"
Do you know what it is that I like about The Fall? I suppose it is that, like with the best of lots of other things, you know, like films and literature - not that I know much about films, or indeed literature if it comes to that, or painting, or whatever it is, you know; the very best work contains, without seeming fussy or cluttered or anything like that, but there's so much detail in there, that every time you look at it, or listen to it, or whatever it is you do with it, you see something or hear something that you had not observed previously. Is that a little pretentious? I think it's true, though, nevertheless."
That was
John Peel, there. Talkin' 'bout The Fall. I'm a-gonna talk 'bout The Fall too.
THE FALL: THERE IS NO REASON FOR HARMFUL
Some people have the
crossword gene. When they read "
He rations the port among those who want it (15)" their minds churn like a washing machine and, without conscious effort, they visualise the word "
Harbourmaster". They look at the word
craunched but they do not see
craunched, they see
dhune crac. People who have the crossword gene tend to lead
unfulfilled lives because their special talent has no place in
modern society, and few people have more than one special talent. The
crossword gene is a curse. It is only useful for people who
make a living compiling crossword puzzles, but the world does not need many crossword compilers, and I am sure that most crosswords are nowadays compiled
by computer.
Nonetheless a few of these
freaks thrive, if they survive beyond childhood. One of these gifted individuals is Mark
E Smith, who has used his genetic abnormality to create and conquer a small part of popular culture. He is The Fall, a modern pop music band. Birds take flight when there is a sudden noise, but it is not the noise itself that shocks them, it is the suddenness. It is
the unexpected transition that shocks them. Birds that have grown up in a noisy environment become restless when there is quiet. Perhaps one day they will take flight at the unexpected sound of silence, and deafen the world with their wings.
I am not a fan of The Fall. I despise fans. They are blind to their obsession. Their minds are filled with facts, but they cannot see the big picture, unlike myself. You might suppose that I am not the right man to write about The Fall, but you would be wrong. One does not illuminate darkness with more darkness. Instead, the
darkness is lit with light. When the light has passed,
the darkness returns.
The Fall is a band, a British band from
Manchester, a town in
the north of England, which is to say that it is in the middle of Britain, if you are looking at Britain on a map. It is between England and
Scotland, to the right of Ireland. Manchester has
a reputation. It is a city where children stab and shoot each other, and it is only a few hours' drive from most other cities in England. It is also a hotbed of pop culture. There are ninety eight million
Google search returns for Manchester, almost forty for every person who lives there.
Mark E Smith's middle name is Edward, but nobody calls him Mark Edward Smith. Nineteen years and fourteen days from now I will be as old as he is today, and he will probably be dead. It is hard to write about The Fall without writing about Mark E Smith. He is an
arty man who reads arty books, but he dresses in plain clothes and he was born of a
working class family. He has modest tastes. He did not go to
university, and yet his band is named after a novel by
Albert Camus, a French intellectual. When he gives interviews he seems like a clever but inarticulate teenager, despite the fact that he is a grown man. He is a cruel master, but people flock to him like sheep to a flame. He is a thin and weedy, but he is mentally tough. He is
a drinker,
a cynic,
a lover, and
a sinner. He gets his loving on the run. To date he is
childless, despite having been married three times in the space of twenty years. Perhaps he does not have penetrative sex. Perhaps he is scrupulous when it comes to contraception. Perhaps he is infertile. Perhaps he has developed a special breathing technique that prevents fertilisation. I do not know. I dare not find out. He is very much like a
grasshopper, I envisage him rubbing his front legs together, clicking, with inquisitive eyes that dart left and right. He has flickering little antenna things that come out of his forehead. With his own two hands he has felled trees, carved wood, made a boat, and set sail, over the horizon, beyond sight of land.
