| Web Eyeballkid.com |
LiVE REVIEWS |
||
|
“Congratulations, you’ve just seen a shit Fall gig”. The Fall fans outside the Kentish Town Forum are not happy. The last hour that I’ve spent dancing, grooving, skanking and plain old rocking out, has apparently been disastrous. An hour late on stage, while a DJ bumbled his way through an odd set of cheesy house, punk rock classics, hip-hop and Smashing Pumpkins, Mark E Smith eventually joins his band and is promptly hit by a plastic glass from the crowd. In fact the bewildered looking Smith barely notices it and proceeds to mumble words vaguely connected with the music his band are cranking out. It’s not the only beverage receptacle that gets tossed on stage, until eventually the woman on the Korg storms to the front of the stage and throws a couple of cans back. But by that stage The Fall fans are really not happy as it’s the encore and the band is back, sans the man himself. So the glum Fall fans are feeling a bit ripped off, though as one veteran points out, he was once at a gig where the guitarist for the night was plucked from the crowd five minutes before the gig, so this one went off spectacularly compared to that. I guess then it’s all about expectations and luckily for me, I had none. I know little or nothing about The Fall. I’m only here because a friend, who is a novice fan, meaning he only owns about five of the gazillion albums Mark E Smith has put out over the past thirty years, came over from Dublin to see them. A novice probably can’t name more than a handful of the multitudes of musicians who came, played and left acrimoniously. I’m less than a novice, fascinated at how much Mark E Smith resembles wild man of snooker, Alex Higgins, and unfortunately it’s the later, playing snooker for drinks, Hurricane Higgins I mean. But Smith is a similar kind of magnetizing presence. He shuffles around the stage, hanging over one of the two mics he has set up, garbling in that sarcastic singing voice of his and generally looking annoyed / confused. And it’s great. Smith is actually more like Shane McGowan, though less in looks thankfully. They are both that particular type of degenerate genius who retains the ability to write great music, while barely seeming able to string a sentence together. Smith seems to have kept better control of his destructive urges and produces a prodigious amount of music that is, from what I’ve heard so far, of an extremely high quality. Live, this means a near infinite numbers of sets that can take in the diversity and range of The Fall’s remit, which is pretty much anything. Punk, rockabilly, drone rock, indie, reggae – it’s all covered here tonight by a band as tight as any you’ll see despite the high probability they will be getting their P45s by the end of the year. The can chucker on the Korg adds depth of flavour, with great pinches of funk and psychedelia, while Smith’s vocals provide the effortless focus. At times they’re rocking the venue so hard the ground seems to shake (though it could have been the ‘unique’ movements of the leather jacket wearing, grey beard dancing in front of me), while elsewhere they’re doing trance-inducing, feedback-soaked noise better than Spiritualized. When a band has been around for 30 years, you don’t expect them to be pulling great gigs out of the bag every night. Nevertheless, commiserations to The Fall fans unable to re-experience this incredible live show for the first time. I guess I must now count myself as one of them. words: Colm Larkin |