by Dave Simpson
I can’t help wondering: could Smith have been an alcoholic as long ago as 1980? After all, he did sing about grappling with terrible urges to drink during the early hours, in 1982’s ‘Hard Life in the Country’ on Room to Live (Undilutable Slang Truth). Were alcohol-fuelled flights of fantasy the source of apparently crazy ideas like recruiting drummers who couldn’t play drums? And if he was – or remains – an alcoholic, how on earth has the Fall Factory managed to keep producing output for 30 years?
Maybe my next informant will provide some insight. After all, as Davies was on the way out, another was coming in.
CHAPTER 11
‘There are a lot of skeletons
in the Fall cupboard, stories
that haven’t been told.’
Like any classic long-running British soap opera, The Fall has minor characters and major characters, although even the latter can suddenly disappear and the saga just rolls on. In the bewildering Fall cast, few characters have made as much impact with their appearance and disappearance as Marc Riley – who has since gone on to other prominent roles but during his time in The Fall (June 1978 to December 1982) loomed as large over events and music as Ken Barlow in Coronation Street.
What I know about Riley is this: he joined after hanging around with The Fall and becoming one of their sporadic road crew. Thus, Riley replaced Eric the Ferret, who replaced Jonnie Brown, who replaced Tony Friel. He became the eleventh disciple to join in the first two years, his reign predating but outlasting Steve Davies. In the month he signed up, cricketer Ian Botham became the first man in the history of the game to score a century and take eight wickets in one innings of a Test match. Albums lining up against The Fall’s 1979 Live at the Witch Trials debut at the time included Prince’s debut For You, Dire Straits’ first eponymous album, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and X-Ray Spex’s punky, saxophoney Germfree Adolescents. Margaret Thatcher was in power. It seems a world away.
As does December 1982, the month he left, when Thatcher still had years ahead of her, but the pop landscape was changing. Manchester greats like The Smiths and New Order were edging towards Top of the Pops. Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader and Michael Jackson’s Thriller rapidly became the biggest-selling album of all time. Riley’s five-year stint was a relative lifetime in The Wonderful and Frightening World but coincides with the beginnings of The Fall’s noble ascent from indie cultdom to national institution.
Riley was one of the ‘Jesuit lads’ as well. I remember watching these legendary characters at gigs: silent, heads down, trying not to catch any crowd attention or their leader’s eye while Smith unleashed his torrents of sarcasm, insight and bile. And yet, Riley was different.
A big, swarthy youth who looked tougher and older than his age, on the rare occasions he did look up to face the audience he had a certain glint in his eye that suggested a man of more individual talents and – perhaps – his own mind.
Riley was just 16 when he began helping shuffle The Fall’s amps and guitars into punk clubs and WMCs in late 1970s Doncaster and Preston: not old enough to vote or join the British Army, but man enough for The Fall. His first task in the studio was to provide twangy, melodic bass to Bramah’s ‘It’s The New Thing’, the second Fall single and Smith’s sarcastic broadside against manufactured pop groups and svengalis which in hindsight, apart from the suggestion of trendy clothing, doesn’t sound dissimilar to the way he runs The Fall.
Once Riley started playing lead guitar over the hypnotic rhythms of Craig Scanlon, their twin-guitar soundscapes became the engine room of The Fall’s first – and to some best – truly golden period.
Riley’s melodic style powered 1979’s classic single ‘Rowche Rumble’ and the Live at the Witch Trials and Dragnet albums. But once he became involved in song writing, Riley’s credits seemed to up the band a gear. He co-wrote a good half of the sinister, compelling Dragnet including the classic ‘Psychick Dance Hall’ and had a hand in ‘Rowche Rumble’ and another killer single, ‘Fiery Jack’. He co-wrote over half of Grotesque, every single song on Slates and even Perverted by Language’s ‘I Feel Voxish’, which emerged in 1983 after he’d gone. He was also in the line-up I saw at the Riley-Smith in 1981 and at every Fall gig I went to over the next couple of years. Then he too vanished and The Fall never sounded quite the same again.
