The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  More surprisingly, he often veers into the relatively uncharted waters of his personal life. I have followed this man’s music since 1980 but know very little about him, which is probably how he likes it. Today I discover a few things. He’s lived in the same house in Prestwich for ‘a very long time’. He has thought of moving but says, ‘By the time you think about it seriously, you’ve got something else to do.’

  He hasn’t taken a holiday for ‘a very long time’, although he eventually mutters something about ‘a couple of trips to the Lakes’.

  His front lawn is tended every fortnight by a local Irishman who calls him ‘Mr Smith’.

  He has no children, saying, ‘It’s enough with the bloody group!’ This hasn’t stopped various people hitting him with parentage claims. ‘I must have seven around the world, all trying it on!’

  He met Elena – née Poulou, some 20-odd years his junior – in Berlin, where she was working as a DJ, promoting a gig by The Fall. He courted her by touring not graves of former drummers but Northern fish-and-chip shops. He remembers a particular establishment in my hometown, Leeds. ‘She said, “This is great. Can we live here?”’

  Intriguingly, Poulou moved to Prestwich and joined The Fall before she married Smith. Somehow, we were back to the group. With Smith, everything seems to revolve around the group.

  ‘I try to take some time off from The Fall,’ he muses. ‘I don’t get very far. I try to keep Saturday clear!’

  More pints appear and suddenly we’re talking about one of the cornerstones of The Fall: Smith’s formidable work ethic.

  ‘I suppose it is a result of my upbringing,’ says Smith (first job, meat factory; second job, docks clerk; third job, this one). ‘When I started work – left school – you had to fight for your Saturdays off. It was a five-and-a-half-day week. They were just getting down from six.’ But, ironically, most people work longer hours now than they did then.

  ‘I could see that coming,’ insists Smith, pointing out a parallel with record companies: in the 1980s, you’d get six sheets of royalties statements, how many records sold, how much money due. Whereas now, ‘You get reams and reams of paper, designed to confuse you’. Bizarrely, he insists he receives royalties intended for The Cure’s Robert Smith.

  ‘There’s more paper in my house than ever. I spend more time in studios just ploughing through sheets of paper.’

  What’s your house like?

  ‘Modest … I throw things out.’

  Like musicians?

  He doesn’t flinch.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the things I throw out. You know, when you’re a bit depressed and you see the NME from 1986 … you need a clear mind.’

  This loathing – or even fear – of the past is fundamental to Smith. Today’s music is fuelled by nostalgia. He knows this, he’s had the offers – to reform a certain line-up of The Fall or perform a certain ‘classic’ album. He’s been tempted, when the band were really broke, but he’ll always fight it. He learned very quickly that the business is ‘full of people who live in the past’. Surely he can’t mean me?

  However, the Fall factory must roll on. The means to the end – and perhaps the end in itself – is production. Without production, The Fall would cease to exist and Mark E Smith, as everyone has known him for as long as he can remember, would cease to exist. And that notion must be truly terrifying.

  We’re getting strangely melancholy now. Have you ever thought it was all over, that the group was going to finish?

  ‘Lots of times,’ he says. ‘About once every three years. No, seriously! But what would I do?’

  He genuinely doesn’t know. There have been offers, for magazine columns and short stories. Short-story writing interests him and he’s written a few, two-and-a-half pages long, examples of what he considers the ‘great British short story’. But he says the publishers don’t want them; they want books like, ‘what they think Fall lyrics are like, y’know, alcohol, violence, industrial estates’. Which is about one per cent of the picture. In this moment, he sounds truly depressed.

  We talk a bit more about his personal life and he reflects that, for all the chaos around The Fall, he likes some things to be solid: ‘a settled back four, if you like’. He agrees he probably makes his best music when his personal life is settled and thus marriage to Elena in 2000 – ‘third time lucky, it’s going marvellous, touch wood’ – had to be a good thing from every perspective. But it wasn’t always like that.

  In 1998, when The Fall fought each other in New York and split up, he came very, very close to losing everything.

