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Fall News


The Fall play ...

21 Jan. Teatro Cervantes, Malaga, Andalucia, Spain
5 March The Robin 2, Bilston (near Wolverhampton), wegottickets, ticketline. MES's 50th birthday.
9 March King George's Hall, Blackburn, wegottickets, ticketline
10 March Carling Academy, Liverpool, seetickets, wegottickets, ticketline
12 March Liquid Room, Edinburgh, wegottickets, ticketline
13 March Liquid Room, Edinburgh, wegottickets, ticketline
14 March The Tunnels, Aberdeen, tickets available from 1 Up Records, Belmont St., Aberdeen (01224 624662)
15 March The Tunnels, Aberdeen, tickets available from 1 Up Records, Belmont St., Aberdeen (01224 624662)
16 March The Ferry, Glasgow, wegottickets, ticketline
17 March The Ferry, Glasgow, wegottickets, ticketline
21 March Irish Centre, Leeds, wegottickets, ticketline
22 March Picturedrome, Holmfirth (near Huddersfield), seetickets, ticketline
26 March The Point, Cardiff
27 March The Phoenix, Exeter, wegottickets, seetickets
28 March Fez Club, Reading, wegottickets, seetickets. Not listed on the official site but Alan Wise has confirmed the date.
29 March Old Market, Hove (next to Brighton), seetickets
31 March ? Pavilion Theatre, Brighton, according to the venue and seetickets. Not confirmed on the official site, but tickets are selling fast through 01273709709 or the Brighton Dome.
1 April

Hammersmith Palais, London, wegottickets, seetickets, ticketline. Apparently the last ever gig at the Palais, which is being knocked down to make way for a block of flats.

However, there's now a rumour of a second night at the Palais.

3 April Zodiac, Oxford, wegottickets, seetickets
4 April Zodiac, Oxford, wegottickets, seetickets
9 April ? Jilly's Rockworld, Manchester, according to Sanctuary and ticketline
1-3 June ? Wychwood Music Festival, Cheltenham Racecourse, according to the Independent newspaper

Alan is offering a cheaper option for some of the gigs via cheque & SASE; details on the official site.

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added 22 February

In today's Independent:

The Fall: On the rise again
Not for the first time, Mark E Smith has reformed The Fall. Tim Cumming hears why
Published: 22 February 2007

"There was something in the air there. I think I'm pretty psychic, but I should've picked up from it." Mark E Smith - for 30 years now at the helm of The Fall, the group he has driven roughshod through three decades of restless experimentation and assault - is reflecting on a tumultuous year that saw, not for the first time in the group's history, the departure of virtually the whole line-up, midway through an American tour.

"They were losing it. Very much. We did a session in Lincolnshire in March. They had eight days in a studio and came back with 10 Eric Clapton-like tunes, and it was just like not good enough. It was flat as a pancake. I should've seen that."

Their departure was abrupt. Following a gig in Phoenix, Arizona, three of the band left without bothering to tell their boss. "Me and Elena got up in the morning and they were gone," he says. "I didn't really have any idea. We'd only been there five days." He laughs - it's not unlike the opening shout of laughter on "Over! Over!", the first track from the forthcoming album. "Dead spoilt, the British. They lost the bottle. It was very embarrassing." "Bottle" is something Smith has never been short of.

"There were all the usual excuses, that I'm drunk and all this," he says. "I spilt some beer over the driver. Flicked a bit of paper at him. To wake him up, y'know. But I was shouting at them." He leans forward. "I was shouting at them because they were half asleep." We're sitting in a corner of the Malmaison in Manchester, Smith's bar of choice for the visiting press. He's here to talk about the new Fall's new album. Reformation Post TLC, a triumphant follow-up to last year's superb Fall Heads Roll, the title of which now reads like a premonition. Again, nothing new. Smith has long been known for "precog" moments in his work.

"I did start the year off wanting to make a personal LP," he says. "Looking at it in retrospect, it does look bitter and twisted." He picks up my promo copy and looks it over. "But there's nothing there, really. Reformation's new, but that's nothing to do with it either."

He drops it back down on the table. "You don't see it objectively, when you're doing it. 'Oh, it's all about the group, Reformation's the group.' It does come out, I can see that. Probably a bit of precog. Maybe."