THE SET-UP
The Fall is Marky Smith plus a
backing group that backs him. The band writes the music, and Mark Smith directs them, and writes and sings the lyrics. There have been at least four or five or six or seven completely different line-ups; sometimes individual members drop out, and are replaced, until the entire line-up has changed, but on at least two occasions the entire band has been sacked and Mark has reassembled The Fall from scratch, usually without a pause. The Fall has never lain dormant, it has never split into two different groups, it has never lost its lead singer. Mark Smith once said in an interview that The Fall would still be The Fall if it was just himself and your grandmother on
bongo drums. It would not be The Fall if it was just Mark E Smith, he would still need your grandmother to play drums. There is something that prevents him from going it alone. He is not like
John Lydon or
Morrissey or
David Bowie or any other prolific musical star who bills himself as a solo artist, but relies on hundreds of different musicians to write music for him. Mark Smith has no innate musical talent and cannot play an instrument. At the same time - and unlike John Lydon, for example - he craves
live performance so much that he is unwilling to simply hole up in a studio with some session musicians. He needs to have a real band behind him. The Fall came into being in 1976, and until
1979 or thereabouts it was theoretically a roughly democratic
band of brothers; in the late 1970s Mark Smith was billed by the NME as "the band's singer" and The Fall was written of as a group, rather than Mark Smith's backing band. In that same NME feature an unidentified member of the band is quoted as saying that "
it's a standing joke in Manchester that The Fall are very deep and always arguing about things, and it's true. There's never a common agreement within the band. Instead there's a tension that makes us stronger", which is ominous in retrospect. Within six months half of that line-up had left or been sacked, and the
purges have continued thick and fast ever since.
In 1977 Mark brought in his girlfriend, an aggressive lady called
Kay Carroll, to manage the band. She was a hard taskmaster. Musicians are a weak and cowardly bunch, and she whipped the band into shape. Only Mark Smith could channel her aggression, and by the time she left the band, in 1983, Mark did not take orders from anyone anymore. He was the boss. He was The Fall. When the music press of the early 1980s ran features about The Fall they wrote about Mark E Smith. The rest of the band were usually not mentioned by name, except for
Brix Smith, Mark's wife, who was very photogenic. Mark had become the living embodiment of the Nietzschean ideal. When I read the writings of Mussolini, I see a little bit of Mark Smith, or at least the younger Mark Smith. He is aggressive and idealistic, working class. He did not inherit power, he built it. He dreamed of conquests beyond his means, and ultimately he did not achieve his goals, although he remained in power. The Fall has outlasted the reigns of Mussolini and Hitler and
Stalin. Mark Smith has been famous longer than
Martin Amis, and he has sold more records than Martin Amis.
YOU FAKE THE FUNK, YOUR NOSE GOT TO GROW
The Fall's first single was recorded in 1977 and released in
1978. It was called "Bingo Master's Break Out" and it was about an aged entertainer who was wasting his life.
"
A glass of lager in his hand
silver microphone in his hand
wasting time in numbers and rhyme
one hundred blank faces buy"
The first album came out in 1979. It was called
Live at the Witch Trials. The second LP came out later in 1979, it was called
Dragnet. Neither disc reached the charts, although they attracted lots of attention in the hip music press, which at that time consisted of the
NME,
Melody Maker, and
Sounds magazine. The group has kept up an aggressive release schedule ever since, putting out more than twenty-five studio albums, and several non-LP singles. The Fall's release schedule has sped up over time, with archival live albums, compilations, rarities collections, specially-recorded radio sessions, the works. The Fall has produced hundreds of songs since 1978, and they are all of a piece. Mark E Smith declaims
fragmentary poetry in his own unique way whilst the backing band plays oppressive post-punk twangy guitar surf music, or relatively slick dance pop, or relatively slick
jangly guitar pop, or contemporary industrial-influenced rock, or drivel, depending on the era. The guitarist almost never solos, the drummer plays a steady beat, none of the players have more than a moment in the spotlight. Sometimes there are instrumental sections, but they are grooves rather than a backdrop for the star guitarist or the star drummer. The Fall's lead instrument is not the guitar or the keyboard, it is the voice of Mark E Smith. On the first album or two it was sarcastic and bratty. He spoke-shouted, like
Rex Harrison with a temper. He did not try to sing in a conventional way, and there is a sense throughout Mark E Smith's career of a man who is not trying hard at anything, or at least wants to give that impression. He affects
boredom with the world. Perhaps this is Mark Smith's biggest legacy; loudly and aggressively affected laziness.