  ‘I wouldn’t go through it again,’ he says candidly. The calls from London stopped. The business he loathes shunned him. But it was an ‘eye opener’. His friends, his few real friends, from before the group, rallied around him.

  ‘It was builders or people who’ve been on the dole all their life that said, “You’ve got to get a meal inside you, Marky Parky”.’ Perhaps the experience cemented his distrust of musicians.

  ‘It makes you think.’

  Did you ever think you were losing it?

  ‘Me personally? A little bit … I was fed up.’ There’s a long and silent pause, but just as Smith frequently hauls The Fall back from the abyss, he brightens, explaining how The Fall were having financial trouble and he was depressed because he couldn’t afford to take ‘the girl’ out for a drink. And then he broke his leg.

  ‘I fell out with The Fall one year, then broke my hip the next,’ he chuckles. He spent five hours in “Cheetham Hill Hospital” (North Manchester General).

  ‘You can’t walk out because you can’t walk!’ He is laughing like a drain. A week later, Smith led yet another Fall line-up onstage and opened with ‘Walk like a Man’.

  I tell him I don’t think a lot of people get the humour in The Fall and he agrees. He even saw the humour in the infamous cigarette incident, pointing out the journalist ‘had an attitude’ and ‘the bloke in the newsagent said it was one of the funniest things he’d read in ages’.

  Do you ever read stuff about yourself and think, who is this man?

  ‘All the time,’ he sighs. ‘I sometimes think there’s a Mancunian or Northern sense of humour that doesn’t travel. They don’t get the glint in your eye. But you’ve got to watch it,’ he scolds. ‘All that professional Northerner stuff, you know, “Aye up mate”. That’s the end of the line. I’d rather walk the streets. You get these professional Mancs, fuckin’ professional people like the Guardian.’

  I feel a rapier slip beneath my Yorkshire born-and-bred shoulders.

  ‘The accent’s false! They say now you can get on in the media if you have a regional accent.’

  He’s smiling. The rapier is removed.

  Regrets?

  He pauses. ‘About once a week.’

  We’d touched on the New York fracas, but it’s time to get into specifics. When he became a solo artist overnight, was that one of the ‘regrets’?

  ‘Nah …’ Deep breath. ‘Nah.’

  So, conversely, was it planned? Another Machiavellian way of jettisoning the band?

  ‘Not by me,’ he insists, adding that it was the other musicians who planned it. ‘I’m not joking. They had studio time booked by themselves, I found that out later. They engineered it, not me. They had another band, The Ark, that was their great idea. Mark without the M. Sank without trace, The Ark! But I’m too much of a gentleman to respond.’

  I realise the room is silent, the barman hanging on Smith’s every word like a Fall audience. I remember an open-air gig at the Phoenix Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon in the mid 1990s where I stood on the front row watching Smith pour out his vocals in the pelting rain, as if relishing unleashing his words in such a charged environment. His face was gnarled but twisted in some distant, knowing pleasure. Then – like today – it felt like him and me. It often feels like that when you watch the man perform.

  But what we are discussing seems poignant. It resulted in Smith losing Steve Hanley
, a bassist of almost 20 years’ service whom Smith had once said ‘defined’ the sound of The Fall.

  Did you not trust him, after all that time?

  ‘To a certain extent, I suppose. You trust some … but you keep ’em on a short leash.’

  But you yourself said he ‘defined’ the sound of The Fall.

  ‘Correct. But it was coming.’

  Smith says when he got back to Britain he phoned the newly departed members to give them a mouthful for leaving him in prison, but they’d ‘changed all their fuckin’ numbers’.

  However, Julia Nagle – the keyboardist whom Smith was charged with assaulting – subsequently rejoined the band and stayed for another three years. Was a mountain made out of a molehill?

  ‘Yeah. No regrets at all.’

  Smith has been uncharacteristically open, but becomes defensive on the subject of Karl Burns, the now AWOL drummer who initiated the New York punch-up by walloping Smith onstage.