The Fall is not a group known for having much of a comfort zone, but his musicians' departure must have been a shock even for a calamity-seasoned Smith. "I didn't really know what I was going to do," he says, "but I wasn't going home."

With the bulk of an American tour to complete, and studio time booked in LA, Smith had to work from scratch, and fast. US record company Narnack waded in with its contacts book. "It was through somebody they knew. He was from LA, I can't remember his name, and he just said, 'Do you need help?' and I said, 'Yeah'."

LA-based drummer Orpheo McCord was first to answer the call. "It was basically, do you wanna be in The Fall for a US tour," he tells me on the phone from LA. "The first show was the following day." McCord brought with him guitarist Tim Presley and the impressively hirsute bassist Rob Barbato, both from LA psych-garage band Darker My Love.

"That night we went in to rehearse for about three hours," remembers McCord, "and did the first show the next day in San Diego." He laughs, with a lingering tone of disbelief. "We'd never met Mark and had heard all these stories. A lot of people said 'be careful', but a lot of what people say about him I haven't found to be true. We didn't know what to expect, but we definitely didn't expect to go in and record an album. That's the intrigue of the band: you never know what you're gonna get."

Neither did Smith. "I hardly knew them, and went onstage and I was amazed. Really good. It could have gone horribly wrong. They could have been a bunch of musos. I was a very lucky man." That cackling laugh again. "We were playing before that other fucking lot got home." Reformation was recorded in Los Angeles after just a handful of live gigs, and finished in the summer at Lisa Stansfield's studio in Rochdale.

Augmented by a second bassist, Dave the Eagle, the new Fall sound is an opaque alloy of spectral garage rock earthed by Smith's reductivist brio and a thundering bass. The guitar has an echoey mid-Sixties feel, and with Elena Poulou's more prominent synthesiser work, the album's sonic backdrop is sometimes reminiscent of 70s Krautrock or even early Hawkwind.

Reformation possesses an intimacy that's a rare commodity on a Fall album. Smith's associational poetics - as if he's uprooted whole landscapes and left only a few jumbled street signs as clues - compels itself into your subconscious despite your not knowing what the words are about. The title track's driving two-note bass riff is pure, unadulterated Smithery, with the drums reversing the rhythm before MES's declaiming, fractured throat-singing ("Cheese states! Black river! Fall motel!") turns the song into a Fall classic.

Elsewhere, Merle Haggard's "White Line Fever" finds itself mixed up with the home-brewed Krautrock of "Das Boat", a largely instrumental sonic assault clocking in at almost 11 minutes. "It just got out of hand, that track," admits Smith. "That's me and Elena. I was going to take it off, but people love it." There are self-referential numbers - "Fall Sound", and the wonderfully disrespectful "Insult Song" which charts the journey of his new band from the beaches of LA county to the hills of Lancashire.

There's a long history of occult references in Smith's work. The mid-Victorian atmospherics of "Coach and Horses" is another pull on that long-running esoteric thread. "I look through an 1860s' window pane, see coaches and horses moving round in the slashing rain", he slurs, one of the lyrics that haunts the rest of the album in the same kind of way that restless spirits haunt the work of MR James and Arthur Machen - both major figures in the Smith canon.

"I used to be in the Machen society," exclaims Smith. "Been a fan since I was 16. Fanatical and all. He's one of the best horror writers ever. MR James is good, but Machen's fucking brilliant. Wrote the first drug story, The Novel of the White Powder. Before Crowley, all of them. Have you read The Great God Pan? Terrifying."

The society's monthly newsletters included excerpts from Machen's unpublished diaries, the source of much of his work. "It's like another world. Goes to all these places, like, 'this is where the working class hang out, this is where the dandies hang out... I went in this pub, a bloke comes in with a knife in his back'. Like, the real occult's in the pubs of the East End. In the stinking boats of the Thames, not in Egypt. It's on your doorstep mate. Strikes a chord with me."

In 2007, the old John Peel adage, "always different, always the same", still holds true for The Fall. And as a new generation of groups jostle for prominence, Smith stakes out his own unique terrain without compromise or hesitation. "It's a strange business," he comments. "It's an old cliché, but what it does to people. Go and watch Pop Idol. I've never been like that." His advice to young bands? Well, that's what "The Usher", one of the album's quirkiest gems, is about. He laughs. "I did an A-to-Z for some music magazine of how to be in a group. Things like A: count your money. B: do not mention The Fall in any shape or form." That laugh again. "It won't do you any good at all."

