Leyland Kirby

One of the great joys of lockdown for me was discovering the works of Leyland Kirby (also known as 'The Caretaker'). At last I had found another experimental musician with with the depth and scope of William Basinski!

The best place to listen Leylands stuff is Bandcamp but his main site there is rather awkward to navigate in that you have to know to click through the Discography links to get to his full works on each project. The following links will take you straight there:

• The Caretaker
• Leyland Kirby
• The Stranger
• VVM

Probably the easiest place to start is with the older works on The Caretaker list:

• Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom
• A Stairway to the Stars

There is also a good interview with Leyland on Bandcamp here.

i like to think that BBC Radio 3 will sometime have a 'Leyland Kirby Day' and I will hear at least excerpts from The Death of Rave (VVM) on that classical music station.

Fantastic Life

I am happy. 

I just came across Fantastic Life on Youtube.  This is one of my favorite tracks by The Fall.  It is a live version, so it is a bit rougher than the studio version that I taped from the John Peel Program back in the early 1980's, but it is pretty impressive, all the same.

For the Record!

A few weeks ago I remarked that a lot of tracks by the Fall had recently been uploaded to Youtube, and I suggested that they might soon be taken down.  However, I was wrong: there are now even more there, including this one which is there labelled as "Portugal", but which I remember as being called "Debacle".  I heard it played a year or two ago by Tom Robinson on his show on BBC Radio 6, and he said that Mark E. Smith had based the lyrics on a letter he had received complaining about the behaviour of his band.  As a 'punishment' Smith made them recite the contents of the letter as lyrics.  I suspect that this track hasn't been properly released because searching on Google does not seem to return any references to it's more memorable lyics ("snot balls!").

Update on Sat 2008-12-20 by Tristram Brelstaff

I obviously didn't search hard enough, for I have just come across the following note on this page describing the CD for the "Theme from Sparta FC #2":

The first pressing of the CD also contained a hidden track, Portugal (aka Debacle (For The Record)), in wav and 192kbps MP3 file formats, playable only on a computer. These CDs were supposed to be destroyed other than a handful of copies which had been sent out as promos, however it seems this didn't happen and the retail CDs were distributed with Portugal included.

Roll up for the Underpants Show!

From way back in 1981, Iceland by The Fall. 

Someone has recently loaded this, and a  large numbers of other Fall tracks, up onto Youtube, so I thought I'd give a link to it before they all got taken down. 

Music journalist Colin Irwin wrote an account of the Fall's 1981 'tour' of Iceland which was published in the Melody Maker; a copy can be found here.

Reformation

The Eurovision Song Contest is on television this evening.  As an antidote, here are The Fall playing Reformation at St George's Hall,  Blackburn, back in March 2007.  Mark E. Smith stuggling to make himself heard over the two bass guitars.  Don't try to make out the lyrics; to understand the mind of MES is to go insane.