Week 30: 17/05/98 - 05/02/99

Approaching the Millennium and we find The Fall not necessarily in rude health. Health being the operative word here - Amy and I watched the BBC4 documentary this week. Mark was pretty hammered throughout that one, I think this was the time when it felt like he was out of control.  And I think this started to effect the music as well - it feels less coherent, less together than usual. And for the Fall that's probably saying something.

But the music - and we start with a Peel session which is barely together. Antidotes especially wallows in incomprehensibility. The band sound perky and eager but there's no gel there and Mark sounds like he's rambling on the spot,

And then a wondrous sneaky thing. Inch was ostensibly a Smith side project but the bible reveals it to be a off cut from Levitate. The Inch were meant to be producers of Levitate but were sacked. AND WHY - Inch sounds 100% better than anything on L (bar I'm a Mummy) and is miles above the version that appeared on the album. Heavy crunching guitars and bleepy bloopy keyboards. It's great.

And then the remarkable single: Touch Sensitive. Right back in the Rockabilly with added "hey Hey Hey!"'s. The lyrics seem to be about Mark being a grouchy old man. It's bloody brilliant and in the way that only The Fall could do it. They're totally back together in this one - pop song amaze balls. There's a dance mix of course which, again, sounds like a outtake from Spaced. The b-side is all over the place. But that A-side though. Genius.

It would have ended there but I decided to dip my foot into the Mark Smith solo project: The Post Nearly Man. It was quite expensive to get a CD copy, so I snagged it on Amazon of all places.

It's a hard thing to deal with - it's not really spoken word, and it's certainly not The Fall. It's kind of like three people reading some of Mark's scrawling with occasional musical interludes. It's part HP Lovecraft Cthlu type stuff and part Mark rambling. There's a little bit of the hotel skit that he did way back on the Luciani play.

First listen I thought it was bonkers but on fifth or sixth listen I think it might be the best thing he ever did - as an album, as a whole it's totally spellbinding. And in the way that Mark does, it sounds incomprehensible but utterly enrapturing at the same time. There's other people speaking throughout. At times it reminds me of the Stephen Jesse Bernstein record - something that exists, that is wonderful but you can't really explain why you like it so much. The Post Nearly Man is fantastic and impenetrable. I love it.

That cover though - why he sticks with Pascal Le Gras is beyond me, his work is generally like a child pissing about with MS Paint.