Arjan:
Haarlem 6.4

Short report from tonight's excellent entertainment, The Dutch branch of FallNet was pleasantly surprised.
After a Post Nearly Man bit from tape Fall take stage shortly before 10 pm. MES, Julia and three unknowns all in matching "uniforms" : white trousers, black shirt. Band sound a bit flat and nervous at the beginning but got better quickly. MES enjoying himself, no antics whatsoever. All in all close to 80 minutes, triple the time the last time I saw them around (Leiden)

setlist:
Sons of Temperance
Two Librans
Touch Sensitive
Antidotes
F'Oldin Money
Hot Runes
Way Round
Ketamine Sun
walk off group during intro Midwatch, walk on for the last minute
1st encore:
Mr. Pharmacist
Dr. Buck's Letter
walk off
2nd encore:
Das Katerer
Cyber Insekt
? (classic new song with driving rhythm and lots a lyrics which according to Al boasts the lines: "I live in the jungle. I am an African Man. I eat monkeys for breakfast". Best song on the night anyway [It's the Iggy Pop song African Man off New Values]. Smith started reading a two minute long piece of prose from a piece of paper : "Hotel Ibis Hotel Computer Man-uh. White man, I hate-uh you-ah!" Excellent stuff.
walk off
3rd encore:
Paintwork

Martin

Yep, Arjan is right about the lenght. Band starts at 22.05 finish at 23.15.
New line up since the Dublin gig:
Spencer (36)-drums
Jim-bass
Ben (23)-guitar
Mark (In real good shape white trousers and black shirt with roses print)
and Julia.
Spencer is better than Tom playing on with the tapes, Ben used to play in a Pink Floyd cover band he's a little bluesy at his solo's........(keep it simple or better leave them out!)
I was at the soundcheck in Sneek the day before and the band sounded real tight, I hoped Mark wasn't going to spoil it. Sneek gig was even better than Haarlem........
http://home.planet.nl/~kreme120

Al:

Arjan's comments on the Haarlem gig said it all really - an enjoyable night out and the best of the Fall concerts I've seen since 1992. The new band members still need to get to grips with some of the stuff - the slow bits in Sons of Temperance sounded dodgy - but for once the "constant sackings" policy actually made sense to me, and I began to wonder if perhaps Smith shouldn't have sacked Hanley/Scanlon et al sooner than he did. I don't mean that in a nasty way; just that the last few albums have had an unpredictability which - for a long time - Fall albums lacked. After all no one complains about orchestras or football teams constantly changing members.

Anyway - the highlight was indeed the new (or reworked) song. I suspect it'll mutate quite a bit more before ending up on an album, if that is the case. It started off with a lot of stuff about laptops and IBIS hotels, before going off on the African tangent. Very good; slotting neatly into the bulging file marked "Fall songs about computers and hotels".

Arjan:

Amsterdam 7.4

Good gig at De Melkweg but slightly different vibe from yesterday I thought.
setlist: Sons of Temperance
Two Librans (better version - they play both guitar parts now)
Touch Sensitive
Antidotes (longer improvised version than the day before)
F'oldin Money
Way Round
Ketamine Sun
after exactly 30 mins playing first walk off
Mr Pharmacist (also much tighter now)
Cyber Insekt
walk off
African Man
(short and less prose now - speeded up at the end which sounded weird. Halfway during this a drunken fan got on the stage from the sides, walked relaxedly to MES and gave him a hug. He first smiled but shoved him from stage right after. Not sure he was annoyed!)
again walk off
Dr Bucks' Letter (again a short version)
Hot Runes
and that was it for a whole 60 minutes in total. We all thought it was much better and tighter than Haarlem but Smith wasn't in a talkative mood : no prose between the songs and not much of it in African Man and Dr Bucks either unlike the night before. But a good and responsive crowd nevertheless. I fail to see the point of all those walk offs, just keeping the tension with the audience or something like that? It destroys the flow IMO. Twice during the breaks there was a Dutch guy on stage enthuising the crowd, no clue where that was all about really. O yes, the tour musicians seem to be members of Trigger Happy who supported them in the UK last november. So an enjoyable gig but I liked Haarlem better.

