by Dave Simpson
Baines plays down her own contribution by insisting it was obvious Smith would make an impact, because he was a ‘great writer’. But while her boyfriend took up with Kay Carroll and began the group’s ascent, his former girlfriend was falling, out of the group and into her own, very personal Wonderful and Frightening World.
As she tells it, she was always an imaginative child and spent hours in a solitary private world. She had two invisible horses – one white, one black – and a terrible fear of anything ‘normal’, longing for ‘anything that was beyond the day-to-day’. Her mother had five children and her biggest dread was ending up ‘pushing a pram at 16’.
One day she was listening to Paul McCartney on television talking about The Beatles’ LSD trips … and at that moment, she thought she’d been handed the keys to another more adult world. She says she started taking drugs long before The Fall, but once the group took off – aided by her keyboards on ‘Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!’ – her consumption escalated, particularly once Smith dumped her for Carroll and Baines took up with Jonnie Brown, ‘running off and living’ with the art student for a ‘crazy nine weeks’. In the beginning, she didn’t realise the new Fall bassist was into heroin, a drug she associated with squalor and needles, not a clean-looking, handsome, intelligent arty type.
‘So it was quite seductive,’ she relates. ‘I wanted to break down boundaries, but with hindsight taking drugs was not the way to do it. It was actually quite dangerous. It wasn’t a normal state of mind.’
Eventually, Baines was stuffing so much into her body, often at the same time, she suffered an overdose of cocaine and morphine – the ‘speedball’ cocktail instrumental in many rock deaths. She says she lost weeks out of her life.
‘There’s days, weeks that don’t make sense,’ she whispers, although this period is censored by lack of memory rather than a hand over the microphone. But she vividly remembers being ‘rescued’. She’d gone back to Smith and Carroll’s flat at Kingswood Road to find no one home, but a woman called Karen arrived and took her to her parents.
‘I remember it being brilliant sunlight on the motorway,’ she says, incredulously. ‘In fact it was dark, at night … When we got to the house I thought the floor was made of music and she was the angel Gabriel … I can remember it in graphic detail. I thought I’d gone to the four corners of the earth. Really weird stuff!’
The path of The Wonderful and Frightening World had led her to a ‘hospital’. Here, she shrouds the details, but remembers that for ages it felt like her whole personality had ‘shattered into pieces’. She remembers a visit from her father, but the rest is just … fragments, moments grabbed on the long road to recovery. But she feels lucky, and believes the breakdown probably saved her life or at least stopped her becoming an addict. She giggles. ‘Not that I chose it.’
According to Baines, her state of mind was the reason she became the third to leave The Fall: ‘Contrary to Mark’s claims, he never sacked me. I was just too ill.’ She says Smith invited her to play more gigs, during which she would stand gazing at the keyboard, which the audience thought was all part of the ‘act’. When she first left, Smith dedicated the song ‘Mother-Sister’ to her from the stage, so if he’s since rewritten history, it may be an act of revenge for Baines subsequently taking up with Martin Bramah (they split years ago, but are still friendly and have a child) and forming Blue Orchids, who won much critical acclaim.
‘Mark had this weird idea that I’d betrayed The Fall.’ According to Baines, she was in Manchester club Rafters one night talking to journalist Paul Morley and made a joke that if she formed a band with Brown they’d call themselves The Lunatics. She thinks Smith overheard her and suspected an act of treachery, ‘when it was just this ridiculous line’.
But either way, that was that.
Baines – now a mother-of-three who has worked in community housing – insists she has no regrets.
‘I am strong now,’ she smiles. ‘I was extremely paranoid in those days. There was a lot of acid around The Fall. I took too much. I wanted to break down barriers and I thought that was the way to do it … it’s not the way. You go to a counsellor and you stop taking drugs! But I survived.’
