The Fall circa 84/85 saw the band creatively flourishing and pulling together in ways that were only previously hinted at on record. Signing to Beggars Banquet afforded the band access to proper studios where their previously scratchy monochrome pantomimes evolved into fully realised technicolour effrontery. The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… would usher in a new era for The Fall, both in signing to a new label, and for being the first album in which Smith’s partner Brix would cast her influence and her West Coast pop leanings into The Fall’s rough-hewn Manchester mannerisms.

While The Fall were always one to embrace melody and upfront song dynamics that could be deemed “pop-ist”, at least in a garage sense, they conspired to release a succession of bafflingly addictive non-album singles that tested the patience of the UK charts. With the reissues stripping each album back to their original track-listing minus these singles, the balance between the ‘wonderful’ and the ‘frightening’ in The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… shifts distinctively. The cult-ish (not the band) chanting that offsets the rockabilly rumble of “Lay Of The Land” is unnerving, as is the descent into the murky depths of “Elves”. Listen to your phobias unravel on repeat on “Bug Day” and embrace the madness.  Here was the sound of swamp rock from the council estate, inhabited by “new fiends on the loose“ (“2 by 4”) and “the neighbour downstairs with one eye” (“Craigness”). It was The Fall, after all.

Beggars Banquet, 2010

9 out of 10 stars

The follow-up, This Nation’s Saving Grace produced some of their best work, casting the band into the mainstream without sacrificing their art or Smith’s bilious behaviour — “All those whose mind entitles themselves and their main entitle is themselves, shall feel the wrath of my bombast!” (“Bombast”). It’s The Fall on the attack, less Mark E. Smith and underlings, and more The Fall United. Breaking free from the mottled ravings of Wonderful And Frightening, This Nation’s Saving Grace, the songs presented here are a revelation, the musicianship and playing unparalleled. Here was a band on fire. From “Barmy” through to “Spoilt Victorian Child” it’s The Fall in all their rock n’ roll finery, gear shifting guitar riffs, pounding bass riffs, call and response exchanges abound. Brix’s contributions, the dance floor stutter of  “LA”, and the jagged twist and shout of “Gut Of The Quantifier” both cut mean future-Fall grooves. In 1985, The Fall were peerless. Where Morrissey was calling out “Meat is Murder”, Mark E. Smith retorted with “I Am Damo Suzuki”. There was no comparison.

As with previous Omnibus Editions (Bauhaus, The Cult), the people behind the scenes have scoured vaults and came up with an exemplary 4 disc (3 disc for This Nation’s Saving Grace) package of unreleased demos, non-album singles (“Oh! Brother”, “Creep” and “Cruiser’s Creek” all date from this period), session tracks and live recordings. Each album is treated like a work of art and deservingly so. At this point in the career, and for the next few albums at least, The Fall were unbeatable. The legend was made here.

With last years re-release of seminal debut albums from the Beggars Banquet catalogue by Bauhaus and Gary Numan, the release sheet this year for the Beggars Archive series look just as compelling, if not moreso. For fans of The Fall, both “The Wonderful and Frightening World Of” and “This Nation’s Saving Grace” (Webcuts twin favourite Fall albums of all-time) will be coming out remastered and repackaged as 4CD and 3CD sets respectively, as well as the entire This Mortal Coil back catalogue, and Pixies’ “Doolittle” apparently marked for blu-ray. Full details, taken from the Beggars Archive website are below. No release dates have been pencilled in as yet.

THE FALL – The tapes have been transferred, licenses to issue radio session material  applied for, no objections from Mark E. Smith, so we’re almost ready to announce a track listing. The releases won’t come out before the new Fall album on Domino but “Wonderful And Frightening World Of” will be a 4 CD set and ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace” expanded into a 3 disc set. The Fall re-issues are slowly making their pilgrimage towards a release date.

