Doctor Smith's Letter

Most of my favourite bands are ignored by almost everyone else, and in some cases I can convincingly argue that almost everyone else is wrong. There's no reason at all, for example, why Ballboy and Half Man Half Biscuit haven't ruled the charts in recent years, given that they write catchier pop tunes with better lyrics than most 'mainstream' acts. Or why the more sombre students have flocked to the superficial whinings of Coldplay rather than the intense and intelligent Low. But with certain groups I can build no rational case at all. I try to shield non-believers from them rather than hoping to make converts, unable to explain my devotion. These tend to be the bands I like most of all and the supreme example is The Fall.

The Fall are relentlessly innovative artists. Their lead singer and autocratic leader Mark E Smith hasn't run out of ideas after nearly 30 years. But there tends to be an artetypal Fall song, 5 or 6 examples of which crop up on every album. Guitars, or less commonly keyboards, repeat a catchy riff. The bass and drums thud through a fast, ominous rhythm. And Smith yelps out lyrics in his inimicable voice, sometimes shouting, sometimes growling, sometimes making eternally unsucessful attempts to sing in tune. There's been a lot of variations on this model. Sometimes conventional verses and choruses are included, sometimes these fripperies are discarded. The structure of Dr Bucks' Letter is so loose that it barely resembles a song at all. On City Dweller Smith has to 'sing' over an overlapping medley of conversations. The drum line for Ladybird Green Grass is so intricate that it becomes a secondary tune. That's the basic template, though. And I honestly can't explain why it's so good, why those 5 or 6 songs tend to be the best ones on each album.

The standard defence for The Fall is to cite their scaborous, satirical wit. Listen carefully to the lyrics, though, and this argument starts wobbling at the knees. Any trenchant observations tend to be thrown in at random, unconnected with the rest of the song. "The Dutch East of India Company and the United States of Anything they can fool" Smith remarks in what was supposed to be a guest vocal for an Inspiral Carpets love song, I Want You. Or else they're so opaque ("Designer tramp goes grrrr") that they could, in fact, mean nothing. And most of the time what we actually get is, most likely, gibberish. The phrase "cavalry or Calvary" pops up throughout Blindness with no justification at all. Or take Chicago Now, where Smith sounds like the park drunk he increasingly resembles: "Do you... work hard? You don't... Do you... You don't... Chicago Now!"

The last Fall gig I went to was revealing. More evident even than Smith's contempt for the venue, a tiny York nightclub, was the diversity of the audience (who he also seemed to dislike). There were balding middle-agers who had dug their old punk t-shirts out of the attic for the occasion. There were fresh-faced students looking around nervously. And there were in-betweeners like me and my friend, hooked on the group since The Frenz Experiment and Extricate in the late 80's. And hooked is the word. The Fall will only ever appeal to a tiny minority; but if they ever get inside your blood, you'll never get them out. We will endure Smith's strops, his faulty quality control (at least a quarter of each album is unlistenable) and his habit of sacking all his fellow band-members. All to get some more of those songs which should sound awful and don't. The Fall are ultimate proof that music is the most irrational of all the arts, incapable of being reduced to its component parts and analysed. They are an addiction, pure and simple, and I hope that it never ends.