These days, Baines still dabbles in music – her latest band are HM Poetic Terrorists, a curious blend of intricate guitars and shouty punk rock vocals who do sound at least a bit like early Fall. She says she still goes to Fall gigs and meets up with Smith ‘every few years, for a pint and a catch-up’. She says that contrary to belief he’s not an ‘ogre’ and ‘far, far more complex’ than anyone has ever known. They weren’t lovers for long but she got to know him better than most and particularly loves the ‘priceless’ sense of humour I’d enjoyed during a rare public outing in Malmaison. ‘There’s what Mark wants people to know, and what is real,’ she concludes, beguilingly, as I prepare to exit Chorlton and head elsewhere in The Wonderful and Frightening World. Just as a journalist can encounter various versions of Mark E Smith, I feel like I’m discovering a different side of the man with everyone I encounter. It’s like walking into the world depicted by The Fall’s 1980 single ‘How I Wrote “Elastic” Man’ (in which Smith assesses the impact of becoming a celebrity) and where the only reality is waking up and rubbing your eyes.
CHAPTER 9
‘There was an outbreak of fleas.’
I’m starting to realise looking for former members of The Fall is becoming almost as peculiar as life in The Fall. Some afternoons, I find myself sending off pointless letters to houses in Salford that have been knocked down. When I type ‘Mike Leigh’ into Google in a final quest to unearth the band’s late 1970s, jazz-cabaret, PC World-shopping, insurance-selling drummer, I get 4,500,000 entries relating to the film director. A similar fiasco follows an attempt to find Chris Evans – not the famous DJ and broadcaster, but a drummer who apparently filled in for one gig in Bristol in 2004. I get so obsessed about finding him I even consider, briefly, securing an interview with the Chris Evans and asking him if he could pretend to have joined The Fall.
Then there’s the peculiar ritual of a daily conversation with Suzanne that goes something like:
‘What have you done today?’
‘Fired off 75 emails trying to track down members of The Fall.’
Even as a Fall fan herself, Suzanne is starting to bristle at the extent to which it’s taking over my whole life. Friends are similarly growing used to a weekend chorus of ‘I’d like to come out, but I’ve got to spend all weekend researching people who used to be in The Fall’.
Meanwhile, my dog, Guinness – who prefers Elvis Presley to The Fall – is starting to bark at me for not taking him on his usual walks. In these really low moments, I naturally stick on an old Fall album for inspiration and fire off a missive to someone like Yvonne Pawlett, who replaced Una Baines in 1978 but left within a few months, allegedly to look after her own dog. Simon Ford, author of The Fall biography Hip Priest, kindly gives me an old address he has for her in Doncaster, but I don’t expect a reply.
I particularly want to talk to Pawlett, who advertised a cassette of music in the NME classifieds in the early 1980s but then disappeared. In old photos she looks as young and innocent as a choir girl, and I wonder what on earth would happen to someone like that in the barmy cauldron of The Fall. Would it be like a Christian being thrown to the lions? Or Mick Taylor who replaced deceased Brian Jones joining the Rolling Stones? He went in a clean-living vegetarian and came out a few years later a chronic junkie.
Equally, Kay Carroll had paid tribute to Pawlett’s brief but significant contribution.
‘Yvonne was wonderful. I loved her stuff,’ she said. ‘She had an incredible knowledge of music. We had to rough it a lot but she never compromised. She was very sweet … enchanting … I liked her a lot.’
The story goes that Pawlett left her German Shepherd behind to join The Fall through an NME advert and audition – the only time to my knowledge Smith has adopted such a normal tactic. The keyboard player,
from South Yorkshire, was dropped off outside Smith’s house by her father. Pawlett’s strident, garage rock notes are all over the first Fall album, 1979’s Live at The Witch Trials. Perversely, this wasn’t a live album at all, having been recorded and mixed in two days in a studio in Camden, London, by producer Bob Sargeant. However, it is a quite brilliant document of the early Fall – who skip from punky jazz to jazzy punk in the quirky, compulsive rhythms of ‘Futures and Pasts’ and the hypnotically splenetic ‘Rebellious Jukebox’, the title of which still sums up The Fall’s stance against prevailing trends.
Pawlett’s playing, especially her atypically accomplished introduction to ‘Frightened’, had been noted in reviews and she appears to the fore on the brilliantly unconventional, mantra-like single ‘Rowche Rumble’. But once leaving Smith’s tutelage, her musical career stopped dead.
