The Fall's Man - The Fall > Reviews > Best Band in the World

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Advantages:	Smith, Smith, SMITH
Disadvantages:	There are none

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

More than twenty - that's years, albums and line-ups, folks. In the world of music at the tail-end of the 20th Century there is little doubt that The Fall, dynamite punkabilly Manc band, led by the spiteful, spiky, evil wordSmith, Mark E are SOMETHING ELSE, as different from most of the everyday dross you found in the charts as butter is to fire.

There's nothing else like this band of whores and comics that has mutated through various guises since the late 1970's, but always with the lippy genius at the helm.

Smith once said, it'd still be The Fall, even if it's only me and my granny on bongoes, and how right he is! The charge that you get when The Fall are around, with their uniwue, rumbustious and even downright dangerous attitude is like nothing else you'll experience in modern music.

Unique amongst their peers in never selling out and never moving away from their dirty Salford roots, this evil bunch of troubadours want nothing else but your soul and your daughters - chart success - pah! Who needs it?

And I've been there with them, through all that time, from the day in 1979 when I won Live at the Witch Trials off a mate in a hand of poker. From the icy and eerie terror of Frightened to the rambling, naive anthem that is Music Scene, this album is as fiery a debut as I've ever heard and they just got better and better and better.

If you've never heard Fiery Jack or Totally Wired or Cruisers Creek or Hit the North, then you've not lived young man. You can take all your collections of bland, rubbishy, sheened pop of the last thirty years and shove it - The Fall are the only band that counts and the Hip Priest will inherit the earth.