The Mighty Fall In Session
Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 03/03/2005
(4 out of 5 stars)
"The previous compilation of the Fall's Peel sessions, cunningly titled The Fall - The Peel Sessions (though it included one track from the non-Peel Evening Session programme), adopted a scattergun approach, selecting from 17 sessions across 17 tracks. This double CD instead takes 7 of the Fall's 24 sessions for the John Peel programme and presents them in their entirety. Only four tracks are common to both collections (and Rebellious Jukebox includes Mark E's spoken announcement this time around). Needless to say, Words Of Expectation, from a 1983 session, is not included.
The choice of sessions is rather bizarre, perhaps fittingly for a Fall collection, as having presented the first five sessions in chronological order from June 1978 to August 1981, the next and final sessions, from midway through the second disc, are not sessions 6 and 7, but nos. 19 and 20, a leap of some fourteen years and eleven line-up changes, resulting in an almost entirely new band. Oddly, this rather works as everything one likes about the Fall is as present in the twentieth session as it was in the first.
Incidentally, the 5th session was recorded on 19 August 1981, broadcast on 26 August and repeated on 19 September, not as stated in the liner info and notes, or as in Ken Garner's invaluable tome In Session Tonight.
Some of these session versions are arguably better performed and recorded than their official counterparts. Many appeared months before the official versions were even recorded, while titles such as Mess Of My remain unavailable on record. These include two intriguing covers. One has guest singer Lucy Rimmer singing Nancy Sinatra's This City Never Sleeps At Night, and the other is an excellent rendition of the good Captain's Beatle Bones 'n' Smoking Stones, a Peel favourite.
Perhaps the intention was to release a further two sets, with sessions 6-11/21-22 and sessions 12-18/23-24 making up the collection. At the time of writing, this spookily prescient scheme had not been realised, but a 6CD box set of all the Peel sessions had been announced, making this and its predecessor somewhat redundant, although as a generous helping of music by the mighty Fall this would be hard to beat. Always different, always the same."
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1