  ‘Can we have two more beers here, sir?’ he shouts to the watching barman.

  Smith is evasive.

  Burns attacked you first?

  ‘Two more beers, please!’

  Then he suddenly answers the question. ‘I thought it [the attack] was very good. Best bit of the gig.’

  I seize my chance. I ask about some of the former members, people like Una Baines and Martin Bramah, who were Smith’s close friends many years ago. He insists they won’t talk to him.

  ‘I can never get hold of any of them. I think it’s guilt. See, most of them left me, not the other way round.’

  Then it dawns on me. Despite Dorothy’s best intentions, there won’t be any contacts given for former members. Nor does Smith want to talk about them. However amicably, he has controlled the boundaries of the interview as effectively as he controls The Fall. I feel he has told me a lot yet no more than he wanted to.

  But we part on good terms. He buys me more beer in a pub over the road and even gives me the autograph I didn’t get in 1981 – for my Fall-loving partner, Suzanne. Always a gentleman, Mark E Smith.

  But after walking around Manchester for a while to sober up, I end up driving home to be met with a problem. My editor is keen to stick with the original idea, to talk not just to Smith but also to former members.

  He’s given me hours of his time, I don’t want it to be all for nothing.

  So, I realise I’m just going to have to find them. All of them.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘The night it all went apeshit.’

  At first I’m excited about the possibility of tracking down the entire Fallen, but this feeling is soon dampened by the enormity of the task.

  I’m staring at a list of over 40 names. For my purposes at least, I’m going to have to have some limits. I decide that to qualify as a Fallen, a musician will have to have played an instrument live with the group. This rules out Adrian Niman, who played saxophone for 15 seconds on the Room to Live album in 1982, but includes Stuart Estell, who ‘joined’ The Fall from the audience for an encore in Reading in 1998.

  However, finding them isn’t easy without Smith, even if he did keep track of clarinet players who left in 1981. The numerous record companies The Fall have had over the years have only ever dealt with Smith. So you could be in The Fall for 19 years, like Steve Hanley, the group’s most venerable bassist, and the music business would have no idea where you are. So what happens to any royalties? Do they all just go to Smith? I haven’t even found anyone yet and already I’m facing a stream of nagging questions.

  I contact the Musicians’ Union, a complete non-starter. They claim to have ‘no information relating to anybody who was ever in The Fall’. Of course.

  I do have another lead, however. Sixteen years ago I interviewed a man called Grant Showbiz, who was in a band called Moodswings, and during the interview it transpired that Showbiz often produced or mixed The Fall. Inevitably, I stopped asking about Moodswings to probe him about The Fall, although he didn’t give much away except to say Smith was a friendlier character than the grumpy public image and The Fall’s greatness had come at the cost of ‘periods of ill health’.

  I manage to get in contact with Showbiz and he gives me some numbers, though, sadly, most of them are dead – the numbers, not the ex-members. But I do reach former guitarist/sleeves man Tommy Crooks, now an artist in East Lothian. There are worse places to start.

  The craggy Scots guitarist played on 1997’s Levitate. It’s not exactly the best Fall album – it may even be the worst – but for me, Fall albums are like children: although they may have their faults, you gradually grow blind to them until you love them dearly. In any case, even a relatively mediocre album, by Fall standards, has innumerable strengths. Levitate took the group’s sound into left-field dance music and spawned the terrifically catchy single, ‘Masquerade’. Smith’s lyrics are particularly idiosyncratic, although my favourite track, ‘I’m a Mummy’, is a cover of a song originally written for music halls by cabaret artist Douglas Byng in 1930. It was adapted in 1959, as simply ‘The Mummy’, by voice-over artist Bob McFadden and Dor (a pseudonym for Rod McKuen); their version is closest to The Fall’s. Quite why Smith chose this particular song is unknown, but the words seem quite in keeping with his barmy public image: ‘I was born one thousand, nine hundred and fifty-nine years ago/ Look what happens when I walk up to somebody/ I don’t try to scare people/ I’m a Mummy!’ For much of the album, Smith sounds half-cut, which perhaps also makes Levitate one of the more revealing albums in the canon.

