Fall in a hole?

Today I picked up a CD copy of The Fall's "Room to Live" at Real Groovy. It was on special at $15, which co-incidentally is what I paid for a Rough Trade Italy import of the original vinyl version in 1982. But that wasn't why I bought it.

What made it an essential purchase for me, was that one of the bonus tracks on the CD is "Hard Life In Country" recorded live at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, on August 19 1982. Now there's a story...

At the time I was Programme Director of RadioActive and flatting with a girl who was on the student executive. Anyway, one night she got a call from the student president, which went something like this...

"I've just had a promoter on the phone who wants to bring some band called The Fall to the Union Hall. Have you heard of them?"

Well you can imagine my reaction, once my jaw came bouncing back off the floor.

"Totally Wired!" I yelled. "You know, they do that song that goes t-t-t-totally wired! They're one of the best bands around!"

He wasn't convinced, and wanted to know about their politics. "They're socialists of course!" I claimed, not altogether truthfully. "One of their songs is called The North will Rise Again, about the plight of the northern working man and his struggle against the southern meritocracy..." or somesuch blither. Somehow that did the trick and a couple of months later the Fall turned up at the Union Building.

Mark Cubey and I wandered up to the soundcheck and spotted Mark E Smith at the far end of the Union Hall, grumbling into his can of beer while his band powered through songs from the Slates E.P. "They're too bloody tight, sounding too much like real musicians," he told us, shaking our hands and spilling beer all over his shirt. Much more genial than we expected, he agreed to do an interview with us after the concert. Which RadioActive was also broadcasting live that night.

A few years ago, some sad bastard (no, not me!) transcribed the interview from an old copy of Salient which you can read here.

The concert itself has been available on bootleg for many years, and it was an absolute cracker. So it's great to see one track at least making it onto an offical Fall release, albeit almost 25 years later!

Oh, and "Hard Life in the Country" was one of the stand-out songs on the night, with possibly my favourite MES lyrics ever. Here's a snip:

It's good to live in the country
You can get down to real thinking
Walk around look at geometric tracery
Hedgehogs skirt around your leathered soles
Fall down drunk on the road
It's good to live in the country

The man's a poet I tell ya!