The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  Meanwhile, I’m starting to realise another Fall fundamental; if you run a band on creative tension, the only way to keep it going forward is to unleash more, and more, and more.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘It was like some kind of medieval Italian

  principality. Or a Chinese court, full of

  would-be sycophants and mandarins.’

  When you follow The Fall you get used to travelling around. I’ve been everywhere from dank pubs in Leeds to stadiums containing thousands of people such as Leeds United’s Elland Road, where The Fall played a wonderfully inappropriate set in 1987 supporting U2. I’ve hitchhiked around the country in cars containing homicidal Container Drivers and spanking headmasters, and at one point was given a lift by what is surely Britain’s only team of skateboarding Mohican-hairstyled punk rock Buddhists, who dwell in an old coach with no seats. I’ve met all sorts of characters – the girl who began our friendship as Amanda but ended it calling herself Susan, by which time she revealed she’d never been the same since ingesting the entire contents of a suitcase full of cocaine. But I don’t really travel too far following The Fall any more, I just travel the country trailing The Fall’s former musicians.

  West Suffolk General Hospital lies 208 miles from Prestwich. It’s an imposing building like many NHS Trust hospitals, with an endless bank of windows and expansive, leafy grounds. It’s not the sort of place you’d expect to find a member of The Fallen, not employed, anyway, but this is the working environment of Marcia Schofield, the twenty-first musician to join The Fall.

  What I know about her is this: Schofield joined in October 1986 and left in 1990, during which she played keyboards and occasionally sang on 1988’s extremely good The Frenz Experiment, the same year’s patchily brilliant I Am Kurious Oranj, 1989’s Seminal Live album (neither entirely live nor seminal) and a thunderous return to peak Fall form with 1990’s Extricate, one of the best Fall albums ever.

  Schofield’s input was more than just aural. Dark, striking and leggy, her unmistakable looks brought another twist of glamour to the group. Visually as much a part of the more commercial era as Brix, she always looked slightly more down to earth and approachable. Somehow, it’s unsurprising to discover she hasn’t married a millionaire but a psychiatrist. The couple live outside Bury St Edmunds, recently voted Britain’s leafiest town, where Schofield is stepmother to three children and a little girl she calls ‘the elf princess’. They share their household with no less than 21 lambs, 12 sheep, 26 chickens and a disabled cat – an even more bizarre assembled cast than that which makes up The Fallen. However, Schofield has never quite left The Wonderful and Frightening World. She tells me none of her medical colleagues had any idea she’d once been in a famous group for ages. She only knew the secret had got out when she arrived in work to discover every computer terminal ‘wallpapered’ with images of her playing in The Fall. At the time, she was an anaesthetist. ‘I’m no longer putting people to sleep,’ she reveals from a functional, computer-peppered office. ‘Not intentionally anyway.’

  These days, twinkly-eyed and youthful, she’s treating cancer patients. Her job title is ‘pain specialist’.

  Now in her forties and retaining a Fall-like sense of humour, the raven-haired Jewish pain specialist entered The Fall’s parallel dimension in time-honoured fashion. Her band Khmer Rouge supported The Fall at Hammersmith Odeon in 1985. Almost two years later, her name obviously having been logged in the same way budding players are scouted for football teams, she was unexpectedly invited in.

  Like Brix, Schofield remembers most of her tenure as being a lot of fun, not painful at all. She remembers events like drunken days spent tenpin bowling in Bremen – which she says inspired ‘Bremen Nacht’ on Frenz Experiment – when Smith had been bowling ‘in a daze’. A B-side, ‘Zagreb’, came about when Schofield, Steve Hanley and drummer Simon Wolstencroft started jamming Stevie Wonder’s ‘Higher Ground’ in a sound check, a song which would prove a very successful cover version for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but not The Fall.

  She tells how another Frenz Experiment track, a favourite of mine called ‘Carry Bag Man’, refers to Brix’s and Schofield’s nickname for Smith because he carried everything in carriers; so he’s obviously not above taking the mickey out of himself lyrically.

  In fact, Schofield reveals further dimensions to the supposed disciplinarian’s alter-ego as practical joker. She tells how he would often customise cartoons and photos from the daily papers with mischievous quips and the tour bus contained an ‘art gallery’ of doctored photographs of The Fall.

