Excavate!: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall

This is 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.

To 50,000 Fall Fans: please buy this inspired & inspiring, profound & provocative, beautiful & bonkers Book of Revelations, choc-stock-full of loving Acts by true Apostles, simultaneously both the scrapbook you wished youd kept and a portal to futures & pasts, known & unknown, & a Fantastic Celebration of this Nations Saving Grace.
DAVID PEACE
Mind blowing . . . there is so much to enjoy in this brilliant book.
TIM BURGESS
A container sized treasure trove bursting at the hinges with strangeness and wonder . . . I strongly advise you to buy it.
MAXINE PEAKE
This is not a book about a rock band. This is not even a book about Mark E Smith. This is a book about The Fall group - or more precisely, their world.
Over a prolific forty-year career, the Fall created a world that was influential, idiosyncratic and fiercely original - and defied simple categorisation.
Their frontman and lyricist Mark E. Smith spun opaque tales that resisted conventional understanding; the Falls worldview was an education in its own right. Who wouldnt want to be armed with a working knowledge of M. R. James, shipping-dock procedures, contemporary dance, Manchester City and Can? The group inspired and shaped the lives of those who listened to and tried to make sense of their work.
Bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans, EXCAVATE! is a vivid, definitive record - an illumination of the dark corners of the Falls wonderful and frightening world.
[EXCAVATE! is] an insane hardback fanzine of found items from one of Mark E. Smiths carrier bags and essays by a really fascinating variety of people . . . this whole book is the most wonderful, unashamedly intellectual, pretentious, ridiculous, exciting hymn to this incredible group.
ANDY MILLER, BACKLISTED
[The Fall have] already piled up much in the way of memoirs and analyses, as if in an attempt to exhaust and deflate it. Excavate! is testament to the power such an effort sets out to rationalise, domesticate and destroy, placing The Fall in the hidden heart of the last 40 years of contemporary art.
THE WIRE
This wide-ranging anthology of scholarly essays, sleeve artwork, lyric sheets and other ephemera is a satisfying reminder of Smiths scabrous wit, unique visual style and rich literary hinterland.
CLASSIC ROCK
A thoroughly engrossing, insightful and immersive trawl through the wonderfully strange Fall-world
RECORD COLLECTOR