by Dave Simpson
Before she wishes me a taped ‘good luck’, Carroll wonders aloud if I’ll ever crack the ‘enigma’ but leaves me with a startling confession: ‘Some weeks I wouldn’t go near it, some weeks I wish I’d never left, others I’d go back in a heartbeat,’ she says, echoing the Hanleys, Tony Friel and Tommy Crooks.
After communicating with Carroll, I’m again asking myself something I’ve often wondered. What created Mark E Smith?
‘You want a goalie who gets bloody shot at!’
There haven’t been a lot of people in music who operate like Smith, but there are a few.
The obvious comparison is with James Brown, whose hits with tracks like ‘Sex Machine’ earned him the title Godfather of Soul. But for musicians who played with him, the late legend was more ringmaster than Godfather. Musicians were subjected to rigorous discipline covering everything from the exact minute members of his band would attend rehearsals down to what they wore onstage. Maceo Parker, a saxophonist in Brown’s famous All Stars band, once told how Brown placed equal importance on wearing the correct bow-tie and patent-leather shoes greased in exactly the right manner as hitting the correct notes. Woe betide anyone who failed to meet these exacting standards: they’d be fined, admittedly not for hitting the tom tom, or despatched from the band. Once out of the Brown enclave, musicians were expected to leave behind their shiny shoes and bow-ties – which must have been a wrench – and return to normal life.
I hear about another similar taskmaster when my editor sends me along to get a drumming lesson and an interview from African percussion legend Tony Allen. These days, the youthful 70-something plays with Damon Albarn and Clash bassist Paul Simonon in The Good, The Bad & The Queen. But his greatest contribution to modern music was to invent the influential ‘afrobeat’ – which inspired Brown’s funk – alongside Nigerian legend Fela Kuti. Once Allen has finished scrutinising my drumming – he doesn’t fine me for hitting the tom tom, but teaches me a whole new way of playing hi-hat – we start talking about Fela Kuti.
‘Very strict, very disciplinarian,’ he tells of Kuti, who fronted enormous ensembles requiring absolute perfection. If a musician ever missed a note or played something ever so slightly wrong, Kuti would stop the music to humiliate the hapless offender on the stage.
These days, as well as playing with Albarn, Allen fronts his own bands and I wonder aloud if Kuti’s discipline rubbed off.
‘No, I’d never stop the music,’ he insists softly, before chuckling, ‘I’d just stop that one musician!’
However, these are purely disciplinarian approaches. What fascinates me about Smith’s approach to musicians is that his techniques seem to enter into the realms of the almost supernatural, or psychological warfare. He’s certainly not the first rock singer to attempt a mental or almost occult approach. Perhaps the most notorious is Don Van Vliet, aka the legendary Captain Beefheart, notably a Smith favourite. For the recording of classic 1969 album Trout Mask Replica, Beefheart effectively imprisoned his band in a house and made them rehearse for up to 14 hours a day. Drummer John French described their living conditions – playing for months on end, often without food, which has obvious echoes of The Fall – as ‘cult-like’. In a macabre twist, which Smith would surely love, Beefheart restricted the band from leaving the house by making them wear women’s smocks at a time when cross-dressing was a federal offence. To leave the house risked arrest as well as ridicule.
Meanwhile, in a feat worthy of The Mighty Fall, Beefheart nipped off to the pub, safe in the knowledge that by the time he came back, the musicians would be so bound up in creative tension they’d deliver a classic album. It worked and it’s clearly significant Smith is a big enough Beefheart fan to be able to quote freely in Malmaison, ‘If you can’t hear the drums, the music’s not there.’
Beefheart – who eventually retired to the desert, where he may or may not bump into Karl Burns – had quite a lot of strange ideologies and practices. On the internet there’s a notorious list of ‘Ten Commandments For Guitarists’, in which Beefheart apparently laid out his own surreal instructions for would-be Magic Band guitar-pluckers.
