Beggars Archive

Fall's gold

The Fall re-issues are slowly making their pilgrimage towards a release date. The choice of tracks for This Nation’s Saving Grace has been made and discs sent to MES for his blessing. There were 14 reels of studio recordings digitally transferred for TNSG. Most of these contained original master recordings but there were 4 reels of out-takes. These actually proved to be a bit disappointing since there is little difference between performances on the alternative takes. More interesting were 2 reels of early, rough mixes of the album recordings which lack the polish off the final mixes but have an accessible… well, roughness. Roughsticity. Rough-a-loogability – somesuch lack of refinement. There’s a tape with an extended version of Barmy which was recorded at the March ’85 sessions along with Cruiser’s Creek, Rollin’ Dany and Couldn’t Get Ahead. It’s the same basic version that was used on the album but with subtly different sonics.
One of the ideas behind the Omnibus releases is to include a contemporaneous live recording of the songs but this won’t happen on this release as the master tapes for two radio recordings, from Clitheroe Castle and Bremen, have been lost or thrown out. Careless. It’ll still be a 3 disc set though, with a second disc of the rough mixes and selected out-takes and a third disc of singles and relevant tracks from John Peel sessions. Also found is a completed master for Ma Riley, an unreleased, Bo’s beat song originally intended as the bonus track on the Cruiser’s Creek 12”. Hopefully The Wonderful And Frightening World digital transfers will be delivered soon.

To end on a topical note… Here’s how MES looks forward to the New Year – 25 years ago…

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Conceptually edible art

Back in May I attended ‘Paintwork 2’, an exhibition of art inspired by The Fall. Among the many highlights was David Alker and Peter Liddell’s The Fall Record Collection : The Top 20 where the sleeves had been painted onto cream crackers – yes, that’s right, the ones you eat with cheese. The artists have kindly allowed us to use two of the paintings in the forthcoming Omnibus edition re-issues but here’s a sneak preview.

A third showing, unsurprisingly entitled ‘Paintwork 3’ is running in Hamburg between 31 October and 21 November at Galerie Borchardt and The Fall themselves are playing the city on 5 November.

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25 years ago yesterday

I was scanning some of The Fall’s artwork yesterday and came across this letter from Mark Smith (25 years later!) – this is where the jumbled track sequence for ‘The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall’ originated as the cassette listing was later used on the CD. Oh well, at least we should be able to correct that one after a quarter of a century.

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