by Dave Simpson
The odd thing about The Fall’s fourth album is that, technically, it isn’t an album at all. It’s a six-track, 10-inch vinyl record, therefore, when it was released on Rough Trade records on 27 April 1981, it didn’t qualify for the single charts because it was too long and was ineligible for the album charts because it was too short. This is typical Fall illogicality it but didn’t prevent its inclusion in something we had in those days called the UK Independent Album chart, where it soared to Number 3. Even the cover isn’t like other albums. There’s a blurred live shot alongside the barmy slogan “‘Slates” by The Fall. Incl: Mid-Mass, Lover etec. [sic] Prole Threat Working, Yeah. Slags, Slates, etset. Cap.! Het! cost: two pounds only u skinny rats.’
Which is a pretty good description of its contents and the average Fall fan, certainly this one who is, and was, a ‘skinny rat’. However, once the needle hits the vinyl, conventional descriptions are impossible. Even more than Grotesque, Slates manages to skirt the boundaries of demented Northern rockabilly, experimental rock and avant garde, but despite that manages to be insanely poppy. Smith once revealed Slates is one of his own favourites and said it was aimed at ‘people who didn’t buy records’. The 10-inch – recently re-released on CD to rave reviews – has songs weird enough for Captain Beefheart, catchy enough for Take That, and contains some of Smith’s most witheringly insightful lyrics.
‘Fit and Working Again’ chugs along gloriously while nodding to the working-class work ethic and dripping with his curious little slogans, declaring that while religion costs much irreligion costs more, and comparing Smith’s state of mind to that of champion boxer Alan Minter after eight tabs of LSD – the fighter having presumably earned Smith’s approval for making a comeback to destroy ‘Marvellous’ Marvin Hagler the year before.
Another track, ‘Leave the Capitol’ sums up Smith’s diffidence towards London and mutters darkly about a hand on the shoulder in Leicester Square. A succession of negative images of the Big Smoke are then delivered in the psychotic rambled style familiar to latter-day Tube travellers encountering the oddballs who hang about outside Camden Town station.
‘Prole Art Threat’, another glorious moment in the Fall canon, is almost derangedly fast, a miniature conspiracy theory bound up in an anti-media tirade against a pink press conspiracy funded by ‘MI9’.
The sublime ‘Middle Mass’ coasts along on the kind of economical but instantly memorable Steve Hanley bassline which suggests just why Smith said he ‘defined’ The Fall. ‘An Older Lover Etc.’ protests about the difficulties of a monogamous relationship with an older woman and is generally believed to be about Kay Carroll. In fact, the song alone perhaps justifies her lingering love/hatred/bitterness towards Smith:
Take an older lover
Get ready for old stories
Of teenage sex
From the early sixties
Under cover
Behind office desks
Old divorces
Children’s faces
You’d better take a younger lover
You’d better take a younger lover
Or take an older lover
You’ll soon get tired of her
(She’ll shag you out on the table).
Smith manages to bring a comic twist to feeling wistful: ‘You’ll miss your older lover/ Her love was like your Mother’s/ With added attractions.’ Ahem.
Meanwhile, the caustic title track suggests that anyone spilling a pint must pay for the correct amount spilt and sends out a veiled, unmentionable threat to the myriad of Fall copyists who have picked the album up over the years.
Slates is like nothing else in the Fall canon and bears a name that doesn’t appear on any other Fall studio albums: Dave Tucker, who briefly joined The Fall on – wait for it – clarinet.
Almost three decades after Smith offered the advice to ‘Leave the Capitol’, I find Tucker in London, where he lives in a first-floor apartment in Haringey. The door opens and I’m greeted by a bear-like man with a bald (rather than shaven, as he sported in 1981) head and few remaining teeth, which is at least one thing he still has in common with Mark E Smith.