  ‘Photos of the band were mercilessly customised,’ she says, remembering one of Craig Scanlon carrying an unfortunate comparison to the Care in the Community patients in Prestwich – OUT ON DAY RELEASE.

  Smith could be equally scathing about himself, illustrating an image of himself in a cardigan with the tag CARDY LAD WASTER. However, just like the song ‘What About Us’ and its references to Harold Shipman, Schofield remembers Smith’s sense of humour sailing spectacularly close to the bone.

  As a British Jew, she found herself having to play a song called ‘Haf Found Bormann’, an account of tracking down the former Nazi who vanished as effectively as Karl Burns, and ‘hating every moment’. When The Fall debuted Hey! Luciani, Smith’s 1986 play based on the suspicious 1978 death of Pope Jean Paul II, Alberto Luciani, the singer mischievously cast her and Brix as Israeli commandos. ‘He’s got a great sense of the absurd,’ she says. ‘Very smart and funny.’

  Onstage, Smith would come over to ‘bash the heck’ out of her keyboards while she was dispatched to ‘make a fool of myself ’ at the microphone. Eventually, as ever on the lookout for insurrection in the ranks, it seems Smith suspected she had dreams of fronting a band herself, which she insists was not the case. Mostly, the late 1980s seems to have been an unusually happy time to be in The Fall. She remembers ‘hardcore parties’ which, because she was the last to join and thus lowest-ranking member, took place in her room, which was then left to be discovered by disgusted hotel cleaners.

  All of this was a side-show compared with Smith’s famous creativity. She says he has a ‘unique perspective’ and is particularly effective at pushing people to do their best. Thus, what initially sounded like ‘loose-sounding sound check jams’ were somehow crafted into songs that became snapshots of history, reflecting not only the wider world but what it was like in The Fall at any given time.

  What is it like, I wonder, to be integral to this process – watching the hypnotic effect on audiences from the stage, night every night, month after month – and then documenting the music flowing out on record?

  ‘When he’s on form, backed by a good, tight, powerful band, the experience for the audience and the musicians is electrifying,’ she says. ‘People never forget a good Fall gig. He’s a magician at times.’ However, she concedes that when the singer isn’t on form, he ‘doesn’t do justice’ to himself or the songs.

  I’m intrigued by the innocuousness of this statement and can’t help wondering aloud what ‘not on form’ might mean, thinking back to Brix’s mention of heavy drinking and Steve Davies’ assertion that people were whispering about Smith being an alcoholic as long ago as 1980.

  ‘I don’t really know what to say about that,’ muses Schofield, as diplomatically as any doctor. ‘Mark is a heavy drinker and always has been.’ When pressed for a professional opinion, Schofield says that, according to her training, the definition of an alcoholic is someone who continues to use alcohol in the face of persisting harm (taken from the DSM-IV-TR medical diagnostic manual’s definition of addiction).

  ‘So, if it is harming him, then that’s probably true,’ she says. She goes on to say that while she was in the band, Smith’s drinking involved levels beyond even those described by Brix: heavy drinking from early morning onwards, and most of the contents of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky ‘before three in the afternoon’. By any normal standards, this is an astoundingly high al
cohol intake but Schofield suggests because Smith ‘always’ drank, he may have had a much higher than usual tolerance. As the days went on, she recalls, he became more difficult to deal with: ‘We generally had to discuss important things early in the day to get a sensible answer.’

  The harm aspect is more murky. Smith has managed to operate The Fall at a fairly consistent level for 30 years, so he can’t be in that bad a condition, surely?

  ‘It’s hard to say if he’s actually being harmed,’ she ponders. ‘Suffice to say, he’s a difficult character. Alcohol may be part of that, but I suspect he’d still be difficult without it!’

  Of course, Herculean intakes of alcohol (and other substances) are not exactly unknown in rock. Lemmy, of metal band Motorhead, is reputed to be downing two bottles of whisky a day (often washed down with amphetamine sulphate) aged over 60, and is still successfully running his band after three decades. Similarly, Rolling Stone Keith Richards told a 1987 interviewer his daily diet involved two bottles of bourbon and little else. In comparison, Smith is relatively sober.

