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Review: The Fall, Marble Factory
The repetitive rumble of The Fall has rolled along with a shambolic glory for the past 40 years. Born in the maelstrom of punk and yet defiantly apart from everything, Mark E. Smith – and his multifarious lineups – has never let up on his surrealist Mancunian monologues while trends around him have come and gone.
The fittingly post-industrial interior of the Marble Factory is the setting for this latest Bristol Fall visit – a large crowd of mainly middle-aged men and a smattering of younger converts gathering for the latest slurred mutterings and incoherent ramblings.
But what ramblings they are…surrounded as ever by a small tight unit – this latest incarnation have been together for a startling nine years, a remarkable feat in the shifting sands of The Fall’s membership history – Smith, gaunt and wizened like a cadaverous granddad, paces the stage, fiddling with microphones and pieces of lyric sheets while intoning amid addictive garage hooks.
is needed now More than ever
Smith has picked at random from the music tree over the years, and The Fall’s sound has encompassed various kind of twisted influences within its own very definite repetitive groove – rockabilly was always there, but there have been nods to electronica and dance sensibilities and even an almost free jazz thing going on, especially a few years ago.
Tonight it’s garage mainly from their last studio album – no 31 officially, although there are many more unofficially – 2015’s Sub-Lingual Tablet, the chugging, jaggedly rhythmic abrasive guitar-driven sound, with bass and drums, creating a pounding discord for Smith to weave his spiky urban poetry over…
Smith plonks away randomly at his own mini-synth stage-side, or scrapes his microphone over the keys, singing from two mics at times – keyboardist Elana Poulou is absent from the band tonight but the others make up for it like an infectious Manc power trio.
Apart from two, I hesitate to say it, almost death-metallish squalls bizarrely buried in the middle of this hour-long set with what sounded like a recorded voice-over other than Smith’s, this was The Fall on pretty good form, with numbers like Wise Old Man and a cover of Big Bopper’s classic rockabilly anthem White Lightnin’ standing out.
The encore is snarling garage rock, and all us oldies and the younger generation so influenced by this/these legends, leave smiling, satisfied and kind of bemused. It’s The Fall, it’s how it should be…
Photograph by Elfin Griffith
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