The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  Pritchard’s relationship with Smith is starting to sound hugely complex. The more we talk, the more I suspect the guitarist – and, perhaps, others I’ve yet to find – sees Smith as a disciplinarian father figure.

  And maybe there was something in Smith’s unusually frank admission in Malmaison that while he had never had and would never have children, there was, very occasionally, a paternal undercurrent to his relationship with his ‘lads’.

  Despite everything, Pritchard’s admiration for Smith and The Fall ideals seems boundless, almost religious. He talks of how Smith could have done massive money-making tours of the United States but has never had an interest in ‘selling out’; how other groups get treated like ‘royalty’ but you’d never find a ‘pompous arsehole’ in The Fall because ‘no one could go in and …’

  … come out the same person as they were before?

  He side-steps the question, pointing out his pride in the way The Fall tour – together, in a van like a ‘cell’. None of the massive tour buses or luxuries that spoils other bands. He sounds a bit like Smith.

  And yet, for every instance of Smith acting like the cruel father, there are touches of benevolence. Surprisingly, in light of what he’s told me, Pritchard suggests Smith has often gone out of his way to make the boy feel looked after: ‘I was young when I joined, very stupid, very naive. He has taken time out to make sure I’m all right. As a result I do see him quite a lot when we’re not working. The rest of the band’ – who Smith apparently dubs ‘the South Manchester cunts’ – ‘he might take out for a pint in a blue moon. If he needs taking anywhere, I’ll drive him. I’ll do anything for him. I do care about the guy a hell of a lot.

  ‘He cares about me as well. He wouldn’t admit it, because he’d think it was soft. But I do have quite a good relationship and that is maybe why I’ve been here so long,’ he insists. ‘I know it’s contradicting what I said earlier on about mates. I’m not his best mate, I’m not saying we’re best friends but … I think out of everyone he’d least mind you talking to me. I’m not here to slag him off. He knows what he wants me to say and he knows what he wouldn’t want me to say. He doesn’t like to give his secrets away, Mark. People say, “How do you do it, what’s your trick?” He’ll never ever tell anyone. Deep, dark secrets. The reason he’s doing it …’

  I’m curious. Has Pritchard become privy to Smith’s fabled and jealously guarded ‘secrets’?

  A pregnant pause.

  ‘Er … Not so much his secrets, no … but I know the man very personally. I do get to see …’ He doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, and in place of any kind of further outpouring, the drawbridge is silently but hurriedly pulled up as Pritchard remembers his responsibilities, and where he stands.

  ‘By no stretch of the imagination do I feel my job is safe,’ he affirms. ‘If there are eggshells around, I’m walking on them. If I get fired tomorrow, there’ll be 100 guitarists waiting to take my position.’

  After four years – and counting – in The Fall and at least something of a relationship with Smith, Pritchard was still ‘battling’ for his job. Which is maybe how it must be in The Fall.

  ‘They must get very bored, these other groups,’ he declares, before giving me a few phone numbers for Fallers he’s seen off in his time. ‘You know, it’s great getting in the van, unloading the gear, doing a sound check. These bands … they don’t even do a sound check half the time … then it’s back to the hotel straight after the gig. What a boring life. It’s a lap of luxury they haven’t really earned.’

  Approaching his fifth year in The Fall, Ben Pritchard has a goal in life.

  ‘One day, when all this is over, I want to be able to look back and think I did a good job,’ he declares. ‘We can all walk away from it feeling very proud. When that will be, I don’t know. It depends how long we fit in with Mark’s vision of the group. But one thing I can say is that we’ll be here as long as Mark wants us. There is no way this line-up now will ever quit.’

  This comment will return to haunt us both, but on that note we say goodbye. I try to remind myself I’ve just been talking to a pop musician and not a soldier returning from Fallujah or some member of a religious cult. But I can’t help wondering what else is going to lie out there. And how on earth has a British pop group not just come to operate like this, but in doing so become an institution?

  I need to go back. Right back to the beginning.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘We were best friends who fell out.’

  What was it like in 1977?

