarter of a century ago.

Maybe take a year or two off – absence makes the heart grow fonder don’t you know…

I've never followed The Fall to recapture my youth - infact what I've always loved about them is that constant element of surprise and invention. One of the things I always enjoyed about seeing them was that 90% of what they would play I had never heard before - they didn't play the hits - gigs never felt like going through the motions. I can't say the same about Friday's gig.

The suggestion that you can't crticise The Fall because 'they just are' seems ridiculous and one that seems completely at odds with the whole idea of the band and Mark E Smith himself (lets face it, he's never been one to pull his punches about the short comingsof others).

The Fall on friday night plodded.

I'm looking forward to hearing what Mopiranger thinks of his first Fall gig. His 'keep the band happy by moving around a lot' is hilarious - maybe they could wire us up to the PA and the lighting.

Thank you, and if it's okay with you, i'll share my opinion without telling anyone to fuck off or to stop overinvesting themselves.
In the meantime, I'll try and prepare myself as good as i can for experiencing a concert while standing in the middle of a bunch of frozen clothesstore dummies.

I'm with Mr Cobweb Eyes here looking forward to your review Mopi. And watch out for all those 50 year old men going mental in front of the stage!

The Gruppe have been better, and about a year ago I would have said you wouldn't get a better live experience. They are still good, but many on this board will be naturally comparing recent high points with the "middle of the table, no prospect of Europe but no chance relegation" form they seem to be in.

Still, I'm really hoping that Grant Showbiz has worked some magic for IWS and my faith will be enhance!

even long time fans would have very different views though - i remember being a lot more disillusioned with the group in the mid nineties than i have been in recent years. its up and down, not down down down

well i enjoyed it ,and thats why i keep going im sure for everyone its a personal thing ,and i don,t give a fuck what anyone thinks ,just happy that the group are still here to go and see .and on a personal note if the 4 fuckers who tried to pick a fight with me outside come on this board watch yer backs the next time i go to see the fall i will have my baseball bat in the car then we will see who gets the last laugh yer cunts