Sleeve notes
The Fall
Hex Enduction Hour · 1982
The Fall formed in Manchester in 1976 around Mark E. Smith, whose barked, half-spoken vocal delivery and contempt for conventional song structure remained the band's only fixed point across four decades and a lineup that turned over dozens of times. Smith treated the group less as a band than as an ongoing project he happened to front, firing musicians mid-tour and rebuilding around whoever was left, a working method that became as much a part of the Fall's mythology as the records themselves.
Hex Enduction Hour, their fourth album, arrived in 1982, recorded partly at a rundown Hitchin theatre and partly in Iceland, built around a rare dual-drummer lineup. The band kept working at a punishing pace into the 2010s, releasing more than thirty studio albums before Smith's health declined; he died in 2018, only months after the band's final show. Few groups have made instability itself sound so deliberate.