  Again, like Brix, Schofield’s experiences in The Fall seemed to follow the pattern of an alcohol-fuelled bender – hugely enjoyable at first, then drifting into chaos. She remembers times when she felt she was living under a ‘reign of terror’ such was the uncertainty of living in the Fall enclosure: ‘One day you are playing the Tourhout Festival [in Belgium], the next you are blindfolded on a bus.’ She compares the experience, one of Smith’s more bizarre methods of psyching up his musicians, to Costa Gavras’ 1970 film L’Aveu (The Confession), in which unsuspecting victims are blindfolded, bussed, taken away and beaten – although even Smith at his most demanding would surely never come close to the working methods of the movie’s sinister Czechoslovakian ‘organisation’.

  The ‘reign of terror’ had other parallels with cultdom, at least in the amount of ‘Byzantine subterfuge’ going on in and around The Fall. She views The Fall as ‘some kind of medieval Italian principality. Or a Chinese court, full of would-be sycophants and mandarins’, with Smith operating as ‘absolute ruler’.

  She alludes to people who are ‘attracted to Mark’s power, and they often try and insinuate themselves into The Wonderful and Frightening World’ – it’s weird hearing a former member use this term to describe the Fall environment – ‘sometimes by trying to undermine people already in the band. But he always used to see through them. He was a good judge of character.

  ‘He isn’t above using intimidation, fear and uncertainty to maintain discipline,’ she adds, agreeing with comments from other Fallen members about Smith’s inability to share or relinquish power.

  ‘He’s a control freak, and he thinks people work better when they are uncomfortable.’ She notes that, unlike other bands, The Fall sound like The Fall whoever is in the group. ‘It’s a management style. Unfortunately, not one conducive to staff retention!’ Schofield eventually came to realise being out of the band was part of the whole dynamic. She says maybe everyone will fall out with Smith – not because he is a nasty character, but because his working methods demand it.

  ‘He just pushes and pushes you. I quit or was fired many, many times before I was definitively fired. I don’t think he can help it.’

  To this day, Schofield is not entirely sure what happened and won’t be drawn on Eric the Ferret’s view that she was fired for dating Martin Bramah. ‘The thing with Mark and Martin goes way back’ is all she will say and she jokes that if Smith, who was, after all, married, ever harboured intentions towards her she must have ‘always got away’. In any case, she says with a twinkle, she was ‘quite busy on the boy front’, implying she had other distractions besides Martin Bramah. Nevertheless, she understands the cult-like doctrine of loyalty in The Fall – ‘No side projects and no “cheating” on the band!’

  Schofield’s teaming up with Bramah effectively formed an enemy camp within the group. Soon she was ‘answering back’, especially when she thought Smith ‘might be bullying Martin’. That was a volte-face: ‘The lads used to defend me when I first started!’

  Another factor was Brix’s departure. Because she had been her ally –

  Jewish, female, and chief dressing room cohort – Schofield now found herself topping the torment list. And, in a manner symptomatic of a cult, she recalls all band members being forbidden to mention Brix’s name.

  Along with Marc Riley, Schofield admits it’s possible, as with so many musicians, Smith may have felt he had exhausted her talents: ‘I think Mark may have just wanted to move on.’ And he did, although Schofield’s work appeared on records after she left.

  Once Marcia Schofield exited the enclave, she too found herself the victim of cult behaviour. The ‘lads’ who had liked her a lot and been so protective were suddenly banned from contact. She says, ‘It was like being “disappeared”.’

  She’d survived four years in the camp. In that period, she saw the music world change dramatically. She joined in the era of stadium rock bands like Simple Minds, while The Smiths were the hottest band in music paper circles. By the time she left, in July 1990, The Smiths had disbanded and The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays had ushered in a sea-change towards dancier grooves.