Mark's voice reached a peak of uninterested sarcastic authority during the mid 1980s, on songs such as "
Cruiser's Creek" and "
Hit the North", where it commanded attention. I imagine he practised behind
closed doors, where no-one would be able to hear him making an effort. He did not mumble, unlike most other indie vocalists of the 1980s. Mark's voice was was loud and clear. It yelped, it swooped and dived, it was a uniquely stylised and affected thing. It resembled a sabotaged imitation of
Gene Vincent's voice, as if
Gene Vincent had been born and raised in Manchester, and had grown up as a market trader, or a
holiday camp announcer, instead of being the rockabilly pioneer who sang "
Be-bop-a-Lula". Although individual words and phrases of Mark Smith's lyrics were comprehensible, even
catchy, his lyrics taken as a whole were hard to focus on, and did not make much sense. Written down, they were often clever and witty, but delivered in the
context of a song they were a verbal wash of sound,
catchy meaningless phrases. "
Hit the north! Ninety-five per cent! Guaranteed!", "Bazdad! Space cog! Analyst!" (from "Guest Informant"), "Bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah!" (from "Kurious Oranj"). At his peak, Mark Smith had a vocal range of a note, which he could bend up and down by almost a
semitone. Nowadays a non-singer with a desire to express himself would rap, but Mark E Smith was born of a time and place that eschewed the music of
the black man. British indie music of the 1980s was whiter than a unicorn. The Fall remains a white band today; it has never flirted with black music. No
ska,
reggae, jazz,
rap or drum'n'bass for The Fall, no hip-hop for The Fall, n.b there are other genres of black music, and of course music transcends race. Would a black person playing the
mandolin be less of a folk musician than a white mandolinist? The answer is no. Mark's voice eventually deteriorated, and today it is a slurred growl that barely sounds human.
I shall now describe the history of The Fall, from
1977 until the mid-90s. You can skip it if you want. It's just a lot of names and dates. Unless you are a fan of The Fall, it will not interest you, because the names are meaningless outside the context of The Fall. If you are a fan of The Fall, you already know all of this information, and will probably spot lots of mistakes. I shall begin now. I have already told you that The Fall emerged in
1976, or 1977, I am not sure. At that time the band was based around Smith on vocals, muscular
Martin Bramah on guitar, man-mountain
Karl Burns on drums, and the lovely
Una Baines, a
lady, on keyboards. The group went on to have several lady keyboardists, and indeed the current line-up features Mark Smith's wife in this role. On at least two occasions The Fall has been reduced to
Mark Smith on vocals, and his current wife/girlfriend on keyboards, and whoever he could find to play drums. The Early Early The Fall did not survive until the 1980s, with all the aforementioned leaving before 1979, but The Classic The Fall that emerged remained relative consistent throughout the rest of the decade, and into the 1990s. It was based around Mark Smith on vocals and thoughts, handsome
Steve Hanley on the bass, and wise old
Craig Scanlon on the electric guitar. Karl Burns continued to play drums and other instruments on an occasional basis, and did not leave the band for good until 1998.
Marc Riley, who I will mention later on, played guitar from 1978 until 1982, bridging the gap between the old and new versions of The Fall.
The Fall's most significant and unusual personnel change took place in late 1983. Whilst on tour in
North America, Mark Smith met and fell in love with an American lady called
Brix. He took her back to Britain and made her his wife and guitarist. Or perhaps she saw Mark Smith as a means of becoming famous, and latched onto him like a blood-sucking mosquito. Perhaps Mark Smith is easily led by women. I do not know.
