by Dave Simpson
He thinks some of the mad behaviour that fuelled Slates may ironically have accelerated his own exit: ‘I know I blew it because most of the time I was out of it or drunk,’ he says candidly.
Because of the manner of his exit, the clarinet man felt rather ‘put through the wringer’ after The Fall, bought himself a trumpet and left the world of rock. However, within a few years, he found himself being drawn again towards The Wonderful and Frightening World.
He was in London, noticed The Fall were playing at the Astoria and plucked up the courage to put in a call. Remembering his ‘friend called David’ of ‘Fantastic Life’, Smith didn’t just let Tucker into the gig free but accompanied him for several beers. Another time, Tucker was in Ladbroke Grove when he heard a shout of ‘Mellatron!’ from a man on a motorbike who couldn’t remember his name, just his group. It was Karl Burns – leather jacket, plastic trews and all. The Fall were recording just behind Tucker’s house but there was a different dynamic to the one in 1981. By now, he says, drug use was spreading through the ranks. Perhaps it is like Steve Hanley said: ‘Mark needs normal people to bounce off but after a few years in The Fall you’re no longer normal.’
Tucker continued to see Smith. When the band were about to get hammered by the taxman he got a tip-off from a mate in the Revenue and got in touch to warn him. Thereafter, every time he’d visit his mum in Prestwich he’d pop into Smith’s and now reports that the old lack of materialism hasn’t changed. The Smith house contains a widescreen TV, CDs scattered on the floor, books and very little else. There are none of the toys or gadgets which you’d find in virtually any other modern home.
‘He’s got what he needs. He’s not a holidaymaker. You can’t see Mark getting up at 5 a.m. to sort out the sun lounger. He appreciates being able to get up at 11 in the morning. That’s more important to him than driving a flash car.’
In the early 2000s, when Tucker was doing some work for the BBC, the visits petered out. Tucker popped in to give Smith a CD he’d just made in America, but found it difficult to gain admittance.
‘His wife never answers the door. “Who’s there? Who’s there? Go away!” she shouts. I don’t know if they get visits from weird fans wanting to breathe the same air as Mark.’ Unlike Steve Davies, Tucker did manage to get inside. They shared a spliff and headed for The Woodthorpe, another of Smith’s favoured local boozers. Tucker – who had other things to do – thought it would be for a quick pint but instead found himself facing a table full of beers and whiskies, struggling to keep up while Smith kept urging, ‘Come on, cock, get yer round in!’
Tucker reports a strain in the atmosphere when he enquired, as unsuccessfully as I had, about the New York punch-up, and that eventually Smith ‘stopped making sense’.
‘Suddenly, he asked me if I could firebomb this stall in Camden Market for him because they’d been selling bootlegs of The Fall!’ reveals Tucker, incredulous. ‘I said, “Mark, I’m not an arsonist, I work for the BBC!”
‘I couldn’t tell if he was joking,’ he insists. ‘It was weird as shit.’ Tucker left the pub.
Soon after this peculiar experience, he discovered he was appearing on various live CDs from the 1980s and made a few phone calls to see if he was due some money, but the man who tipped off The Fall about the taxman was told that their business affairs had been relocated to the West Indies. He didn’t pursue it and admits Smith ‘would never set foot onstage with me again’. But leaving The Fall was not the reason Tucker fled from Prestwich – the real reason lies behind those teeth.
One night coming home from The Foresters he found himself jumped by ‘several guys’. He insists they came off much worse than he did – he was wearing steel toe caps at the time – but says nevertheless he found himself ‘scrabbling in the gutter looking for my teeth!’ And at least this bit of the tale is demonstrably factual. He had to leave in the end, he says, because the more Frightening than Wonderful World of Prestwich was ‘going to kill me’.
I’ve never been to Prestwich, but I’ve often driven past the signs for it and wondered what lies up there. It’s time to pay a visit.
CHAPTER 13
‘A whole different universe.’
