Christ knows what the crass carcrash of my feelings really, really are about this band. I mean, I can’t say what I mean ‘cause I can’t work them out at all. And maybe that’s the whole point. I just don’t know. But let’s try anyway…

I mean, of course, I love The Fall. I love them with all my sickness of gut and flabiness of prose, of prosaic phrase and mosaic mentalmaze. I love the brilliance of the poetry, of the indulgence, the fuck-up frenzy and sheer bust-down-the-walls burp'n'burn brilliance of the muscular dumbass disgrace that passes for a flirting riff, before it all disappears into territories of my bewildered brain that seek only for solace or caress. And I love these soresoarstonestoresmashclawcrawpoorpour songs that carve tracks into synapses that had been abandoned, piss-soaked and wheezing in wheelchairs of glorious stupidity, long-retired from complex processing.

Mark E. Smith and the incomprehensible inspiration that drives him are parts of my life that make me wonder whether I’m really inspired by that bloody band of his, or I’m being conned and confused into infusing the consonance of these consonants with an importance that should really be described as impotence. These five CDs of semi-official bootlegs of five 2001 gigs by the bloody Manchester misfit are shoddy and shabby and shit and error-ridden and erotic and ersatz and cultured and crazed and foolish and frenetic and cool and crap and drunken and devilish and… ah fuck it.

If there is any wisdom in this release, it’s tarnished by the obviously oblique delivery for which yer man Smithy is beautifully infamous. Forget the five CDs and the 70 tracks and dip and delve in and duck and dive and connect somehow, somewhere, masturbatorily, massively with the dark power of the performances. Maybe.

So what’s the point of all this? I still don’t know what I feel about the band. I’m trying to get there, trying to heal the rift between what my ears tell me and what my imagination shies from expressing.

The Fall.

Fuck ‘em.

I think I want to.