The Last Time I Saw The Fall

The last time I saw The Fall. 28 May 2017. Manchester, England.

Going through old boxes of tickets and abandoned folders of photos on my hard drive, I came across these. 

It was at Transformer at the Victoria Warehouse in Manchester. This sort of festival was named in commemoration of Lou Reed and the line-up reflected it: Swans, Royal Trux, Loop, Suuns, This Is Not This Heat and others. A sort of Metal Machine Music wet dream in an industrial warehouse in the North West.

Swans played loud. Pretty loud I would say. I remember security handing out earplugs to the poor souls, with a few deserters already in retreat from the sheer volume of Michael Gira and co. It was beautiful.

The Fall played before Swans and as ever with The Fall, the only thing you could expect was the unexpected, which was always a good thing. I remember hearing the songs from 'New Facts Emerge' (The Fall's final LP) live for the first time. Abrasive. Strange. Raw. Only like The Fall.

After this night, The Fall would play only four more gigs: the legendary 100 Club in London in July, Wakefield and Newcastle in October, and finally Glasgow on 4 November 2017.

At that final show, Mark E. Smith entered the stage in a wheelchair, visibly unwell and in pain, but still getting through the songs. Less than three months later, on 24 January 2018, he was gone.

According to setlist.fm, 1,746 Fall gigs are documented between 1977 and 2017. With a group like The Fall, there are inevitably shows missing from the record, and the real number may never be known. But even 1,746 puts Mark E. Smith’s extraordinary work ethic into perspective. 31 studio albums, 32 if you count 'Slates', is no joke.