Random Fall Song Wednesday Three

Random Fall Song Wednesday continues, a series that wasn't meant to be a series but has become one due to the participation and contributions of guests. Last week SRC from No Badger Required regaled us with The Fall in 1982 and Jawbone And The Air- Rifle. 

This week JC from the standard setting blog The Vinyl Villain takes the reins...

My I-phone has 526 tracks by The Fall.  Some of these are ‘doublers’ thanks to their appearance on compilation albums such as 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong or 458489 A-Sides.  As such, there was a chance that this could go badly wrong when I pressed the shuffle button.

Thankfully, it didn’t.  But it certainly didn’t deliver what could be classed as a typical Fall song. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the immediately identifiable vocal style, you might have been hard pushed to guess the name of the band correctly. 

The Mixer

From the 1991 album, Shift-Work, the band’s 13th studio recording.

Here’s a bit of a surprise statement, the album was recorded at a tumultuous time in the band’s history.

A 12-date tour of Australia, New Zealand and Japan in June/July 1990 was disrupted when MES sacked Martin Bramah and Marcia Schofield for the heinous crime of becoming romantically involved. The sacking took place after a show in Sydney, and while the couple went one way back to the UK, a band now consisting of just four musicians made their way to Japan for the final three shows of the tour, with their roadie Kevin Riddles (described by Steve Hanley as ‘eighteen stone of hairy-arsed Motorhead roadie’) who had previously played in some obscure heavy metal bands, stepping into the role of keyboard player.  He would replicate that role for the band’s appearance at the 1990 Reading Festival, where they were second top of the bill on the main stage on Sunday 26 August, behind the Pixies. 

MES was keen to use the stripped-down version of the band for the next album, but this solid back four of Smith, Scanlon, Hanley and Wolstencroft ended up being augmented with a couple of virtuosos in the shape of Kenny Brady on fiddle and Dave Bush on electronics, and it is their contributions which end up being what makes The Mixer so different from the usual.

The NME review of the album states that ‘vast rippling keyboard riffs power The Mixer’ which kind of manages to overstate and undersell the song in one go.

There’s no doubt that the dance-style synths and electronic drums/handclaps are what mostly propel the song forward, but the persistent violin melody is every bit as important….and just as maybe you think the song is about to overstay its welcome, there’s a strange spoken outro:-

'It possessed the sort of bright sound microphone with audio pickup pattern.  It can produce broad responses, hi-fidelity quality, no feedback and no howling etc. We can express good sound of your voice, an excellent melody orchestra, a self-contained filter control, explosive breath sounds, controlled explosive breath sounds...... wind noises, in different locations.…'

Nobody is credited when said spoken contribution, but it’s been suggested on various online forums that it is Robert Gordon, one of the three producers who worked on the album – the others were Grant Showbiz and Craig Leon.

Worth mentioning that Robert Gordon was one of the founders of Warp Records, the label probably best known as the home of the Aphex Twin.  Oh, and also worth mentioning that much of Shift-Work was recorded at FON Studios in Sheffield.  FON, which also lent its name to an indie label that was the initial home of Age of Chance, stands for Fuck Off Nazis.

And that, frankly, is what we are here for. Many thanks JC, a fantastic piece of writing about a genuinely random Fall song. If anyone else wants to join in with a random Fall song (you choose your selection method or ask me to randomly assign you one) and some words, please feel free to send it in.

Next week our guest contribution takes us from Glasgow to Portugal.