The cover of The Fall’s 1980 double-single ‘How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’ / ‘City Hobgoblins’ isn’t just a visual; it’s a battleground. A sinister, leering hobgoblin looms over a crumbling tenement, its crude, etched form crashing into an already fractured urban landscape. Mark Fisher’s description of this image is key: “This is a war of worlds, an ontological struggle, a struggle over the means of representation.”
It’s an act of defiance in pure form: Prestwich Weltanschauung distilled into a jagged proposition; alien invaders in a world not ready for them, pushing relentlessly against the contours of culture. The hobgoblin does not belong. It’s a constant disruptor, refusing to adhere to the order that’s been imposed. And that’s exactly what The Fall did as they set out: not just making music but forcing an alternate reality into the world. If Mark E. Smith and his crew were, as Fisher added, the “popular modernist weird,” then the weird shaped everything: not just the content, but the structure itself. Singles Live Vol.1: 1978–81 is a brutal close-up of this scene; a living, breathing artefact standing firm against a world too familiar, too complacent.
Curated and compiled by original members – and four of the greatest to ever do it – Paul Hanley, Steve Hanley, Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon, Singles Live Vol.1 doesn’t merely assemble early performances in cramped, smoke-choked rooms, drenched in half-lit grime and rattling PA systems… but that’s in there, too. This is one young band’s a priori refusal to play along, but perform they will. It kicks off with a scalding rendition of ‘It’s The New Thing,’ where the guitars screech like a rusted skip being dragged over cobblestones. Yvonne Pawlett’s keyboards aren’t melody: they’re erratic machine malfunction, fighting their way through a backroom din. There’s no grace here, just the New Sound, fighting for its own survival. Smith is already a master of range: projectile-like shrieks one moment, doom-pop crooner the next. As ‘Various Times’ begins, he rises above it all, hurling out with bite: “We’re bringing a bit of culture!” Not a boast, not a declaration, but a challenge to everything that came before it.
Look around you: it’s all dartboards with cracked doors, Benson & Hedges ashtrays, the gentle hum of piss from the Men’s, old brown coats, and the desperation of endless rollovers and lock-ins – and it’s perfect. This compilation, like the very best Fall live albums – ‘Totale’s Turns,’ ‘Fall in a Hole,’ ‘A Part of America Therein’ – captures that right-now energy. Right now, and nowhere better to be. No bloody taxis anyway. If it weren’t packed, you’d be looking at a band that was instantly meant to reinvent and, with it, rearrange reality itself. Take one of their all-time best, ‘Rowche Rumble’. The tumbling drums, the irate, spidery guitar phrase repeating over and over, like coming over all funny after taking a hit in the queue. The Fall’s eternal gift to the world was, of course, equal parts cyclical and scowling; the very sound of tension in motion. Strain your ear, and you can just about hear Smith and Pawlett chatting off-mic in an early bridge, Smith’s voice almost cutting through with a glib “I don’t care” as she tries to negotiate something, presumably to do with the on-stage monitors. It’s subtle, barely discernible, but it hits like an invitation to feel that supreme tension – that pure-cut freedom – that fuelled Smith’s presence right up until his last performance in Glasgow in 2017.
Do one with your Dolby Atmos: these performances remain permanently unvarnished, their cracked fidelity preserved, unbothered by external hands. Having later lent its name to another stellar early-days Fall live LP from 2000, the version of ‘Psykick Dancehall’ featured here is self-possession squared, with a smirking Mark reaching out from the past: “When I’m dead and gone / my vibrations will live on / In vibes on vinyl through the years, People will dance to my ways.” Not a boast: owning the blueprint.
With a sinister chromatic climb that would more or less metamorphose into ‘Bourgeois Town’ from Are You Are Missing Winner twenty-odd years later, ‘In My Area’ is another peak. “A dwarf plays pool to prove his height,” MES begins, peeling back his knack for turning the “madness of his area” into something both absurd and painfully real. Elsewhere, the band’s fourth single, ‘Fiery Jack,’ is a masterful runaway freight, more self-prediction in motion. “Fiery Jack is the sort of guy I can see myself as in 20 years’ time,” Smith said at the time. “Manchester has always had men like that: hard livers with hard livers, faces like unmade beds. Even though they’re clearly doing themselves damage, there’s a zest for life there. They’re not as oblivious as you might think.”
You can easily trace the imprint The Fall would have on early Sonic Youth in this version of ‘2nd Dark Age.’ A bonus track on Dragnet, it shines a searing light on their knack for beating you over the head with the thing you asked for: slightly faster, yet far more urgent, chanting locked in. From there, ‘City Hobgoblins’ blurs the grotesque into the familiar, a perfect prophecy of urban decay seen through a forensic, fucked-off lens. With Riley, Scanlon and the Hanleys sharper than the buzz of an all-night mill, outside creatures ten times their age and one-tenth their height, Fisher’s take on the single’s cover speaks directly to the track itself. It’s not just about what’s being represented: it’s about how it’s being represented. The Fall’s world wasn’t one where the boundaries between the normal and the abnormal were ever clearly defined. It’s a mangled, magnificent space full of ‘Fiery Jacks,’ way more clued-in than we ever gave them credit for. Here, and in vibrations undying in vinyl from back when, the monsters – and the masters who brought them to life – lurk just beneath the surface, waiting to emerge.
