7. The FallFall Heads Roll
It’s really hard to choose a favourite Fall album because they’re all amazing in different ways. I picked this one because it’s attached to when I first started driving. I got a collection of CDs for the car, and this was one of them. I don’t know how these CDs came into my life. I don’t remember purchasing them… oh, it was actually gathered from my parents’ collection! My parents are people who have been quite conscious not to influence. Bits from their music collection were present in the house, but they wouldn’t talk about them. So as the child, you had to go around and seriously pick things. Which is what I did with this. So we have had a lot of alone time, me and Fall Heads Roll.
It’s got that huge variety that I love in records – from ‘Blindness’ to ‘Midnight In Aspen’. ‘Midnight in Aspen’ is actually my favorite Fall song. Mark E. Smith is known for being a bit of a tyrant, a crazy, angry dude, so hearing someone like him produce these really tender moments… I connected to him the most when I heard that song for the first time. And it’s the coolest thing when it disappears and it comes back [for ‘Aspen Reprise’]. I’m definitely gonna steal that. Also, Fall Heads Roll just makes me laugh. Some of the lines, some of the synth parts – these guys aren’t the serious, angry people that everybody thinks that they are. They’re having so much fun on this record.
The Fall really heavily informed the first band that I was in, to the point where I sometimes felt like we were a bit of a pastiche. Then when I was around 16, they got really popular amongst people my age, and because everybody was listening to them, I didn’t know how I felt about them. It was only later in life that I gained perspective. Eleni [Poulou, The Fall keyboardist] was a bit of an icon for me as a kid. She’s almost like a really great comedian who tells jokes but keeps a straight face. When I saw her walk on stage with her handbag, she kicked off my handbag collection. I have a disgusting amount of little handbags because of her. I would bring my handbag on stage when I was first in bands, and I’d hang it on the amp.
