The Fall @ QMU, Glasgow, 4 Nov

The Fall are a difficult band. Everyone knows this; it's part of their charm. Fall fans have always prided themselves on their commitment to the band through thick and thin. The question this throws up, which most fans courteously avoid, is how long the thin patch which the band are currently in can go on before people lose interest. We reckon that with The Fall, and the cult of personality around Mark E. Smith, it’s now abundantly clear that it’s gone on too long.

This performance at the QMU brings that into shocking, vivid focus. It’s the usual drill from The Fall as of the past decade – a group of basically fine pub rock musicians come out on stage and play basically fine fuzzy post-punk for too long before Smith comes out to a rousing cheer from the audience. Tonight he is clearly ill, sat in a wheelchair as he stumbles and mumbles indifferently through Wolf Kidult Man, Over! Over! and Fall Sound, the band's supposed creative highlights from the last decade.

As the band segue into new material from this year's New Facts Emerge album, the songs are indistinguishable from one another. The band is fine, but fine isn’t really what you want here. There are bands where not being able to hear or understand a single lyric is part of the experience, but is it really the best we can expect from The Fall? The Fall, whose entire point in their heyday was Smith’s beautifully surreal, pitch-perfect lyrics floating carelessly over the angular rhythms and noise guitar of Craig Scanlon, Marc Riley, Brix Smith, and so on? Smith's entire creative output now consists of grumbling incomprehensibly over a garage rock band.

There are moments which you wouldn’t see with any other band in the entire world, such as when Smith wheels himself off stage and invisibly continues the set backstage for a handful of songs. But it’s just not enough. It’s time for Fall fans to collectively acknowledge this band is a shadow of a shadow of its former self. We have nothing to lose but our copies of Ersatz GB.

It’s a performance marked by creative laziness, complacency and – whisper it – contempt for the audience. The Fall were one of those seminal bands who came along to make people realise there was no reason to tolerate mediocrity in music and that bands should always be challenging and pushing boundaries. But you are only as good as your latest work. If The Fall didn’t have the weight of their own reputation behind them, would anyone care about them based on this lacklustre, derivative performance? The moment The Fall become a tribute act to their own greatness is the moment they die creatively. The audience seem happy with whatever they’re given, but we supect the band's moment has long passed.