These included such gems as ‘Listen to the birds’ – because ‘that’s where all the music comes from’. Guitarists were told their instrument was not a guitar but ‘a divining rod’. They were told to ‘Practise under a bush’ – ‘Eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.’ Other commandments included: ‘Walk with the Devil’ (on the grounds that ‘an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub’); ‘Do not think’ (on the grounds that this removes feeling); and – my personal favourite – ‘Do not wipe sweat from the guitar’ (on the grounds that great music had to have ‘that stink’).
Gary Lucas, a Magic Band guitarist, suspects the Commandments are a hoax, but are consistent with instructions he was given while in Beefheart’s employ. He reveals that Beefheart told one drummer to copy the sound of him throwing a metal ashtray against a wall. He had a theory called the Exploding Note Theory, that notes should have no relation to the previous note and be like ‘bombs exploding in the air’. Perhaps, next to some of the Captain’s mad pronouncements, Smith’s favoured commands are pretty tame. Equally, very few of Beefheart’s or Brown’s musicians lasted as long as 19 years, as did Steve Hanley, or emerged from the experience needing treatment.
Other stars have issued bizarre musical ideologies – rocker Jerry Lee Lewis has said that to get the sweetest tone from a piano, you must set it on fire. However, these artists issue their mad commands to seasoned musicians, not uncultured guitarists stumbled over in the pub. Which gives Smith’s ability to craft great music with The Fall a whole different dimension.
The more I find out about him, the more he brings to mind a great football manager than a director of musicians. In Malmaison, he was able to offer strategies for winning football matches just as he was for music. At one point, he even told me exactly what is wrong with the England football team, describing it as a music ‘supergroup’: ‘It’s like picking the best guitarist in Britain, the best drummer and the best singer, it’s ridiculous and it’s never going to work.
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘See, [Sir Alf] Ramsay [manager who led England to the 1966 World Cup], people never liked him for it, but he’d always have the full-backs from the Second Division. Gordon Banks’ Stoke City were bottom of the First Division. They’d conceded more goals that World Cup season than anybody else, but it works.
‘You want a goalie who gets bloody shot at every week. You don’t want the Arsenal goalie or whatever in any national team, because he’s never got anything to do! He might pull off the occasional beautiful save, but he’s never going to be any good against a gang of Poles who are going to get shot if they don’t score.’
When I look for people who succeed with similar methods to Smith, I turn to football as much as music. In the early 1980s, as manager of Aberdeen, Sir Alex Ferguson inspired an unfashionable group of un-fancied players to win the 1983 UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup. Ferguson’s ideology – which bears a similarity to Smith’s view of musicians – is that no player should be bigger than the club.
He also seems to display an uncanny knack of knowing just when to jettison a player – you could compare Ferguson’s dispensing with David Beckham to Smith’s ability to dispense with star players like Martin Bramah – in order to reshape the team. Not that Smith – as a City fan – would relish being mentioned in the same breath as a manager of United. However, while Ferguson’s youth policy nurtured the likes of Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs (the Ben Pritchards of Man United), lately he’s had to rely more and more on big money signings – football’s equivalent of flashy lead guitarists and thus alien to Smith.
But the footballing comparison I turn to more than anyone is with 1970s Nottingham Forest and Derby County manager Brian Clough.
Like the Prestwich-Salford Fall, Forest and Derby were from unfashionable backwaters. By virtue of shrewd management and
psychological tactics, they were inspired to win league titles and, in Forest’s case, the European Cup, twice. Clough could spend money – he signed Trevor Francis from Birmingham City to Forest for a record British fee. But his teams were mostly constructed from unknown players and low-key signings, which the former player ‘moulded’ into a winning team.
His exact methods were secret at the time although they have dripped into the public domain courtesy of former players. The principal method seems to have been to develop an elaborate, extreme example of the ‘carrot and stick’.
Like The Fall, Clough’s players never knew which was coming next – one day he’d be buying them all steak and chips, the next humiliating them in public. A typical story is the one about a former centre-forward who scored a hat-trick in the first 45 minutes and came off expecting to be congratulated by the boss. Instead, Clough punched him in the stomach – for missing the easy chance that should have given him a fourth.
