by Dave Simpson
In this way, the Fall factory has been able to produce at least one unit – an album, and often more – a year. However, in recent years the revolving door has almost spun off its hinges. What I didn’t realise in 1981 was that, even then, The Fall had already seen off eleven musicians. But in more recent years, line-ups have imploded before gigs, after gigs and even during gigs, with accompanying tales of fist-fights and appalling behaviour. Even Paul Morley has pondered, ‘What if he wasn’t a genius, he was just an old drunken tramp that when he got really drunk started to spout phrases that made a kind of sense, and we read too much into it, you know?’
And yet, after each seemingly terminal session of public hara-kiri, Smith has got up, dusted himself down, assembled yet another Fall and continued, to the bafflement of many, to reshape the band and make even more great music.
By the time I interviewed Smith in 2005, I’d become fascinated both by his guarded doctrine of ‘creative tension’ but also by the curious lives and fates of the former members. Because Smith has always maintained a Goebbels-like iron grip over The Fall’s interviews, little is heard from Fall musicians even where they’re in the group, and certainly not afterwards.
As I prepared for my interview, I found myself wondering where they were, not least the line-up I encountered all those years ago in 1981.
The guitarist, Marc Riley, had become a famous DJ on Radio One. Steve Hanley, the bassist, had remained alongside Smith from 1979 until 1998, when he’d departed after a particularly infamous New York punch-up which landed Smith in jail. Craig Scanlon – perhaps the band’s most revered guitarist – had been mysteriously sacked in the mid 1990s and was rumoured to be a broken man, grinding out his days working in the dole office.
Most perplexing of all was the mysterious fate of Karl Burns. Burns had been the band’s high-profile drummer for 20 years – fired and rehired on numerous occasions – but since the New York incident had vanished as effectively as Lord Lucan. Even Peel had been moved to ponder, ‘I don’t know if Smith is killing them all or what?’
The more I totted up the number of people who were active members of The Fall (as opposed to producers, girlfriends or wives who added backing vocals, or saxophonists who contributed 15 seconds to a track in 1982), the more mysterious it seemed. Inevitably, Smith was unwilling to shed light – suddenly clamming up or changing the subject whenever we veered towards the topic of ex-workers. Each time I asked about Karl Burns, he swiftly changed the subject, summoning the barman to supply us with more lager.
So, I set myself the task of finding them, dead or alive, imagining that the former members not only held the key to the legends of The Fall, but that The Fallen musicians were themselves a piece of social history: 30 years of music seen through the eyes of the foot soldiers.
Which is why, on a Tuesday morning in December, I was ringing people in Rotherham called Brown. When I started my mission, there were 42 ex-members of The Fall on my list. When I ended it, there were 45. I had to find Jonnie Brown, and the rest, before MES ‘killed’ any more of them. Or me.
CHAPTER 1
‘It’s like football. Every so often you’ve got to replace the centre-forward.’
The first thing you notice when you have any sort of dealings with The Fall is that even in the most cursory functions they don’t operate like any other group. There are no armies of publicists, marketeers or stylists, or even something as customary as a manager. What there is, is a very nice lady called Dorothy who acts as something like a go-between between The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (the title of their cracking 1984 album) and everybody else. Requests for interviews and such like are batted on to Elena, the third Mrs Smith and at time of writing the current keyboard player in The Fall, who then forwards them to Smith himself.
‘How about getting Mark to talk about the former members and then some of the former members to talk about Mark?’ I ask Dorothy.
She seems unsure, but she has a suggestion: ‘Why not interview Mark, see how you get on, and then hopefully he’ll put you in touch with some former members?’
