Confounding The Past: The Fall, Live in London

The mighty Fall have never endorsed nostalgia; as even the most casual fan will be aware, their live sets very rarely feature any old material, and performances of their "hits" (a word to be used cautiously here, in reference less to any commercial smashes than to general fan favourites like "Totally Wired", "I Am Kurious Oranj" et al), and their recording career has been one of continuous digression, contradiction and confrontation. To state another well-worn Fall fact, Smith's notoriously twitchy proverbial trigger finger has led to these qualities even pervading the membership of the band, whose sheer personnel turnover is unparalleled. Yet therein lies one of the several paradoxes that makes tonight's show so special. Despite that infamous Prestwich revolving door, this Fall line-up has proved hardier than most, enduring a decade-long tenure more or less unchanged. And it really shows this evening; the band are astonishingly tight, not simply in the quantised manner of top-tier session musicians, but as a cohesive, organic unit. To certain fans, that might sound disconcerting; after all, so much of the unique power of classic records like Hex Enduction Hour and Perverted By Language owed a debt to the fact that The Fall didn't sound like a band in the conventional sense on those albums. The playing was loose and dissonant, yet created something that was expressive in a way that no other music had been before or has truly been since. Tonight, however, their proficiency and intra-band confidence lends this set an invigorating urgency, as it does their new album, New Facts Emerge (my favourite Fall record for a very long time).

Then, there's Smith himself. I'm not going to dwell on this - to paraphrase the great man in one particularly memorable interview, this isn't fucking This Morning - but he doesn't look well tonight, even by his own standards. It was remarked not too long ago that his face has moved out of its Johnny Cash phase and into its WH Auden. He's aged since even then it seems, but let's hope that tonight's evidence of ailing health looks worse than it is. Either way, he's on compelling form tonight. Though he spends much of the set sitting down, intermittently switching corners in which to recline, he's in fine voice, as shrilly resonant and half-cut charismatic as ever. As the band, a couple of whose members are visibly too young to have even been born when The Fall’s career began, pound along solidly, he's free to more or less do what he pleases. Again, there’s another lovely contradiction – this version of The Fall isn’t The Fall of Hex, Perverted or Dragnet, yet the ill-defined power that drove earlier incarnations to make such records as those seems to be alive and well within these musicians. Whatever Smith does to his charges, he does it well, and he does it consistently.

After this relatively short but exhilarating set, the band throw in a final curveball. They close with arguably the best-known Fall song of them all, "Mr Pharmacist". It caught me genuinely off-guard, and despite its being far from my favourite Fall song, its familiarity and youthful exuberance (still evident despite Smith’s advancing years) were difficult to resist. Once more, The Fall’s relationship with their own past is toyed with, and one’s preconceptions subverted. Smith has always been a mischievous sort, and four decades into his career, it’s clear that the joke is still on his audience.

More than any other artist of his generation, Smith is acutely aware of his legacy. It makes for interesting comparison that this show comes so soon after New Order’s ∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) residency at Manchester International Festival; these two groups, who emerged from the same Mancunian gene pool at the end of the 1970s, continue to rail against the sentimental golden-agers who insist upon romanticising their early years at every turn. For Sumner and co, the defiance of such nostalgia is delivered by future-gazing, acknowledging their past but never settling for it; at the hands of Mark E. Smith, that rejection comes in the form of confounding his followers’ perceptions of The Fall’s past and present, one glorious contradiction at a time, forging a tantalisingly indeterminate future along the way. Long may he continue.