Song · The Fall
“Hit The North” by The Fall
“Hit The North” by The Fall appears on 4 radio countdowns from 4 stations between 1987 and 2003. Its best result is #9 on the John Peel's Festive Fifty of 1987. In the combined RockLists rankings it is the #58 alternative song of 1987, #5,926 alternative song of all time and #420 of the '80s.
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"Hit the North" was the Fall's single for October 1987, out on Beggars Banquet, and it's the sound of Mark E. Smith's awkward squad being nudged, however grudgingly, toward a wider audience. Smith wrote the words; the music came from Brix Smith and Simon Rogers, both fairly new to the band, and Rogers built the track on a freshly bought Sequential Circuits Studio 440 sequencer-sampler, starting with a bass, a snare and a tiny Indian bell on the pads.
Brix made no secret of the plan: she thought the Fall were far too underground and unappreciated for a band that mattered so much, and this was a deliberate push toward accessibility. Mark, her husband at the time, wasn't having it; as he saw it, they were just making things punchier while keeping them clean and simple. Either way, it gave the Fall a UK chart placing at number 57.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Alternative & Modern Rock
All Rock Formats
Year-end countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | 78 | WLIR / WDRE Long Island, NY | WLIR Top 100 Songs of 1987 | 99 |
| 1987 | 9 | John Peel (BBC Radio 1) | John Peel's Festive Fifty of 1987 | 50 |
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 861 | CFNY 102.1 The Edge | CFNY Top 1002 Songs of All-Time (November 1999) | 1002 |
| 2003 | 1638 | Fred (XM 44) | Fred XM Top 2044 Songs of All-Time (July 2003) | 2044 |
Also listed as: Hit the North; Hit The North Part 1; Hit the North Part 1.
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