While the dentist’s worst nightmare makes the tea, I survey the contents of his flat. There’s every instrument imaginable, from a large cello to a tenor sax and a tiny drum kit. A giant Frank Zappa poster gazes down over a computer. The room is littered with CDs, some of which he is using as beer mats which means every time I take a sip of tea a compact disc sticks to the bottom of the mug. Tucker seems completely oblivious. Every so often, a CD will tumble from my mug and land on the table, where I notice it hails from the world of jazz or improvised music in which Tucker now plies his trade (most recently with Scatter, an improvising band of several years’ standing). He’s clearly not making a king’s ransom although he’s been successful enough to have played with name musicians like Evan Parker. Rather than the favourite Fall diet of amphetamines and beer, Tucker seems to run on spliffs and Typhoo. We seem a very long way away from The Fall’s natural habitat, but maybe that was always the point. Ben Pritchard’s revelation that ‘the challenge is to take someone not right for the group and make them right for the group’ certainly seems to apply to the jazzy clarinet player, even more than bongo man Steve Davies. Tucker has his own take on why he was recruited: Smith wanted an accomplished musician ‘to make the other guys nervous’.
It’s all a very long time ago, but just talking to him I get a sense of the odd vibes that fuelled Slates. I’ve only been in the flat a few minutes and he’s telling me a weird tale about being given a copy of The Necromonicon, a fictional occult book of spells and the like, created by Smith favourite H P Lovecraft. Tucker then lent the book to a friend who suddenly dropped dead. By the time the body was discovered, in a state of decomposition, The Necromonicon had disappeared.
Still, at least in some ways Tucker is a relatively normal Faller. Like the Jesuit lads, he lived in Prestwich, moving there after spending his childhood being bounced round various other North Manchester suburbs. Once safely in the territory covered by Smith’s trusty radar, he was an occasional presence on the punk scene after being ‘swept up’ by new wave while still a schoolboy. His first band, the Dirty Shirts, were unable to play their instruments. Then he formed Mellatron [sic], who got a good review in Melody Maker for a track (‘Hunters from Beyond’, on a 1978 compilation called Identity Parade) he says was a ‘mess’. ‘It was a psychedelic jam using all the buttons and effects in the studio,’ he chuckles, spliff in one hand and Typhoo in the other. In timeless Fall fashion, Mellatron didn’t have a drummer so ‘drafted someone in’ the night before.
They were all set to take off with an EP produced by Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley, who’d just scored a massive hit with ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have?)’ when it all went badly wrong. The band got into an argument with the label boss, who wanted a picture of Shelley on the sleeve, not them. This all became rather academic when the label manager suddenly stopped returning Tucker’s calls. The Mellatron man was then told that the label boss had been suddenly detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure after a serious driving incident: either way, the boss and the master tapes disappeared. This sort of farcical, tragic chaos doesn’t just happen to The Fall.
Fatefully, the drummer who was drafted in – for the impressive fee of £50 and a curry – was none other than Karl Burns. Tucker remembers the now missing Faller as a ‘seriously good drummer’ with an ‘incredible sense of tempo’, who wore plastic pants and a leather jacket and never changed his clothes. ‘He had the sort of rock ’n’ roll attitude that should have landed him in Mötley Crüe,’ says the almost toothless man. Which is why Tucker is surprised such a big character has disappeared – although he thinks he may have left the country.
‘He was always in hot water. He’d either owe someone some money and they’d be threatening to break his legs or he’d be fucking someone’s wife. There was always something a bit dodgy with Karl.’ He adds that ‘bad blood
’ lingered between Smith and Burns after the onstage punch in New York.
Still, knowing Karl indirectly led to Tucker joining The Fall. Hanging out in Prestwich, he got to know Una Baines and Martin Bramah. One night he popped into Smith’s local, The Foresters Arms on the Bury New Road, and ended the evening in The Fall.
‘I met Smithy, we talked about H P Lovecraft and Ornette Coleman,’ he remembers. ‘Two weeks later I was onstage with him at Manchester Polytechnic.’
Tucker remembers Fall gigs in those days as tense, edgy affairs with a mixture of appreciation and hostility between band and audience – a charged atmosphere in which Smith thrived. At one gig, at North London Polytechnic, The Fall went on stage to be met with Nazi salutes. At another, in Paisley, the atmosphere was so violent they had to make every song last 15 minutes until the police arrived to escort them out.
