Exciting website developments afoot, Officially endorsed by MES

Thanks to the tireless work of a "third party" to whom we are eternally grateful, Stefan, Conway and myself are very pleased to announce that we have today received approval from Mark E Smith to add some exciting new sections to the website.

T-shirts for sale
In the very first instance the items sold via this website will be a small supply of T-shirts (to gauge how well they would sell on the site), although ultimately we'd hope to bring you other products too (eg badges, CDs, etc).

If this venture takes off it is entirely possibly that we could see the reinstatement of T-shirt/etc sales at gigs in the future, which I know a lot of you ask about regularly.

It's still early days, but rest assured the prices will be competitive, will be noted as Official Fall product and will hopefully see an end to the ridiculous prices some other organisations are charging for unofficial product at other sites (eg £17.50 for a Ben Pritchard 'guitar hero' T-shirt my arse....).

Vote for your preferred design on the first batch of T-shirts here - we'll try to make this a regular thing, so you guys get to choose what appears on T-shirts

official bootlegs for sale
Entire gigs will soon be made available for download and a small charge (£2-3) made for this service. Still working out the logistics but it is eminently do-able. For those not on broadband, it may be possible to send audio CDs - we'll see how it goes on downloads only in the first instance.

addition of a new multimedia section
A new (and free) multimedia section will be created on the site, bringing together some audio clips, video clips and (touch wood) some low resolution 30 second taster snippets of 'Fall Heads Roll' in the weeks preceding the album's launch. We'll be consulting with Mr Bending and Mr Bike Bloke on the video side of things, given their fantastic knowledge and support for the availability of video in the past.

Exciting times ahead folks - clearly it will be a few weeks before everything is up and running.

To those who said Mark being involved in the website was a bad thing, kick yerself hard in the arse now

I'll fetch me purse

These all are exciting developements indeed!!! I look forward to being able to purchase both t-shirts and gigs!

Bet they're the same people who said that he was just the "git who couldn't sing" too....

Bloody brilliant news. Well done to involved in the planning... Even more well dones if ye get it rocking an rollin!

T-Shirts: Good. I never bought one due to mostly being sold by parasites. Except home made jobbies, which go the mile of course.

Downloads: Also good. May possibly be in time to prevent my impending reputation as a leech..... due to having little to give but there being plenty to take

Well done all. Many thanks from 1st battallion, 2nd Fall brigade!

Excellent stuff! Makes sense to make stuff available for sale here, - I can't think of any other "official" website that I've seen where there isn't stuff available.

Excited about the gig recordings since The Fall never play near to where I live. Hope they'll be soundboard recordings, rather than from some bloke with a walkman!

All excellent news.

And this bit in particular is wonderful news. I pushed this idea a while back...I do have broadband, but I have a crap pc. Even if I get a better one in the future, I have had too many disappointments with hardware in general in recent years (turntables, cassette decks, CD recorder) all not being made to high enough standards to want to take on recording CD's myself except as a small time hobby - the more I can get from a trusted source than find at some point the equipment is not working to my standards, the better.

So to all concerned.

(and to manufacturers of hi-fi equipment, and of pc's too, as much of my mistrust of doing CD-R's on a pc comes from hearing too many badly done CD's by others in the first place).

Curses. There goes my money making scheme then....

Chuffed with it all
Only thing that worries me is payment method - Belive it or not, some Fall fans are as prole as thier songs suggest..... Could we try and work out a system where we could send cheques via post for those of us non credit card owners / Direct Debit users?
And do me a big favour and pass on a thanks on behalf of the whole message board to this third party

This is great news.
Hopefully Paypal will be an option.
This way I will personally be able to guarantee MES & Eleni enough beer & mascara to make early retirement attainable.

i am all interested in the live show downloads but i cant for the life of me figure out how to open up that bit torrent jazz. if they are going to be in this format could you offer a tutorial or better yet just post as individual mp3s maybe

will credit card be the only method of payment?

i'd also hope for something like this. (paypal doesn't seem to know that my bank exists because it's really small; no credit card...)

as chachacha mentioned somewhere else, would it be possible to have the shirts made by a company that doesn't contract labor out to sweatshops?

also, yay for the third party!

