by Dave Simpson
The singer left a message on his answerphone. But it wasn’t returned. Instead, Steve Hanley set sail in The Ark with Burns and Crooks, but, he insists, contrary to what Smith told me, none of them had planned on leaving The Fall.
‘The only thing we talked about was maybe doing something while he was busy,’ elucidates Steve. ‘I wouldn’t have swapped being in The Fall for anything. I certainly wasn’t looking to join anyone else.’
Neither of the Hanley brothers has run into Smith since, but both suspect, despite everything, they’d have a pint together and it would be just like old times. That strange loyalty again.
Steve considers sagely, ‘You have to separate the great stuff we did from what happened at the end.’
Shortly after abandoning The Fall, Steve found himself watching the latest line-up when they played in Manchester with the Buzzcocks. He’s laughing: ‘I still didn’t recognise any of the songs!’ Some time later, his son came home one night to announce excitedly that his own band had landed a support slot with The Fall. Thus, one of The Fall’s greatest ever musicians found himself watching his own son support his former band. ‘I thought Mark would give my lad a hard time,’ he admits. Smith was as good as gold. ‘The drummer gave him a hard time!’
SMASH. We’re suddenly interrupted by the noise of flying glasses as the pub’s glass collector sends the table crashing. Everyone jumps. Everyone except Steve Hanley. The veteran of Fall dressing rooms doesn’t even flinch.
I feel I could talk for hours to the Hanleys but both have domestic duties which call them away from The Wonderful and Frightening World. Before we say our farewells – and I kick off Fall Reunited by giving him a phone number for Tommy Crooks – Steve tells me his theory about The Fall.
‘The Fall work best when it’s Mark and four or five normal people who he can bounce his ideas off,’ he muses. ‘The trouble is that after a while in The Fall you’re no longer normal.’
This, he thinks, is the real reason Smith changes the line-up and why some people disappear. Steve reveals he spotted Mike Leigh – The Fall’s cabaret, jazzy drummer from 1979 to 1980 – in PC World and apparently he’s now in insurance. As for Karl Burns, he was definitely ‘not normal’, certainly when he was in The Fall. But where is he? He seems to have completely vanished.
‘I found him in my back garden once,’ Steve reveals. ‘Another time he was in the back of my car. But you’d pay to watch him play drums on his own.’
I would. But I have to find him first.
CHAPTER 5
‘I’m losing my hair through stress!’
Karl Burns is proving elusive, but at least word is getting round. Every day or so I’m getting an email or message on my answerphone from a member of The Fallen who say they may be willing to talk. But today’s is the most surprising one so far – from Ben Pritchard, guitarist in the current line-up.
I hadn’t expected this at all, not least because Smith – even while he may have ‘mellowed’ – is fiercely controlling of the group’s media presence and even at this stage I can’t imagine him condoning one of his musicians talking to me.
But in an initial phone call Pritchard says it’s okay – he won’t be doused in petroleum or suspended from a bridge over the M62 by his trousers. ‘There won’t be a problem,’ he insists, and it crosses my mind he may in fact be a double agent sent by Smith to find out who’s been talking. But on the phone line there is laughter. ‘You’re tracking down everyone who’s ever played in The Fall?’ he splutters. ‘Are you crazy?!’
Maybe I am. Pritchard doesn’t know the half of it. I’ve only just started trying to locate The Fallen and already my eyes are going square from gazing at the internet, my retinas burning from hours poring over album covers in search of clues for musicians who left in 1979. Then there are the telephone fiascos, calling phone numbers so old the codes have changed several times. But then again, if anyone will understand the nature of my mission it’ll be Pritchard, who must be familiar with obsession, perfectionism, dementia and things becoming weird …
He is, after all, in The Fall.