To place such madness in some sort of context, the music press was full of ‘new pop’ at the time – fey guitar bands from Scotland, and Adam and The Ants were huge with their Burundi beats, pirate and Indian chic. My school bus often carried a miner who travelled to North Leeds in a shiny-backed NCB donkey jacket customised to read ‘Adam’ on the back, and he had a white line daubed in make-up across his nose. These were mixed-up times. Hardcore punk was still popular at street level but the NME were writing about squeaky pop duo Dollar and the mainstream was being infiltrated by the floppy-haired, make-up wearing but otherwise conservative, materialist New Romantics. Meanwhile, in tension-wracked outposts around the country, The Fall were crafting hypnotic wordscapes that in terms of influence and relevance would outlast them all.
Tucker remembers the Fall line-up that made Slates an album ‘firing on all cylinders’ – where The Fall are often militarily regimented, at that time a big ingredient was improvisation. Songs would be so loose they sounded different every time they were played, and so the recordings on Slates document a unique moment in time in the studio. How much Smith encouraged this remains unclear. At the end of ‘Slates, Slags, etc.’, he cries out, ‘Don’t start improvising for God’s sake!’, which may have been directed at Tucker, who, as a ‘creative musician, was treated accordingly, with disdain’.
Tucker provides an insight into the way the songs themselves came about. The musicians would arrive at work with songs, which would then be subjected to the site manager’s quality control as efficiently as if they were a production line making sausages or radios. The ones that passed the Smith ‘ear test’ were then recorded in London’s Berry Street Studios – chosen because it had just hosted one of Smith’s few musical heroes, Jamaican reggae legend Prince Far I.
The other key component was tension, fuelled by the familiar fear of the P45. Like Kay Carroll, Tucker recognises Smith as a master-manipulator who relished playing people off against one another and who, like Brian Clough, knew just when to ‘inflate your ego and when to devastate it’. But he goes further, suggesting Smith’s mischievous prods and backstabs even made their way into songs about band members. Tucker confirms ‘An Older Lover Etc.’ is indeed about Kay Carroll – ‘You should have seen Kay’s face when he sang it.’ Tucker suggests one song, the wonderfully rampaging ‘Fantastic Life’, refers to him, having been identified by the scrutinising Smith as someone prone to exaggeration. The song describes a ‘David’ who reckoned he’d had a run in with a policeman, but suggests Smith didn’t believe him.
‘It’s true!’ pleads Tucker. ‘I was in the cells the next day.’
Part of the problem may have been that people in and around The Fall then were often so out of it nobody knew what was real and what wasn’t. Tucker paints a vivid picture of The Fall’s social scene. Smith ‘didn’t court close friends’ but there was an ‘inner circle’ of drinkers at The Foresters who’d go back to someone’s house – often John Quays’ because he had a mammoth record collection – take drugs, drink beer and listen to music (rockabilly giant Charlie Pride for Smith, industrial weirdos Throbbing Gristle for Tucker).
To this day, music, work and stimulants seem the primary components of Smith’s social life. He doesn’t drive, eschews materialism and pours scorn on traditional rock lifestyle perks like cars and yachts. Dave Tucker suggests this is because of his background. Tucker, like Smith, was from a lower middle-class/working-class family in Prestwich.
‘We didn’t have that many choices,’ he comments. ‘You had to make your own fun. At the docks he was making 17 quid a week. It was the same for me in the late 1970s. I landed this job where I was earning 40 quid a week, it felt like a fucking fortune. I was going to see Sham 69 one night, Wire the next. It was a different age.’
‘You’ve got to think of Manchester in the late 1970s,’ he expands, lighting another spliff. ‘It was a depressed area, no one gave a fuck about it. You could still see the remnants of textile mills or whatever. That’s totally gone now, it’s all business parks, malls. I don’t recognise Manchester any more, although you can still go to some pubs and get bladdered on a tenner. Mark’s a big drinker, always was. He’s at his happiest when he’s getting out of it. I’ve never seen him straight. We were either popping speed or smoking or drinking ourselves stupid.’
Tucker suggests a lot of Manchester folk are still content with a pie and a pint, although in Smith’s case you can usually skip the pie. Bizarrely, he insists that in his two years in The Fall he never once saw Smith eat: ‘I never saw him put anything in his mouth that didn’t have a filter tip or roach attached to it.’
The phone rings and we’re blasted back to current reality.
