LaRM day 146 (The Fall)

Only one thing today and that's the 7 hours of the Fall's Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004 box-set (released in 2005).  What a lot of stuff there is here, 6 CDs of wildly varying quality, but some of it is absolutely sterling.  It's fascinating to be able to briskly chart the development of the Fall's style, from the avant-poet's ramshackle backing act to a full-blown art rock/pop outfit and back again.  The first CD covers 1978-1981 and has some great versions of Live at the Witch Trials material, with blistering versions of 'No Xmas for John Quays' and a truly vitriolic reading of 'New Face in Hell'.  It's all pretty abstract and tottering stuff, as if it's constructed of flimsy sticks and Smith is at his most youthfully nasty.  CD 2 is 1981-1983 and shows some signs of a slightly more clear design in song construction, particularly by the last session which heralded the arrival of Brix Smith and her pop melodic sensibilities.  Earlier on the disc though Marc Riley's often overlooked guitar work is at its best on 'Look, Know' and an uncharacteristically lovely version of 'Winter'.  The third disc covers the sessions the band did when they were truly at their creative and musical peak, from 1985-1987 and there are versions of songs from This Nation's Saving Grace and The Frenz Experiment which occasionally surpass the studio versions.  There are superb takes of 'Gut of the Quantifier', 'Cruiser's Creek', 'The Man Whose Head Expanded', 'Athlete Cured' and a supremely vicious 'Australians in Europe'.  In fact the levity and humour with which Mark E Smith had started to introduce into his bilious outbursts really elevate these songs, even more so in the session takes than the studio album versions.  CD 4 (1988-1992) is still pretty top quality stuff, but it's by this point that a sense of pop melody had really taken hold and there's a grounding of the keyboards and electronica ideas that had started to shape the Fall's sound.  There's still a lot of good material here, particularly 'The War Against Intelligence' and 'The Mixer' but it's not as immediate or creatively inspired as the previous couple of year's worth of stuff.  The big pop and the complete takeover of the keyboards is the main thrust of the fifth disc, covering 1993-1996.  It's a mixed-bag by this point with some spirited pop music (mainly thanks to the brief return of Brix) and some hilariously knockabout covers ('Hark the Herald Angels Sing' and 'Jingle Bell Rock', reduced to rubble), a great 'Spinetrak' and the ever enjoyable baiting of 'Hey! Student', but there's a lot of fairly nondescript stuff too.  Interestingly disc 6 (1998-2004) still has the keyboards, but has them playing the role of jittery noise, just like the other instruments, and it means that the Fall sound strangely similar to band they were some twenty years before - it all sounds on the point of collapse again.  The songs aren't really up to much by this point but it's fascinating to hear the whole thing come full circle.  All in all the whole box-set is a superb demonstration of the endless invention of a man who does the same thing over and over again.  It's inexplicable, but it's brilliant.