'Reformation Post TLC' is out now on Slogan. The Fall play 'The Independent' Stage at the Wychwood Festival in June.

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added 20 February; updated 21 February

There was an Mark E. Smith interview in the 18 February issue of the German publication Welt am Sonntag -- one of the better MES interviews. There are scans on the message board and a translation by the unseen. And here's the online German version.

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added 20 February

The 2003 Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry did a Q & A for last Saturday's Telegraph Magazine (17 February), wherein he mentions the Fall. He also selected Hip Priest on his recent Desert Island Discs spot.

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added 12 February; updated 16 February

Mark Fisher has posted part two & part three of his excellent essay Memorex of the Krakens: The Fall's Pulp Modernism. In case you missed it last May or want a reread, here's part one.

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added 12 February

Brix Smith's track Star (a remake of Glam-Racket) is on a new compilation Various Artists: Best of the VIP Lounge Part 1. You can listen to the track on cdbaby.com.

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added 6 February

There's an MES interview in the February 2007 issue of the free UK zine The Stool Pigeon. Many thanks to Electric Triangle for scanning it in. For some reason the interviewer thinks the USA tour split was in 2005 and not last year, which lessens his seven-year cycle hypothesis a bit.

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added 6 February

First the end of the Hammersmith Palais is nigh, now the world's oldest record shop (in Cardiff of all places) is threatened. Please sign this petition to save Spillers Records. Monty says "Do it now!"

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/spillersrecords/

We the undersigned recognise the importance of the world's oldest record shop - Spillers Records, founded in Cardiff in 1894 - and believe that every effort should be made to preserve its presence at its current location at the Hayes in Cardiff. We call on the landowners, Helical Bar to acknowledge that Spillers Records is an asset to Cardiff's city centre and part of our musical heritage and to reflect this view by charging an affordable rent to safeguard its future.

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added 5 February

Dr. Freak's Padded Cell (aka Steve Evets) has posted a video on youtube with "Packing a Gun" (featuring Mark E. Smith) as the background music. I preferred Steve's The Adventure of Edwin O'Body video.

In other MES collaboration news, the Ghostigital track "Not Clean" was voted Song Of The Year at the Iceland Music Awards last week. Here's an article on the awards ceremony for my Icelandic readers.

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added 31 January

The Blue Orchids are selling a recently unearthed 1981 Manchester gig recording on their site, http://www.blueorchids.net/. There's not much in the way of info on what kind of files you're downloading (I'm assuming mp3, but at what bitrate?) nor samples to listen to.

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added 30 January; updated 6 February

A sneak peek of the Narnack edition of Reformation Post-TLC with the Bob Gruen cover. Good to see Safi Sniper next to Orpheo. Am I the only Fall fan who likes his support set?

Narnack says it'll be an enhanced CD with video clips from the Hiro Ballroom show, so no bonus DVD after all.

Also, according to eil.com there's going to be a Japanese CD edition (the first since Cerebral Caustic?) out on 14 February. A bit on the pricey side...

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added 27 January

This is from a magazine called Hardcore Is More Than Music. Can someone send in a legible scan? I think it's in the latest issue.

Here's the original article (many thanks to Michael for sending it in), submitted to the magazine around 2004. The printed version may be slightly different.

Mark E. Smith, lead-singer of The Fall, is not renowned as a smooth talker. In June 2000 he called Rodger Evans (of The List) ‘a fucking fat sack’‚ and in December 1997 his interview with John Perry (of Loaded) ended with Smith calling him ‘a fucking dead-leg cunt’.

However, alongside such misdemeanours Smith maintains a reputation as a bit of a ladies man. When asked by Caitlin Moran on the television programme Naked City whether he liked sex he replied ‘I’ve fucked more women than you’ve ever seen’. Quite a boast, but how has it been possible? Looks are not everything, obviously. Smith’s rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle has long since provided him with a terminally ravaged aspect. And money can’t be a factor either. Despite being one of the most prolific and hard-working musicians around, Smith’s records hardly ever worry the chart compilers, and a BBC3 documentary on his ‘Liquid Assets’ would soon turn into a depressing tale of broken contracts, bankrupt record labels, and expensively cancelled American tours. There’s no chance then of Smith turning into Hugh Heffner and buying a mansion on the hill. He prefers to stay close to his working class roots. When his first wife Brix, a glamorous, expensively educated American, followed him back to Prestwich, Manchester, she found herself living in an unheated flat with an outside windowsill acting as an ersatz refrigerator for their bacon and eggs.

