On the heels of The Frenz Experiment came this curve ball for The Fall’s eleventh (or maybe thirteenth) album. Who could have foreseen a ballet soundtrack was in the offing? Yeah, it was quite a surprise, even if I’d seen Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan by complete accident a few years before, the dots were never joined, though it did turn me on to the loveliness of The Fall’s Bend Sinister album.
Killing all pretension, they made a perfect team, Michael Clark and his collection of Ballet Rambert rebels pimped in eye-popping Leigh Bowery finery, giving a cool (often hilarious) stab at the dusty Swan Lake establishment whilst Mark E Smith and company turned the notion of William Of Orange taking the English throne on its head. A rough rub of the rude and graceful that even all these years later, still remains as freshly painted as it did back in 1988.
The Hex Enduction Hour glance back / fast forward of “New Big Prinz” is a storming ball roller that back in the day I used to dancefloor my local laundrette as the proprietor bonked his girlfriend against the incredibly thin divide (sometimes in time to the beat, replete with moaning overdubs). It’s a gem of a track that siphons a host of odd dance moves out of you, and watching Mr Smith slumber into his microphone on TV had an odd sense of perfection to it. Michael Clark and dancers cutting in as he leans into the lyrical flow, the beat feeding the spring in their steps, sewn up in a tangle of ripe riffery into a fleshy flash-flood that the acoustical sparkle of “Overture From ‘I Am Curious Orange'” kicks in tasty opposites.
It’s a fun, if somewhat perplexing experience (and I wouldn’t want it any other way); then the title track hits you with a drooly and didactic Mark spidering its driven awesomeness, ba-ba-ba(ing) the reggae ripeness. Those strange detouring signature changes that mix it all up, that Stuyvesant-smokin’ stabbing brazeningly amongst the repeated riches, quickly followed by the breezy bluntness of “Wrong Place, Right Time”.
Full of surprises, the flip side clambers over itself to claim an acid-haus crown with “Win Fall C.D. 2080” that sees the band remix themselves. The poppy dynamics of “Van Plague” are at odds with the subject matter, Mark swapping his usual choppy delivery for some actual singing, the off-kiltered ballardy of “Bad News Girl” too slipping its skin (without warning) for even more commercial cantering. But it’s “Cab It Up!” with its jangling keyholes and skim city curves that steals the final limelight as Smith hotlines a megaphoned deliriousness. As they say, you don’t known what you’ve lost until its gone – RIP Mr Smith, your tunes will live on.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