‘Yeah, yeah, we won them over at the Union Jazz Festival,’ he breezes down the receiver. ‘I thought we were going to get fucking lynched.’ As I gaze at him quizzically, he says ‘Look, can I call you back? Someone is “interviewing” me.’
And we’re back to early 1980s Prestwich.
When he picks up his thread, Tucker relates how popular speed was at the time, because it was ‘the anti-hippie drug’. ‘It gave you an edge,’ he says, although he insists amphetamine abuse in The Fall was generally limited to himself, Smithy, Carroll and – alarmingly – one of the band’s drivers, who ferried them all to gigs. This is confirmed by Carroll, who says the driver, ‘a really sweet guy, got into speed amphetamines with us a bit but wasn’t a major addict’. One hopes he wasn’t done for speeding.
Tucker says that the Jesuit lads didn’t dabble – unless they had been recording all night and had a gig the next day, in which case one of them might pop a ‘bluey’ – whereas Smith, Tucker and Carroll would go ‘apeshit’.
‘You’ve gotta remember that this was an era when the record companies were giving their bands drugs,’ says Tucker. ‘Maybe some still do. But there were guys turning up at the recording studio with gear, [speed] wraps everywhere. It wasn’t party time, because we were working, but it did give you a certain front.’
And that front came out in the music and Smith’s sneering performances, which may explain Slates and other Fall albums’ slightly unhinged vibes.
What an odd world it must have been … travelling the country, crammed into a van, amphetamined to bits, making this brilliant, warped music. With Kay Carroll leading the assault. Tucker explains that, because The Fall’s manager was female (unheard of before Sharon Osbourne), Carroll had to make sure she was doubly tough. He remembers her having guys ‘up against the wall’ in universities in states of abject terror.
‘She’d be screaming, “You fucking this and that,”’ he laughs. Meanwhile, Smith, like Macavity, would be hovering in the background. ‘But he probably instigated it. And you weren’t allowed to pick up a girl if you were in The Fall! Kay was very scary, off her tits all the time. The thing is, speed and alcohol make you into a nasty piece of work. If you give Santa Claus a line of speed and Special Brew, he’s going to start fighting with the reindeers.’
Not for nothing was The Fall’s 1980 masterpiece titled Grotesque. The ‘gramme’ – also the subject of its song ‘Gramme Friday’ – is amphe
tamine.
‘That’s what happens when he takes as many amphetamines as he still does … I suppose he still does!’ says Tucker, of the post-gramme altered state. ‘The last few times I’ve seen him on TV he’s been off his tits but he comes across as eccentric which is why the British public like it. He’s still full of piss and vinegar and bile.’
Tucker thinks drug abuse has exaggerated Smith’s habit of being different things to different people, suggesting that dealing with everyone from rabid fans to ‘slimy bastards’ in the music industry requires him to be able to slip into various characters. However, when Kay Carroll left in 1983, Smith was suddenly running The Fall on his own – and that led indirectly to Tucker’s excommunication.
As he tells it, Carroll didn’t just ‘run out on’ The Fall in America, she made off with all the takings. When I put this to Carroll she says that – according to the group’s tour manager at the time – the musicians had the money but drove into a snowstorm in Canada. The tour takings were all in a brown paper bag, which blew out of the van. Cue a hapless Fall line-up chasing dollar notes around in a raging blizzard.
Tucker hadn’t played with The Fall for quite some time – because a smaller band is more viable – but was still around the inner core. He got an unexpected call from Smith in America, asking if he could look after the band’s affairs in England while The Fall played enough gigs in America to afford the flights back home.
When the beleaguered group finally made it back, Carroll was long gone but Smith had someone new upon his arm – the American guitarist who soon became Mrs Brix Smith.
‘I went to the pub and there she was,’ remembers Tucker, rather sniffily. ‘Her idea of punk rock was The Dickies and she had one of their guitars. You’re talking to someone who saw the Buzzcocks at the Free Trade Hall, never mind the fuckin’ Dickies. Mark never said a word all night and then right at the end of the conversation he says, “Oh, Dave, thanks for everything you’ve done, I’ll be in touch”, and I was suddenly out of the picture. That’s what it’s like in that band. Suddenly, you’re disappeared.’