What I know about him is this: in his late twenties, the guitarist played on ‘Dr Buck’s Letter’ (on 2000’s The Unutterable) before he was in The Fall. However, he officially joined in February 2001, appearing on November 2001’s Are You Are Missing Winner, an album of berserk rockabilly rock which neatly divided critics into those who thought it carried the spirit of Gene Vincent and those who thought it a sprawling mess. Myself, I hated it at first and grew to love it – sometimes Smith’s abnormal vision isn’t immediately appreciated by people who are remotely normal. Anyway, Pritchard’s appearance seems to have coincided with a re-energised Fall after the drama and debris of New York. 2003’s The Real New Fall LP: Formerly ‘Country on the Click’ – it was so titled because a leak on the internet meant a hurried remix – was a marked return to form and 2005’s Fall Heads Roll – which earned a five-star eulogy in the Guardian – was better still. Fall fans don’t put him in the top drawer of Fall guitarists occupied by Brix Smith and Craig Scanlon, but he is loved rather than religiously worshipped. Fall fan sites regularly carry tributes to the way Pritchard stares longingly at the ceiling during gigs, usually a precursor to receiving a schoolmasterly prod or shove from Smith. Moreover, as we talk he’s already survived four years, making him a relative Fall veteran.
‘I know,’ he sighs. ‘I should get a gold watch … What’s my secret of surviving? Long, long story. Look, can’t do an interview now, I’m playing football in a few minutes.’
Football?
You really don’t expect Fall members to play football. Given the carefully sculpted mythology of the group, I’ve always thought Fall members would spend their spare time slumped in working men’s clubs, reading about the Industrial Revolution or the Third Reich (a Smith favourite) while staring at pints and grumbling disconsolately about the ways of the world. Watching football is one thing – Smith regularly attends Manchester City’s Eastlands stadium himself – but playing it is another. Playing football seems too healthy. Too mainstream. Too normal.
‘It’s the only way I get to relieve any stress,’ explains Pritchard. Which does makes sense.
We arrange to speak at 2 p.m. the following day.
‘It’s not a normal group,’ he begins, bang on time, but still sounding slightly tense despite the kickabouts. He can’t compare being in The Fall to being in another group because he hasn’t been in another group, but suspects few operate like The Fall. He offers two familiar analogies: one, being in The Fall is like a ‘psychological experiment’; two, it’s ‘boot camp: you’re thrown in at the deep end and you either sink or swim’.
What this means, he clarifies, is a new Fall member goes through a rite of passage – the sort of initiation you get in cults like the Hells Angels or the army. However, in The Fall, you never know when your trial by fire will arrive.
Pritchard had entered his fourth year before Judgment Day came calling. Unbeknown to me, Smith had already obliquely referred to it in the suggestion that Pritchard had ‘begun a resignation letter, but by the time he’d finished it he was back in the group’.
In fact, Pritchard insisted he hadn’t resigned at all. According to him, he was fired.
The Fall were three-quarters of the way through a 2004 American tour which, as usual, became stressful. Not least because Smith had broken his leg – according to a Fall spokesperson, by careering down a slope into a concrete post while attending a rockabilly festival in Great Yarmouth – the accident that led him to hospital in Cheetham Hill. With the boss plastered – but not in the usual way – the nine-legged Fall made it out to the States in what Pritchard describes as a ‘horrible, hostile atmosphere’. Pritchard says that this coincided with the reappearance of Ed Blaney, the mysterious, occasional ‘broker’-cum-manager who also played guitar (placing him at Number 36 on my list of wanted Fallers), but was employed by Smith as a sort of extreme sergeant major, to drill the troops into
line. Pritchard says that when Blaney got to work, things almost immediately went pear-shaped.
‘Every time he got involved something went wrong,’ says Pritchard. ‘I mean, I’d love to be able to say Ed was a nice guy but he wasn’t. He used to threaten us.’
Threaten you?
‘His mentality was that he was Mark’s manager, not The Fall’s. He would leave us all for dead as long as he could take care of Mark. So, about a week after he joined the tour, everything fell apart.’
Pritchard suggests that Blaney had fuelled Smith’s suspicions that their latest tour manager was stealing from the band. Not only that, but the lineup themselves were about to walk away. It seems slightly unreal that an artist of Smith’s stature could be coaxed into paranoid theories involving the petty cash … but then again, this is The Fall.