Given such handicaps it soon becomes obvious that what makes Smith so attractive must have something to do with the charisma accumulated over the past 25 years as the leader of the cult band of all cult bands. Brix described this attraction to me very eloquently. The first time she saw him on stage she thought Smith looked ‘troubled and mean’ but still she was spellbound: ‘I wasn’t attracted to him at all, particularly, I was just fascinated by his mind and what he was thinking, what he was saying’. Soon after the gig the two met, went to a party and Smith proposed. He gained wife and The Fall acquired a new guitarist. It wasn’t the first time Smith had mixed his domestic and working lives: early girlfriend Una Baines played keyboards, Kay Carroll was the band’s first manager, his second wife Saffron Prior ran the band’s fan club (after their divorce she sold his typewriter on the internet), Julia Nagle played keyboards and her current replacement happens to be Smith’s latest wife, Eleni Poulou. What does Smith think about this precarious work-life balancing trick? In a recent interview he told Mick Middles: ‘You should never have women in a band. Completely screw things up, they do. Bloody women in bands’. Touring, especially appears to have been a cause for extreme tension. For example the beginning of the end of Smith’s relationship with Nagle probably started in 1998 when after a gig in New York he was arrested and charged with third degree assault and haressment charges after an ‘incident’ with Nagle in their hotel room. The court case ended with Smith promising to undergo an alcohol treatment program and anger management counselling. Throughout all these relationships and marriages, however, there has always been one stable female presence in Smith’s life - his mother. It seems appropriate, therefore, to end this prurient speculation with some motherly thoughts, as told to Middles, on the subject of her son’s love life: ‘He really needs women with him. But in his job there are so many things going on and the girls are all round ... it must be very hard. I wouldn’t have liked it myself. But he’s a romantic, Mark, you know. He always was’.

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added 27 January; updated 2 February

From the 21 January Manchester Evening News (thanks to Paul for the scan)

Here's another one from the internal BBC publication Aerial, thanks to Monty.

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added 5 January; updated 25 January

Mr. Mark E. Smith: Fantastic Man

There's an interview with Mark in issue 4 (Autumn/Winter 2006) of the Dutch "lifestyle" magazine Fantastic Man ($20 in the USA). Many thanks to Peter for a scan of the article (PDF, 460k)

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added 24 January

In case you haven't seen it before, here's the Channel M episode of Frank Sidebottom's TV show from last month where he, David Soul, Paul Ryder, and Little Mark E. Smith sing "Hit the North" at the end.

If you want to skip directly to the HTN performance, there's a clip on youtube.

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added 24 January; updated 26 January

Sanctuary has very kindly sent me a copy of Reformation Post TLC (or is it "Post-TLC Reformation", as on the front cover?) and it really is a cracker, as John Peel might've said. The best Fall album in a long while, I think. The longest, too, at 61m:22s. For best results, play loud with a slight bass boost.

It appears that the UK release date has been pushed back a week to 12 February.

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added 22 January

Three additions to the site's photo archive, thanks to Gary Walker and Slick:

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added 21 January; updated 22 January

21 January 2007 - Teatro Cervantes, Malaga, Spain:

actual set played:

My Door Is Never / Pacifying Joint / Theme from Sparta FC / Over! Over! / Fall Sound / What About Us / Mountain Energei / I Can Hear the Grass Grow // Hungry Freaks, Daddy / Blindness // Reformation / Mr. Pharmacist

MES / Eleni / Tim / Rob / Orpheo / Dave

Reviews, photos, and links to youtube clips on the message board. Thanks to Mark (who else?) for the setlist.

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added 20 January

From today's Times Online:

The Legends of The Fall

Thinker, drinker, fighter — as Mark E. Smith reaches 50, Nigel Kendall salutes the last punk in town

When David Bowie turned 50 ten years ago, he marked the occasion with a giant concert in Times Square, New York. When Mark E. Smith, the lead singer of the Fall, celebrates his half-century, on March 5, it will probably be at The Robin 2, in Bilston, near Wolverhampton, where his band will be playing as part of a tour to promote their new album, Reformation TLC.

