The Fall – Bingo-Master’s Break-Out EP

29th June 2022 · 1970s, 1978, Music, Punk

The first time I saw The Fall was at the opening night of The Vortex, a punk club at the top of Wardour Street just off Oxford Street on 4 July 1977. This was their first recording a year later.

It was a quid to get in and it was a mostly Mancunian affair: John Cooper Clarke opened proceedings, as he so often did in those days, and Buzzcocks closed the show.

In between, Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers made an impromptu appearance to play a couple of numbers.

I didn’t know until now that it was only The Fall’s fifth or sixth gig.

All I recall is a rudimentary musical backing of scratchy guitars and clattering drums behind a badly dressed bloke with an accent like John Cooper Clarke ranting about this, that and the other like a born-again beat poet.

This was their first release, a three-song EP recorded in 1977 at the expense of my mate Richard Boon, who had hoped to release it on his New Hormones label.

It would have been the label’s second release after Spiral Scratch, but he couldn’t afford to press the records so he gave the tapes back to the band.

The line-up on these three songs (a fourth, Frightened, was discarded before release) was Mark E. Smith (vocals), Martin Bramah (guitar), Tony Friel (bass), Una Baines (keyboards) and Karl Burns (drums).

By then they had already lost one member, original drummer Steve Ormrod, becoming the first casualty as Smith worked his way through 66 band members over the next 40 years.

By the time the EP came out on Miles Copeland’s Step-Forward label almost a year later, in August 1978, the band had inevitably changed personnel again, parting company with Friel and Baines – and Friel’s brief replacement Jonny Brown, who designed the record’s cover art.