Week 26: 26/06/95 - 16/03/96

Halfway. Literally Halfway through The Fall's career and in my real life, I was heading up to Sheffield to start University. This week coincided with the Fourth of July here, so I haven't really listened to much of the playlist but I got a good measure of the Fall in this period (I will listen to all the tracks at least three times this week I promise).

Three albums that balloon the playlist up to a mighty five hours. The Album is Cerebral Caustic which is kind of okay, a little bit the Fall on autopilot. The Brix novelty has worn off a little. There feels like there are tracks here (Rainmaster I'm looking at you) that should have been left on the cutting room floor. And a lot of the tracks that are good, are better elsewhere, whether that be live or in session. They do Life Just Bounces again, but it's not nearly as good as the original or that live version with the thing about Pipes. Bonkers in Phoenix is meant to be like being at Glastonbury. Well it is utter shit and a waste of time so maybe he's right. Ha Ha. It's not a bad record but there's just not enough oomph to it.

Thankfully the CD has a bunch of "Rough Mixes" of the tracks - so you get to hear them all twice, albeit some slightly differently. No improvement.

And then on to the 27 Points. I bought this at the time on two cassettes - I remember it being pretty cheap for a double album, I don't think I listened to it much but it's actually aged pretty well.  There's a spread of tracks, and the quality is generally pretty high. A cracking version of Return here, a decent stab at Ladybird Green Grass.

And one of the best moments of the Fall: Idiot Joy Showland, played brilliantly but Mark's not happy so he stops the band and pulls them off stage for 5 minutes. "RIGHT REX - YOU BETTER GET THIS SORTED". He then plays a tape of 10 points that he hates about a person. All of these will come back to you and confirm you as a damn pest. They don't come back on and finish Showland.

A fiery version of Mr Pharmacist, Bill Is Dead again?. And then it's gone, to be added to the list of "Above Average" live albums. All of the live stuff is kind of rolling into a single mass at this point, and so I breeze through The Idiot Joy Show without missing a beat.

The Peel session was awful: He Pep!, Oleano, Chilinist, The City Never Sleeps. The Fall safely on autopilot here. The latter is weird, I don't know who the vocalist is but they've been studying that book on mid-90s indie female vocals pretty hard. More of those Receiver things round this out and make me think that that was the most uneventful five hours of the Fall so far. Halfway though.