I say probably, because at the time of writing, less than two months before the gig is to take place, the whole Fall tour is unconfirmed. While the figures we salute as the mavericks of rock — from Bowie to the Stones to Jarvis Cocker — have their diaries filled two years in advance, Mark E. Smith and the Fall seem to be in chaos. He wouldn’t have it any other way.


“Bloody hell, I hadn’t even thought about it,” he laughs. “We played there, God knows, in 1977 or something, and it was full of people with long hair who didn’t give a s*** about our music at all.”

This is typical Smith. While bands he shared a bill with during the 1970s punk explosion, such as the Buzzcocks, have grown chubby and tour endlessly, churning out a greatest hits package with the odd unappreciated new song thrown in, Smith refuses to be drawn: “There is nothing backwards about this band and there never f****** will be” is his mantra. His band will play almost no old tunes in concert, and he remains lean to the point of emaciation. Just like his band. Or, rather, bands.

In the 30 years his group has been together, more than 50 musicians have come and gone, entire bands have been summarily sacked, or walked out, often mid-tour. Invariably, they are replaced by inexperienced musicians who can be moulded into the Fall way of doing things. Whatever that is. You want a rock maverick? Meet Mark E. Smith, the most difficult, obstreperous and temperamental man in music.

By rights, the Fall should be one of the top-selling indie bands in Britain. They were, of course, John Peel’s favourite band, while Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and Radiohead cite the Fall as an influence. In 1998, Smith received the NME God-like Genius Award, whose other recipients include U2, the Clash and Morrissey.

Smith’s response? “I think the award should go to anyone who can read the NME from cover to cover,” he sneered with his gong in his hand. On Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party: “To me, there’s no belief in what they’re doing . . . It’s like they just want a career in music. I’m always suspicious of people like that.”

It’s not that mainstream success has eluded the Fall. It’s that Mark E. Smith has actively avoided it. In 1978 the Fall were the new wave darlings of the music press. Smith went instead where he was most hated, recording a live album on a tour of northern clubs. The audiences’ absolute loathing for the band, its music and its singer — “Call yourselves bloody professionals?” — is never far from the speakers; likewise Smith’s joy at the atmosphere of antagonism he has created. “It’s funny,” he says. “I get into a kind of nervous hysteria when I’m recording an album or about to go on stage. When I finish something, it all disappears and I can relax, although I don’t listen to what we’ve recorded very often.”

The closest the Fall came to a big commercial breakthrough was in the 1980s. Under the influence of Smith’s commercially minded American wife Laura Salenger (better known as Brix), the Fall produced a series of punchy pop songs, made videos, released acclaimed albums and composed and performed I am Curious, Orange, a well received ballet, with the dancer Michael Clark at Sadler’s Wells. The consensus among fans was that the Fall had grown up, and were perhaps losing their edge.

We should have known better. By 1990, Smith was estranged from his wife, and back in the business of sacking his band. With their belongings packed to leave the Australian leg of a tour for Japan, the keyboard player Marcia Schofield and bassist Martin Bramah were handed tickets back to England by the band’s manager. No warning, no farewell. Later in the decade, another version of the Fall would splinter even more spectacularly, as a 1998 New York gig disintegrated into an on-stage fist-fight. “I think constant change is what the Fall is about,” says Smith unapologetically.

I first met Smith in 1997, after 20 years of listening to his music. On the rare occasions that journalists meet their heroes, a touch of nerves is common. I was nervous for different reasons. The week before, I’d heard, Smith had stubbed a cigarette out on a journo’s face. I got him on a good day, although it had its moments. At lunch in a London café, the waiter asked him what he wanted from the menu. “Meat,” he replied. “Just meat.” He then tore through a plateful of cheap steak with his bare hands. The rest of the day passed in a happy blur of lager and conspiracy theories about his (and my) beloved Manchester City. My generally sympathetic interview was printed. I met Mark again after a London gig. He turned his back on me and refused to talk. These are the ups and downs of the man.

In the ten years since, Smith has continued to produce brilliant records at a rate that would make other musicians blanch. And the tantrums have continued. Tomaso Capuano, an art director at The Times, played bass with RICO, a Fall support band in 1999. He recalls that one night, before their soundcheck, Smith fenced off the Fall’s equipment with white gaffer tape: “Anyone who crosses that line is a dead man!” “We soundchecked with our drummer in the cloakroom because there was no room on stage,” laughs Capuano. “Sounds crazy, but it sounded great.” Shortly afterwards, from Smith’s dressing room, came the sound of furniture being kicked, then the after-show sandwiches were hurled through his door, one by one.

