Trivia / The Fall (Band)

• Adored by the Network: The Fall were favorite band of BBC Radio DJ John Peel, and it was a rather good thing for the band to have one of the most respected, beloved and influential radio DJs in the world as their number one fan, as he regularly played the band's records on his shows, giving them a major Colbert Bump. Even though the band played Peel's radio show many, many times before Peel's 2004 death, he and Mark E. Smith only met face-to-face on two apparently awkward occasions.
  • When the band performed "Eat Y'self Fitter" for the first time on Peel's radio show in March 1983, Peel actually fainted from how awestruck he was by the song and his producer had to resuscitate him.
  • Peel kept a large box of singles under his bed containing his favorite singles just in case he had to leave his house and his massive record collection during an emergency. His fans and friends noted that there were absolutely no Fall singles in the whole box. This is because his favorite Fall singles were housed in a completely separate box because there were too many.
• Black Sheep Hit: The band's biggest UK chart hit is a cover of The Kinks' "Victoria", which is a bit more poppy than their usual sound.
  • "How I Wrote Elastic Man" is a meta-example - about a rock star pissed off that the only song anyone ever cares about is a Black Sheep Hit where they don't even get the title right.
  Everybody asks me how I wrote "Plastic Man"!
• Died During Production: Smith died during the band's New Facts Emerge tour, which had several shows - including the band's first American tour dates in a decade - postponed or canceled due to his rapidly deteriorating health. Although he performed his final few shows from a wheelchair, and was still as lively and full of venom as ever, video footage of those concerts show him to be exhausted, frequently out of breath or difficult to understand. Ultimately his health got so bad that the group had to scuttle several shows just before they were due to go on, including what would have been their final show on 17 November 2017.
  • Mark had mentioned the possibility of a follow-up to the 2007 album Tromatic Reflexxions by Von Südenfed, his collaborative electronic music project with the members of Mouse on Mars. It's unknown if any material for their second album was actively being worked on before his death, let alone if any of it would be in a releasable state.
• No Export for You: For a good chunk of their career, their albums had no consistent U.S. distribution.
• Reclusive Artist: Drummer Karl Burns, who had been a member of the band on and off from 1977 to 1998, more or less disappeared from the music scene after he left the band for the final time. He was the only long-standing member that Dave Simpson was unable to contact for his book The Fallen and other former members were unsure of his whereabouts. Simpson was only able to get in touch with Burns after the book was published, when Burns emailed him to ask for a copy.
• Throw It In!: "Paintwork" goes through a couple of odd, abrupt sound collage breaks where the music suddenly becomes distant-sounding and gets drowned out by Spoken Word in Music via a program about astronomy and later, a brief snippet of classical music. This was because Mark E. Smith accidentally taped over parts of the song.
  • A sample of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" creeps into the intro of "Cowboy George".
• Word of God: The title of Reformation Post-TLC: the "TLC" part stands for "traitors, liars, and cunts". This was the first album released after most of the Fall Heads Roll lineup quit, so just guess who that was supposed to be referring to...

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