“Totally Wired” by The Fall

"Totally Wired" came out on Rough Trade in September 1980 as a stand-alone single, sounding every bit as twitchy as its title, and it has since become one of the Fall's calling cards. It only reached an album later, tacked onto CD reissues of Grotesque (After the Gramme). Mark E. Smith wrote it with guitarists Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley played bass, Paul Hanley drums, and John Brierley and Kay Carroll produced.

Not everybody was sold. Danny Baker gave it a kicking in the NME, calling it ugly and badly produced. The people disagreed: it climbed to number 2 on the UK indie singles chart, landed in John Peel's Festive Fifty in both 1980 and 1981, and turned up years later on Uncut's 2001 list of the post-punk era's greatest singles and in Pitchfork's 2014 guide to the best songs since punk.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.