  The decade saw huge changes for all of us. I started the 1980s with a spiky punk haircut and ended it with the sort of ghastly, overlong bowl cut that was an unfortunate side-effect of the onset of bands like Inspiral Carpets. In between there was a disastrous perm, a Morrissey-type quiff, an augmented skinhead resembling a root vegetable with leaves growing out of it and a lot of emotional upheaval. Mum had died in 1984, leaving me alone in our semi-detached council house and on the dole for years, listening to too much Fall, before I sent a few reviews to Melody Maker and became a journalist, principally so I could be paid to listen to The Fall. I did listen to other bands – for quite a while developing a parallel obsession with New Order – but always returned to The Fall, like a strict but loving parent you return to apologetically after some act of teenage rebellion. Then I met Suzanne when the Roses played my old establishment, Leeds Polytechnic, and she moved in with that record box containing Live at the Witch Trials.

  As for Marcia Schofield, she felt ‘burned and hurt’ by her exit from The Fall and for a long time afterwards turned down all offers to make music for work or pleasure. She even found herself unwilling to go out of the house because there’d always be ‘some weirdo asking “What did you do to Mark?” or “Are you and Martin Bramah still together?”’

  But now she has her life back, and maybe it’s significant her psychiatrist husband had never heard of The Fall. Because of his profession, I wonder aloud if her husband would find Smith interesting.

  ‘Probably not,’ she responds flatly, ‘because he’s not mentally ill. He’s got some pretty well recognised morbidity. Other people’s perceptions of who he is, his cultural significance and the fact that they love his music, but also are intimidated by him … that’s what’s really interesting about him.’

  Oddly enough, I’ve never felt intimidated by Smith when I’ve met him. I’ve always approached him like an Alsatian dog – pat it nicely and it will respond. Show fear and it will bite your hand off. But behind my easygoing approach, I suppose some nervousness must have lurked. Schofield echoes Brix’s comments – ‘The Fall are a mirror’ – and compares Smith to a process used in psychology to determine the mental functioning of patients: ‘He’s a walking, cultural Rorschach Test.’

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘Dependency on the organisation … attack

  the self.’

  I’m becoming fascinated by the apparent parallels between The Fall and the controversial world of religious cults. I’m not suggesting Smith has ever led 912 brightly clad followers to commit suicide by cyanide poisoning, as cult leader Jim Jones did in Guyana in 1978, but there are things in common.

  I’m reading a fascinating book called Cults in our Midst by Margaret Thaler Singer, one of the world’s leading experts in cults and brainwashin
g, in which she explains how we should define a cult. The first aspect common to them all is the origin and role of the leader, usually the founder of the cult and based in its nerve centre. We know Smith founded The Fall in Prestwich (although born in Broughton, Salford) and he is the, perhaps not divine, but certainly absolute, leader of The Fall whom some members call ‘God’.

  The next element common to cults is a power structure, the relationship between leader and followers, and we all know how that works in The Fall.

  Singer’s third category is persuasion or ‘thought reform’. Ben Pritchard calls it ‘moulding’. Smith is more direct: ‘I just brainwash ’em’.

  Another feature common to cult leaders, according to Singer, is their claim to have ‘special knowledge’, which is true of Smith. He asserts that he has no musical ability but has ‘good ears’, which takes his claim of appreciation and knowledge of what makes a good tune into the area of the mystic. And, of course, there are Smith’s reputed abilities as a psychic, as described by Brix earlier. Admittedly, he has never claimed to have visited special places in a spaceship – a trait common to cult leaders – but he does talk mythically of Prestwich and Salford, finding the uncanny in the harsh industrial North.

  Singer suggests cult leaders tend to be ‘domineering and charismatic’. Tick.

  They venerate themselves over other leaders and gods, as Smith was quick to do with me in Malmaison: ‘These other groups are rubbish’.

  Cults tend to be authoritarian but within them important jobs are delegated – which might include the driving and other tasks given to Ben Pritchard.

  Singer says cult leaders tend to be innovative, offering something novel. What could possibly be more novel in modern music than The Fall?

  Singer also says cult leaders have a double set of ethics, requiring exacting standards which are not applicable to themselves. Members are further required to confess all to the leader and deceive and manipulate non-members. Cults dictate what members wear and where they will sleep (including sleep deprivation techniques). From what I’ve heard so far of The Fall, they don’t sleep very much and Fall musicians almost universally have short hair and basic, functional clothing.