As Clough’s fondness for the bottle developed alongside his success, his behaviour became more extreme, typified by an incident in which he swung at one of his own fans – for invading his territory, the pitch – and almost immediately relented to give him a kiss. Nevertheless, his players – many of them now successful in management themselves – usually have an unstinting respect and even love for the demanding but successful instructor they still call ‘the gaffer’.
Like Smith, who views the music business with thinly veiled disdain, ‘Ol’ Big Head’ was so outspoken he offended the football top brass so much they refused to make him England manager when he was the obvious – if not the only – candidate.
The other aspect of Clough’s reign, which echoes Smith’s, is that he worked best when he had someone else alongside him. Where Smith had Kay Carroll – and later, Brix, Julia and now Elena – Clough had his assistant manager, Peter Taylor. His faithful sidekick was entrusted with various tasks including recruitment and operated as Clough’s ‘eyes and ears’, often reporting back to him with tales from the training room and boardroom just as Carroll was trusted to handle the business and keep the musicians on their toes. Similarly, when Clough managed alone – notably at Leeds – he was unsuccessful, although there were various other factors. Facing player battles at Leeds and feeling isolated between the twin rocks of dressing room and boardroom, Clough ended up pleading with Taylor to return to his side – obvious echoes of the way Steve Hanley told me Smith asked him back.
As someone who is very well read and versed in football, it seems inconceivable Smith hasn’t read about Clough and perhaps taken the odd tip here and there. Other historical figures have the aura of Smith about them. If what Friel and Carroll say is true, there’s a Machiavellian streak to Smith’s plotting and musically he seems to follow the political philosopher’s doctrine that ‘the end justifies the means’.
Yet, Carroll’s tales about how Smith dealt with her brother ‘Noddy’ and Tony Friel bring yet another literary figure to mind, in a poem by T S Eliot.
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
And whatever time the deed took place – MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!
Which could also explain Smith’s loathing of canines.
However, comparing Smith to anyone else is ultimately frustrating. Like Macavity, The Mystery Cat, the more you try to pin Smith down, the more he slips away.
CHAPTER 8
‘I took a lot of drugs and was
a bit of a nutcase!’
In The Wonderful and Frightening World, you can go from horror to humour and back again at any given moment.
I’m heading for a café in Manchester’s leafy Chorlton, where I’ve arranged to meet Una Baines. As I’m crossing the road towards the tiny establishment I suddenly realise what a mad assignment this is. Baines hasn’t been sighted – or photographed – for years. All I have to go on is a fading photo from 1978 in which she sports a hairstyle like the auburn one in Abba and has weird staring eyes that seem to be gazing in opposite directions.
I tiptoe in through the white wooden door and instantly recognise a woman – but it’s not Una Baines, it’s a friend from Leeds I haven’t seen in years. When I tell her what I’m doing here, she laughs and shrieks, ‘I know junkies!’
You what?
‘I know John Quays.’
Ah, I get it. John Quays is a character in the 1977 Fall song ‘No Xmas for John Quays’. It’s always been assumed ‘John Quays’ was a pun on ‘junkies’ allowing Smith to make scornful and, perhaps, a tiny bit hypocritical judgments on those who use hard drugs, relating the story of a junkie who thinks he is more interesting than the world. The John Quays character is certainly a play on words. However, my friend insists there is a real John Quays – he was one of the hazy, crazy, druggy entourage that used to hang around The Fall. Apparently, she knows him well because he lives just round the corner. I’m starting to feel I can hardly go out of the house without stumbling down another avenue of The Wonderful and Frightening World.
Suddenly, my friend’s attention is grabbed by a middle-aged yet still youthful-looking woman staring quizzically in our direction. She wears a plastic coat and her once brown hair is now dyed blonde, giving her the slightly ethereal air of a 1960s heroine but with a Manchester accent and slightly uneven teeth. The moment I sit down with her, the Velvet Underground’s first album featuring Nico wafts out from a speaker.