A decade and a half later, Riley is no longer a Jesuit lad but is arguably equally hardworking – but for the BBC, not The Wonderful and Frightening World. His offices are the Beeb’s Manchester headquarters on Oxford Road – a fading, grey epicentre which itself still looks like a hangover from an architect’s futurist fantasy of the 1960s or early 1970s. Unusually among The Fallen, since Riley left the nest he has risen to a profile higher than Smith’s. Although he enjoyed a stint in his own post-Fall band, The Creepers, Riley’s big success has been on British radio.
He first emerged on the Beeb in the early 1990s, when he was sidekick to Mark Radcliffe on Radio One FM’s cult music show Hit The North, where they’d play the latest hot offering by trendy bands like Suede alongside the music that inspired them – in Suede’s case Bowie and The Smiths.
Nowadays, Riley is better known as ‘Lard’ – the DJ and occasional butt of jokes – who, again alongside Radcliffe, became part of a formidable comic duo who fronted Radio One’s flagship Breakfast Show for six months from in 1997. At the time, I was despatched to their Oxford Road nerve centre to file a piece for Melody Maker, but to be honest wasn’t as impressed by being in the HQ of the supposed hottest and hippest DJ team on British radio as I was to be in a room with the co-writer of ‘Container Drivers’. In person, Riley had the same matey, blokey ‘boy Lard’ persona that works so well on radio but I suspected concealed steel. You can’t, after all, spend five years in The Fall without developing some toughness.
It was that toughness or combative edge which probably did for Radcliffe and Riley. They grew more impatient with the constraints of Radio One’s infamous playlist and increasingly began making subtle but sarcastic – even Smith-like – comments about the records they were forced to play and somehow it was no surprise when they were moved to a less high-profile afternoon slot, to make way for the more conventionally zany Zoe Ball.
In the parallel universe of Prestwich, Smith was becoming publicly irked by the rise to stardom of one of his former employees. He told an interviewer how he found himself confronted by Riley’s enlarged head on an enormous billboard in Manchester city centre and found it ‘fuckin’ scary. I thought I was going to die and all the people I’d ever known were going to flash before my eyes.’
These days, Riley enjoys a lower but perhaps more fulfilling profile as presenter of BBC 6 Music’s Brain Surgery, still at Oxford Road. Currently broadcasting for three nights a week, it’s another mix of old and new records designed to ‘educate and entertain’ like the original Out On Blue Six. His own Rebellious Jukebox.
Contacting him is as easy as firing off an email to the BBC 6 Music website.
‘What exactly are you doing?’ comes the surprisingly quick reply. Riley says he is forever getting asked to do Fall interviews and rarely does them because he’s got nothing to gain and plenty to lose – interviews by former members do not generally go down well in the Smith household.
I email again, explaining I’m tracking down 40-odd former members of The Fall. ‘Ha ha ha ha ha. You’re crazy. I’ll do it!’
Now a powerfully if not entirely athletically-built man in his forties, Riley still has the gentle, matey voice from the Breakfast Show and his conversation is peppered with ‘mate’s and talk of pints which is a second language to many a Fall fan. However, despite his shift from making records to playing them, Riley has never left The Wonderful and Frightening World. We’ve barely begun talking when he reveals that far from hanging out at showbiz parties he’s yet another member of The Fallen who still goes to the gigs.
I’m starting to suspect part of the reason The Fall are currently attracting their bi
ggest audiences in years is that they’re stuffed to the gills with former members of The Fall.
‘I’ve just seen them on this [latest] tour,’ chirps the former Lard, explaining that at gigs he still has to adopt the head-down posture, not to avoid the leader of The Fall but the gaze of curious Fall fans. ‘They were great,’ he says of the band he left behind. It’s typical of the way The Fall operate that despite their former guitarist being in a position to help them considerably – and the sort of media figure any other band would schmooze – Riley’s name doesn’t ever appear on Fall guest lists.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?!’ he splutters. ‘He was scribbling my wife’s name off when I was still in the band!’ Thus, we’re onto The Fall’s bewildering but effective working methods, which he describes as ‘fraught’.
The matey, blokey tones give way to something discernibly harder – he sounds more like a BBC war correspondent than jokey ‘Lard’. Riley says Smith’s doctrine of tension was so entrenched, even by the late 1970s, when he joined, that whenever things seemed to get comfortable, the boss would ‘throw a spanner into the works’.
