18 May 2021

Book: EXCAVATE! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall

About: A book about Mark E. Smith and The Fall – or more precisely, their
ever-influential world. The Fall were so many things, so many worlds, if you
got it (and not everyone did), they represented everything.

Publisher: Faber

Available via Amazon and other renowned online shops.

Bob Stanley (co-editor) in an interview with We Are Cult: “The Fall are an education.
You can take from them what you want. They enrich your life. The book explains that without saying it out loud. We had to leave things out. We didn’t want to cram everything in and we definitely wanted to give it space to breathe so it didn’t look like a scrapbook. Not all squashed down… We didn’t really want to write a book about how many band members there’d been or what fags Mark E Smith smoked or whatever because there’s plenty of books on that already. Talking about M. R. James or H. P. Lovecraft [who were a big influence] though… that’s kind
of what we wanted.”

Louder Than War says: “It’s a book that requires a constant return—coming back to
its fragments over and over again in acts of readerly repetition—to gain new knowledge
with each bit-by-bit encounter. Excavate! feels like a Mark E. Smith version of the Arcades
Project—never finished, and always producing new meaning.”

THE FALL: Facebook