Well done Clayts........not so sure about paying for the live gigs though - if they are soundboard recordings from the band fine - if they are audience tapes of varying degrees of quality then isnt this a little unfair given most of them are in the publc domain anyway......??? Please clarify

Maybe for new gigs played? or maybe MES has a collection going back years of gigs not recorded by bootleggers..that'd be nice.

Yes .... that sounds good....I'd go for that....then third parties would not be making a profit and we could design our own sleeves (if we wanted to...)

This is all fantastic news, especially about the live downloads.

I think a small charge may be fine, since they've still got to cover hosting and admin etc.

Plus, even though they might be in the public domain, it wouldn't harm anyone to contribute to some royalties etc. maybe....

Lots of questions, which I'll do my best to answer here :

payment methods
Yes Paypal will definitely be an option, as will old-fashioned money/cheques/postal orders/goats, etc - I'll most probably be taking a leaf out of fallfandave's book and opening a PO Box for this very purpose unless I can figure out an alternative method of doing it.

official bootlegs
It's important to recognise that The Fall currently receive no revenue for the countless live recordings that, as Eccles correctly states, are already in circulation within the trading circuit.

The majority of monies being charged for this service are, as The Frenz Experiment notes, mainly to cover the actual hosting of large files and the cost of bandwidth usage to get files from us to you.

Bit torrent will not be used, many will be relieved to know, for the simple reason that a separate download address will be given out to each person - i.e. one purchase = one website address, which will be removed as soon as that person has completed the download. Sorry if that sounds draconian, but the idea of this service is to benefit The Fall, not the traders.

Using bittorrent goes against this, as many people would end up sharing one £2-3 download, which is not what this is about. Clearly a pocket money fee for this service should not disadvantage many people here. It may be possible to consider a 'season ticket' price at a reduced rate for, say, 10 downloads.

In terms of sound quality, we can't promise soundboard quality all the time, but there are some very good audience recordings out there, believe me.

So does this imply the end of gig trading for what is already out there? Some advice might be useful on this before we start running foul of the law.

A final editorial decision has yet to be made on this issue.

(Politician's answer which most likely means 'yes, afraid so' as it was part of the proposal to Mark).

hmm...knew there'd be a snag somewhere...

hope we see the end, therefore, of live recordings sold at stupid prices...

That was the main aim - some tapes have been going for silly prices on eBay and we really wanted to nip that in the bud.

As I said, this is something which I need to discuss with Stefan and Conway more thoroughly, so please don't go making any presumptions at this point in time.

you could have used my PO Box - nobody hardly sends me stuff thru it anyway ... they all use paypal... but i'm a few hours out of the way for u collecting it - which is a massive problem.... oh well.

Thanks for the gesture, Dave, it is most appreciated.

As you state, however, the geography is all out of kilter, more's the pity

Anyone who tries to get payment for these bootlegs is acting pretty immorally anyway...don't buy from ebay...not Fall gigs, anyway.

Excellent news all round. If the charges for gigs is a nominal one for hosting and Mark's beer money, I'd be more than happy to pay a couple of quid for some decent-generation recordings of some of the ones I already have. Most of the well-circulated ones I've got are billionth-generation tapes... A|nd I certainly need to replace some of my old Fall t-shirts

Three cheers for The Fall entering the digital age - and for MES being open-minded enough to see that it could be a good thing...

(edit - sorry, that sounds really bloody patronising, doesn't it... I didn't mean that in anything other than a positive way )

Wow.

I give it six months before the raging psychic vortex immolates everything in its path. But what a six months it will be!

Dan