A great album.
What's your favourite track and why do you love it?

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2G+2 / Are You Are Missing Winner / Bend Sinister / Cerebral Caustic / Code: Selfish / Dragnet / Extricate / Fall Heads Roll / The Frenz Experiment / Grotesque (After The Gramme) / Hex Enduction Hour / I Am Kurious Oranj / Imperial Wax Solvent / The Infotainment Scan / Interim / Levitate / The Light User Syndrome / Live At The Witch Trials / The Marshall Suite / Middle Class Revolt / Perverted By Language / The Post Nearly Man / The Real New Fall LP (Formerly ‘Country On The Click’) / Reformation Post-TLC / Room To Live / Seminal Live / Shift-Work / Slates / This Nation’s Saving Grace / Totale’s Turns / The Twenty-Seven Points / The Unutterable / The Wonderful & Frightening World Of The Fall / Von Südenfed's Tromatic Reflexxions

Shoulder Pads for the whistle-along-with factor. :)

Not one of my favourite albums though.

Bournemouth Runner - classic Doc Shanley grumbly bass.

I'll be interested if anyone goes for Terry Waite Sez

Gross Chapel just outpaces ROD at the line

BANANA!!!

I think that Shoulder Pads is an audacious tune...it goes on forever with loads of odd lyrics, & one cheesy riff. Also features "Couldn't tell Lou Reed from Doug Yule" (you listening, Dave? That's "Doug Yule", not "Moscow Mule", "Ultima Thule" or whatever other nonsense you speak :D ).

But it's not one of my favourite LPs, that's for sure.

It's got to be "Bournemouth Runner"- worra daft thing to write a song about!
Especially a song with different movements!
That slow bassline at the beginning has got to be one of Hanley's best (the other being Tempo House of course)...and that funky little keyboard bit.
I want to hear it right now.

Thaaaa..... Gross! Chap-EElllll!

wotta song :D

Tow-row-row-row :D

What ARE your fave albums, Conway? You said above that TNSG isn't top5, so what's your top 10?

I'm guessing you have HEH at #1. Now THAT's an album I usually skip through.

Agreed. I can't whistle, but I try.

R.O.D.

Love the whole album, but what a great opener. Creepy, groovy, dark. Love it.

It's also the track that sold my wife on The Fall.

Played it tonight, it's still a flipping great record.

US 80's-90's is strangely pertinent, considering today's shenanigans.

I love the way that we're all waaay too cool to vote for Pharmacist, despite it being the most-played-at-gigs song in the band's history.

I bet it's actually everyone's favourote song, but we're all paranoid and insecure and weighing up whether it would be "too obvious" to vote for Auto Tech Pilot or if all the other Fall fans would laugh at us.

I really like Mr. Pharmacist, which though not very different from The Other Half's original is punchier: a super rocker. (I'm always willing to go out of my way not to be too cool.)

But I've heard it many more times than Shoulder Pads, so the latter is currently my favorite.

1. I think Mr. Pharmacist is getting ignored because it's over-familiar (played to death at gigs), rather than because it's uncool. Plus, cover versions aren't really the essence of any Fall album. And, on Bend Sinister, there are so many better tracks.
2. How can we vote for Auto Tech Pilot when it's not on the vinyl LP and – more to the point – not actually in your list?

not one of their best albums but i'd probably go for bournemouth runner

Played this song again the other day – and what a great track it is!

U.S. 80's - 90's.

I'm slowly coming round to this album. Not that its intrinsically crap, just something I can't get in to. Can't figure out why, I'll just have to plug away at it.

Riddler! Closely followed by ROD. A real sense of foreboding on both these. This may actually be my top Fall album. Gets better every time I listen.

Also like first 3 lines of Terry Waite Sez when Mark repeats Brix but with a completely different emphasis on the words. Sad eh?

It may have been mastered from a crummy cassette (or whatever the story was), but this sounds fantastic to me. Do I need my ears checked?

:applaud:

That's the best cat pic. Great stuff :)

Although, aargh. I've never noticed... is it just my imagination, or is there a barely visible image of a face, amongst the blackness of the cover? As though squatting, facing outwards. Face just below THE FALL and above the center picture. Kind of cartoonish. Long nose.

Or, I'm going mad...

Yes, there's a sort of embedded spectral pic. Bend the sleeve and it looks... sinister

Bournemouth Runner is like Extricate's Chicago, Now! in that it sounds a bit lame at first then grows over time into an odd Fall classic.

Can anyone explain the lyrics of Dktr Faustus?

And then the rest of the album too, please...

Loads of outstanding tracks on this - Gross Chapel, ROD.....

I think this album is very accessible, lyrically-speaking. Many songs are small vignettes or stories, Bournemouth Runner, US 80s 90s. Others are more abstract but nothing to get really annoyed or puzzled about.

Although I prefer Living Too Long to Living too Late....who are the guest guitarists on Living Too Long - anyone know?

I went for Gross Chapel, one of my top 5 or so of all time. Great dark atmosphere, I wish it was twice as long.

Bournemouth Runner has sentimental value: during the saddest portion of my short life, I was teaching at a crap university in Beaumont, Tx (the only thing memorable about this part of the world is that, among other musicians, Janis Joplin was born nearby). I did a lot of driving to the nearest big city (Houston, 2 1/2 hours away). Listened to this album a lot during that time, it sounded like he was saying "Beaumont Runner". I felt the song was somehow about me.

Andy

Gross Chapel & ROD are my top 2 off BD :applaud: :applaud:

bend Sinister is my favourite Fall album. If only Living Too Late had been included on the album version. I never undertsand why MES says that he was disappointed with it, while I can understand him & othr members of the band dismissing Middle Class Revolt.

He can't have been that disappointed – aren't Mr. Pharmacist and US 80s-90s the most played live tracks ever?

He has spoken about the album in less than enthusiastic tones. Mr Pharmicist I think he plays as a kind of joke nowadays.

Maybe my favourite album. When I first heard it, i was amazed. I played 5-6 times in a row. I think my obsession with The Fall started by this album.

I too was amazed. I think it's one of their very best.

Why, in 1986, did M.E.S. need shoulder pads?

Ane why did he need a glove on the recent Germany tour? I think we should be told.

Interestingly, MBV refers to Bend Sinister here as his favorite album when in every other post he kept calling PBL their masterpiece.

Makes me wonder - do people distinguish between their favorite Fall album, and the Fall's masterpiece? For ex, you may recognize that an album is simply their best work even though you may not like it as much as one of your faves?

And, guys, everyone wore shoulder pads in 1986.