Features Disc of the day
The Fall
Totale’s Turns (It’s Now Or Never)
(Rough Trade, 1980; Reissue on Castle, 2008)
First Rough Trade release is bug-eyed, two-fingered live album. Thank you, Doncaster!
Call it what you want: post-punk, nascent indie - Mark E. Smith was hating it as early as 1979. It was a scene, it implied shared values, and Smith pronounced them bogus. In this scabrous, sub-lo-fi live album's keynote address, Cary Grant's Wedding, he hilariously equates the old Hollywood celeb system with the rise of "new wave personalities": "Cary Grant, slaughterer of innocents / Add on 30 years, it's Jake Burns"
That Smith could be bothered to set up the mostly harmless Stiff Little Fingers frontman for such a put-down (what about Geldof, or Sting?) is typical of his unique perversity; with fellow travellers like Smith on the post-punk "scene", who needed proper enemies? For this reason alone, Totale's Turns would be a fascinating instalment of Fallness, sharing with The Stooges' Metallic KO whatever's the inverse of a communion with an audience. The sleevenote, by Smith nom de plume Roman Totale XVIII, complains of an "80% disco weekend mating" crowd at the Doncaster show contained herein, an assessment underlined by the mute Northern opposition and slightly stunned dribbles of applause which pass for audience response. But what kind of audience did Smith want? Not punks: "Are you doing what you did two years ago?" he sneers, presumably at a gobber. "Well, don't make a career out of it." Not studenty post-punk types spouting the "left wing tirades" he spears in Fiery Jack. Nor the Lambert & Butler-wreathed "death-circuit" zombies of the Working Men's Clubs.
Say what you like about Smith: he's an equal-opportunities hater, and when it informs the music, as it does throughout the evil tension-fug of Totale's Turns, it has a transcendent quality. Behind him, the Hanley-Riley-Scanlon-Leigh line-up are like a serrated hunting knife sawing through sheets of aluminium. But palpably, sweatily nervous, too, knowing their best will not be good enough for Smith and their worst - cf. drummer Mike Leigh's overambitious tom rolls in No Xmas For John Quays - will be rewarded with a public flogging (Smith: "Will you fucking get it together instead of showing off?").
It was a hell of a strange way to announce a new career with a new label. Perhaps Smith was saying that a soft Southern label would not change The Fall, that he hadn't bought into the budget-buy mini-star-worship creeping back into British rock and if he must air The Fall's dirty linen to prove it, then he would. As he concludes in New Puritan, a terrifying squiggle of new-beat-poet mental illness, included here in spectral home-demo form, "It's only music, John." But as Totales Turns continues to prove, in all its weird and hostile complexity, it is and it isn't.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 13/03/2009
Further Listening
The Fall – Grotesque (Rough Trade, 1980)
Iggy & The Stooges – Metallic KO (Skydog, 1976)
Bob Dylan – Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Live 1966, “Royal Albert Hall” Concert (Columbia, 1998)
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Comments
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This was the first Fall album I ever got back in 1980.
I now have a grand totale(!) of 33 Fall albums plus numerous 7" and 12" singles. Will there be a new album in 2009?
Fall advance!!
Posted by simon F at 1:48 PM GMT 13/03/2009 Report Abuse
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not jake burns. k burns. then fall drummer.
Posted by showbizwhines at 8:50 PM GMT 13/03/2009 Report Abuse
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Fantastic review. Thanks!
Posted by Flying Carnation at 2:43 PM GMT 06/04/2009 Report Abuse
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