Not that Riley disapproves. ‘He thinks it’s creative, and I think he’s right.’
Smith’s beliefs – often literally drummed into his musicians – are not given up easily even 25 or so years later. Similarly, Riley describes how Smith and Kay Carroll controlled the purse strings to control The Fall – musicians never knew when they would or wouldn’t be paid because this kept them ‘nervous’. But Riley concurs again.
‘We weren’t really “musicians”,’ he suggests. ‘We were just kids who were learning to play as we went along.’ And to do that meant getting with the programme.
Unlike the Ferret, Riley doesn’t call his old boss ‘God’ but retains respect even after so long apart. He sees Smith as an ‘almost Dickensian’ character – a one-off in the rock world, ‘more Hunter S Thompson than Roger Daltrey’, but with characteristics of a harsh but benevolent leader. ‘If he ruled the country there wouldn’t be people walking round in hooded tops robbing old age pensioners.’
Riley may have been even younger than Ben Pritchard when he joined, but in those days – suggesting Smith has indeed ‘mellowed’ – there was no great friendship between the Fall leader and his most junior ever pupil. Riley was a worker and Smith was the boss, and, as such, demanded discipline, even subservience. However, in 1982, a heavily jetlagged Fall played a gig in Australia – not a great one, but not a bad one – and, as we have heard, Smith does not do ‘average’.
The band relaxed after the show by heading for the dance floor. As the musicians gyrated away to The Clash’s hit ‘Rock the Casbah’, Smith came up and slapped each member one by one. Fatefully, when it came to Riley, the guitarist raised his hand to stop Smith and punched him back.
That punch – an act of resistance unheard of in The Fall – was his P45. One story – given to me by another former member – suggests Riley was sacked on his wedding day because getting married meant he missed a rehearsal, but he says this is only half-true, at best. In Christmas 1982, both Riley and Steve Hanley were getting married but didn’t dare mention such a development to Smith or Carroll. Riley was married on Christmas Eve and the first couple to be hitched when the registry office reopened after New Year were the Hanleys. They both announced their new marital status at the next rehearsal, but while Riley was sacked a few days later, Hanley wasn’t. However, conflicting accounts sum up the wider confusion that has always surrounded Riley’s departure and it seems time to try to set the record straight.
One repeated suggestion is that Riley wanted a career outside The Fall. In ‘Middle Mass’, on the 1981 Slates album, Smith narrates the tale of a hapless young musician seduced by the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley – Riley has always insisted it’s about him, something Smith rejects. Either way, Riley denies he wanted to play with anyone else and would never have formed The Creepers if he’d remained in The Fall.
The other line, which he also denies, is that he wanted The Fall to go in a more pop-oriented direction.
‘The way The Fall went was the way Mark wanted them to go,’ he insists, conceding that while they were ‘very influential and totally ahead of their time’, the poppiest they got while he was there was his co-written ‘Fiery Jack’, a torrent of spiky rockabilly. But he also mentions his involvement in The Fall’s ‘weirder’ songs like ‘Spector vs Rector’, written by Riley and Craig Scanlon, and the accusing ‘Hip Priest’, ‘which we all got a credit for’.
‘I never tried to turn them into a pop band,’ he says, pointing out correctly that The Fall became poppier without him.
‘I loved The Fall after I was booted out. “Cruiser’s Creek”, “Oh! Brother”, “No Bulbs”. “Hit The North” is possibly the best record they ever made. In fact as I left they became ridiculously poppy!’ He suggests there may have been a ‘smokescreen put up to hide the fact that … I did write a lot of songs in The Fall but …’ His voice fades.
It’s likely that growing insubordination – typified by that punch – may have hastened Riley’s exit. The album credits for 1982 albums Hex Enduction Hour and Room To Live show very little Riley, but he insists that he was writing better than ever and in fact, uncredited, penned or helped pen all but one song ‘Fortress’ of Hex.
‘He doesn’t sack everyone and I’m not sure he craves that reputation,’ he considers of his former mentor. ‘It’s not easy being in The Fall, but it can’t have been easy working in The Magic Band with Beefheart. Mark has got this mindset and he will always follow it. If you’re going to work with someone like that you’re just going to have to put up with it, he’s made more good decisions than bad ones and more great records than not so great ones.
