The Fall formed in 1976. By the middle of 1979 the only founding member who was still in the band was Mark E Smith; the Fall had crystallized around him, but lineup changes would remain a constant in their history. The band ceased to exist with Smith's death in January 2018, and by that point it was impossible to imagine any other way things could have ended.

The Fall are usually defined as a post-punk band, which might be the most accurate of all the available genre labels, but I have always felt that they defied characterisation. John Peel famously described them as "always different, always the same", and this is the best way to understand their work. Mark's approach to music remained amazingly similar over the years, but the band itself never stopped moving forward. The most significant evolutions in musical style were usually brought about by changes to the composition of the band, but even the relatively stable periods in the Fall's history never became stagnant. The sheer variety of the Fall's oeuvre is one of the most compelling things about them.

The music of the Fall is deeply special to me, and has been for a long time. I can hardly recall a time when I cared about music at all but didn't love the Fall. For a long time my appreciation was fairly shallow, having only dipped into a few of the more popular albums from the early portion of their career. I was still a fan but I never bothered to investigate them too deeply, and in fact I didn't know about Mark's death until several years after the fact. But one day I was listening to Grotesque and something suddenly clicked, and I felt the urge to check out the myriad other albums I had previously ignored. It was hard to believe what had been under my nose all that time, and I'm very glad that moment came.

I've spent ages listening to the Fall and my thoughts on their music have had a long time to percolate, but I've never really expressed them in writing before. My intention is to write a "review", or at least a collection of my ideas, on every album they recorded. The names below will become links when they're ready.