  Whenever I read about it now, it seems to have been all about the collapse of the post-war political consensus, the beginning of the end for Jim Callaghan’s Labour government and the beginnings of a shift to the right which would lead to the election of Margaret Thatcher. Jimmy Carter succeeded Gerald Ford to become the thirty-ninth president of the USA. South African campaigner Steve Biko died in police custody, which meant he could at least avoid Fleetwood Mac’s omnipresent, multi-million selling Rumours. I remember running into my mum’s bedroom one night because I’d just heard on the radio Elvis Presley had died. Many British households spread the sad news via BT’s new plastic Trimphone.

  On 7 June 1977, the Queen had her Silver Jubilee and a load of us kids on my estate got together to throw a celebratory party in the community centre up the road, where the sound of breaking glass at the end of some raucous punk record or other caused my pal Michael Clarke’s mum to think the building was being broken into. But very shortly after that, the music playing in many of our heads was an alternative national anthem released the week before: ‘God Save The Queen’ by the Sex Pistols, which should have shot to Number 1 but was banned and demoted to Number 2 in favour of Rod Stewart’s ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’, which was deemed much less offensive.

  These, then, are my memories of 1977. For most of it, I’m at the Royal Wolverhampton School in the West Midlands, having been sent there because Mum was ill, Dad had died and a charity paid for me to get a ‘decent education’. So there I am, struggling to fit in with my Yorkshire accent and at the mercy of teachers who are often called upon to administer a caning. I turn 14 in August – a proper teenager by now – but I’m already aware something else is in the air.

  The first I hear of the Pistols is some time earlier the same year – it may even have been the year before – when a London-based pupil called Mark Chivers came back from holidays excitedly announcing he’d seen this band who did cartwheels and threw up onstage. Shortly after, Chivsy announced we should all call him Mark Mutilation. It wasn’t a name we’d easily forget and if we did, he’d stencilled it on the back of a ripped-to-pieces tracksuit he sported along with a new haircut modelled on a hedgehog.

  Before long, the section of the music class where we’re allowed to play our own records will reverberate not to the previous term’s atrocities like ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ by Supertramp (which Chivsy was into at the time) but ‘In the City’ by The Jam and the Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’. When this record in particular hits the turntable, about a quarter of the class rejoice in glee and the rest react as if somebody has farted.

  Which is pretty much how I remember punk. Historians and the Pistols’ chart success tell us it swept the nation, but I’ve often wondered how many of those singles were bought by wives, families and friends of EMI executives anxious to protect their investment.

  Around the country, the really big phenomenon that summer is Saturday Night Fever, the disco film starring John Travolta, which provokes small children and adults old enough to know better to experiment with dance moves and chest-hair wigs. Punks are supposed to exist in massive numbers but, like rats, you glimpse one rarely, when they are generally accompanied by a chorus from passing old ladies moaning, ‘Have you seen their hair?’

  Nationwide, the impact of punk probably mirrors that in our school; a minority interest, but those who are interested put it above everything else. I spend a Saturday afternoon taking lesson
s from Chivers on how to pogo. The idea is to leap up in the air and pretend to head an imaginary ball. I’ve often wondered how many footballers over the years developed an aptitude for football while dancing to The Stranglers.

  Another day, three of us spend a physics lesson covering our school uniform with ink, then head off to see The Jam, only to find their audience full of cardigan-wearing hippies. And that’s how I remember summer 1977: not a seismic cultural revolution but a mere ripple on the pool of things to come. If punk was reaching the provinces, the Midlands – and to an extent my hometown, Leeds – were left out. The winds of change were discernible – hippies smelled of patchouli oil, punks reeked of new leather and Cossack hairspray, which gave a desirable ‘extra firm hold’ – but the new music seemed to make more of an impact in Manchester than anywhere else outside London. But at this point, I’ve never heard The Fall. Then again, before May 1977, nor had anybody else.

  Almost three decades later, I’m winding my Punto through the hills and dales of the Peak District, headed for Buxton, Derbyshire, to meet Tony Friel, who three years ago played in the Woodbank Street Band. It’s thanks to their website I find him.

