Oh happy day. The mailman brings a collection of new releases and among them is a collection that I’ve been obsessing about since it was issued at the end of June. The Fall’s box set “The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004” compiles every single Fall session on John Peel’s radio broadcast. The good. The bad. The ugly: Mark E. Smith.
Peel and Smith had a very strange relationship. One would automatically think the two would be chummy in some romantic notion of a pair of English gentlemen talking tunes over tea. The fact was, by Smith’s own admission in explaining why he wasn’t present for Peel’s funeral, the two barely knew each other. Peel, perhaps knowing well enough not to break the wall of fanboy, stayed out of The Fall’s way and remained their most notorious supporter. From that point, it’s safe to say that you would look pretty cool by having a Fall album or two in your collection.
Or six: “The Complete Peel Sessions” span over a quarter century of sessions, tracks, personnel. Does a newcomer really need six discs of tracks from a radio broadcast to become familiarized with The Fall? They’d probably be better served with last year’s “50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong” best of compilation. But you know what? I’d recommend the investment in this box set over any single disc set in a heartbeat. It has everything you need to hear to get an understanding of what kind of band they are (feisty, snotty, well read, primitive, unconventional, blah blah, wolf wolf) and it contains shit you don’t need to hear. Truly, this is the first compilation/retrospective that I’ve ever seen acknowledge some of the sessions were shitty. That being said, the shitty are few in numbers: there’s at least three dozen really great versions and about three dozen really good versions in this package. Do the math and that’s a better return on my investment than my Jimi Hendrix box set.
Out of the “really great ones,” disc two wins in my cd player. It contains my favorite broadcast (session six) from March 23, 1983, the period right around the Perverted By Language release, which ain’t even my favorite Fall album. Nope, that album The Frenz Experiment managed to produce another great session (eleven) from May 19,1987.
Here’s the thing: when Smith started to realize a degree of complacency in the band (read: proficiency) he would immediately rebuild the band with new members thereby forcing a continual feel of tension. When shown in such a large context, you begin to see the method to his madness. It plays like an audio rollercoaster and Mark E. keeps getting back on the ride.
Packaged in a simplistic brown box, the liner notes are well written and the sessions clearly identified and critiqued. Relevant pictures capturing the radio experience are throughout the booklet, including one of the only pictures I’ve ever seen of Mark E. Smith smiling…standing right next to Peel himself.
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