  Crooks took the sleeve photos, obtuse/arty, but more significant to me is that he was involved in the onstage New York punch-up in 1998. Over a crackling phone line, Crooks recounts what will soon become a familiar theme. He describes being in The Fall as ‘the pinnacle of creativity’, speaks of ‘enormous pride’ to have played within the group … but admits there was ‘a lot of madness’.

  It appears that even the process whereby someone joins The Fall is not normal. There are no advertisements in music papers and nothing so traditional as an audition. Smith just seems to somehow find them. In Crooks’ case, he was walking around Edinburgh at 8.30 in the morning. Two people headed towards each other like gunslingers at dawn. One was Crooks, on his way to renovate a house. The other was Mark E Smith, on his way to renovate Tommy Crooks.

  ‘I think he was up with a TV crew from Liverpool,’ Crooks begins, his Edinburgh accent roughened and given a certain colour by something that may or may not have been his two years in The Fall. ‘They were doing a thing about cities that had been nominated for City of Culture – Liverpool and Edinburgh. Of course Mark had a good laugh about that.’

  Crooks was ‘sidling up the road … our eyes met’.

  Suddenly, the Scotsman found himself telling this person whom he’d never met before about his work as an artist. Smith was intrigued enough to request he send some artwork (images that would end up on Levitate). And very quickly after, he was in The Fall, despite living 200 miles away from Smith’s patch and having only limited ability on guitar. Not that this was a problem – technical flamboyance is the very last quality you need to join The Fall – and he would simply commute 200 miles to Salford and stay with bassist Steve Hanley.

  On arrival, Hanley ominously informed Crooks he was joining in ‘the eye of the storm’. The phone crackles again as Crooks remembers the first rehearsal, which he describes as ‘taking the biscuit’ but was a reasonable indication of what he could expect.

  ‘It was in Longsight, a squat in some shitty part of Manchester,’ he recalls. The rehearsal room had been acquired because ‘Mark had met some guy at the railway station’ who’d said they could use his place to rehearse. The basement had mattresses all over the walls. Simon Wolstencroft [drummer] walked in, I met Steve. It was really weird seeing these guys.

  ‘Eventually, Mark turned up,’ says Crooks, who remembers the singer wore black gloves and that keyboardist Julia Nagle, briefly Smith’s girlfriend, wore white gloves.

  �
�We began … It was just bloody crazy!’ He pauses. ‘But really good.’ He remembers lights coming on and off, and Smith unplugging his amplifier and holding the microphone up to the guitar. ‘No chance of getting a sound out, y’know,’ he grinned darkly. The object, Crooks believes, was to ‘freak him out’.

  We’ve only been talking minutes and already we’re tapping into Smith’s ability to use a psychological approach to motivate, or goad, average musicians. I mention that I’ve often thought of Smith as being as much a psychological conductor of his bands as the people who stand in front of classical orchestras waving a stick. Crooks isn’t sure.

  ‘I don’t know if it was part of the psychology or just part of Mark!’ he laughs, going on to recall ‘good times and hard times’. The hardest was almost certainly the fateful American tour of 1998. Almost a decade later, there’s still palpable emotion in his voice as he recalls events unfolding like on a battlefield. For starters, The Fall themselves were divided into ‘battalions’.

  The first was ‘the group’ – Crooks, Hanley and Karl Burns (on drums for the seventh time, having been fired and rehired on six previous occasions – Simon Wolstencroft, who was drummer when Crooks joined, had already joined the massed ranks of The Fallen). The other battalion was Smith, in cahoots with Julia Nagle, who Crooks remembers as being ‘pretty vague. She’d walk on and do a gig, and that was it, or not do a gig … or walk off halfway in.’ The notion of two battalions seems consistent with what has always seemed to be The Fall’s creative dynamic: on the one hand, Smith, the leader or lightning conductor, usually with a lieutenant; on the other, the musicians, the cannon fodder.