I’m driving up the Bury New Road towards Prestwich, The Fall fanatics’ equivalent of Beatles fans travelling to Liverpool to see the rebuilt Cavern or Muslims crossing the world to Mecca. Except I don’t have a mop top or a copy of the Koran. I have the Fiat Punto and Dragnet on the stereo. Winding past the sign for Prestwich, there’s no immediate sense of what Smith told me is a ‘completely different universe’, nor why he remains so obsessed with the suburban area in which he’s spent his entire adult life – give or take an early 1990s sojourn in Edinburgh.
‘It was pretty much an exile, yeah,’ he told me in Malmaison. ‘I was single for a start, which is unusual for me. I’d played the Edinburgh Fringe with [contemporary dance punk] Michael Clark, and thought I could really live there. They’re not Fall fanatics in Edinburgh. They like The Fall, but they’re not die-hard fans like in Glasgow. Moving there would have been hell. But Edinburgh was actually as cheap as Manchester. I could kick myself actually. I should have kept the house. It was different up there … but I liked it too bloody much! I was coming home and that, but I was out of touch with the lads.’
He’d suggested he had considered moving but by the time he got to thinking about it there was something else to do, and it seems unlikely Prestwich’s most famous resident will ever get around to leaving now.
Prestwich, which borders and then blurs with Salford, seems nice enough. It looks like a rather cosmopolitan area: lots of trees and plenty of facilities, not least local pubs like Smith’s favoured Woodthorpe and Foresters Arms. (Another Smith haunt, The George, has long since been knocked down.) But there are places like this all over the country. What keeps him here? Locality to his remaining family – mother and three sisters – who also live nearby? Or something uniquely Fallesque?
I’ve gone past the big Woodthorpe but now I’m lost. I’m no longer in Prestwich, but adjoining Whitefield, which looks remarkably like the sort of dark landscape depicted in Dragnet’s songs all those years ago, like ‘Before the Moon Falls’, in which Smith paints a brilliant, evocative landscape of late 1970s industrial decay and social stagnation.
Up here in the North there are no wage packet jobs for us
Thank Christ
While young married couples discuss the poverties
Of their self-built traps
And the junior clergy demand more cash
We spit in their plate and wait for the ice to melt
I must create a new regime …
Before the moon falls
I must create a new scheme.
Because so many of our cities have been regenerated, the song sounds like a piece of history, but it’s all still here in Smith’s childhood landscape: weather-stained Victorian and Edwardian houses and industrial shells like something from science fiction or old Fall album covers. There are no visible ‘city hobgoblins’ or ‘hydrochloric shaved weirds’ but the queue for the fish and chip shop stretches halfway down the street, like a soup kitchen. Smith occasionally tells hair-raising stories about such places in interviews, and journalists doubt whether they ever existed in the first place. But in Hyde, they still do.
This may be one of Smith’s sources of inspiration, but it’s not home.
I wind the car back towards Prestwich village, past TGI Friday’s and kitchen showrooms, a Chinese acupuncturist and more old houses. At last, a sign: WELCOME TO PRESTWICH – PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY.
There’s a businesslike, bustling feel here, a world apart from the mysterious gloom of Hyde. There’s a large Marks & Spencers, a Chinese takeaway and a Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Caucasians go about their business among a smattering of Asians and an enormous quotient of Orthodox Jews. On the pavement, an older man argues with a younger woman, gesticulating wildly. In the newsagent I pick up a copy of the Prestwich Advertiser, from which
Smith has suggested he occasionally finds ideas for lyrics, but there’s nothing in it today except for tiny news stories concerning Prestwich Heys Football Club and Sedgley Park, a little known Rugby Union team Smith is thought not to support.
But the address I’m looking for isn’t here, either.
I head out of Prestwich and over the border into Sedgley Park, where Smith spent most of his childhood and his mum still lives today. It looks much leafier, more sedate, upwardly mobile without being showily affluent. Preferred cars are old Volvos, BMWs and the occasional Ford Estate. Solid, dependable, but never flash.
A mock Tudor near-mansion close to my destination has lions on the gateposts and sticks out a mile because of its flashiness, which must drive Smith wild, being so close to his own humble abode.
I’ve finally found my mecca. It’s a deserted street that reminds me of an old New Order lyric from ‘Ceremony’ about avenues all lined with trees. I park the Punto in the twilight and wander up the road.
