Singles Live Vol.1: ’78 – ’81 (New LP)

“I have seen the madness in my area” sings Mr Smith on track 4 of this record. That sentence sums up a lot of The Fall’s appeal to me: they looked at The North, the place I was brought up in, and saw something alien and inexplicable in it. Not “Gritty Northern Realism” but rather “Snotty Northern Sur-realism”. A welcome alternative to all that Hovis advert, brass-band, “Ee by gum”, “Last of the Summer Wine” schtick you normally got whenever The North was mentioned in the mass media. According to The Fall, people in the North of England also had dreams and sometimes saw “monsters glowing on the roof” of the local disco and had to deal with City Hobgoblins on a daily basis. This was great news. Incredibly great news for an 18 year-old who had just left school and was on Social Security and was trying to make it in a band, which was quite difficult because the rest of said band had been forced to go to university by their parents. Plus, The North was (pardon my French) completely f***ed by 1981: it’s industries closed down by the Thatcher government, leaving the entire population in a severe state of shock. We needed something new to believe in. A band to believe in.