Perverted by Language

“Apparently, there are some people out there who don’t love the Fall,” John Peel announced on BBC Radio One once, after playing yet another song by his favorite band. “I spurn them with my toe.” Between 1978 and Peel’s death last year, the Fall recorded twenty-four “Peel sessions,” sets of four songs recorded in three hours or so at the BBC’s studios in Maida Vale for broadcast on his twice- or thrice-weekly show. Peel aired a few bands’ sessions every week for more than thirty years, a custom held over from the days when the British musicians’ union required a certain amount of music commissioned for radio play. The Fall, though, were the quintessential Peel band; he once said he was “incapable of telling if they’ve ever made a bad record.” They have, but his adoring rain-or-shine fandom made it possible for them to sustain their marvelously odd career, and their six-disc set The Complete Peel Sessions 1978–2004, on the British label Sanctuary, is the cornerstone of their work.

Fussiness is arguably the Fall’s biggest problem in the studio—their worst records sound as if they’ve had the life tinkered out of them, and most of the best sound like they were rocketed onto tape in a few minutes before the police arrived. So the no-time-to-lose format of Peel sessions was ideal for them: They could do a few takes of a song, or add a quick overdub or two, but that was it. There have been fragments of the Fall’s Peel sessions released in the past: a couple of EPs, a late-’90s album, a double-CD anthology. Mostly, though, these performances have been passed around on tapes of tapes of tapes from the radio, hand to hand, and more recently on file-sharing services. They’ve never quite been commercially viable to release as an actual bootleg—the title of the Fall’s recent retrospective compilation 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong is on the mark—but the new set will retire a lot of hissy, fuzzy cassettes and CD-Rs.

Who exactly are the Fall? If you believe frontman Mark E. Smith’s infamous quote, “if it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s a Fall gig.” It’s true that Smith has been their only constant member—there have been near-constant lineup changes since he formed the first Fall as a teenager in Manchester in 1977. (“Always different, always the same,” Peel said.) But the Fall’s sound and style have a lot to do with the musicians Smith’s worked with, too: Remove his voice from any of their records, and it’d still be obvious who was playing. Guitarist Craig Scanlon and bassist Steve Hanley were in the group from 1979 until 1995 and 1998,...