The musicians – Pritchard, bassist Steve Trafford and drummer Dave Milner – found themselves abandoned in Houston, in George Bush’s state of Texas. They had no money. They did have non-refundable tickets to Manchester but those weren’t valid for another two weeks. An alarming prospect for most musicians but, according to both Pritchard and Tommy Crooks, an occupational hazard of playing in The Fall.
‘We had to go home with our tails between our legs,’ he says. ‘The real twist is that we were carrying his [Smith’s] wheelchair with us. He’d dumped us and expected us to take it home!’
Pritchard reveals that when he finally arrived home from the USA he received a 1 a.m. phone call from Smith terminating his services. However, dutifully loyal, the guitarist refuses to blame his boss, pointing the finger squarely at Ed Blaney – ‘Ed thinks he knows Mark and he tries to behave the way he thinks Mark would behave.’
Pritchard cites other, even more bizarre cases involving Blaney’s bad behaviour – where the band had had to pull the ‘broker’ away from promoters he was attacking and even occasions where The Fall’s ‘manager’ was fighting their own crowd.
How on earth is this allowed to happen? Where, in all this, for instance, is ‘site manager’ Mark E Smith?
I put this to Pritchard, who says Smith has a period every so often where he goes a little ‘nuts’.
‘He locks himself away and we don’t see him for a couple of months. But when we got back from the States last year there was something wrong. I said, “Mark, what have I actually done?” I couldn’t get a straight answer. He was a bit inebriated as well. He just said, “I think we should go our separate ways”.’ Pritchard says Smith kept calling him ‘Judas’ – a word which he says bears the imprint of Ed Blaney.
Pritchard seems more than a little paranoid about Ed Blaney, but he swears most of the paranoia in The Fall is Smith’s: ‘If people plant a seed, the tiniest thing can turn into this huge paranoid explosion.’ I worry again that Pritchard’s boss wouldn’t like his guitarist spilling these beans and remember something Smith said to me in Malmaison – ‘I’d trust you [a journalist!] more than a guitarist!’ In fact, Pritchard says, after so long in the business, Smith has been ripped off so many times he finds it difficult to trust anyone. Despite people ‘screaming’ to work with The Fall, Smith takes a lot of responsibility on himself and, as the Hanleys also suggested, this leads to ‘greater tension’.
However, perhaps realising he’d lost a (nother) valuable member, Smith acted quickly to bring Ben Pritchard back. I was hearing two different stories of the same exit from Pritchard and the boss. Why would Pritchard lie? But similarly why would Smith insist he’d resigned? To save face?
Whatever the truth of it, since returning – within three days, that much was true – Pritchard noticed he was now acquiring ‘bits and bobs’ of responsibilities. Smith, almost uniquely, was lowering his guard. On the other hand, he insists he doesn’t want to make the mistake made by many in The Fall where they ‘get a bit of attention and think Mark’s their best mate. Then they can’t believe it when they get fired. I appreciate that I could get fired at any moment. In no way, shape or form do I believe me and Mark are best pals,’ he says of the man who, after all, dumped him at a foreign airport. ‘He is my boss and I work for him.’
Is it really that simple?
Like Tommy Crooks, Ben Pritchard joined The Fall almost by an accident. He grew up in Prestwich and often spied the singer in various locals, although for a while he thought he was just a weird bloke who drank too much rather than a living legend of British music. Fatefully, Pritchard also lived near another friend of Smith’s, Steve Evets, who, inevitably, has also been in The Fall. Once, when Smith was, yet again, a member short, Evets suggested young Pritchard. No matter that Pritchard wasn’t a good guitarist; he owned a guitar and that would do.
‘When I joined the band, I thought, “Wow, isn’t it great, I’m in The Fall”,’ he enthuses, but reality soon set in. Almost immediately upon joining, various people around The Fall said he played too many chords. Thus, Pritchard was subjected to the most mythical and secret part of Smith’s psychology – the complex ‘moulding process’ (which Smith has jokingly called ‘brainwashing’) involved in turning an unsuitable musician into a member of The Fall.