  Now in lecturing and electronic engineering, he lives in a house so tiny, if you blink while driving past you miss it, which may be how he sees his role in The Fall. It was certainly significant – Friel founded the group in 1976 – but he only lasted a few months and I’m here to find out why.

  I pull up outside the cottage to find no Fall fans outside, nor is there a blue plaque proclaiming that ‘The bloke living here formed one of the most notorious and legendary British pop groups of the last 30 years’. And if there were, Friel would probably take it down. He has hardly ever talked about The Fall and seems to have purposely relegated himself to a mere footnote in history – The Fall’s very own Pete Best. However, despite being born in 1957 like Smith, the man opening the door is nowhere near as ravaged – he is vegan and looks like a gym teacher – but then again he hasn’t spent his whole life in The Fall. Still, he owns a bass guitar – which looks expensive in a corner – and his living room overlooks the most breathtaking scenery – his very own Wonderful (and not particularly Frightening) World.

  Friel pours herbal tea – anathema to Smith – and takes me back to the start, when he was a 15-year-old who ‘bumped into’ Mark Smith’s sister Barbara in the same way Smith encountered Tommy Crooks. Friel dated Barbara and first met Smith in Sedgley Park, Prestwich, when the future singer was on the sofa with his girlfriend Una, with Friel and Barbara cowering behind them on the floor. Friel remembers Smith didn’t take too kindly to a leather-jacketed miscreant dating his sister, but after initial ‘tension’ the pair became firm friends. Popular perception has it that Smith grew up in a shoe, but Friel says, while the Smiths weren’t wealthy, they were ‘fairly well-to-do’, had a ‘very nice’ detached house and Smith benefited from a grammar school education at Stand Grammar School – which unfortunately for Fall sightseers has since been knocked down.

  Smith has often told how his strict father would banish him from the house, so he’d take refuge in the local library and the worlds of books and music. Not that he discovered the sounds that shaped The Fall. Friel remembers he liked Jethro Tull while Smith was more into Genesis. ‘It was pretty abysmal,’ he recalls, but the mid 1970s were.

  In Malmaison, Smith told me how he had to really seek music out, and the bands he discovered have obviously made a lasting impact. He told me how he’d recently taken the whole Fall to see The Troggs, who were ‘fucking amazing’ despite being in a village hall full of old grannies and singer Reg Presley talking for ages between numbers.

  ‘These stories are going on for half an hour and The Troggs are snoring,’ he said. ‘It was funny, but that sort of music was the only thing around when I was at school.

  ‘There was fuck all to buy,’ he remembered, explaining that the onset of CD has meant ‘all the shit I was avoiding when I was 16 is now on every jukebox. The Eagles and stuff like that.’

  Another band he really liked then were 1960s keyboard heads The Seeds – but the future Fall were soon fired up by reggae and the energy of punk. Although Smith has since dismissed the class of ’77 as ‘bad heavy metal’, Friel insists the energy of the period certainly rubbed off.

  The first Fall bassist remembers ‘taking lots of amphetamine’ and going to heavy metal clubs, a forgotten subculture of the 1970s scene. They played ‘bad’ music but were better than the equally long-lost skinhead clubs, where attendance usually meant risking a kicking. The way Friel describes a typical night out then doesn’t sound that different to a Fall gig now – ‘We used to get drunk, take speed and take the piss out of people. It wasn’t tremendously malicious. We bonded as a group because we weren’t like other kids. We were outsiders.’

  The Fall could literally have been The Outsiders; it was the name Friel favoured after literature-mad Smith introduced him to the Camus novel. However, after a ‘discussion’ they settled on The Fall – also a Camus title – and The Outsiders was relegated to become a never-recorded song.

  The early Fall’s stroke of genius was to ally the energy of punk and Smith’s literary leanings with the repetitive nature of another Smith interest – German Krautrock bands like Faust and Can – which bequeathed the Fall ideology (as documented in ‘Repetition’), one of repetition in the music which must be adhered to at all costs.