Either Smith had coaxed something from her nobody else was able to tap into, or she really had given up to look after her dog. Simon Ford is under the impression she’s some sort of biologist.
I’ve just about given up on her when the phone rings in the middle of Coronation Street. ‘’Ello, it’s Yvonne,’ she begins simply, sounding not unlike one of the soap’s characters. ‘Yvonne who used to be in The Fall.’
For the next 30 or so minutes, I further incur Suzanne’s wrath by turning Coronation Street down to listen to the peculiar words of one of The Fallen.
She explains she’d love to be able to answer my questions but she doesn’t really have the time. Her son has just gone away to university and all her spare moments are going into decorating his student residence.
She spends so long talking about this I start to think we could have had time to talk about The Fall. I want to discuss Live at The Witch Trials. She keeps returning to paint and soft furnishings. Not unreasonably, she suggests The Fall was ‘such a very long time ago’.
After a while, minor details and memories filter in between talk of brushes versus rollers. Yes, her dad did drop her off, it seemed like a big adventure at the time. The Fall were still listening to bands like The Velvet Underground and Can. But every time we edge nearer the thorny subject of what it was like for an unworldly South Yorkshire teenager to be in such an odd band, she seems to clam up and veer off on another tangent. But she’s charming, in her way: soft-voiced and motherly and definitely an unlikely recruit for The Fall.
Still, being in The Fall had left her with her a quest for exploration she’d directed back into her love for animals. She’d done a BSc and a Masters in horticultural and environmental sciences, then ended up working in investigative biology: perhaps the ideal profession after what Ben Pritchard suggested was The Fall’s ‘psychological experiment’.
Pawlett suggests she’ll ‘think about’ my questions and see what she can remember. A few nights later, she calls to say the questions are still propped on the mantelpiece, she even has a scrapbook from her time in the band somewhere and her son – who is awestruck that his decorating, dog-loving mother was in such a famous group – keeps urging her to help. But I never hear from her again.
Before she disappears forever, she does tell me she didn’t leave to look after her dog at all – even though the creature was sick at the time – she simply ‘never fitted in’ and left to pursue biology and breeding German Shepherds. This explanation delights Kay Carroll, who fires off another anecdote concerning Pawlett’s mysterious exit.
‘I think she got homesick,’ she says. ‘There was an outbreak of fleas at the [Kingswood Road] house and that really freaked her mother out! It never got nasty with her, she just was like, “I’m going to have to go”.’
I can’t help wondering if Smith – one of Britain’s most avid conspiracy theorists – suspected any connection between the keyboardist’s love of German Shepherds and The Fall going down with fleas.
A couple of days later, I’m listening to ‘Mess of My’, the Fall song from 1978 which contains salty Smith diatribes about being as strong as your weakest link when an email arrives from Martin Bramah, founder Fall guitarist.
That’s the good news. The bad news, he doesn’t want to talk to me. ‘It’s all well documented,’ he says, via his other band Blue Orchids’ virtually dormant website. But it isn’t, really. Little is known about Bramah apart from his two spells in The Fall, which included an unexpected return in 1990 for Extricate, one of The Fall’s most successful albums. I saw his comeback that summer when he strode onstage unannounced at Sheffield Leadmill wearing the sort of silver shirt you’d usually see in a glam rock band. This curious apparel aside, his brilliant, short bursts of jaggedly sweet guitar melody suggested he’d never been away. Since then, all I had to go on were rumours that one of the all-time great Fall guitarists was now driving a bus.
Undeterred, I fire off a load of questions about The Fall’s demented dynamic and what he’s doing now. This time, his reply is a little more forthcoming: ‘Sorry to be so awkward. Your questions are very interesting, but it’s all too personal to be put in the public domain.’
I can hardly argue. Apart from his two spells in The Fall, Bramah has also been particularly embroiled in the group’s complex romantic history. He first left The Fall to form Blue Orchids with Una Baines, Smith’s former squeeze and the mother of Bramah’s child. On returning he embarked on a relationship with another keyboard player, Marcia Schofield. It’s often rumoured Smith takes a dim view of such behaviour – like any office, perhaps romances are a privilege of the boss. Either way, Bramah’s exit the second time was painful. He was abandoned at a foreign airport exactly as Paul Hanley had described one of Smith’s favourite pranks – taking members abroad, just to send them back.
Bramah can’t be persuaded to break his silence and I respect that as much as I respect anyone who has survived The Fall, but an unexpected ping in my inbox brings an email with this short but significant message: ‘I bet you haven’t talked to Eric McGann.’ And there’s a phone number.
‘You’ve got to be a hard case to be in The Fall.’
He’s right. I haven’t talked to Eric McGann. I’m not as Fall-encyclopaedic as some of the Fall fans out there but I like to think I know my former members. I confess I have never heard of this one who, it appears, replaced Jonnie Brown on bass after Brown replaced Tony Friel. The situation is further muddied when Bramah says he also goes by the names Rick Goldstraw, Eric Echo and even Eric the Ferret. I phone the number and a soft Salford voice answers. He’s never given an interview about The Fall since leaving in 1978.
When McGann exited, the charts were full of the Bee Gees and Village People, punk was fading into the new wave of Squeeze and Elvis Costello, and Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz faced 25 years in jail. McGann/Goldstraw/Echo/Ferret says he’ll do an interview but only over the phone and he doesn’t want his photo taken.
However, we’ve hardly begun talking when it becomes obvious he was definitely in The Fall. He begins by describing one gig where he was hit by a flying chair.
‘My daughter was in the front row and she was getting a lot of hassle from some National Front skinheads,’ he explains, bringing up an unfortunate feature of punk-related gigs at the time. ‘I had to stop playing to help her.’ However, like Fela Kuti, Smith took umbrage at this development and told Ferret in no uncertain terms to ‘Start bloody playing’. Then he threw a chair at him onstage. Ferret, as you would, resumed playing. However, none of this has troubled his undoubted admiration for our leader.
‘The Fall never, ever cruise,’ he states, awestruck after all this time, adding dutifully, ‘You’ve got to be a hard case to be in The Fall.’ What’s more, Ferret says actual violence in The Fall was rare – it was more the threat of it, to put the group on its mettle.
However, there were plenty of rucks at live gigs, but between band and audience, not between The Fall and Smith. Smith would often encourage hostility by baiting restless audiences with jibes like ‘The difference between you and us is we’ve got brains’ – as immortalised on Totale’s Tu
rns (It’s Now or Never). While gigs often involved projectiles, actual day-to-day life was apparently quite sedate.
Ferret remembers a certain togetherness, especially as the line-up extended to include fellow Salfordians Craig Scanlon and Steve Hanley, both ‘local lads who enjoyed a pint’. However, he agrees with Ben Pritchard that Fall musicians were never secure enough to feel they were in the group and the difference in those days was that these Fall musicians were fans of the band – big fans, years before Smith decided against employing ‘fans of the bloody group’. They’d all hang around at gigs, loading gear, occasionally looking for a smile from our leader.
According to Ferret, for lads with few prospects the attraction of joining The Fall was to be whisked away from Prestwich to see the world – much like early twentieth-century soldiers were excited to be drafted. But, once they went abroad, they’d mostly just sit in pubs. They could do that in Prestwich. No, there was something else. For people like Eric the Ferret, the biggest motivation was the opportunity to view, at close quarters, a bona fide genius at work.
‘You really get to listen to his lyrics and when you’re in the group you realise you how clever the kid is,’ he says, sounding more like a teenager than a 50-something. In fact, like Una Baines, he reveals he still follows The Fall.
‘Mark’s fantastic,’ he says. ‘I’ve watched him create soundscapes. People assume he’s just trying to wreck the amps, but he creates these collages of sound and voice. Mark is a musician who doesn’t play an instrument. But he’s sharp, musically. I don’t know anyone else who is as relevant. The Fall are the one thing Britain has that America can never have. Most people in music just pose. They have nothing to say except “Look at me”.’
Playing onstage with The Fall was a ‘magic hour’ which they lived for. Ferret says the musicians he played with ‘worshipped’ Smith and none would ever criticise Smith because he ‘made’ them. Ferret goes even further, suggesting that among some band members Smith was actually known as ‘God’.
