Rough Trade Exclusive. 140 Gram Vinyl with Signed A4 Print by Marc Riley, Stephen Hanley, Paul Hanley, Craig Scanlon. Limited to 500 copies. Signed. UPC: 5065019688828 The third Fall album in the bespoke Popstock label Narrative: Written by Jarvis Cocker, December 2024 "I have seen the madness in my area" sings Mr Smith on track 4 of this record. That sentence sums up a lot of The Fall's appeal to me: they looked at The North, the place I was brought up in, and saw something alien and inexplicable in it. Not "Gritty Northern Realism" but rather "Snotty Northern Sur-realism". A welcome alternative to all that Hovis advert, brass-band, "Ee by gum", "Last of the Summer Wine" schtick you normally got whenever The North was mentioned in the mass media. According to The Fall, people in the North of England also had dreams and sometimes saw "monsters glowing on the roof" of the local disco and had to deal with City Hobgoblins on a daily basis. This was great news. Incredibly great news for an 18 year-old who had just left school and was on Social Security and was trying to make it in a band, which was quite difficult because the rest of said band had been forced to go to university by their parents. Plus, The North was (pardon my French) completely fucked by 1981: its industries closed down by the Thatcher government, leaving the entire population in a severe state of shock. We needed something new to believe in. A band to believe in. "We are Northern White Crap that talks back" was another inspirational quote at this time (you can hear it in the introduction to "Psykick Dance Hall" on this record). Because that was what I was aspiring to do: I was attempting to find a voice. Attempting to find out who I could be. Tough job. The Fall had always been helpful to me in matters like these: Pulp's first mention in the local press, whilst I was still at school, had likened us to "a cross between ABBA and The Fall" (best review ever!), whi...