Rowche Rumble

Rowche Rumble opens with a pair of interlocking guitars from Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon. Riley said the riff came to him from the Stooges. Steve Hanley’s bass runs underneath it like a motor that does not stop. Mark E. Smith delivers the words in a ranting monologue, half-barked and fully contemptuous. Oz McCormick produced the session with the band at Cargo Studios in Rochdale on June 11, 1979. The whole thing was recorded in one day. NME named it Single of the Week when it arrived that July. The song sounds like it cost nothing and is worth everything.

The title is a pun. Roche was a Swiss pharmaceutical company that manufactured Valium. Smith spelled it wrong on purpose, possibly to avoid legal trouble. The song attacks the over-prescription of the drug to women and the doctors who handed it out. Smith had worked as a shipping clerk in Manchester handling crates from Hoffmann-La Roche. He knew the company well enough to despise it. The lyrics invoke the phrase “Physician, heal thyself” and push it outward to musicians, businessmen and anyone running on a prescribed death dance. The Fall made abstract institutional contempt feel like a personal argument.

Rowche Rumble was released on July 30, 1979 on Step Forward Records. It became The Fall’s first UK chart entry, peaking at number thirty-one on the inaugural UK Independent Singles Chart in January 1980. John Peel placed it at number forty in his Festive Fifty that year. NME ranked it eleventh among the best tracks of 1979. AllMusic critic Ned Raggett called it “both a highlight of the young band’s career and a clear signpost toward much it would do in the future.” Sonic Youth covered it in a 1988 BBC session for John Peel, later released on the EP 4 Tunna Brix. Forty-seven years ago today, The Fall put out a three-minute argument that never really ended.