The Fall, Electric Brixton, London - review

An abstemious new generation is rejecting the traditional British mode of letting one's hair down, with surveys reporting falling drug and alcohol use among the young. Perhaps that's why so many of them were at The Fall's gig: they had come to goggle at a battered relic of the olden days.

The Fall's leader Mark E. Smith, 58, has been a mainstay of alternative music since 1970s punk. He is also a veteran of intoxication. His songs are steeped in alcohol, chemicals, tobacco smoke and confusion, while his features are as craggy and unwelcoming as the most ungentrified pub in his native Manchester.

He started the gig half an hour late, as though reluctantly dragged from just such a hostelry, gurgling a noise through which could be dimly discerned "My Door Is Never", from 2007's Reformation Post TLC. What followed was as much a surreal anti-happening as a rock gig.

Smith roamed around the stage, fiddling with the volume levels on the monitors, interfering with instruments and vociferating into two or three microphones simultaneously. The occasional fragment of sense materialised amid the groans and barks like an image in a Rorschach test.

The rest of the band provided the order amid Smith's imp-like misrule. Famously volatile, with more than 60 former members, The Fall are currently benefiting from the most settled line-up in their 39-year history. The recent inclusion of an extra drummer has also helped.

They took a few moments to warm up but then settled into a pounding Can-style groove. "Auto-Pilot 2014-2016", from the excellently named forthcoming album Sublingual Tablet, was the standout, a prime slice of old-fashioned experimental rock with a mesmerising beat, wired guitar riffs and psychedelic Korg synthesiser drones over which Smith delivered an opaque diatribe against "English musicians", a pet hate.

Another new song had the ironic title "Dedication Not Medication", its bristling rhythms and woozy harmonic effects dramatising a battle between the two states. Meanwhile the youthful contingent of the audience, a novel addition to the grizzled lags who usually turn up to Fall gigs, moshed merrily at the front as though it were 1976.

The usually contrary Smith seemed energised by the sight, leading his band back for a curfew-busting series of encores after the typically abrupt main set, climaxing with the spirited football chants of "Sparta FC". The abstinent habits of modern British youth may be about to go into reverse.

thefall.org

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation