by Dave Simpson
Perhaps in the way Jesus instructed his disciples, or Smith’s father taught his plumbers, perhaps there is something supernatural or mystical in the way Smith ‘takes the crap people do’ and turns it into brilliance – the musical equivalent of turning water into wine. Years before Ben Pritchard, Ferret tells how you could join The Fall being barely able to hold a guitar and within weeks be informed by the music papers you were ‘the best thing since sliced bread’.
Ferret was an ordinary bass player when he joined The Fall – ‘my thing was just to hold down the sound, not that wild thing which they had before’ – but realised that by joining the band he subtly transformed the sound. Similarly, cajoled by Smith, he found himself able to write songs, not just ‘Mess of My’, for which he is credited on record. ‘I penned quite a few, actually,’ he says, ‘but credits are a lottery in The Fall, if you know what I mean.’
Smith defends this charge in his autobiography, essentially saying that he gives credit where it’s due. For example, he says that ‘Blindness’ is essentially a cover of an Iggy Pop song and so Iggy Pop is the only person that can really be said to have written it. But maybe this also explains why Fall musicians subsequently seem to fail. Without Smith’s life-force, they are bereft. Or perhaps they are never great musicians, just great Fall musicians. Which may explain why even a Martin Bramah – ‘the best guitarist in the world’ according to the Hanleys – could be suddenly despatched.
We talk a bit more about Ferret’s view of Smith, whom he regards as the genuine item, not a rock performer – ‘Mark is that guy, 24 hours a day,’ he argues. He also suggests Smith wants things to be so good and to have ‘that edge’ he bears ‘a cost’ for fronting The Fall.
I’m curious. What is the cost?
‘The way he works, the things he uses … they take their toll,’ he says, but doesn’t elaborate. Just as I’m thinking this Ferret may not be about to squeak, we start talking about Martin Bramah, who played with him in Blue Orchids. The pair had another musical partnership backing Nico, at a time when the German chanteuse was hauling herself around Europe’s flea pits playing gigs to pay for heroin. However, the Ferret seems as matter-of-fact about this episode as he is when dropping the revelation that he himself took heroin in those days to combat ‘stage fright’. It’s a tiny reminder that some musical experiences may be even more bizarre than The Fall.
Ferret – who now manages and plays with Salford poet John Cooper Clarke, himself an ex-heroin addict who occasionally supports The Fall – says he is one of the few people to be in touch with both Smith and Bramah, who did indeed drive buses for a spell in London.
Ferret agrees with the Hanleys that Bramah’s short, attack-like guitar defined the Fall sound and suggests, while they were friends, a sense of competitiveness between Smith and Bramah fuelled their music.
The pair had been ‘very close’, discovering music together around Prestwich. ‘And when people are close,’ ponders the Ferret, ‘when there’s a fallout, it’s a big fallout.’ Perhaps Smith never forgave Bramah for the perceived betrayal of leaving The Fall to join with Baines. Yet, when the guitarist returned in 1989, he was a hired hand, not a cornerstone of the group. Had Smith brought Bramah back in 1989 just to wreak revenge?
He says the backdrop to the second fallout was indeed Bramah’s relationship with Marcia Schofield, but the final showdown was over matters musical.
‘Martin fell for all that big shot stuff. “Here I am, back in the band …”’ suggests the Ferret, and that silver shirt at Sheffield Leadmill suddenly seems significant. Bramah had broken Smith’s most cardinal law – in acting like a rock star, he ‘played into Mark’s hands’.
Ferret relates how Smith didn’t just abandon Bramah thousands of miles away from home, in Australia, but dumped him just before they went to Japan, a country Bramah had wanted to visit all his life. This seems extraordinarily cruel; maybe it’s just comical.
‘Fair play to Smithy, he kills me!’ the Ferret laughs. ‘He should have his own TV show.’
These days, Smith and Bramah are at an impasse. Bramah ‘will not sell himself off the back of Mark’ – perhaps another reason for his silence. Meanwhile, Smith refuses to work with his founder guitarist because, in more football parlance, he’s ‘got the ball, and refuses to pass it’.
