The Classical - The Fall

Fan video. From Hex Enduction Hour (1982). Footage from a Fall documentary, played around with by me.

Hex Enduction Hour is a 1982 album by The Fall. It was the first album to feature both Karl Burns and Paul Hanley in a two-drummer lineup and was partly recorded in Iceland during the group's 1981 visit, with the remainder being completed in a disused cinema in Hitchin, England. A single, "Look, Know" / "I'm Into C.B.", was recorded contemporaneously but not included on the album, standard practice for the group until 1986. Mark E. Smith told journalist Sandy Robertson that he had envisaged Hex as being the group's final album and that he would not have continued in music had this been the case.[1] However, the record received very positive reviews and was the first Fall album to make the official chart, spending three weeks in it and peaking at #71.
In 1984, Motown Records expressed an interest in signing the band to a new UK division and asked to hear their back catalogue. Hex was the only album Smith had to hand. The letter the group received back stated "I see no commercial potential in this band whatsoever". Smith publicly speculated that this might have had something to do with the lines "Where are the obligatory niggers? / Hey there, fuckface" from album opener "The Classical".[2]
"The Classical" was later covered (though with altered lyrics) by Pavement, who Mark E. Smith frequently accused of copying The Fall in their early career. Their version is currently available on the expanded edition of Brighten The Corners.
One of the record's most recognised tunes is "Hip Priest". Smith later reworked the song for the band's 1988 album I Am Kurious Oranj, while the original track was used in the climax of the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. Colin Wilson, a writer on the occult and existentialist philosophy, is mentioned in the refrain of "Deer Park".
The album went out of print when the Kamera label folded in 1983 but a German edition on the Line imprint was widely imported with copies pressed on white vinyl. Line also issued a CD edition, flat transferred from a later generation tape. In 2002, a new edition claiming to be remastered was released via Mark E. Smith's Cog Sinister imprint, but was actually just a direct clone of the Line CD, adding both sides of the "Look, Know" single. It was finally remastered from the original master tapes and issued in January 2005 via Sanctuary with a disc of bonus material (omitting "Look, Know" but not its B-side). In April 2007, a single-disc edition containing just the original album was issued in a digipak sleeve at midprice. The Sanctuary two-CD edition was repressed in alternate, expanded packaging by Universal in 200