On the album Shift-work MES rails against verbose and vacuous media pundits in a track called 'A Lot of Wind'. At Beacons festival the curmudgeonly Canute railed against the elements as the festival big-top strained against the tail end of a hurricane.
Halfway through The Fall's set a woman in headset and Barbour manifested herself onstage to ask the audience to step outside while they "assessed the situation". This meant the inebriated masses stepping out into a full on rain and wind storm lashing the site. She was roundly booed. (In fairness, warning the crowd the immense tent might fall on their heads is more public spirited, albeit less cool, than warning "watch out for the brown acid").
The Fall thundered on, two drummers stomping out their trademark Krautabilly. The power was switched off. The Fall continued to thunder on with MES bellowing from the stage, gurning and grinning. The band continued to grind out their music through monitors and sans amplification. When a jobsworth tried to lead MES offstage, he swatted out in annoyance, the curmudgeonly Caligula. The crowd lapped it up, cheering and hooting, few choosing to go out into the maelstrom. The reviled interceder approached Mrs Smith at her keyboard, got short shrift. Inevitably, after a few minutes of refusenik riffing The Fall left the stage, bemused and amused.
Once outside, the Culturebergers could see that tent poles were out of the ground, the roof was leaking, parts of the festival site were cordoned off. It was grim up north. The Seasoned Fall Watchers I spoke to weighed up the chances of a restart. Negligible to non-existent was the consensus. It's hard enough to get him on stage in the first place. The health and safety totalitarianism will have royally naffed him off. They're half way to Manchester by now.
Never second guess The Fall.
Mark and band slouched back on, with an added pullover the only concession to the elements, and announced sarcastically, "Aww. I don't feel safe anymore!" and launched straight into 'Mr Pharmacist' to the biggest cheer of the day. It was a great moment.
The Fall thundered even further on. It was one to have been at. To my mind there is more rock and roll in a 50+ man strolling strangely round the stage, nudging his guitarist in the back mid-solo like a mischievous uncle, than in most of the foot on the riser, festival by number gestures of the weekend. You cannot take your eyes of MES. You daren't.
The set made no concession to expectation. I recognised (I think) a couple of tracks from recent ep The Remainderer and a barked out yelp of "Yorkshire Dales-ah". The band was mesmeric, MES hypnotic. After a bit MES seemed to tire of his curmudgeonly Spartacus role and handed a sheaf of scrawled lyrics to the 2nd drummer who bawled out the previously unseen screed in a very creditable impersonation-ah of MES as the curmudgeonly James Brown ambled off. Talking to Seasoned Fall Watchers this is not a new thing for The Fall. Mrs Smith is often left to carry on the show in similar fashion. My view is that it's a showbiz tradition, I saw Bobby Womack do something similar last year. At Beacons you didn't know what might happen next, and the possibility that the tent might fall down was forgotten as The Fall rumbled on. Some bands act like they don't want to be a member of any club that will have them as a member. The Fall would rather leave than discuss the possibility.
Earlier, one of The Fall's spiritual heirs, Sleaford Mods, were on the smaller Noisey stage. Now when a band is rapidly coming ot public awareness, as the Mods are currently, interest spills over. The Noisy tent was rammed.
Jason Williamson commands attention in the same way as MES. He has carved out a unique persona. His East Midlands accent is almost absent from popular culture, but you can hear echoes of Shane Meadows' self-limiting avatars and Arthur Seaton's rampant hedonism and belligerent obfuscation in there.
Are they authentic? The answer is both yes and no, in the same way that The Ramones were and weren't authentic. If the Mods' barrage of swearing and vitriol wasn't harnessed by a keen artistic intelligence it would rapidly become boring, but their vision is finely honed, as narrow yet seductive as The Ramones first album. They're not pinheads.
The music is similarly narrow. These days anyone with a few quid and two index fingers can harness a pretty professional sound on keyboard and drum machine. It takes nous to limit your sound to the rinky dink throb of the Mods punk rock without the rock. You can hear the antecedents in rap, dancehall and toasting, all imbued with the guttersnipe perspective of 1977. One of their songs (possibly called Yesterday's heroes) was a piece of punk year zero snide, swiping at Johnny Marr and Pubic Hair Ltd, conflating No More Heroes and The Clash's 1977 for the Acrid House massive.
There are 2 Mods on stage. Andrew Fearn is The Uber-Bez. He stands back of the machinery, hollow-cheeked and dodgy looking. Where Bez was the embodiment of the Monday's audience, dancing on-stage with elated abandon, Andrew is the Mods' audience, swaying along, swigging lager from the bottle, shouting along to the best lines with a preoccupied grin. His apparent nonchalance - he pushes a button to kick off the next tune every few minutes-is in contrast to the frenetic knob-twiddling of the Titans of Dance like Jon Hopkins and ilk who buzz across their equipment like Duracell Bunnies. He seems to be saying "This is easy, this is cheap, go and do it."
After the show - and it is a show- people are quoting great lines to each other. There wasn't much of that with other bands. Tourette's delivery, self absorbed belligerence and insouciant swagger -part of a great tradition. All they need to do now is to ignore the invitation.