Pranks aside, perhaps the collapse of the Smith-Bramah relationship – the Jagger-Richards of The Fall – is genuinely one of the group’s forgotten tragedies. If that competitiveness spawned the music, what sounds could they unleash now, after three decades of rancour? The Ferret believes – while The Fall could have been ‘massive’ with Bramah, their most pop-oriented guitarist apart from Brix Smith – if they’d carried on together The Fall would not exist. Another cruel paradox.
Ferret adores Bramah as much as he reveres Smith and he’s trying to coax Bramah out of retirement. He breaks off to play me a blast of Bramah’s new guitar sound down the phone. It’s raw, psychedelic – and nothing like The Fall.
‘Martin says he doesn’t want to sound like The Fall,’ suggests the Ferret, audibly exasperated. ‘I tell him, “We were the bloody Fall”.’ But not for long. Despite the Ferret’s reverence, he only lasted three months himself.
What happened?
‘We were driving to do a Peel session and the van suddenly stopped to pick up this bloke,’ he remembers. ‘Hawaiian shirt. Bloody bongos! It wasn’t what I thought The Fall should be.’ The Ferret resigned on the spot. He’s regretted it ever since.
I need to find that bongo player.
CHAPTER 10
‘I was living this incredible double life!’
You never really quite know when you’re going to encounter a ghost from The Wonderful and Frightening World, and for Steve Hanley a spirit from the past arrived when he was sat down watching telly. The programme on the box was Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights and Hanley found himself captivated by a character onscreen. ‘It couldn’t be,’ he asked himself … but he was sure it really was: the very same bongo player who caused Eric the Ferret to walk out in disgust in 1978.
That bongo player was the sixteenth disciple – the sixteenth to join The Fall.
All I have to go on is a name. Unfortunately, it’s a very common one: Steve Davies. There is a Stephen Davies listed on the Phoenix Nights cast list but with no other information, so maybe it wasn’t him. A search on Google for ‘Steve Davies’ throws up 1,420,000 entries. There’s Stephen Davies, a ‘Pr/blogger’, Professor S G Davies who works in chemistry research, and Stephen Michael Davies, a professional left-handed wicketkeeper/batsman. It could be worse. He could be called Steve Davis, which would give me 50,600,000 items relating to the snooker player.
However, the Fall website – which has barely any details about crucial founder members – turns out to be a relative mine of information about the disappearing and reappearing bongo man.
He first appears in Fall history adding congas to the first Peel session in May 1978, which an old interview with Marc Riley suggests was a ruse by Smith to up the BBC session fee by taking an extra member.
Then Davies disappears for two years, abruptly making a reappearance on the 1980 Dutch tour as a stand-in for Paul Hanley who – aged just 16 – is taking time out to do his O-levels. After the Dutch tour, during which he borrowed and managed to demolish a drum kit, it appears he took up Afro-Cuban and Brazilian hand drumming. He now runs a percussion and dance workshop with the hefty name Baba Yaga Global Percussion & Arts Workshops, which is how I find him. Davies is another forgotten cog in The Fall’s demented past, but is about to break decades of near-silence. An email returns within days of my contacting the Baba Yaga website: ‘Sure, I’ll talk about The Fall.’ He immediately confirms Hanley’s suspicions. He was indeed on Phoenix Nights: ‘I played Darius.’
The solitary photo that exists of Davies in his Fall days isn’t like Darius or anyone else on Phoenix Nights. It depicts a crop-haired, mischievous-looking youth. Now in his fifties, he’s greyer, bigger,
with a ruddier complexion and a hazy, rather absent-minded demeanour reminiscent of a seasoned dope smoker.
‘Some American guy in the Far East turned me onto Lebanese weed and that was it,’ admits Davies. Later, when a number of The Fallen are photographed for the newspaper, the percussionist turns up wielding a feather duster. With the possible exception of the Pope, Rod Hull’s Emu or Yvonne Pawlett, he’s the last person you’d expect to have once been in The Fall.
‘It’s very hazy,’ he sighs. Yet, he says, when he was in The Fall he adopted a ‘very healthy’ lifestyle – far removed from the usual Faller diet of beer, more beer and speed.
But the bongo man wasn’t a usual Faller.
For a start, Davies was older than the line-up he joined and thus wasn’t another willing indoctrinee who would put up with all manner of psychological assault courses just to escape the snugs of Prestwich. By the time he joined up with Smith’s barmy army, he’d been in the navy and had been in prison – which is where he often is today, but providing percussion for workshops rather than doing time for some mystery offence. In the 1960s, he travelled around the States and even worked for the Kennedys, another experience he insists must otherwise remain a secret.
‘I’d taken myself to the edge,’ he admits. Which perhaps aroused the interest of the boss.
Crucially, Davies lived in Prestwich, which often seems to be the only qualification needed to join Britain’s most parochial band. Once again, the bongo man just seemed to career into Smith’s orbit. He had a mate who knew Kay Carroll and their paths crossed in the grounds of Prestwich Psychiatric Hospital, where various undesirables including Baines and Carroll gathered to smoke pot.
The mental hospital loomed large over Prestwich back then. Not least because, according to Davies, its inmates often roamed the streets. ‘In those days they used to just let them wander around,’ he says. Thus, in 1978 and 1980, Prestwich was crawling with chemically enhanced nurses, the mentally disturbed, and past and current members of The Fall.
‘We’d live alongside each other really. There were some wonderful characters,’ sniggers Davies, ‘and that’s how I met Mark.’ Davies smoked pot, and was into Can, the seminal German band whose doctrine of Repetition so strongly influenced The Fall.
Davies suggests his involvement was much earlier than is actually recorded – he says he was ‘there or thereabouts’ at the beginning, jamming in rehearsals with Bramah, Smith and Baines, but not actually joining the group.
But maybe that was the point. Gradually, Davies seems to have been ‘moulded’ as effectively as Ben Pritchard. Before he joined, he listened to jazz legend Miles Davis, admired the ‘competence of musicians’ and when not puffing on spliffs spent nights doing gym work and Thai boxing, in the belief it would make him a great drummer. All these notions would be beaten out of him in The Fall.
Smith decided to actively recruit Davies after watching him support The Fall in 1980 at Manchester’s now defunct Band on the Wall venue in a band called Victor Draygo and the Blues Train. This curiously named combo briefly contained Karl Burns and seem to have inspired the 1984 Fall recording ‘Draygo’s Guilt’, in which Smith talks of guitars in hands that turn and stab you.
‘We used to back all the American blues artists like Johnny Guitar Watson and Jimmy Witherspoon,’ says Davies, providing a vocal snapshot of the forgotten, godforsaken live circuit The Fall were up against at the time. The NME were writing about Joy Division and Siouxsie and The Banshees but most clubs up and down the country were still hosting hippie bands with beards and jobbing blues guitarists. The spiky Fall sound wasn’t exactly what Davies listened to, but that night he grasped their indefinable appeal.
‘They were so refreshing after all that 1970s rock stuff, Pink Floyd and that, which had dragged on too long,’ he says, remembering how he’d seen Pink Floyd at Knebworth a year earlier and the prog rock legends were so out of tune he felt ‘embarrassed’ to watch them.
Watching other people watch The Fall, Davies realised there was ‘this wave of tremendous energy which the hippies hated’. He remembers Smith’s group then as being very experimental – Smith’s vocals were more like a ‘collage of ideas’ than singing – and so he felt honoured when the singer finally asked him to join.
However, there was a twist – Davies was an aspiring percussionist, not a drummer. He’d never owned or played a drum kit in his life. Displaying just the sort of dementia or genius that holds Fall fans in awe, Smith suggested this wouldn’t be a problem, he could just borrow a kit and play 11 dates in 14 nights in a foreign country.
Davies remembers the tour of Holland he was thrown into as being ‘absolutely crazy’. Using the borrowed kit, he had so little technique it gradually fell to pieces every night while all he could do was ‘whack the hell out of it and hope it was in time’.
Kay Carroll remembers the night the drum stool collapsed, leaving Davies slowly shrinking behind the kit while his knobbly knees came up over the snare drum. ‘It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,’ she shrieks.
Typically, hazy Davies can’t remember the specifics, but suggests there were so many things like that they all blur into one. ‘Um, ah …’ he begins, and trails off once again. Luckily, one or two tapes survive from that tour. In one of them – recorded at Eindhoven Effenaar – Smith introduces ‘City Hobgoblins’ by telling the crowd, ‘We’ll stick punk rock up your fucking arse. Right, here’s a good one – it’s a bit of fucking culture for you. Right, Hobgoblins! Davies! Hit the fucking cowbell quick!’
And he does. The insanity was compounded by Davies’ driving between gigs, which he says ‘terrified’ the musicians almost as much as Kay Carroll. ‘I was doing French Connection-style driving.’ He’s laughing loudly. ‘They were very dull, y’know!’
There were a lot of capers, but Davies admits he didn’t really bond with the ‘Jesuit lads’ – a name coined by Smith for a mythical group of Fall musicians, also including Craig Scanlon and Steve Hanley, who were known for their particular devotion to the cause and unstinting dignity of labour. They were so much younger, and appalled by the Hawaiian shirt. ‘They must have been thinking, “Look at that shirt”,’ he laughs. “What’s he doing in the band?”’
Another difficulty was lifestyle. Davies could smoke pot with anyone, but found it particularly difficult to keep up with the apparent Fall requirements of seriously heavy drinking. ‘I tried,’ he pleads, ‘but it was hard!’ There were money issues as well.
Because The Fall had a growing following, Carroll was able to challenge the ‘pay to play’ policy that existed in many venues – and The Fall were able to command large fees – but because it was ploughed back into the group or behind the bar little made its way to Davies, who became the third Fall drummer – after ‘Dave/Steve’ and the PC World-shopping Mike Leigh – to sell insurance.
‘I was leading this incredible double life,’ he says, describing playing gigs at night and selling insurance policies to housewives in the daytime, who presumably had no idea what the smiling man in the suit did after hours.
I can relate to this madness. In the 1990s, when I was working for the now defunct Melody Maker magazine, I too lived a crazy double life. I could be jetting around the world, interviewing Jarvis Cocker about the size of his penis and spending nights quaffing champagne with Michael Hutchence (‘Have you met Kylie? You should.’) … but then I’d go back to a two-bedroom former council house, where I’d receive sackloads of packages in the post to the bemusement of neighbours who thought I was either on the dole or selling drugs.
I lived like that – freelancing, not selling drugs – for years until I sent a review in to the Guardian. But for Davies, who had a mortgage, something had to give, and that something was The Fall, although he never asked to leave. Paul Hanley came back, and the incredible double life was over.
‘Could I have become a permanent member?’ he muses, asking a question which has nagged him ever since. ‘Possibly, but Mark never asked me.’ Howe
ver, like Friel and Carroll, Davies doesn’t rule out a return either – although I somehow can’t see Smith salivating at the prospect of what he suggests would be The Fall with an ‘African percussive twist’.
At the time, though, Davies decided he ‘never wanted to play with a rock band ever again’ and plunged into percussion. Then, following some sort of ‘mid-life crisis’, he enrolled at the Northern School of Ballet, where he found himself in the bizarre situation of being interviewed by a fellow student who couldn’t believe an ex-member of his favourite band of all time was prancing alongside him in class.
Davies never did entirely sever connections with The Wonderful and Frightening World. He reveals Kay Carroll emailed him recently – like me, looking for Karl Burns – but he was unable to help beyond suggesting the drummer may be ‘in the hillsides’ around Rossendale, Lancashire, where they formed Victor Draygo.
The bongo man reveals that for some time after leaving the group, he was regularly allowed backstage but one day visited Smith at home to find the metaphorical drawbridge being pulled up. Messages were posted through the door to no avail: he’d been discarded like all the rest. He wonders what the reception would be now, if they bumped into each other in the street.
‘People get a bit starstruck with Mark, and he’s very detached,’ he says. Smith’s misanthropy is ‘a defence thing. Working-class, stiff upper lip.’ Davies knew Smith was a big drinker but was taken aback when someone suggested the singer might be an alcoholic, although reasons if this was the case it would explain ‘some of the behaviour’. He doesn’t wish to dwell on this aspersion from long ago. ‘I’m quite protective towards Mark.’ That devoted loyalty again – after all these years and that rejection, it’s rather touching.