This is Smith’s street, the avenue which has been the fulcrum of his life for the best part of two decades, where he lived, a few streets from his parents, first with Brix and now with Elena, the young Greek DJ he met in Berlin.
‘She took a step down to marry me,’ he told me in Malmaison, implausibly but rather gentlemanly, I thought. ‘She was a big DJ in Berlin, ran clubs and all sorts, had her own band, Zen Faschisten. She’d just promoted a gig. She wasn’t a massive Fall fan, y’know, we just got on like a house on fire. She joined the group first, then we got married. Oh aye, she knows about the ejector seat.’
He cackled, a wondrous, deep cackle suggesting this was a favourite joke. But now he’s on his third marriage and – together since 2000 – it’s going ‘fuckin’ marvellous. Touch wood!’
And this is home.
Smith’s house is so anonymous I walk past it twice before realising, this is it, the address given to me in confidence by someone around the band (not, if Smith’s spies are reading this, anyone in or formerly in the band).
The house isn’t exactly what I’d expected from the imagery in the Fall songbook – I’d expected a Gothic manor or perhaps a tiny terraced house with an outside toilet and a couple of underage chimney sweeps lurking. Instead it’s a large but nondescript semi – the sort of abode you’d expect of a teacher or a plumber. There is a huge wooden door that, as Steve Davies and Dave Tucker told me, could definitely offer protection against curious fans and former bassists. Like Tony Friel’s house, there is no blue plaque announcing THE MAN WHO LIVES HERE IS A LIVING LEGEND OF BRITISH MUSIC. When I ask a passerby who lives there, he shrugs and says, ‘Mad Mark.’
Apparently, that’s what the neighbours call him. I wonder if he knows.
I do my best private eye routine and check out the situation. There’s nothing in the garden: no car, no toys, no plants, just a concrete drive. Venetian blinds cover all the windows, suggesting the inside is kept dark at all times. There is, as Dave Tucker had suggested, no visible sign of ostentation. In fact, there’s no visible sign anyone lives here at all. Which is probably exactly how Smith wants it.
Nothing connects this average semi in a tree-lined avenue to the music of The Fall: it’s not amazingly comfortable but it’s not uncomfortable, a world away from all those satanic mills and Fiery Jacks. Neighbours wash their cars. Maybe Smith would spend his Sundays doing the same if he owned or could drive a vehicle. Probably not.
I’m reminded of something John Lennon said towards the end of The Beatles era. His theory was that if the artist is hungry, he will never work, and if the artist has enough, he won’t work. The ideal was to achieve a level of security to be able to work.
This is what Smith has here. As Dave Tucker suggested, ‘He has what he needs’ – a position of some security from which to create radical works.
But surely this is too comfortable? Where is the creative tension among quietly whistling passersby and well remunerated tradesmen?
I get back in the car and drive back through the centre of Prestwich, where the older man and the young girl are still arguing on the pavement. I park and wander around the streets. And then it hits me. The tension. You can feel it in the atmosphere as clearly as I can now see the light evening drizzle. The tension between the people, the glances of suspicion at this outsider, the distrusting glances between individuals and communities that Tony Friel suggested once lived happily together but don’t seem to anymore. Whitefield surrealism and Prestwich tension – it’s not in the buildings but in the environment, the atmosphere, the sparks between people. It’s not nasty, but it’s tangible with an ever so slightly unsettling undercurrent. I remember what Tucker said about ‘unease’.
If I could bottle this and take it with me, I would have one of the principal ingredients of The Fall.
I grow tired of suspicious glances and return to the car.
CHAPTER 14
‘’Ello, luv. Are you having a nice
holiday?’
The journey’s now taken me 206 miles from Prestwich, to Rivington Street in London’s Shoreditch, where I’m looking for a boutique called Start, which houses another of the Fall drama’s cast of major characters – the doomed romantic heroine.
The boutique is easy enough to find because even in a street of trendy shops there’s nothing quite like this. In fact, I hear it before I see it. Click, flash. Click, flash. The sound of two mannequins in the window, clad in PVC, ‘taking photographs’ of anyone who passes by the window.
