So this would have been the song I blogged about on Wednesday, a self-proclaimed song about nothing.
Song: Mother-Sister
Album: Live At The Witch Trials
Year: 1979
So despite being a song about nothing, this one is a fantastic romp, really full of punk spirit and surprisingly well-recorded considering the album was recorded in a week and this was their debut. The spoken excerpt at the start is great, right from the start the Fall were self-referential and obtuse, very post-modern.
The song itself is like the band falling downstairs, calm and collected one moment, hare-brained and scattershot the next, Mark's vocals are brilliant, the inflection and dynamics work incredibly well, his cries of 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, Mother-Sister!' are not only funny, but cathartic it seems, really like this one. I love the keyboards, they sound perfect backing up the screeching guitars and heavy-handed drums, I'd have loved to have heard this at the time, it would have sounded so different, remember punk had almost come and gone in its original, commercial form and I'd argue that The Fall and bands of their ilk, The Raincoats, X-Ray Specs etc, made much better music than The Sex Pistols and all that guff, as people have said of these bands before, The Fall had more ideas than three chords and anti-monarchy/empty anarchy threats, I'm glad they have persevered, this is a snapshot of a band finding their feet, but taking massive steps.
The lyrics are something else, not a clue what they are about, but general phrases that stick out include 'why don't you put your neck in' some of the lines here remind me of later masterpiece Hip Priest, the space in which MES has to dribble invectives over is the same.
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