‘It’s very possible that he didn’t like what I was doing at the time. Mark does like turnover. He’d had some good stuff out of me and maybe it was the end of my time.’
Typically, Smith turned it all into another joke. The cover of The Fall’s In a Hole, the live album of that Australasian visit, is of a newspaper clipping depicting a smiling Riley arriving at the airport, under the headline ‘Happy Fall guitarist’.
Two years later, The Fall were performing a song called ‘Hey! Marc Riley’, which refers to Riley as a ‘dancer’ and calls him a ‘pillock’. However, the future Lard fired his own joke back, using The Creepers as the launch pad for a song called ‘Jumper Clown, Warts ’n’ All’, in which the lyrics – ‘Dare to dance on an Aussie dance floor/ Bloody nose, bloody poor!/ ’Cos you’re a jumper clown’ – make reference to the Aussie incident and Smith’s idiosyncratic taste in knitwear.
Although there’s possibly the slightest hint of regret, Riley insists he has no hard feelings. In fact, years after Riley was fired, the pair ‘sort of made up’. A ‘mate’ of Riley’s was having a birthday party and both had been invited. However, Riley found himself surprised to be told by a third party, ‘Mark wants a word with you.’
‘We got on great,’ he reveals. ‘I told him I still loved the albums. It was a bit like two drunken blokes saying, “You’re great”, “No, you’re great!”’ However, shortly after, a compilation album came out with Riley’s songs on it and, needing the money at the time, Riley put a call in asking about payment. Relations went ‘back to square one’. Sometime after that, he glimpsed Smith stumbling towards him in a railway carriage. Their eyes met, and Smith walked on. There has been no direct communication since but Riley still plays The Fall on the radio – apart from the tracks he’s on – and admits any lingering grudge would be ‘a bit sad, really’. Their paths have veered apart – although Riley supports Smith’s beloved Manchester City, he’s become one of the country’s higher-profile vegetarians. Yet, he says the experience of being in The Fall made him who he is – more confident, more single-minded and more able to express himself – exactly the qualities required for British radio. Who would have ever thought – in those dark winters of 1978 and 1979 – the young kid on guitar wa
s beginning an education that would transform the content of British radio?
Riley admits freely the only reason he got on the airwaves in the first place was because various BBC heads were avid Fall fans and – after encountering him when he briefly worked as a radio plugger for groups like the Pixies and Happy Mondays – liked his presence in the BBC enclave and suggested he stay.
‘I’ll probably look back when I’m 70 and think I’ve had a charmed life – working on the radio,’ he says, not noticeably dewy-eyed, ‘but the thing I’ll be most proud of is being in The Fall. It set me up for everything that’s happened since. It was a start in life, really.’
However, I can’t help feeling the man of few Fall interviews has been guarded today, something he admits himself when he says, ‘There are a lot of skeletons in the Fall cupboard and stories that haven’t been told, and some of them are pretty out there,’ making me wonder what I’ve yet to find.
We talk about the mysterious fate of Karl Burns and he dismisses Steve Davies’s assertion that he’s alive and well and living in the hillsides above Manchester. ‘I’m sure if Karl moved into a village anywhere near you, you’d hear about it!’ he says. Maybe you never really leave The Wonderful and Frightening World. Oddly enough, soon after I interview Marc Riley, the BBC announce that several broadcasting departments are being moved from Oxford Road to Salford – a stone’s throw from where Smith lives. Perhaps this episode in the ongoing Fall soap opera may have yet another twist.
CHAPTER 12
‘I’m not an arsonist, I work
for the BBC!’
My colleague Michael Hann has a theory that every Fall fan’s favourite Fall album is the one they hear first – because when you first hear The Fall they sound so odd compared to other bands the experience sticks with you forever. The theory makes a lot of sense and certainly applies to me. My first Fall album, Grotesque, remains my all-time favourite although I’m not sure if it’s actually the best. If I have to put emotions and associations aside and pick the all-time greatest Fall album, it would have to be Slates, from 1981.