‘I was a terrible guitarist when I joined,’ he admits, but suggests this might have been precisely why Smith wanted him in the group. ‘The challenge is to take someone wrong for the group and make them right.’ Music doesn’t come into it. Smith never says, ‘Play this.’ In fact, the quality required in The Fall is a ‘frame of mind’ – and it’s arrived at via boot camp.
Onstage in The Fall, Pritchard soon became used to flying elbows from the boss, being constantly jostled onstage and on a few occasions drinks being poured over his head. Ninety per cent of musicians would probably cut and run, but Pritchard understands this experience as pivotal to the Fall creative process. Survive the Fall assault course and the reward is Smith’s respect. It seems a bit like the relationship between angry sergeant majors and newly recruited army cadets.
‘I’m losing my hair through stress,’ admits Pritchard. ‘It’s good to talk about this. I don’t really get to talk about this with anyone else, because no one understands …’
And there it is: the true reason for the phone call. This isn’t an interview. This is therapy.
Pritchard clears his throat and we’re suddenly talking about the group’s most recent dates. Because so many people adored Fall Heads Roll, the band were booked into bigger venues than they had occupied for years. And all were selling out, which Pritchard suggests was an ‘added pressure we could have done without. Mark made it very difficult for us all, because he was under a lot of stress … He doesn’t like being told that he’s got a good group. And he really doesn’t like his group being told that they’re good!’
Pritchard’s analysis was curiously similar to Steve Hanley’s, from the days when Kay Carroll would accuse The Fall of ‘playing like a fookin’ pub band’. The ideal is the musicians will play well but not realise it themselves. The fanatical but undeniable logic seems to be if the group get to know they’re playing well, they’ll stop. ‘So he makes a point of putting us right back in our place,’ sighs Pritchard, allowing himself a brief giggle and revealing that Smith did indeed accuse them of ‘sounding like a fookin’ pub band!’
‘I know he doesn’t mean it,’ he claims. ‘We understand why he’s doing it, but gradually it did bring everyone down.’
Pritchard reveals situations on tour he describes as ‘moments’. ‘Moments’ can happen anywhere – onstage, in hotel rooms, especially in dressing rooms, the principal theatres of Fall warfare depicted by the Hanleys. ‘I don’t want to go into details, because I don’t really want to think about it.’
Shortly after arriving home, Pritchard noticed his already rapidly disappearing hair was now falling out in even greater clumps. As The Fall’s most senior member he found himself in the particularly uncomfortable role of Fall guy.
‘He knows he can shout and bawl at me, and the rest,’ he admits, ‘and he knows through tried and tested methods that I will bear it
. I won’t let him down because he shouts at me and he knows that … and he knows he can use me as a whipping boy. But there was a lot more of that on this tour.’ He pauses, remembering some ‘really low moments’, but then he brightens, pointing out that, understandably, when you have those low moments the good moments mean more.
A normal person might wonder why musicians put up with any of this and, indeed, why they don’t get a less stressful job bashing out covers on cruise ships or even playing for a relatively less demanding employer – someone like notorious diva Mariah Carey, say. But a normal person wouldn’t join The Fall, just like a normal person wouldn’t try to climb a mountain or risk death to break the land speed record. There must be an incredible sense of pride being in such a legendary and bizarre band. But maybe even the most determined Fall explorers have their limits.
Pritchard says the band came unusually close to imploding at a recent gig in Stoke. As demand for the tour outstripped supply, the promoters started booking gigs on what were supposed to be the band’s rare days off. What had been a gruelling schedule became murderous.
‘There were moments on this tour when everybody, including Mark, was at the end of the line,’ he says. ‘There were days when we were battling against the elements, when Mark was being impossible. There were a few gigs where we should not have carried on. Mark specifically requested that some gigs got cancelled, but Stoke was the first one where he was told it was already sold out and he had to play.
‘Mark does not like to be put into a corner like that and that show was particularly nasty. He’s got no one else to take it out on but us. He does this but he always ends up apologising for it. We understand. We love the guy to death and sometimes we hate him.
‘Sometimes I think he expects us to let him down,’ he ponders quietly. ‘You almost want to bang his head against the wall and say, “Look, we’re here to help you. We’re not your enemy.” We want to do a good job for him as much as ourselves …’
