Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall

Hex Enduction Hour, the Fall's fourth studio album, was released on 8 March 1982, and it catches Mark E. Smith at his most cantankerous. Grant Showbiz produced it, and the sound stays deliberately rough and lo-fi, all abrasive, repetitive guitar, Steve Hanley's circling bass and not one but two drummers, Paul Hanley and Karl Burns, hammering away together.

The sessions started on a trip to Iceland in 1981, where the band played three shows to enthusiastic crowds that rarely saw a touring rock band, and Smith was taken with the otherworldly landscape; "Hip Priest" and "Iceland" were cut at Hljóðriti in Reykjavík. The rest went down in an abandoned cinema in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Smith meant the whole thing as a sneering answer to the pop of the day, naming Elvis Costello and Spandau Ballet as targets. Even the cover was a provocation, so crude that HMV racked it backwards.

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