The Fallen: Life In and Out of Britain's Most Insane Group Book

THIS THING ABOUT IF YOU LIKE X YOU'RE BOUND TO LIKE Y ISN'T TRUE

I spend too much time trying to get myself to like The Fall even though I think they're one of the most annoying bands ever, annoying because everybody I respect loves The Fall, and yet they sound like a cruddy unfunny cacophony fronted by a violent loudmouth with obvious mental problems, the guy you'd take one look at and quietly leave the pub in case he caught your eye. Actually that all sounds pretty good on paper, but in your headphones it's more like wet gravel being shoved down the back of your shirt. This may be the think that divides me and Fall fans. They actually like that sensation. They'd pay good money for it. They probably do it to each other in the privacy of their grim rooms. They make up this gravelly oily slop in a bucket then take turns pouring it down each other's shirts.

THIS BOOK IN FORTY SECONDS

Heavy drinking, speed, knitwear, hiring, firing, no eye contact, no eye contact during the hiring or the firing, no pets, working class inverted snobbery, gluey unglued personalities, deep aversions to putting anything in your mouth apart from beer bottles, tax inspectors, shabby motorway cafes, fighting on stage, fighting in the audience, divorce, indifference to basic musical conventions bordering on the autistic, more knitwear, still no eye contact, someone sabotaging your amp while you're trying to play live, heavy drinking, some acid but mostly speed, deliberate capsizing of anything which might be mistaken for an attempt to become popular

slit my throat with a garden vegetable if we ever look like U2

and so on, round and round, for thirty years and forty members.

ICONIC

Bollocks

MARK E SMITH - GENIUS

Bollocks