Halfway through the recording of the new album, in 2006, Smith lost his band, which many fans had thought to be his tightest for years. He says he fired them, they say they left. “I think he’s going through a phase where his tolerance for alcohol has dropped,” the newly departed guitarist Ben Pritchard said in an interview on the unofficial Fall website. “He was falling asleep in the dressing room five minutes before we were due on stage.”

Smith’s own take on his fractured and fractious existence will be made public this summer, when Viking is due to publish his autobiography. “I’m trying to make it like a parody of a footballer’s autobiography,” he laughs. A spokesperson for the publisher tells me that the typescript has been received. Smith tells me that he hasn’t finished writing it yet.

Before publication, of course, the line-up of the Fall, whose new members Smith currently describes as “a godsend”, will almost certainly change. I doubt that the same can be said of Mark E. Smith.

Reformation TLC is released on Feb 5.

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added 18 January

Anjulireeves's big night out down the pub:

1) practicing beforehand

2) thoughts following Dutch courage

3) showtime !

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added 15 January

Mark E. Smith is again working with members of Mouse on Mars. The new collaboration goes by the name of Von Südenfed. They have an obligatory myspace page with two tracks (one a new version of Wipe That Sound) from Tromatic Reflexxions, an album due out in May on Domino.

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added 10 January

Steve Lamacq played My Door Is Never from the new album on his show this afternoon. You can listen again by clicking the Wednesday link on this BBC6 FM page. It's just over 40 minutes into the show.

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added 10 January; updated 11 January

For the next day or two you can hear White Line Fever from the new album on this Radio France page.

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added 9 January

Good news: The latest word from Sanctuary is that the UK/Slogan edition of Reformation Post TLC is out on Monday, 5 February.

Sanctuary has a myspace page for the album, including audio clips and the slightly reworked cover, at http://www.myspace.com/reformationposttlc

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added 5 January

From Uncut.co.uk:

The Fall's Mark E Smith is to appear in the third series of Johnny Vegas' surreal sitcom Ideal.

The show about scally Manchester drug dealer Moz has Mark E Smith taking on the role of Jesus. Jesus plots to get Moz killed as a punishment for his dope fuelled existence.

The second series of Ideal is being repeated on BBC 2 later this month and series will air on BBC 3 in March.

The Fall have a new album, Reformation Post TLC, due out in February.

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added 4 January

The Inspiral Carpets are releasing a compilation of B-sides and rarities, including a previously unreleased collaboration with MES entitled Saturn 5. The comp - Keep the Circle - is out on 26 February.

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added 2 January

Steve Lamacq played Fall Sound from the new album on his show today. It's about 39 minutes into the Tuesday show on this BBC page.

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added 29 December; updated 1 January

Here's a review of Reformation Post TLC (4 stars) from the latest issue of Mojo, along with a short interview with MES. Many thanks to Ocelot for sending me a more readable version than posted on the forum the other day.

Ocelot also scanned in these 1993 promotional postcards.

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added 18 December

A Rolling Stone blog has a great clip of Scenario from last month's Hiro Ballroom show in New York.

Apparently the Narnack edition of Reformation Post TLC may include a bonus DVD of said show: good news. Bad news: Narnack's release date is scheduled for 27th March, six weeks later than the Slogan edition. There's mention of an April US tour, too.

There's more information on RPTLC in the 30 December 2006 issue of the Fall news.

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22 February 2007

This is the latest news and gossip off the message board, Fallnet, and elsewhere. If you have anything to say, please email Stefan at fallnews@gmail.com.

To subscribe to Fallnet, send mail to:
fallnet-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

ta to biv for this


Recent news...

06dec30 Reformation Post TLC announcements, NYC & Strangeways gigs, Julia Adamson photos, Dave Milner songs, Gusgus Not Clean remix, Fall forum crash, Sonic Arts Network cd, PBL book, Mitsubishi Blindness, Monks live session, MES on Dylan.

06oct30 Silver Monk Time & Monks gigs, Oct. UK & Ireland gig reviews, Ben Pritchard interview, "Renegade: The Gospel According to MES," MES DJ set on Radio 1, Environmental Health News, Stewart Lee in Sunday Times.

06sep21 Simonfb, r.i.p., Bournemouth & London gigs / UK festivals, Silver Monk Time, Sunday Herald & Maximum RnR interviews, Julia Nagle's latest projects, another Peel tribute CD.

06aug17 Brooklyn Vegan / Arena Homme Plus interviews, Oya Festival, Tesla-K, The Blimp, Tycoons Follies, Artrocker review, Tony Friel archive, PBL book update, KFNY poster, Billboard, more Voiceprint CDs.

06jun13 US tour (second leg), more US press (NYT, The Pitch, SLC Weekly, Stop Smiling), Manchester gig (inc. MEN preview & FT review), What Sven Could Learn from Me (Guardian int. from last year)

06may23 US tour (first leg), US press (LA Alternative, LA City Beat, SF Chronicle, OC Weekly), Smog Monsters, Morley on MCR/L'pool

06may01 Berlin gig, Reclaimers' footy song, MES "In Their Own Write", Praxis Hagen exhibit.

06apr06 UK tour, Greek/ Swiss gigs, "The Two-Year Gap" announcement, John Peel Fall intros/ outros mp3, Wire's Fall Primer, Q's Manchester special, Monks Beat Club clips, Fallnet's "Dr. Buck's Letters", Fall album survey results, Nikki Sudden / Ivor Cutler r.i.p., Brix's new house, cult musicians, Gavin Esler.

06feb21 Official Fall site now Unofficial, Guardian ex-Fall members article, Mojo interview and poll results, IS, IAH, MCR & CC remaster details, Mixing It session, Antwerp & Wigan gigs, Ding's two new bands, Ghostigital, New Year's Honours, fashion corner: Brix interview & Lagerfeld show, Blue Orchids new album, history of Salford bands.

06jan03 Word MES interview, ticket refund information, Festive 50, misc. year-end press roundups and Fall forum poll results, preview of Guardian's ex-Fall members article, MES lego minifig, Armitage Shanks & Necropolis Fall-related songs, Ghostigital's "Not Clean" & "Codomatopoeia," Corsa ad back on TV, John Peel's Record Box.

05nov08 Fall Heads Roll reviews, UK tour, Incendiary, Rock Sound & Pitchfork interviews, PBL book preview, Commercially Unfriendly cd.

05sep30 Fall Heads Roll details, MES to read footy scores, Peel tribute CDs, ChronicArt preview, Blast Off DVD sampler, Frank Skinner, Jacob's Cream Crackers, Stewart Lee, Deisel-U-Matic award.

05aug18 Paul Hanley BBC radio int., MES Metro "60-second" & Kitchen Sink ints., 1979 Jamming! int., Deisel U Matic award, Paul Wilson's Fall Mix, Stewart Lee's favorite things.

05jul26 Berlin & Paris gigs, Fall site news, Diesel-U-Music & Mojo awards, Live from the Vaults: the "real" story, Sanctuary / Slogan Records announcement, Mayo Thompson, Commercially Unfriendly CD, links to loads of Peel box reviews.

05jun14 UK & Lyon gigs, Conway's guitar tab and Adult Net pages, Jools Holland, Deeply Vale cd, MES int. w/BBC on Peel, Lime Lizard 1993, Festive 50 book, Live from the Vaults delayed, Wake Up in the City, Cuz'n Roy's yard sale on ebay, Jahn Rhondos.

05apr27 UK gigs, Left of the Dial & Scotland on Sunday interviews, Deeply Vale CD preview, Bingo Masters press release, Scherzo Schist, Live from the Vaults, Simon Reynolds, Simon Armitage, Prenzlauer Berg, Fall Cafe, Poloraoids special offer, Brix & Gromit, MES on Funhouse, Fall documentary transcript, the Fall wants your photo.

05feb25 BBC4 Fall doc, Hex reissue, KFNY gig, Fall Forum's TNSG, Ice Magazine (UK) MES int., Sun Zoom Spark articles, Playlouder appreciation, unofficial Sparta FC video, Peel set postponed 1 month, MES's New Years Honours list, 9may81 photos, Hunter S. Thompson, RIP.

05jan07 Jim Watts resigns, UK gigs, Pseud Mag, Festive 50, Deeply Vale, documentary, City Bar "fall-out", Polaroids on the Fall, Wipe That Sound, Narnack sampler.


Fall News archive