Witch Trials also featured, IMO, the best Fall keyboard player, Yvonne Pawlett. Her playing was integral to the sound, not an afterthought. Witch Trials was a fine debut but the band really started coming into its own on Dragnet.

Yeah, I had heard some singles on the radio when they came out:
Bingo Master’s... Totally Wired and ...’Elastic Man’, and loved them,
but the band didn’t really hit me until later in 1980 when the distributor
I was working for picked up Rough Trade. Both Grotesque... and Slates
came thru the door and were plopped down in front of me to sell and,
holy crap, I was immediately hooked!

The next year, they came to our city and the engineer at our radio station
named Tim Powell recorded them and two tracks were later released
on A Part of America, Therein (N.W.R.A. & Hip Priest).

Since that first gig, I’d seen them at least a dozen times.

You're lucky as hell dude. What shows were the best/worst?

The early years were always the best ones, I think, but even tho MES got more belligerent as he got older, there was always some kind of spectacle that would be happening when they played. In the early days of the 80s, there was the solid playing with an edge that was great and, then, in the mid 80s, I managed a record store and one of the guys who worked there went to high school with Brix and so on the night The Fall were to play, she came around to the store to hang out ... and then the concert itself, that night, was almost joyous in it’s energy. MES seemed like a happy guy and not the sloppy drunk he sometimes became at later shows (mostly, slurring lyrics to the point you had no idea what he was saying to constantly fucking with other members and their instruments while they were playing, etc...). The only time that had stopped happening during the later years was when he came out and did a whole show in a wheelchair ‘cause he had gone out a few days earlier for some cigs and fell on the ice. My wife started having doubts about going towards the end (and she’s a big fan) because she couldn’t understand what he was singing about on the tunes he wrote and was kinda uninspiring when he’d sing something he didn’t write, like Mr. Pharmacist.

wow hanging with Brix sounds rad

Well color me extremely jealous. I wish I had the chance to smoke some cigarettes with Brix and chat about her contributions to the Fall. As for MES, yeah, he was struggling at the end, but the fact that he still came out and performed in a wheel chair, despite his condition, instilled even more respect for him than I already had.

@elph - you finishing your Fall journal any time soon? Come on man, you got one album left.

Once had a dream where Mark E. Smith came to my house and made me do chores, it was weird.

this guy was looking for a Brix and the Extricates CD today (we only had the record), and I got to talking to him and he was telling me he was friends with Brix right around when she married MES, and that he went to the pub with him on one occasion and got drank into a coma trying to keep up

Was his name “Pete”? (sincere question)