Live at Band on the Wall (1982)
I would say that the 90's weren't the most financially rewarding times for Mark E. Smith and that he had to resort to all kinds of ways to keep himself and the Fall solvent.
I mean, nowadays he's been around long enough to be on the verge of being a cranky old national treasure who gets to guest read the Football Results on National TV
And as a great go-to semi-celeb when you need a cranky wrinkly old fart to tell you about the digital age.
Meanwhile, back in the 90's a large number of rather dodgy Cog Sinister reissues started showing up on compact disc. For the most part they were rather shoddy productions mastered from poorly recorded vinyl sources. The one for "Fall in a Hole", the two lp live recording on New Zealand's Flying Nun Records which was the biggest thing on my wantlist at the time was even mastered from a totally beat record that actually fucking skipped on the Cd. It was more than a little bit infuriating.
But it wasn't all truly terrible. Mostly.
The shitty cd version of "Room to Live" and the awful cd version of the singles compilation "Palace of Swords Reversed" had bonus discs with two halves of a 1982 live performance at Band on the Wall as presented by the Manchester Musicians Collective (which put on the very first Fall gig in 1977.) That's what we have here.
There were also quite a few dicey live recordings from all sorts of times and places that ranged from decent soundboard or radio show to someone stuck a crap mono tape recorder by the speaker sort of thing. I have some of them, but have never quite felt the need for that much completeness in the dodgy realms of Fall releases...
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