One of the ideas behind the Omnibus releases is to include a contemporaneous live recording of the songs but this won’t happen on this release as the master tapes for two radio recordings, from Clitheroe Castle and Bremen, have been lost or thrown out. Careless. It’ll still be a 3 disc set though, with a second disc of the rough mixes and selected out-takes and a third disc of singles and relevant tracks from John Peel sessions. Also found is a completed master for Ma Riley, an unreleased, Bo’s beat song originally intended as the bonus track on the “Cruiser’s Creek” 12”.

THIS MORTAL COIL – The first two albums have been re-mastered and approved. Initially all three albums will be issued in newly artworked (by Vaughan Oliver) gatefold, Japanese paper sleeves and also put into a box along with a 4th CD of all the singles. The analogue master tapes are also being transferred to digital at 24 bit / 96khz (as is our standard practice) but with the emergence of Blu-ray audio we may do a release so that you can bathe in the wonderment of genuinely improved sound quality.

PIXIES Doolittle Omnibus Edition – The surround mix of “Doolittle” is slowly coming together and we’re looking to interview everyone involved with the album for the Omnibus booklet. The demo tapes will be mastered soon (or as soon as The Fall is finished).

Defied by some, loathed by others, Bauhaus’ musical legacy is an uncertain one. In the five years they were active, releasing four musically divergent studio albums and one snarling snapshot of the band in live repose, Bauhaus were an electrifying and provocative presence whose releases still have the power to stun into submission. In the near 30 years since the release of their towering debut album, In The Flat Field, the lack of success and notoriety deserving of an innovative and influential act like Bauhaus beggars belief. Few debut albums will birth a genre. Fewer still will retain their mystique and mystery, years after their graves have been robbed and secrets sold on.

Arriving in the midst of the post-punk wilderness in Northampton, England, Bauhaus were art school friends influenced by glam rock, yet for all the pop and pastiche of the glitter bands, they conspired to create a sound that bore the barest semblance to the prim pout of Bolan and Bowie. Theirs was an primal kind of rock and roll, both brutal and barren, that when projected upon the louche and lean frame of vocalist Peter Murphy, became something quite unlike anything else. In The Flat Field appeared on the back of a succession of singles, beginning with the mock horror of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” and ending with a decorous dalliance through T-Rex’s “Telegram Sam”, its nine songs acting as lightning rods, illuminating the dark and creating an ugly, electrifying presence.

From the twisted snarl of Murphy’s “Double Dare”  to the heavy metal gallop of the title track, Bauhaus had created a musical palette, steeped in melodrama and drained of all colour. Daniel Ash’s guitar work played Mick Ronson to Murphy’s Bowie meets Iggy Pop contortions. The rhythm section of brothers Daniel Haskins and David J. gave Bauhaus its forward foundation, mixing fretless bass-playing with synthetic drums, leading to the leadened bass footsteps of “Spy In The Cab” and the driving electro pulse of “Dive”. The highlight of the album, and long-standing fan-fave, lie in the possessed incantations of “Stigmata Martyr”, Murphy rebelling against his Catholic education and turning the song into a volatile Exorcist-like moment that the mounting tension of closing track “Nerves”  would only go on to exacerbate.

Beggars Banquet, 1981

10 out of 10 stars

Their 1981 follow-up Mask would eclipse the bloodless boogie of their debut, but was one not without its false starts (something that can be tracked via the rejected album mixes featured on the bonus disc). Mask thrived on the contributions made from each of its members, from Murphy’s vocals, both haunting and sharp, devious and direct, enacted in the gutteral ferocity of opening track “Hair of the Dog” and his eerie encounters in “Hollow Hills”. David J’s funk bassline defines the near pop of “Kick in the Eye”, and later collides with Daniel Ash’s wailing saxophone on “In Fear of Fear”. Ash himself veers between the acoustic rabble-rousing of “The Passion of Lovers” to the manic electric guitar squeals of “Muscle in Plastic” while Haskin’s restrained playing on “Hollow Hills” and his brooding tribal beat of the title track trades drama with despair and triumphs.

