Magic Sound:House Of All @ Highbury Garage.

"I finally found the magic sound. It just sounded like a roar - with a solid work ethic" - Magic Sound, House Of All

When Mark E Smith died in January 2018 where were Fall fans to go? Except the pub - obviously. Brix & The Extricated did a great job of mixing classic era Fall tunes in with their own songs but Brix wasn't interested in becoming, solely, a tribute act to her ex-husband and why should she?

House Of All are very much NOT a Fall tribute band but it's hard, impossible, to ignore the fact that there is a lot of Fall in there. The band name, house oF ALL, is a big enough clue then there's the fact that all five members were once in The Fall. Frontman Martin Bramah was actually the original vocalist of The Fall but Mark E Smith proved, perhaps wilfully, so inept on guitar that they swapped roles. After that the band belonged to MES.

Then there's the Hanley brothers (Steve on bass, Paul on drums - a rhythm section that really does deserve to be called an engine room), Pete Greenway on guitar (last night absent and replaced by an unnamed substitute - who we called a youngster despite having a baldy heed complete with Shearer's island), and Si Wolstoncroft, looking very much his age, on drums. Yes, two drummers. Who doesn't love two drummers?

Of course, if Steve Hanley is in the band the band resolves around Steve Hanley. He looks slimmer and more rock star like (sunglasses at night - in one of London's darkest venues) than he used to and he even commands centre stage as he delivers agricultural bassline after agricultural bassline. Hanley plays as if rock is an industry and when there's a problem with the sound of his bass you feel the band suffer for it.

When that problem is fixed it feels like someone's turned the light back on. Maybe he needed those shades after all. Bramah seems to be loving his moment in the spotlight. His vocals, while hardly reminiscent of Al Green or Sam Cooke, are a bit more tuneful than ol' Smudger's were. There's no yelping, no - ah-ing, no muttering but at the same time there is, very much so, a sense of sprechgesang.

Tunes like But Wilful I Am till the same ground The Fall did. Mixing up the likes of The Velvet Underground, The Groundhogs, and Can (whose Uphill the band covered as an encore along with, quite bizarrely, Wet Leg's Ur Mum) with The Fall's distinct working class northern sensibility and arcane lyrical references.

The titles alone - Dominus Ruinea, Minerva Disrobed, Harlequin Duke (which references the return of a certain "bingo master"), give you a pretty clear idea of what kind of territory you're in and a look around the venue - bald heads, plastic pint pots, Modern Lovers t-shirt, Stewart Lee buying a Guinness at the bar (obviously) - makes it abundantly clear that House Of All aren't attracting a lot of punters who weren't already Fall fans.

They seem pretty cool with that. In fact they seem to be having a ball and so was everyone in the crowd. I found myself shaking my leg so much I got a reasonably decent step count for the day. House Of All, by all accounts, have not been welcomed by Mark E Smith's family (or 'estate') but they clearly have been welcomed by Fall fans.

At first I wasn't going to go this gig but then my mate Gary dropped out and gifted me a ticket. I'm glad I did go though. It might have been nice, or maybe annoying, to have MES fucking around with the amps, punching band members, and storming off stage in a pissed rage, but it was equally nice to see a band keeping the flame alive.

With excellent support from David Lance Callahan (Wolfhounds/Moonshake) who chucked in a surprising cover of Bo Diddley's Pills (one of my favourite ever songs) and excellent company in Stu and Pam I had a rather lovely, and - by the end, quite merry, night out in the Highbury Garage (my first visit since seeing Wire there six years ago, again with Stu and Pam) and the best song of that night was, without a doubt, House Of All's Magic Sound. In another world, a very different one, a number one hit.