Thus, I find myself hurtling in the Fiat Punto to Manchester’s Malmaison, wondering which Smith – born 5 March 1957, whose name, Mark, is Hebrew for ‘warlike’ – I’ll get today. My only previous interview with him took place in 1997, when Melody Maker had the idea to put Smith together with New Order bassist Peter Hook and The Beautiful South’s singer Paul Heaton to debate the burning issues of the day. Smith turned up complaining of an attack of tinnitus, caused by a bang on the head sustained in the course of sacking his latest line-up two nights previously, and with a limp he suggested was the result of being mis-sold some ‘corrective shoes’. It then transpired we’d have difficulty finding a venue for the interview because Smith was at the time barred from most of Manchester’s city centre pubs. We finally found a suitable, if insalubrious, bar where I felt a tiny bit apprehensive regarding Smith’s grouchy reputation. However, Smith was nice as pie with me, perhaps because he was more preoccupied with hilariously destroying Heaton, who had made the grievous mistake of confessing to be a huge fan of The Fall.
The session went on for hours and hours, during which we somehow managed to tackle subjects as diverse as the Spice Girls, the Teletubbies, the IRA and why electioneering Conservative politicians in Smith’s native Salford have to don balaclavas if they dare to knock on doors, before I passed out on the train home.
The interview had already been postponed twice. Ominously, we were supposed to meet on the Friday, but Dorothy phoned to say Smith had suddenly had to dash off for some ‘urgent business’ in Austria. Whatever could that mean? Then I got halfway across the M62 to Manchester when Elena called to say Smith had been ‘unavoidably detained’ a second time. Two days, two hours and ten minutes later, he cascades through the Malmaison revolving doors – it’s a chic establishment, suggesting the ban no longer applies – wearing a leather jacket that seems to be struggling to stay on his shoulders. When he sits down with the inevitable pint of their strongest lager, I notice his blue shirt is peppered with iron burns. Smith may be a musical genius, but he has clearly yet to master the more demanding domestic tasks. Later, when I mention the shirt to a friend, the friend comments, ‘That sounds quite trendy.’
So how was Austria?
Smith looks bemused, then erupts in laughter. He hasn’t been to Austria at all.
It wasn’t planned, he explains. The thing was, he’d met some football fans on the Friday who ran a fanzine and they’d included a chart of all-time favourite Fall songs and ‘Paranoia Man in Cheap Sh*t Room’ – one of Smith’s personal favourites – had made it to Number 5. He’d originally planned to nip out for an hour, but one thing led to another and he was enjoying himself so much he hadn’t realised he’d been out with them most of the weekend.
Smith admits he’s ‘a bit hazy’. However, he wastes no further time in setting up one of his favourite pre-interview gambits: the erection of barbed-wire fences between The Mighty Fall and all those Other Groups.
‘They’ve started manufacturing “alternative” groups now,’ he begins, in his inimitable Salford slur. ‘The last two awards ceremonies I went to, the arse licking when they went onstage was intolerable. Thanking the publisher, the manager, the record company, the one who started us off … and they’re supposed to be alternative groups. It was sickening, actually. We were like “Shut up!”
‘They all want careers in music. You’d think they’d be up for a party, but my mates who are builders have more fun than half these bands.’
He pauses, then explodes. ‘And make more money, arrarrarr!’
This seems to be a recurrent feature of Smith’s interview technique: establish camaraderie between artist and interviewer, and align us both against everybody else. He has been known to take a similar combative approach both with and against his own musicians. He soon reveals there’s been yet more turmoil in the camp.
Spencer Birtwistle – a long-lost drummer who Fa
ll fans had thought lost to the mists of time (or wherever Fall drummers go when they suddenly disappear) – is back in the band.
‘He left a year or two back, having a hard time with his wife or something. When I rang him up he’d just packed his drum kit away for good that morning. He wasn’t in a good state, actually. I said “I’m not doing this for therapy. I need you now!”’
And that was that. More curiously, guitarist Ben Pritchard – who after four years is a relative Fall veteran – has apparently resigned and been reinstated in the space of the last three days.
‘He took three days to write the resignation letter,’ explains Smith, trying hard to stifle a cackle.
Almost imperceptibly, we’re onto the major topic of the interview: the hiring and firing of musicians, and Smith’s seemingly lifelong philosophy of ‘freshening up’ The Fall, which he compares to managing a football team: ‘Every so often you’ve got to replace the centre-forward.’