Brix Smith was the opposite of The Fall. She was good-looking and glamorous. The Fall has never been a good-looking band. Brix looked like a stereotypical mid-80s
rock chick, with a big guitar and big hair, and big bright lipstick. She added a little bit of
the B-52s to The Fall, a little bit of glamour where before there had only been dourness. She had a pop sensibility, and the Fall's music quickly became beatier and hookier and more tuneful. By the middle of the 1980s The Fall was a
surf guitar experimental
riff rock band, with Brix Smith doing her thing on guitar and
backing vocals. Her backing vocals were often out of tune. It seemed as if the band was mocking the quirkier side of commercial rock music, whilst simultaneously giving commercial rock music a tobacco-flavoured
French kiss. Brix Smith was not quite
Kate Pierson, but she was not quite
Kim Gordon either. Some fans of The Fall have a soft spot for Brix Smith. Some have a moist patch for her. Some fans hate her, for transforming "their" band into an indie version of
The Bangles. It is impossible to know what The Fall would have become if Mark and Brix had never met. Her membership of The Fall coincided with its greatest commercial success, and some of its most memorable songs, such as "Cruiser's Creek" and "L.A.". The marriage did not last, and Brix left the The Fall in 1989 to concentrate on her own project, a band called
The Adult Net. It is okay if you have never heard of The Adult Net. She came back for a couple of years in the mid 1990s, but left for good in
1996. She now runs a fashion shop. I don't know whether the failure of the marriage had an effect on Mark Smith. He did not show it in interviews, and the histories of the band that I have read tend to gloss over it. Perhaps Mark was devastated and cried like a baby; perhaps he decided that, from then on, if people would not love him, they would fear him instead.
Craig Scanlon left in 1995, after sixteen years in the band, supposedly sacked by Mark Smith because of his slovenly appearance. The Fall slowly crashed and burned after that, with sackings and rehirings, and the band blew up in April 1998 during a gig in
New York. The show turned into a pushing match between Mark Smith and Karl Burns, at which point Burns and Hanley left for good. Smith then muddled along with backing tapes and various makeshift line-ups, based around
Julia Nagle on keyboards and guitars. Nagle had the terrible misfortune to join The Fall and become Mark Smith's girlfriend just as the band was collapsing, but she was made of tough stuff, and survived into the twenty-first century. Mark Smith assembled a new band of younger people, and although at first The New Young Fall was a sad joke, with force of will Mark Smith brought the group back from the dead. The group's 2000 album
The Unutterable was very good, with three great songs and no bad songs. Subsequent albums featured a new guitarist called Ben Pritchard, who was younger than The Fall itself.
Are You Are Missing Winner (2001) and
The Real New Fall LP (formerly "Country on the Click") (2004) and
Fall Heads Roll (2005) were of a consistent standard, with a few good tracks and no real stinkers. They attracted mostly positive reviews from the press. You might have seen the reviews yourself - the critics tended to write about the history of the band, with very little about the music itself. This is because The Fall's music had become superfluous to the Legend of The Fall in the same way that
Paul McCartney's music became superfluous to
the Legend of Paul McCartney. It is easy to write a review of a modern The Fall album. Simply write four hundred words about The Fall, and then say that the new album is a return to form, or that it is a disappointment compared to the previous album.
