Many artists have one or two songs dotted about in their back catalogue that, despite their quality, never made it onto a 'proper' studio album; 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' is a notable example. The Fall's back catalogue is littered with such moments. It was not uncommon for some of their best material to be relegated to b-side status whilst apparently inferior songs were bafflingly promoted to full album status. This is a round-up of the best (or at least the most interesting) examples...
New Puritan
The Fall's third Peel session, recorded and broadcast in September 1980 represented a remarkable paradigm shift in the group's sound; 'New Puritan' was its astonishing highlight. An odd, scratchy lo-fi version of the song had appeared on Totale's Turns four months earlier, but here it was transformed into a lacerating diatribe, a ‘righteous maelstrom’. Not only did it never appear on a studio album, The Fall never recorded it again. It's a song in which you can become hopelessly lost, utterly immersed.
Fantastic Life
It's a mark of how productive and creative The Fall were in the early 80s that a song as strong as 'Fantastic Life' was used a b-side. It's thumpingly energetic and features a hyperactive, infectious guitar line. This gnarly, distorted version is from In A Hole.
Guest Informant
Even by The Fall's standards, it was a bizarre and perplexing decision to include less than a minute of 'Guest Informant' - one of the strongest tracks from the period - on the vinyl version of The Frenz Experiment. The 'full' version references Genesis, Marillion and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. As for Brix's infamous vocal refrain, the Annotated Fall settles (after much debate) on 'Bahzhdad State Cog-Analyst'.
Arms Control Poseur
A lurching, swampy slab of gloriously ramshackle yet controlled noise, everything from the startling blast of harmonica to the raw, distorted soloing guitar to the depth-charge keyboard effects meshing together perfectly. How this didn't make it onto Extricate (especially considering that Popcorn Double Feature did make the cut) is a mystery that would challenge Poirot.
Lucifer Over Lancashire
A piece of rickety rockabilly racket which sees Smith getting all high-pitched and ‘yee-haw’ while the group rattle along like a train. It was tucked away on the b-side of 'Mr. Pharmacist'.
Auto-Tech Pilot
Also from the 'Mr. Pharmacist' single. The very definition of an obscure/overlooked gem. An eerie, fascinating and complex song, it was never played live. There's an excellent, detailed analysis of the song here.
Extricate
Not exactly one of the group's most effective or innovative moments, but it's interesting to consider what it might have become had they spent a little more time on developing it.
Twister
Starts with a slow, snaky, twangy dual guitar line which is joined by galloping drums, double-tracked MES vocals and even some prog-like organ, before ascending into a crazy whirl featuring some eerie Brix contributions, thumping toms and manic keyboards. A b-side to Victoria, it was only ever played live once.
Mess Of My
Recorded in November 1978 for the group's second Peel session; they never revisited it in the studio. Written by 'Eric the Ferret' (the third bass player), its intriguing transitions are almost prog-like in tone and were an early signal of how different The Fall were from the rest of the punk crowd.
Noel's Chemical Effluence
A Shift-Work outtake that featured on 1995’s semi-live The Twenty-Seven Points, I'd have been in serious trouble with my good friend J Eric Smith had I not included this one. It's a piece of murky, psychedelia driven by a jagged and increasingly frantically strummed 3-chord guitar part. There’s a long tradition of rock songs about the tour bus, life on the road, etc. but few others have taken the chemical toilet as their main subject, let alone discussed the ‘red-purple vomit stream’. The shambolic ending seems to catch Craig Scanlon by surprise.
That's it for this week. See you next Monday for some Film/TV-related Fall...
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