  Otherwise, their beginnings were not quite the stuff of legend. Adding another pal, Martin Bramah, on guitar, Friel invested in a £50 bass guitar and Smith’s nurse girlfriend Una (Baines) bashed biscuit tins for drums. In the early days, Smith also played guitar and, intriguingly, Friel swears the ‘non-musician’ came up with tunes so strong he remembers them today. But Smith wanted to concentrate on his words and by the time The Fall debuted at Manchester’s North West Arts Centre on 23 May 1977, Smith had dropped the instrument.

  Dick Witts – another friend of Friel’s who briefly managed the fledgling Fall – remembers the venue as being ‘like a fashionable restaurant in the late 1970s, with everything white. It was done out like a small white cave. We just took the tables and chairs out. Mark and Martin, who were taller than the others, had to bend down because of the low ceiling. It wasn’t really public, the audience was just a group of other musicians sitting around listening.’

  ‘Mark just got up and did it,’ says Friel. ‘I don’t think he thought he could be a proper singer, so he developed a thing which was almost reggae, semi-talking.’

  Friel remembers the 1977 Smith as a ‘funny, witty bloke’ who introduced him to authors like Philip K Dick and H P Lovecraft before dropping out of college. Smith got a job as a clerk and, as a result, Friel believes, he saw the first written evidence of what would become Smith’s trademark finger-pointing style.

  ‘He didn’t do any work,’ he grins, ‘but he used to write me these letters, full of asides about his co-workers. I’ve still got them.’

  But otherwise, Friel remembers the members of the group as being ‘all tremendously nice, actually’, which doesn’t sound very Fall. In fact, ructions began almost immediately and Tony Friel managed to avoid the dubious honour of being the first to leave The Fall. That unfortunate accolade goes to a drummer – whose name no one can remember, he is usually called ‘Dave’ or ‘Steve’ – who was an insurance salesman and briefly in The Fall when Una Baines switched from biscuit tins to keyboards.

  ‘I think he was called Steve. He was a nice guy, but pretty naff,’ insists Friel, explaining that the hapless sticksman penned a song called ‘Landslide Victory’ anticipating Thatcher and therefore, however prescient, simply had to go.

  In the manner of various Fall line-up shuffles ever since, Friel already had an eye on a replacement – Karl Burns – who he’d seen play and knew would fit in with a rock band. Thus, ‘in the nicest possible way, which wasn’t probably very nice, really’, ‘Steve’ – or ‘Dave’ – was given his P45.

  The Fall were just
weeks old and already there was a member of The Fallen.

  The next head to roll was Friel’s. As he tells it, he wasn’t keen on a 7-inch deal the band were about to do with Step Forward Records. But the main reason was Smith had started going out with Kay Carroll, who worked at the local psychiatric hospital and who Friel didn’t take to at all, especially when Smith announced she was their new manager. ‘I thought she muscled in,’ says Friel, ‘although Mark asked me to stay.’ Nevertheless, after an ultimatum – ‘It was her or me’ – Friel discovered he was the one taking the bullet, in December 1977.

  Although his former pals became legends in music, he swears he has no regrets other than falling out with his best mate, Smith. He suggests he’d ‘play for Mark’ again. After exiting The Fall, Friel formed a band called The Passage with Dick Witts but fell out with him too.

  ‘I was drinking too much, taking too many drugs and being too snotty,’ he admits. ‘I was a bit of an arsehole. I wasn’t sacked but I should have been. I left, but looking back I was fed up with it. I wanted to get back to doing something with some guts.’

  Then he made a record with Karl Burns, but managed to extricate himself completely from Fall circles by falling out with Una Baines, for reasons he refuses to divulge.

  Lately, he’s got the music bug again and is playing in a 1960s covers band, The Scavengers, whose set includes songs by The Move, a band also recently covered by The Fall.

  Always different, always the same.

  And yet, it doesn’t quite add up. Friel’s tales of drugs and fallouts with everybody don’t square with the ‘nice’ Fall he depicts or indeed the gentle chap before me now. I can’t help suspecting either his memory is fading or he’s giving me a rather sanitised version of what happened. Either way, I seem to have jolted something, perhaps a sense of what might have been if he’d not attempted to face off Carroll.