The New Young Fall fell apart in 2004, but Mark Smith huffed and puffed and the band pulled together again, surprisingly without any major line-up changes. During this period the group had established a reputation as the most erratic live act on the planet, alternating gigs where
Mark E Smith would fall over or walk off after fifteen minutes with gigs where the band rocked out like a
magickist. The Fall was starting to attract young new trendy fans, but it all fell apart again in May 2006. The band was touring America, and had just reached
Phoenix, en route to
San Diego. An altercation developed between Mark Smith and the lead singer of the support band, at which point The New Young Fall lost its patience with Smith and went back home to the UK, leaving Mark E Smith on his own again, with his lovely new lady wife
Elena Poulou on keyboards. The band says that Smith had become impossible to work with, being abusive, erratic, dictatorial, drunk, and generally unpleasant. Smith maintains that the band were lazy and wet and ungrateful. In a magazine interview published a few months later, Smith was proud to reveal that he been paying each member of The New Young Fall
one hundred dollars a day, with free food, free drinks, and free lodgings in a hotel, although they had to share rooms. I do not know how much Mark Smith paid his band when they were not on tour. Musicians are usually cagey about money. Assuming it is true that each member of The Fall earned a hundred dollars a day in 2006, that was a decent wage, but less than many graduates. As I write these words,
a hundred dollars is worth
fifty pounds, which is a handy sum to have in one's wallet, especially for ninety minutes of work starting at nine o'clock at night. I cannot think of any other incentives to be a member of The Fall. It is not a glamorous band, in fact its image is deliberately glum. I cannot see the band attracting many groupies. There is free travel, but it is free travel in vans and cheap aeroplanes. There is no time to sightsee, and the boss is a tyrant. And when The Fall comes to an end, a wage of fifty pounds a day will not have been enough to buy a house, or a pension plan, or to retire. There is a certain amount of glamour in being a former member of The Fall; it is like being the
survivor of an
aeroplane crash.
Still, The Fall continued. A Newer Younger Fall was assembled in the space of two days, with Mark coaching his new guitarist, bassist, and drummer by playing them old Fall records. The tour resumed immediately, to a mixture of good and bad reviews, and the band put out a new record, which was terrible. Today The Fall is Mark E Smith, plus his wife, and some other people, and a second group of other people who are there to stand in for the first group of other people (this is true: I am not making it up). I imagine that they are all sweaty,
nervous men who smile nervously whenever Mark Smith hoves into view. I do not know how much they are paid. The Fall no longer has full time members, it is an amorphous collective. Mark Smith is
the only constant. He is like
Charles Manson. He has never killed anyone, or at least he has never been convicted of murder.
THE OTHER PEOPLE ARE BAD PEOPLE
There have always been other people, and the same is true of The Fall. Many other people have been briefly captured by The Fall's gravitational field, dozens of people. None of them are even remotely interesting, and they are just names. It is a fact that Craig Scanlon was once a member of The Fall, but it is a meaningless fact. Craig Scanlon does not mean anything to anyone outside his circle of friends and family. He is not a lesson for us. It would be a feat, to memorise the names of the men and women of The Fall, to remember the names of all The Fall's albums, and the dates when they came out, and so forth, but it would be a meaningless, pointless feat. Fans of the band have fond memories of Craig Scanlon, and Steve Hanley, and also of
Ben Pritchard, although he did not remain with the band long enough, during a significant enough period in the band's history, to really become part of the legend of The Fall, but none of the men and women of The Fall have possessed greater fame and glory outside The Fall, either before they joined, or after they left. It is as if The Fall was a
giant plant that gave off an irresistible scent, and when its victims fell in, the plant sucked them of everything. Craig Scanlon now works for Britain's
Department of Work and Pensions, where he controls the people of Britain. Greater power, perhaps, but no greater glory. Steve Hanley is a
caretaker in a school. I can think of few jobs that are more melancholic than being the caretaker in a school. No-one is sure what happened to Karl Burns. Only Mark E Smith has thrived as a member of The Fall, but even he has achieved no success outside the group, although he has tried his hand at acting, spoken word poetry, and he also wrote a play. The few famous people to have interacted with the fall, such as Damon Gough or Michael Clark, were not proper members of the band. And
Michael Clark is not really famous outside of the world of dance.
Damon Gough co-wrote and played guitar on one of the B-sides of the second of a two-CD single release of a song from the band's 1998 album
Levitate. He is nowadays famous as
Badly Drawn Boy, winner of the
Mercury Music Prize in 2000. I am proud of the sentence "Damon Gough co-wrote and played guitar on one of the B-sides of the second of a two-CD single release of a song from the band's 1998 album
Levitate"; it is factually correct, it is precise, it is ridiculously baroque, in such a way