Gig played on 11/09/06

Imagining a world without The Fall is like trying to contemplate life without denim - you can't. Was there once really a time when Mark E. Smith's triumphantly nasal, nigh incomprehensible mutterings and his band's accompanying scrawly but compulsive Krautracket weren't a part of our cultural landscape? Thirty years and a conservatively estimated 429 albums on, The Fall are not so much a band as an institution. One seemingly unbothered about its profile, but constant and ever ready should you need a shot in the arm of obliquely expressed, socio-political comment shot through with misanthropic wit and stinging cynicism.

Fall fans are nothing if not determined; they've been shoe-horned inside this unbearably humid room for almost an hour, as one rumoured onstage time ticks by after another. Even Frank Skinner is sweating there at the back with the plebs. Finally, movement. A bunch of unfamiliar faces amble onstage, followed by keyboardist Elena Poulou (also Mrs Smith) and finally the wizened, gum-chewing vision of nonchalance in bad slacks that is Mark E himself. Smith's new gang - hired after yet another of series of walk-outs and sackings - is a strikingly young one, featuring the guitarist and bass player of LA-based psych rockers Darker My Love and American drummer Orpheo McCord.

In an inspired move, there are two bass players, all the better to deliver The Fall's insistent, motorik rhythms and maximise the high-tensile grooves that exercise such a hypnotic pull. They play a well-judged set with awesome ferocity and surprisingly polished focus, Smith's players working like skilled, match-fit regulars, rather than hastily drafted-in subs. The Marquis himself stares into the middle distance and gives nothing away, neither hesitating nor varying the pace of his bone-dry delivery, his trademark tagging of '-ah' onto every line ending now almost beyond parody.

Whether charging through the tribal, perkily clattering "Bo D", summoning a mosh-pit storm just three songs in with the punchy "What About Us" (in which our ringmaster provocatively contemplates Harold Shipman's drugs stash), leading the anthemic chorus with handclaps in "Theme From Sparta FC" ("this is not a poem for the bin", apparently) or cruelly prompting the heat exhausted to bounce higher still with the classic "Mr Pharmacist", The Fall are little less than magnificent. It's off after nine songs, then back for filthy and buzzing, Krautrock grinder "Blindness", after which Smith shoves past his still flailing drummer to exit through the stage curtain. Then on again for a newbie and finally, "Systematic Abuse".

Defiant, ornery, wilfully unfashionable, tunnel-visioned, even - Mark E Smith's The Fall are all these things. And clearly, still vital as oxygen.

by Sharon O'Connell