There seems to be quite a lot of this in Fall world. People exit, usually amid much rancour, then suddenly come back. The oddest instance of this was in the mid 1990s, when Brix Smith, Smith’s long-suffering first wife and Fall guitarist, didn’t let divorce or the fact she’d been out of the band for six years stop her popping up onstage, unannounced, in York.
‘I call it the “two-year gap”,’ says Smith, pondering his lager. ‘They think I’m a dictator. But after two years they come back and say they never had as much freedom.’ Smith admits he can be ‘a bit of a sod sometimes’ but insists he’s on ‘fairly good terms’ with most of the ex-members – the more recent ones anyway – even someone like former guitarist Neville Wilding, who Smith says ‘could really be a nutcase’.
Smith goes on to explain that at one point – shortly before going onstage at the prestigious 1999 Reading Festival, no less – he and Wilding had been ‘at it with knuckle-dusters’ backstage, eventually taking to the stage covered in each other’s blood. And now?
‘We phone each other every month. All forgiven.’
A likely story? In The Wonderful and Frightening World, you never really know what’s real.
I stare across the table. The crow’s feet he sang about two decades ago in the song ‘Living Too Late’ are even more entrenched now, telling their own story of a life fronting The Fall. But when he smiles – and today he smiles surprisingly often – the years seem to melt away and he looks for all the world like a mischievous schoolboy.
Do people get too comfortable in The Fall?
‘In the past very much so,’ he says. ‘Job for fuckin’ life, you know. It’s not like that in this business.’ He says he sees membership of The Fall as a ‘two-or three-year cycle’ and he has two principal requirements of musicians. They should not ‘think they’re it’, nor should they be ‘fans of the bloody group!’ because that always ‘backfires’. He rightly insists turnover is common in orchestras or Northern Soul bands, but those organisations tend to be full of session players performing old material, not hungry young musicians making edgy music and having punch-ups.
When people leave The Fall – or even when they are in The Fall – they often say it’s responsible for the best times of their lives and also the most terrifying. Whatever do they mean?
‘There’s been some big fights,’ he confesses, lighting up a fag before he goes into the particular perils of foreign tours. ‘You get to America and people pull a gun out. That’s happened in Europe too. Someone jumps onstage and goes for the bass player, and he’s never been out of Manchester before, it’s his second gig. Welcome to The Fall!’
Projectiles are common at Fall gigs. Microphone stands were particularly popular for a while.
‘Us throwing them at people or them throwing them at us?’ Smith chortles. ‘Both? Hahhahahahha, call it a draw.’ And yet, over the years, it has often seemed the greatest threat to a Fall musician’s wellbeing or sanity can come from the man employing them. Fall gigs routinely see Smith jostling one of his musicians, standing over them like an intimidating schoolmaster as they play.
In recent years, a favourite trick has been to dismantle the band’s equipment – while they are playing. ‘When you’re playing five or six nights a week, the group get slick,’ Smith says in his defence. Some of this is tongue-incheek but Smith is deadly serious when he points out that for him, and thus The Fall, routine is ‘the enemy of music’.
Thus, Smith has become not just a director of musicians but some kind of experimental psychologist. In the past, he’s admitted to giving musicians the wrong address to the studio, on the grounds that by the time they arrive they’ll be so flustered they’ll play better. His onstage instructions range from the sternly encouraging ‘Give it some guts’ and ‘Fucking get it together and stop showing off ’ to a simple, bossy ‘Hit it harder’.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ he protests. ‘It works. Admittedly it can be a problem if you’re the guitarist.’
Another pint is drained and he describes his employment of the ‘European phrasebook’, sending guitarists to say things like ‘I am a flower’ in German.
‘In Germany, when they’re ordering breakfast you’ll get them to shout the German for “Excuse me, stick it up your arse, will you?”’ He is laughing so much he can barely speak.
Then, suddenly, he looks sad. ‘[The musicians] are getting wise to it now.’
On tour, he says, he sits at the back of the bus, like a manager with his players, to retain ‘detachment’. ‘That’s the key to it, really. You can be matey and have a pint but you don’t want to be round their houses.’
