Hip Priest

I have been on holiday this week and as well as doing the requisite holiday things like going to the beach, sleeping in late, growing a beard and heavy drinking, I have also been listening to music and albums that I have not heard for ages. One stand out album is Hex Enduction Hour by the Fall.

For those of you who don't know the Fall, they are a prolific, ramshackle band lead by the idiosyncratic, mercurial Mark E. Smith. Smith is the only member of the original line up, and the band are perhaps as famous for their ever-changing line up as they are for their unique, fiercely uncommercial, music.

Hex Enduction Hour is widely regarded as one of their best albums. In this day and age of identikit, pointless pop pap it is wonderful to hear a fierce, highly original album. The Fall are one of the best exponents of post punk, a hugely under-rated band and a crucial link between post punk bands sich as Joy Division and the hugely successful Madchester scene of the early nineties.

And it is tempting to say that if there was any justice in the world then Mark E. Smith would be a mutli-millionaire rock star, and the Fall a record breaking, global force in music. But when the best, and most accessible, track on the album (The Classical - number 38 in John Peel's All-Time Festive 50, fact fans) contains the lyric "where are the obligatory niggers? Hey there, fuck face, hey there fuck face" you can kind of understand why The Fall never really got the air play they deserved.