From: "neil ovey"
Subject: amsterdam

best fall gig in years. first good sign was smith striding on 30 secs into sons of temperence in splendid rose emroidered poker shirt, announcing good evening we are the fall and looking really into it. if this is the new line up i'm all for it. no v-sign or semi-detatched bullshit. like a group with a couple of singles out and on a roll. really raw and barely controlled. lots of mic switching/paper shuffling. couple of false starts and dat breakdowns, smith waving songs to a halt. sang half of touch sensitive without a mic. highlights were f-oldin money as the last time i saw them it was a lacklustre disgrace and a fucking brilliant dr. bucks -lyrics all over the place. bit short - 40 min and off. crowd were really into it - no shouting for greatest hits/obscure b-sides. someone comes on and shouts this aint just any band this is the fucking fall, which is how i felt on the night, and its been a while. scary when thier gigs are a 7 hr drive away. nice spooky waltz midwatch, antidote, ketamine sun, two librans (ok). cyber insect - really good, julia inaudible on backing vocals. encores of pharmacist, african man(?), bit of poetry, 30 secs of hot runes. went with someone who leaves the room if i put on one of their records and he came out buzzed. spent half the gig pissing myself laughing. bodes well for the british tour, i'd say. wish i could get to see it. a great night.

Mike Jones:
Subject: Fall Dublin 1997 pics

Pics from the gig, are now available at -

http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/otalgia

Thanks to JackD:
from the may 2001 Spin Magazine -- I just HAPPENED to pick it up -- 25 yrs of Punk Issue.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GOBBING

It's Christmastime in Manchester, England, 1977. The Fall are playing one of their earliest gigs (documented on _Live 77_), and the storm falling onto the stage isn't snowflakes. Guitarist Martin Bramah snaps at the crowd: "Will you stop fucking spitting!" Singer Mark E. Smith, half-swallowing the microphone to avoid swallowing anything else, drawls, "Biiiiinngoooooo we have uh mouth trouble at the front of the stage. Our saliva cannot be kept...in its...MOUTH-UH!" Gobbing -- the act of firing phlegm at the stage -- was the bane of early U.K. punk bands. When Joe Strummer got hepatitis in early '78, he was pretty sure it was from accidentally swallowing spit from the audience. Adam Ant reportedly wore an eyepatch less for the "pirate" effect than to cover up his gob-induced conjunctivitis. Poor Siouxsie Sioux caught both maladies. Nobody's exactly sure how gobbing started. Johnny Rotten claims he use to spit onstage because of his sinuses; Siouxsie & the Banshees' Steve Severin blames Damned drummer Rat Scabies. Scabies passes the buck to the Sex Pistols and an early gig the Damned played with them: "I think it was Steve Jones who gobbed first, and then I gobbed back. But there was a lot of onstage gobbing anyway. Then it spread into the crowd. And spread all over many of the bands afterward." ---
Douglas Wolk

hit the north from the cambridge 88 LP is on the free uncut cd this month.

From the guestbook

I'm amazed that no site has mentioned the track 'Cheap Space Chant' by Timekode. It features an electronically generated clone of Mark E Smith's voice (he apparently approved!) Visit: www.timekode.co.uk

This is what Brix is up to nowadays (from the Telegraph magazine):

i've scribbled a piece about them, just common-or-garden stuff really (an 'introduction' type thing), for my website . If you think it would warrant being linked to, please do!

http://callbox1.homestead.com/fall.html

Messers Radcliffe and Lard talkin about Beefheart and you know who

http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,448649,00.html

Peter encounters the kids on the street:

I was out at the pub though and on a related history of popular music theme, I made a discovery regarding the survival of punk rock. As I will now relate.

3 punk blokes and a punk girl came in the pub. They were old school punks with studded jackets bearing the names of Subhumans and Discharge. One of them sat at the bar and spat at the barman's back, after he was asked to turn off his ghetto blaster (he was listening to the Prodigy). He unfortunately wasn't very good at spitting and the spit dribbled down his chin. The barman didn't notice. Then the punk ripped a hole in a newspaper, which he held up over his face pretending to read, before drinking his pint through the paper. At this stage the other punks all started laughing. One of them came over to me and my pals and started talking about a pigeon they'd caught. This pigeon couldn't fly. It had been brought back to the punk squat for them to take photos of it and he started handing the photos round. The punks had put a variety of polystyrene cups over its head, with different faces drawn on. These faces were either goofy or aggressive or both. With a fierce face on it, the punk called the pigeon "the battle bird" and started laughing hysterically. Behind the bird in the photos was a fried chicken box ("original taste of Arnold's"). Then he showed a photo with the pigeon wearing a paper superhero cape made out of a chip bag. Again he fell about laughing saying "is it a bird?" (remember, the pigeon couldn't fly). Despite laughing myself I'd had mixed feeling about all these activities until I saw the final photo in the series, which had nothing to do with pigeons. It just showed his mate pissing on to a photo of Craig David.