However, he suggests he’s mellowing, talking benevolently of the latest line-up as ‘my lads’. This means bassist Steven Trafford has been allowed the rare privilege of his own band on the side, which would never have happened before because he used to have ‘that thing where if you played with any other group yer dead’.
Except it wasn’t always like this. In fact, the original Fall line-up – Smith, Tony Friel, Una Baines and Martin Bramah – was a quartet of pals who spent a lot of time at each other’s houses, listening to music and talking about the future. But at some point, fairly quickly, Smith became a ringmaster.
He ponders this for what seems an age.
‘It wasn’t … well, it was sort of intentional,’ he finally concedes. ‘But I wasn’t thinking on those terms. I don’t really plan though. I can’t really plan ahead of next week. I certainly don’t plot sackings like they say.’ He looks wounded.
Perhaps the most vulnerable position in The Fall is the drum stool, and over the years there have been more incidents involving drummers than any other members.
Smith is a connoisseur of percussion – ‘It’s like Captain Beefheart said, “If you can’t hear the drums, it’s not there”,’ – and has a strong idea of how Fall drums should sound – not ‘flashy’. He describes how the mysterious Karl Burns used to receive a five-pound fine ‘every time he hit the tom tom’.
Have you never considered a drum machine?
He chokes on his pint. ‘The first thing I have to do in every studio is get the bloody click track off,’ he spits, sounding like a manic Victor Meldrew. ‘Every bloody engineer, whoever they are, they think you don’t notice, y’know,’ cause Mark Smith’s the singer and he’s had a few, you know. They’ll go, “It wasn’t quite in time, Mark, so I added a bit of drum machine.”
‘It’s bloody stuff like that,’ he rages, aghast. The other thing that drives him mad is when producers make the drums all sound in time; drummers love this ‘because it makes them sound technical’. He suggests a lot of ‘revered’ groups only use machines because the drummers are rubbish and insists he could do better on a ‘bloody typewriter’. That’s debatable – and if it were true, Smith would surely have done it by now – but what is certain is that Fall musicians are never allowed to forget they are replaceable. If they forget it, Smith will less than subtly ram the point home. Once, when the rhythm section were late for a gig, he brought on players
from the support band and was delighted when the errant drummer and bassist walked in to see their replacements on stage.
Perhaps the only certainty of being in The Fall is the knowledge that one day you will be out – although musicians are never privy to the knowledge of when this might happen. Members have even been fired during gigs, which Smith sheepishly says he is trying not to do now because it gets ‘a bit tricky’.
Once, onstage in Stourbridge – the sort of off-the-beaten-track location that often features on Fall tours – a guitarist, Ed Blaney, was booted offstage by Smith after just two songs.
Smith roars with laughter. ‘It wasn’t working, was it?’ He splutters. ‘Some people are brilliant in rehearsals, they go onstage and they crack up.’
So you usher them off?
‘It’s for their own good,’ he insists. ‘People get nervous.’ It’s worth pointing out that Blaney had been in The Fall for four years at the time. However, Smith suggests he too gets nervous: ‘After all these years, I do.’
This is an intriguing statement. It suggests that, for all the hiring and firing in the group, the person most feeling the pressure of carrying a legend like The Fall is Smith – because, after all, it’s his reputation on the line.
As we touch on the stresses of fronting The Fall, he suddenly changes the subject, but interviewing Smith is often like this: ask one question, you’ll get another answered. Often, he’ll deliver his thoughts on something unrelated. Over the course of three alcohol-fuelled hours, Smith’s train of thought careers like The Fall’s line-up. Subjects covered range from his distrust of gadgets – ‘I have these things lying around the house. They’re useless!’ – to why people in Hull think the singer from AC/DC is a ‘fucking singing gnome’ – Humberside is an unforgiving place, where fools are not suffered gladly – to the fact that Smith is under the impression Morecambe is in Yorkshire, whereas it lies on the coast of Lancashire, unless the site manager has recently had it moved. After two hours he spies my tape machine a foot in front of him and asks, ‘Are we recording this? I thought it was your portaphone.’