‘I used to spend hours listening to this,’ says Una Baines, delicately pouring tea. Her eyes are just like those in the fading photo – childlike but wild – although thankfully looking in the same direction these days. In a way she’s like The Fall, imperceptibly off-kilter but with the sort of self-effacing sense of humour you’d find in songs like ‘Carry Bag Man’, or even an episode of Coronation Street.
‘Oh, my God,’ she yells, as I tell her about that photo. ‘I looked like a Nazi storm trooper!’ When I tell her I’m tracking down everyone who’s ever played in The Fall, she howls in disbelief. ‘How many years is that going to take you?’
However, when I make a joke about how I might end up looking in mental institutions, the laughter stops dead and she places a hand over the microphone. For the next hour, Baines will matter-of-factly explain that some things about her past can’t be printed for the sake of her family. Occasionally, she forgets to cover the microphone and so simply whispers, ‘You won’t print that, will you?’
Baines met Smith in 1976 at a summer fair in Heaton Park – the leafy greenery still bordering Prestwich – and as they became boyfriend and girlfriend she ended up in the fledgling Fall with Tony Friel and Martin Bramah. She’d grown up with two brothers so it just felt like another ‘gang of lads’.
Back then, she says, they were all creative people who were trying to expand their boundaries: ‘musically, politically, personally and narcotically’. She paints a picture of a lost, forgotten Britain, where NME still had a ‘Titpic’ (pin-up) and young women in office jobs were forbidden from wearing trousers.
‘That’s why I wore those ridiculous boots in those photos,’ she laughs, ‘and skirts down to there … it seems a universe away.’ Baines describes herself in those days as very young and paranoid: ‘I took a lot of drugs and was a bit of a nutcase.’
Maybe, but she was also a radical feminist at a time when to be so risked derision. Baines remembers being labelled a ‘man-hater’ and being showered with abuse on demonstrations. However, she rejects Kay Carroll’s suggestion that they were surrogate sisters, saying she ‘didn’t really click’ with the older woman.
‘I used to think, when I’m 29 will I think like that?’ Baines plays down Carroll’s well documented feminism and insists, herself aside, the biggest feminist in The Fall was actually Mark E Smith.
Although The Fall have had many female musicians (not all of them his wives), Smith is often thought of as a typical, working
-class male traditionalist, but Baines says in those days he was the opposite. Together, they’d check out women’s groups and opinions across the political left – including the International Marxist Group. However, Baines says they quickly realised it was ‘bollocks’, especially when someone had a go at her for liking American female punk icon Patti Smith.
‘That’s when I started to question everything,’ she says. ‘I had a problem with people who believed in armed revolution. What’s the point in more conflict? Up the workers? Why, are they going to behave any better?’ Interestingly, Baines suggests their interest in politics may have triggered The Fall’s now fundamental scepticism: ‘I think Mark’s politics now are neither left nor right. He’s very sceptical of anything that’s banner-waving or sheep-like, like a club …’ Which could possibly explain his attitude to his musicians.
In those days, The Fall were democratic and perhaps still left-of-centre. Baines insists the firing of the hapless Tory drummer ‘Dave’ – who may have been called ‘Steve’ – was by consensus.
However, within the gang Baines was an individual. A female musician was rare enough in those days, never mind one as odd as Baines. After deciding that bashing biscuit tins for a drum kit was really not a good idea, she took out a bank loan to get herself an electric piano which she calls ‘the worst keyboard in the world’. She then got it into her head the bank owed her the money and she would don the boots to march into her branch screaming, ‘You owe me!’
Apart from her curious approach to finance, Baines seems to have been the first Fall example of what Ben Pritchard called Smith’s ‘moulding’. The frontman encouraged her to keep her keyboards as simple as possible, which explains why they sound something like a cross between The Seeds and a cat landing on a gas ring. Strangely enough, similar – maybe squawlier – keyboards still feature in The Fall – with Smith’s wife Elena playing what he described to me as ‘Miiiaaoowwwww … space music’.
