Brix and The Extricated

28th February 2019

The Mash House, Edinburgh

I never saw The Fall in concert.  And even though I enjoyed a brief flirtation with the band during the mid Eighties, when they produced a number of really rather fine tunes, retrospectively I don't really feel like I missed a bus in any way.  

For whilst I certainly enjoyed a fair few of their single releases around that period (am thinking of the likes of Cruiser's Creek, C.R.E.E.P. and Couldn't Get Ahead), whenever I dove headlong into an album (Perverted by Language, I think I bought), I would come up spluttering for air, after almost drowning in a sludge of almost listenable dissonance.  With each subsequent Fall album I listened to, coming across like some British Trout Mask Replica – an album everyone is scared to criticise, on case they be accused of “not being intelligent enough to get it”.  Or something.

Anyway, this period where The Fall skirted around the edges of musical conventionality, not uncoincidentally, coincided with the introduction of Brix Smith (Mrs Mark E. Smith) into the band.  Whilst she could hardly be said to have had anything like a commercial music background, she did bring a rather more structured songwriting ethos to proceedings.  Although that term “structured” is distinctly relative where The Fall are concerned.

Brix left The Fall in 1989, the same year she and Mark E. divorced, although she did return for a short stint in the band in the mid 1990s.


Fast forward to December 2014, and Brix has teamed up with the former Fall rhythm section siblings Paul and Steve Hanley to help promote the latter's autobiography, and Brix and The Extricated are born.  Initially performing just The Fall material, the band gradually began introducing their own compositions into the mix.  With the result, this Edinburgh stop on a short UK spring tour saw the band promoting their second album of original material: Breaking State.

Blind Brix

Brix and The Extricated - Edinburgh 2019

When you forget to charge up your camera, and have to rely upon a phone which is older than the youngest band member....

Led on stage blindfolded, Brix and her band opened the show with a bass driven decibel-leaden chunk of punky thrash called (I think) Alaska.  This ear-splitting opener setting the scene, sonically speaking, for the rest of the show.  The next tune, Prime Numbers, flirts with pop on the album version, but here it was heavily metallicised, and used as a blunt tool to bash us all over the head with.  And I loved it.

Similarly H.C. and Dog Face, each remind me of the sort of stuff The B52s would hide away on albums, but here were both given voluminous reboots this evening.  And each an opportunity for Brix to indulge in a bit of Hit The North dancin'. 

The first of four Fall songs performed, Feeling Numb, came along midway through the set.  But this is a relatively late one, chronologically speaking, and not really typical of the band's sound, I would suggest.  So it was only once Dead Beat Descendant and Glam Racket put in appearances that we could really hear Brix's late hubby's voice by proxy, as it were.

Anb in another nod to the ex-old man, the band chose to wander off stage after performing for less than an hour.  But they did return to play a couple of encores; the second being perhaps The Fall's best known song Totally Wired.

And a fine rendition it was too, with the impact of the band members' exiting-stage-left-in-installments spoiled slightly by a breathless Brix swiftly returning to do that demeaning thing all bands have to these days: to pretty much beg us to spend (a lot) of money at the merch stand.


Set list

This is the set the band were playing during their Autumn 2018 tour, and looks to me pretty close (if not identical) to what we heard this evening

Alaska
Prime Numbers
Pneumatic Violet
H.C.
Vanity
Dog Face
Feeling Numb
Sleazebag
Valentino
Glam Racket
Going Strong
Dead Beat Descendant
Damned for Eternity
Hollywood

Encore
Something to Lose
Totally Wired.