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Email a friendPeel's favourite finally here
THE collection Fall fans have clamoured for is finally here, but the obvious reason for its completion remains an insurmountable tragedy for serious music lovers.
Ironically, John Peel once wrote that he had a special speech prepared for The Fall's 25th Peel session.
His death means that the roller-coaster ride of The Fall's extraordinary tenure with him ceases at 24.
No band have been associated with Peel's legendary sessions more than The Fall and this collection, all 97 tracks and seven hours of it, paints an illuminating picture of a band that virtually invented the word "uncompromising."
It captures perfectly the twists and turns in the unpredictable mind of Mark E Smith, the leader and only constant member in a group where total career membership could fill your local village hall.
There are tracks that surpass their officially recorded versions comprehensively - 1980s dictatorial government thriller New Face In Hell and the spellbinding 1983 session explosion that is Garden.
The "pop" years in the mid-1980s are well represented, with CREEP and Athlete Cured being notable highlights.
Curios like 1994's Hark The Herald Angels Sing and the following year's rendition of Nancy Sinatra's The City Never Sleeps, where Smith
uncharacteristically surrenders lead vocals to Lucy Rimmer, raise the odd welcome distraction and raised eyebrow.
The annus horribilis of 1998, where the band imploded on a New York stage in a fist fight, is displayed in all its ugliness. A turgid session summarised in an inebriated version of Hank Mizell's Jungle Rock foresaw the catastrophe about to happen.
Culminating on top form in a session recorded two months before Peel's demise, The Fall line-up number 546 launch into an astonishing medley of their old favourite Wrong Place, Right Time and The Move's I Can Hear the Grass Grow, proving that, despite many death-knells proclaimed by the music press, The Fall could never be written off.
Smith said memorably in 1978: "If it's me and your granny on bongos, it'll still be The Fall."
While it is a pity that that line-up never made the hallowed confines of Maida Vale, this collection remains an exemplary document of a truly vital band.
LEE MCFADDEN