Over their thirty-four year career The Fall have released twenty seven albums and have changed their line up numerous times (the list of previous members is thirty-seven names long), leaving vocalist Mark E. Smith as the only constant. Picking one record alone to represent them is nigh on impossible and so it makes sense to start from the beginning with 1979’s Live At The Witch Trials, their full length debut.

First things first: this is not a live album. It may seem like it from the title. But it isn’t. It was, however, recorded over the course of a single day and mixed in the next. No singles were culled from the record, as would become the common practice for the band, and it’s easy to see why for two main reasons. One is that it’s difficult to imagine any of the songs encouraging the casual music listener to go out and buy a record that sounds like this, and the second is that the record is brilliantly cohesive. From “Frightened” through to “Music Scene” is a bizarrely wonderful, if slightly terrifying journey through the mind of vocalist and front man Mark E. Smith. Thankfully he doesn’t even try to pretend he can sing, and so doesn’t try, deciding instead to shout, intone, mumble, preach, or scream over the atonal, discordant post-punk music behind him.

The record isn’t for the faint of heart, and at times can be relatively hard going, but for every part that it is challenging it is equal parts engrossing and charming. The vocals on “Frightened,” for instance, are intermittently and inexplicably panned to the left channel. It’s disconcerting at first, and sounds like a mistake, but soon becomes amiable and riveting, like a little puzzle within the song. This is the way much of the record works, pushing the listener in one direction and then pulling in another. “Crap Rap 2/Like To Blow” is a brash punk assault on the listener, but this soon segues to the discordant pop of “Rebellious Jukebox” – the closest thing to a single on the record. “No Xmas For John Quays” starts as an attack on Christianity but then degrades into ‘things I can see in the supermarket’. Standout track “Industrial Estate” is vicious and yet simultaneously upbeat and friendly, claustrophobic and yet somehow loose.

The Fall always were and always will be a band that contradict themselves whilst remaining steadily on course. This record sums up that attitude perfectly, anarchistic energy flowing throughout it, but not overpowering the bands sense of what a song needs and where it will fit into the record. Instruments are out of tune with each other, but it creates an atonal symphony of noise. Things that shouldn’t work miraculously do when placed into the hands of The Fall. A noisy, difficult, invigorating rebellious jukebox.