It’s a boutique designed to cater for the very rich, extremely hip or straightforwardly famous. Some days, a familiar face to Fall fans is visible in the shop, occasionally spinning discs or helping out behind the counter, but her usual job is helping pick fashion lines to buy and otherwise assisting her husband Philip Start in running the business. Her name now is Brix Smith-Start, but Fall fans the world over know her as a Smith.
What I know is this: she was born Laura Elisse Salenger to a middle-class American Jewish family on 12 November 1962. After her parents’ divorce when she was just a baby, she divided her time between the Californian homes of her father, a Freudian psychologist, and her mother, a model who lived in the Hollywood Hills and later became a reputed television producer. One day, a babysitter started the seven-year-old-child on guitar, and although she didn’t know it at the time it was the start of a chain of events which would eventually lead her to The Wonderful and Frightening World. As a teenager, Salenger wanted to become an actress, but she became more and more fascinated by British pop, although at first she loved Adam and The Ants, Tears for Fears and Culture Club rather than the challenging music made in and around Manchester. However, while studying at the famed liberal arts establishment, Bennington, in the eastern state of Vermont, she engaged in theatre and experimental music and formed a band called Banda Dratsing. Later, she moved to Chicago with the band’s singer-guitarist Lisa Feder, One day, while they were in Chicago’s Wax Trax, Feder drew her attention to a vinyl copy of Slates by The Fall. And so began a process in which Salenger, by then renamed Brix, would marry Smith and join his group.
Brix’s impact on Mark E Smith was musical, personal and notably sartorial, but she had an equal impact on The Fall. As Riley had pointed out, with him no longer in the picture they adopted a distinctly more commercial sound, with killer anthemic choruses. They weren’t entirely pop, but they weren’t too far from it either. With Brix pouting moodily at the camera and lashing out sweeter pop riffs than anything ever conjured up by Jesuit lads Scanlon or Riley, Fall records infiltrated the unfamiliar mainstream.
The Fall’s chart positions illustrate Brix’s impact. The first Fall album to feature her, December 1983’s Perverted by Language, didn’t chart but received universal rave reviews. Listened to now, the album is almost a documentary of early 1980s Britain, with phrases like ‘Eat Y’Self Fitter’ (a track which John Peel once said almost caused him to faint with delight) pilfered from an advert of the time, and forgotten terms like ‘Gas Miser’
(a budget Cannon Industries gas fire often seen in council houses at the time).
In September 1984, The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall reached Number 62. For an independent band to chart at all was a significant achievement (best track, probably hypnotic opener ‘Lay of the Land’, where Smith dispenses sage descriptions of the Britain of the day, from towns in Surrey peopled by crooks and kerb-crawlers, to the Home Secretary with a weird look, and the fact that between the human heart and mind there lies an air-block of wind). The following year’s This Nation’s Saving Grace made Number 54 and is a truly marvellous album, achieving the perfect balance between the new, poppier Fall sound and the old, starker weirdness. By this point, Smith had become a purveyor of uncomfortable home truths. July 1985’s ‘Couldn’t Get Ahead’ single laid out the pitfalls of trying to keep up with the rat race, but the album takes this theme further to comment on the wider effects of the consumer/industrial society on human beings. ‘What You Need’ takes the old ‘repetition’ mantra to the nth degree – the pulverising melody mimics an industrial process and the brutal mundanity of clocking on or going to work. Britons are depicted as a race of sex-starved heavy smokers. Another track, ‘My New House’, portrays a defeated nation, imprisoned in faceless anonymous homes. The album’s a perfect State of the Union address delivered by what was at the time Britain’s finest group on unrivalled form. To this day I’m fascinated by the almost mathematical construction of tracks such as ‘Spoilt Victorian Child’, where Smith seems to get the group to play what is a jazzy melody but within a rock format, the perfect vehicle for one of Smith’s typically curious subjects. He imagines a well-off Victorian household where one of the children feasts on sugar and cakes and pop-up books, but later pays cruel penance for their excess in the form of toxic, disfigured poxes. Utter genius: a morality tale for any time.
