The Fall face up

Press, 19 August 1982, Page 18

The Fall face up

Look, know again. I looked at The Fall at the University of Canterbury on Tuesday evening. I know that they were messy (and unhappy with, the performance), but also that they were very, very good. Well, yeah, it’s the thing, you know, to have been to The Fall and say “cor, greht, amazing,” and so on. But their loud, brash “rock” had an effect. A very strong one. The drummers sealed my opinion. While Smith was the governor-general of the sweaty stage-front, Paul Hanley and Karl Burns (an original Fall member, now back in the fold) slammed out the rough rhythms. It was more than just twice as loud and playing the same thing. It was the backbone and the attack of The Fall, and there was plenty of that. “They say I sneer,” said Smith, on one of his recent discs. He. does. He cannot sing in the usual sense of the word. But his witty," sharp lyrics demand more than any soprano. Steve Hanley plugged a rough trail on bass to start the set, the drums began, Smith strode on, and with only a “good evening we’re The Fall,” held court with “Impression of J. Temperance.”

To keep their interest up, and that of their audiences, they swap instruments often.

Smith stooped to a. guitar, but gave it up in disgust, apparently, as it malfunctioned. Burns also played guitar, and Marc Riley alternated between guitar and strange sounding keyboards. He even played rimshots on Burns’s kit once. The set was a mixture of the old and the new, no requests. They did not play “Totally Wired" (“hardly ever do it now,” said Smith, earlier).

"Fantastic Life” and "Look, Know,” two familiar to me, were slabs of noise and pleasure, and something called “Marquis” (The Fall, funky?) showed that their wealth of unrecorded material contains surely some killers. When Smith, Scanlan, Riley, Hanley S., Hanley P., and Burns left the stage, the, audience just stood and stared at the empty space for several minutes. They didn’t know what to do.

A few souls thought that the old encore routine might work even with these cynics. Right again! The return, and the angry, annoying “City Hobgobblins,” Smith still not speaking to the masses.:

The end came after about an hour. The Fall were unhappy, we were not. It was fiery, Jack.

DAVID SWIFT.