Another fool

But perhaps that lack of excitement that I usually get from Fall gigs was absent because like you, I wasn’t in the thick of the crowd, and surrounded instead by the older, more experienced group.

The fact that The Fall still attracts a steady stream of younger fans shows that Smith was right to keep on changing things around, every couple of years. I’m sure any band would kill to have Head Roll as their first album. I’ve been listening to it recently again and I think its incredible. Next time I’m going to get closer to the front.

From our perspective up in the balcony, it looked like there were plenty of younger fans there; most of the bald heads were probably sat alongside (and among) us.

All the reviews I’ve read of the gig have been positive, but I saw them at Primavera in Barcelona last year and that gig was much better, although being in the thick of the crowd often influences my enjoyment of events, I find.

The temptation to use Smith’s persona as a key to the songs was especially pressing because all pretence of democracy in the group has long since disappeared. By the time of Grotesque, it was clear that Smith was as much of an autocrat as James Brown, the band the zombie slaves of his vision. He is the shaman-author, the group the producers of a delirium-inducing repetition from which all spontaneity must be ruthlessly purged. ‘Don’t start improvising for Christ’s sake,’ goes a line on Slates, the 10” EP follow-up to Grotesque, echoing his chastisement of the band for ‘showing off’ on the live LP Totale’s Turns.

It explains a lot I think, and I wish I’d read it before writing my review of the gig, because it shows that Smith now has the type of band he’s wanted from the beginning. There’s a similarity here with how Beckett used actors.

He has some cheek talking about his work ethic - playing a one-hour gig a night drunk ain’t exactly hard labour.

Attacking a working journalist for being a middle management cunt and professing his working class credentials while he’s a bone idle rock star just shows how deluded he is. He’s in the entertainment business at the end of the day, providing a more niche opiate for the masses, doing pretty much the same thing Loaded do in fact. The man’s a fool, even if he is an inspired one.

I don’t know much about his politics but if anything he seems to have a Nietschean complex where he is the centre of the universe.

Check this interview from 1989 out with him, Shane McGowan and Nick Cave:
http://www.shanemacgowan.com/articles/nme89.shtml

To be honest though, if you’ve been to Fall gigs in the last couple of years this was no different. Or maybe its just what used to excite me does not, like I’ve used up my allowance of Fall-based experiences.