Taking the same format as the recent reissue of The Cult’s Love, each Omnibus Edition album is accompanied by a 48 page insight into the album, replete with memorabilia and rare photographs as well as a second disc of previously unreleased recordings and alternate versions matched with more familiar b-side tracks, culminating in a powerful live disc on the Mask edition which leaves the previous period live recording Press The Eject and Give Me The Tape for dust. It’s as much a detriment to the band as it is music in general, that the ‘Goth’ tag has engendered such a tainted reputation over the years, as both these albums, Mask in particular, represent some of the most compelling and original music ever recorded.

A genre-defining release in the Goth pantheon, The Cult’s Love was a bold move for the band, still trying to shake the post-punk Southern/Death Cult shackles and move into the mainstream. This was 1985 though, when their contemporaries were making featherweight pop without substance or shame. Recorded after the success of the chart-busting “She Sells Sanctuary”, Love would ironically be helmed by Steve Brown, the man who produced Wham!’s million-seller Make It Big. Think about that for a minute.

Love is The Cult at their most psychedelic and pop indentured — they would never make another record like this again. The chiming sitar-come-electric guitar riff that heralds the beginning of “She Sells Sanctuary” changed the trajectory of the band forever and exposed the largely unrecognised talents of one William ‘Billy’ Duffy. At the heart of Love are the melodies that flow from each of Duffy’s fingers. It’s in his hands that Love lives. Ian Astbury was the classic frontman — charismatic and beautiful, with a vocal style that was equal parts Jim Morrison swagger and Robert Plant cool, and he could take any phrase and create a song out of it by singing a few lines of evocative mumbo-jumbo and then repeat that phrase ad nauseum for the chorus. Vacuous songs were part and parcel of the 80’s. If you weren’t The Smiths, then nobody was going to bother reading your lyric sheet.

Steeped in Led Zeppelin-like mysticism, Love beckoned you in with the dreamlike “Nirvana” and the slap-bang glitterband-chug of “Big Neon Glitter”. The psychedelic title track avoided any hand holding, but captured a band moving as one, the ‘love’ perhaps at the point they’re now at, as Astbury would sing ” spent a long time in this hole/spent a long time in this town”. Mired in the occasionally foot-dragging tracks like “Brother Wolf, Sister Moon” which continued Astbury’s fascination of the American Indian and the bleak march into the sea that is “Black Angel” which closes the record, there lies Love’s saving grace in its trilogy of singles – “Sanctuary”, “Rain” and “Revolution”, the latter burdened with another of Astbury’s empty phrases (“there’s a revolution, yeah!”) but the lush layers of Duffy’s guitar and multi-tracked backing vocals come together to create this elaborate tapestry that makes Love one of the unmistakeably brilliant albums of that period.

The tragedy of Love is that by the time The Cult were on the road touring it, the next phase of their evolution was already beginning, a change in sound that you can hear in the fiery guitar and frenetic wah-wah soloing on “Phoenix” that when stripped of its tarted up sound edged ever closer to the torn denim and rock n’ riffs of Electric. Had the band gone in their original direction, it would’ve resulted in the aborted Peace, essentially Electric in a dress. Having heard both efforts, I’m not entirely sure which I prefer, but the album that The Cult will be forever identified with has been rightfully given the thorough re-release it deserves.

The Omnibus Edition offers the remastered Love album (which makes it twice remastered on my count now), a disc of b-sides and extended versions from the three singles, a third disc of previously unreleased demos (thankfully not already compiled on the Rare Cult boxset) and a fourth disc of a BBC recording of The Cult at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1985. The packaging for the Beggars Omnibus series is without fault. Each CD comes in a replica vinyl sleeve and the accompanying booklet traces the evolution of the album with track by track commentary, lyrics, interviews and archival photos. The no-frills 2 CD Extended Edition caters for the less discerning fan, with just the remastered album and the b-sides disc, but really, when it comes to making a choice, ask yourself this — do you want a little Love or a lotta Love?