The Fall – This Nation’s Saving Grace – Review

The Fall

This Nation’s Saving Grace (Beggars Banquet)
by Nik Rainey

It’s twenty years after the would-be insurrection of punk rock, and it shows – most of the wild-eyed soldiers that made up its ranks are stooped shadows of their former selves, every last one of them a bunch of grumbling old men. Only one footman remains on the front lines – Mark E. Smith, the indefatigable, inscrutable frontman and ill conscience of The Fall, probably because he was a grumbling old man from the day he left the Manchester docks and, inspired by his Link Wray, Can, and Big Youth records, decided to give this rock ‘n’ roll thing a bash. And so it has been, through a collector-smothering outlay of releases and more lineup changes than a South End station house on St. Patrick’s Day, and so, it seems, it ever shall be. Without a single hiatus in two decades, Smith and whatever group of sidepeople he can tolerate that week have held fast to the dictum presented on their first, statement-of-purpose single in December ’77: “Repetition in the music and we’re never gonna lose it.” A Fall record is a formulaic thing, which is not as damning as it sounds – they simply have the right formula: a simple, inspired guitar riff repeated indefinitely over a raw, circular rhythm, varying degrees of weird sounds over the top, and somewhere in between, the tone-deaf locution of Mark Smith ranting on about something. What it is, you can’t quite be sure (even if you have the lyrics written out in front of you), but somehow, it’s dead-on right. The very definition of a cult band – apart from sporadic charges up the British pop charts and the very occasional US radio semi-hemi-demi-hit, The Fall remain a taste palatable to a vociferous few – but their influence looms large over modern music, and their resilience and creative consistency are truly astounding given the constant upheavals running throughout their long and bumpy existence.

This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985) completes the transformation, cementing their ability to be both of the pop moment and miles beyond it simultaneously, resulting in one of their full-fledged classics. (The album proper begins and ends with the same theme, a trait common to classic rock records for the last thirty years.) From the moment Smith recites the distorted, oblique threat that introduces the compact rock melée of “Bombast,” the superb balance between the crotch-focused imperatives of conventional rock ‘n’ roll (Karl Burns’ drums and Steve Hanley’s bass combine with a focused power uncommon for this band of contrarians) and The Fall’s defiantly original attack gives the album, with no two songs similar stylistically, a brilliant consistency. The tom-tom-driven clap-along chant of “What You Need” (which, according to Smith, includes “a vid of Iggy Stooge,” “sex behind cabinets,” and “the book Theft Is Vision by the brothers Copeland” [a sly swipe at the charlatans at his first label]), the inspired guitar figure that bolsters “Spoilt Victorian Child,” and the first glimmers of synth on a Fall record in “L.A.” (complete with Russ Meyer quote) are all fabulous, but the album only gets more wonderful as it gets weirder, climaxing with the indescribably eccentric “Paint Work” (one of their finest numbers ever) and the Can tribute “I Am Damo Suzuki” (Grand Guignol guitars and violin skreek over an “Oh Yeah” beat). Bonus tracks include the first of many great covers, Gene Vincent’s “Rollin’ Dany,” and two more top-notch single sides, “Couldn’t Get Ahead” and “Cruisers Creek,” an honest-to-God party anthem (a party only slightly less horrific than the one in “Sister Ray,” but still…). Novitiates to the Hip Priest are hereby advised to begin here. Flush with success, Smith began to get ambitious. He wrote and mounted a play,Hey! Luciani, about the one-month reign of Pope John Paul I and various shady dealings in the Catholic Church (the great, chiming theme song is regrettably nowhere to be found on these discs), and created a thematically-linked trilogy of singles and LPs, the “Domesday Pay-Off Triad,” to go with it. 1987’s Bend Sinister (title courtesy of Vlad “the Nymphet Impaler” Nabokov) is the full-length statement of the trio, grafting some of Smith’s most caustic diatribes to darker, sparser music, like fellow Mancunians Joy Division opting for homicide over suicide. Smith hates the album now, and it’s not nearly as exhilarating as its immediate predecessors, but there’s dour power in numbers like “R.O.D.” and “Gross Chapel – British Grenadiers,” along with nifty curveballs like the obscure garage nugget “Mr. Pharmacist” and the daft fantasy “Shoulder Pads” (in which Smith imagines himself “a superhero in harlequin keks”). Difficult but rewarding. (The U.S. version of Domesday… combines tracks from all three records and reshuffles song order more logically.)

These six discs represent a mere slice of The Fall’s assault on rock convention, now loping into its third decade. Their integrity and refusal to bow to fad or fashion except as it suits them remains a model of the punk ethos and an iconoclastic beacon for unorthodox music-makers the world over. If you’ve yet to acquire this singular taste, these records are a fine place to begin, but be warned: if, once hooked, you find yourself liquidating all your assets to buy up the back catalogue and wind up-ah talking-ah like this-ah all the time-ah, I’m not to be held responsible-ah.