This isn’t the first recording by The Fall, but it’s the first to have been heard on the radio, when John Peel played their debut session in June 1978.

It was his producer John Walters who discovered Peel’s future favourite band, following a recommendation from Danny Baker in his NME days, when they supported Siouxsie & The Banshees at The Greyound in Croydon.

The first of their 24 sessions for Peel was recorded on 30 May that year and includes a couple of my favourite Fall songs – Rebellious Jukebox and Industrial Estate.

I remember the latter lodged in my head and never went away.. perhaps not surprising since the lyric consists largely of MES chanting “Yeah, yeah, industrial estate” over and over again.

And I love that guitar line in Rebellious Jukebox that follows the vocal melody (or vice-versa).

Not much else to say except that guitarist Martin Bramah plays the bass for a fairly unusual reason.

The band needed a lift to London to record the session and had promised a local Manc musician they would let him play congas if he drove them there.

But the newcomer did not meeet with the approval of all the band members – although for once it wasn’t Smith who raised an objection.

“Eric, our bass player, saw the congas and this guy in a Hawaiian shirt and said: Fuck this. If he’s playing on the session I’m not. I’m not getting in the van,” recalled Bramah later.

Bramah then begged the band’s previous bass player, Tony Friel, who had just been fired after falling out with Mark E Smith – as would some 65 others over the next 40 years – to borrow his bass guitar.

“I was a guitarist, not a bass player,” he added, ” o I stripped it down to root notes and played very aggressively.”

And if you listen to Rebellious Jukebox carefully, you can just hear the congas on there… very low in the mix.