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| The Fall at Southampton Engine Rooms - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
The last time I saw
The Fall was at a rather shambolic show in Stockholm - Mark E Smith was in a foul mood and the amp-fiddling, annoying his band-mates and constant walking off stage wound everyone up. At one point he got himself trapped Eric Morecambe style in the curtains behind the stage and then proceeded to sing the encore from back in the dressing room. Before that I saw them at the Islington Academy where we were bombarded with the cut-up video DJ Safi Sniper as support, a seemingly endless and hideous nails-scraping-down-blackboards aural and visual assault that drove grown men to try and scale the barriers to inflict actual bodily harm on the culprit as bottles and glasses and foul-mouthed invective rained down on the stage. It's something that still haunts my dreams to this day. I was fearing another similar performance but tonight there was no such shenanigans - first of all what we got was a brilliant and surprisingly high profile support act in the Japanese Psychedelic guitar band
Bo Ningen who went down really well with the crowd.
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| Bo Ningen - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
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| Bo Ningen - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
The Fall took the stage promptly and launched into "Wolf Kidult Man" one of only three songs I was to recognise all night, its searing Stooges style riff almost lifting the tin roof off the venue. Mark looked well and I am sure I saw him smile once but that might have been a trick of the light. The amp-fiddling was kept to a bare minimum and I must admit that on one occasion I found myself thinking, "hey, that actually sounds better..!" What followed was a set of mostly new and unrecorded material and it was all pretty intense full-on hypnotic driving stuff. Here's some photos of the gig...
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| The Fall at Southampton Engine Rooms - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
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| The Fall at Southampton Engine Rooms - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
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| The Fall at Southampton Engine Rooms - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
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| Bo Ningen - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
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| Bo Ningen - Photo Copyright Retro Man Blog |
For more information on The Fall please check out their excellent website and archive
here and Bo-Ningen can be found at their official Facebook page
here.
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