This notoriously volatile cult band played four London dates over the course of five nights. For the final show, at the Galtymore, a delightful Irish venue in Cricklewood, two of the line-up that played at 93 Feet East, in Brick Lane, on Monday, had already departed. When jazz soloists seek out new collaborators, it’s seen as artistic restlessness, but rock journalists find the erratic line-up changes of the group that Mark E Smith formed in Manchester in 1976 endlessly amusing.

The Fall’s front man, glossing over accusations that he is simply unbearable, compares himself to a football manager, reshuffling his squad.

Smith currently operates two basic Fall formations. At Monday’s show, we saw him and his wife, the keyboardist Elena Poulou, backed by a principally American Fall, hastily assembled in San Diego last May when the duo were abandoned by their group after an incident involving a plantain. The drummer Orpheo McCord maintains the streamroller thrust of What About Us? and Pacifying Joint while making them swing, and the guitarist Tim Presley lends an uncharacteristically psychedelic flavour to the Fall’s pulverising riffs. The bearded bassist Rob Barbato and the British bass-player Dave Spur create a heavy, laval bedrock. Smith’s voice has recovered a range presumed lost, and his cryptically compelling lyrics are riddled with dog-growl rumbles and falsetto yelps. The new material — the high-octane drone of Reformation and Fall Sound, a speed-metal declaration of intent — is among his most electrifying work to date. His apparent lack of stagecraft conceals an understanding of the dramatic power of the smallest gestures.

Three nights later, Presley has gone home, and an ashen-faced Pete Greenway, of the band Das Fringe, plays the same guitar riffs with harsher, serrated textures. Barbato nods the group through the changes. In a pleasingly unprepared encore, Poulou reads her husband’s lyrics over improvised backing. “You are the sort of person who keeps a pair of plastic women’s breasts under his desk,” she declaims, to the delight of the crowd.

By Friday, Barbato is gone too, and the band have peaked, shrinking back to a five-piece. The Fall’s music remains impossible to define, incorporating the visceral, blue-collar thrills of 1950s rock’n’roll and the visionary experimentalism of Krautrock and dub reggae. Its sound exists only in Mark E Smith’s head. In these gigs, he came uncharacteristically close to defining it.

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