by Dave Simpson
These are Smith’s vocals and instructions for the song ‘Pumpkin Head Xcapes’, a 1992 B-side that’s never been played live. After recording all this stuff on cassette tape, Smith had posted the results to Rogers, who had the daunting task of somehow sifting the lyrics from this lot and synching them to The Fall’s music. It’s a demented way of working but it worked.
In another box the bassist turned producer finds letters Smith sent him welcoming him to The Fall.
One reads: ‘Dear Mr Bastardo, mucho thanks for subbing rehearsal fees and for bringing Incantation featuring Algernon Bastardo musicians into the world’ and is signed ‘the white Christian, let God be your judge’.
Another reads: ‘Dear Mr Rogers, welcome to the twilight zone. Are you ready for the disembodied head of Karl Burns to manifest itself in your street?’
I still haven’t found Burns, never mind his disembodied head, but Rogers at least has a new tip for me: Burns is currently ‘doing post offices’. He remembers the colourful drummer as a ‘character’ who would go on a US tour armed only with a giant suitcase containing a single pair of underpants and nothing else, and says the reason he was forever being fired and rehired was that unlike the rest he’d stand up to Mark E Smith. Physically, if need be.
‘They were always having fights,’ says Rogers, remembering one time when the pair of them were punching each other in a moving car. Luckily, neither of them was driving.
The musician tells how one night the whole Fall returned drunk and red-eyed from a US tour and turned up to stay at Rogers’ house, where he was hosting a visit from his elderly parents. During the early hours, his ageing mother awoke in her nightie to find a man on the end of her bed.
‘I was going, “Er, Mum, this is Karl”,’ laughs Rogers, who believes Karl Burns may have disappeared from public life because, despite being brilliant on drums, his unpredictable personality simply wouldn’t fit in with any other group.
Rogers guesses a lot of members suffer burnout. He mentions 1980s–1990s drummer Simon Wolstencroft who developed a stomach ulcer, possibly from the stress of being in the group. To relax, the drummer took up the hobby of searching for antique glass bottles in fields. One night while he was in a field a helicopter came down with a searchlight and the hapless sticksman was heard to exclaim, ‘Oh, my ulcer!’
But another reason is commitment.
‘If you’re really into The Fall and Mark likes what you do you could, in theory, be in The Fall forever,’ says Rogers, oddly enough using the same cult-like phrase as the Ferret – ‘the magic hour’ – to describe being on their stage. However, similar to what Charlie Watts once said of his first 25 years with The Rolling Stones (‘five years work, 20 years hanging around’) – there is apparently a lot of downtime in The Fall.
‘There’s a lot of time in the boozer waiting for Mark,’ he explains. ‘Obviously, he gets fantastic results like that but it’s not for everyone.’ Rogers, who saw a stream of musicians flow through in his time, has clearly thought about this a lot and delivers another insightful reason why so many people leave The Fall: in the end, no one can ever be into it as much as Mark E Smith.
His own exit from Fall circles, in 1994, came after a row about a studio Smith had booked. Rogers had mentioned, perhaps wearily, that it was unsuitable. Unusually, there was no big falling out. They just stopped phoning each other.
‘Mark says he sacked me,’ he says, echoing Una Baines. ‘He didn’t.’
They haven’t spoken since, although listening to the tapes seems to have prompted some fond memories, and he says he ‘just might’ call his old boss up.
After exiting Smith’s orbit, The Fall’s unlikeliest musician carried on working in differing musical environments. He produced The Lightning Seeds (including their England football anthem, ‘Three Lions’). He’s been involved in dance music but has recently turned to TV scores, including the BBC drama Family Business and Carlton Television’s naval series, Making Waves. Never mind the Royal College or the Ballet Rambert, Rogers insists his greatest education was in The Fall.
‘It taught me that there are no musical rules. Just do something good.’
He plays me the theme tune he wrote for the BBC’s hit crime caper series Hustle. As he admits, it sounds very like The Fall, suggesting they invade our culture, and his life, in ways he least expects. He’s not the only one.
Because Suzanne can’t drive, part of my daily ritual is to ferry my partner to her work, some 500 yards away as the crow flies but difficult to access on foot. Every day at 9.15 a.m. – and again at 6 p.m. – I become a driver. I am Suzanne’s Ben Pritchard and, like young Ben, if I am not on time the boss gets very angry. Lately, there have been quite a few times when the boss has been very angry. I feel bad. I feel disloyal. But it can’t be helped. I’m on a mission.
CHAPTER 18
‘He looks much the same as he ever did –
short hair, glass eye.’
Rogers’ anecdotes have made me even more determined to find Karl Burns, but my next assignment is finding a much more minor, but significant character in the Fall soap: Kenny Brady, a fiddle player who was the first Fall departure of the 1990s but hasn’t been heard of since 1991.
My Google enquiry, ‘Kenny Brady and The Fall’, throws up a mere 507,000 Kenny Bradys, at least some of whom were in The Fall. The first one is from The Fall Live Gig Repository, a sort of rolling compendium of live shows, which has a few inaccuracies and half-truths like anything in The Wonderful and Frightening World. However, the Repository records Brady’s live contributions, ranging from adding fiddle to a ‘lethargic’ Fall at The Fridge in Brixton on 3 December 1990, to making the instrument sound like a ‘demented bluebottle’ in Cardiff a week later. Alas, by the time The Fall play Brighton Top Rank on 26 March 1990, just three months later, Brady has vanished, although you can still hear his fiddle on the bootleg of the gig. Just like Marcia Schofield, Brady still seems to have playing been in The Fall long after his physical body had departed.
The following year Brady makes a surprise reappearance onstage at Amsterdam’s Paradiso. The Repository notes how, ‘Simply memorable versions of “Bill is Dead” and “The Mixer” dominate the first half of the set – the importance of Brady’s violin in this context is never better realised than on the latter.’ During ‘Life Just Bounces’, the author notes how the violinist ‘leads the band in a mad jig around the melody – this is simply a wild ceilidh of speedy noise which just has to be heard to be believed’.
Which sounds as if Brady had become an integral part of The Fall – fitting then, that that was his last gig.
After hours of fruitless Googling I throw in a few curve balls after remembering Brady is, or was, if he is no longer alive, a Scotsman. I type in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh alongside his name. Eventually, this pays off, and I discover he had been in Glasgow Cajun band The Peyote Brothers. But he’s now left them, as well. After that it looks like he played with a singer in Glasgow called Electra, who resembles Cher in a particularly ill-fitting fright wig. Again the trail goes cold. Then, a breakthrough.
By curious coincidence, I get an email from a journalist colleague who knows about my quest. ‘You’ll never guess who my ex-boyfriend has bumped into’, she writes. ‘Kenny Brady – in the Bongo Club in Edinburgh’. Then her ex-boyfriend emails me too; Brady looks ‘much the same as he ever did – short hair, glass eye, just thicker-set’. He’s been in another Cajun band called Deaf Heights Cajun Aces and has his own band Starvation Box.
Unfortunately, an email to their website reveals they’re trying to track him down as well. ‘He left a year ago,’ comes the reply, ‘and we’re still trying to catch up with him. Can you let us know if you track him down?’
By now, my journalist pal’s ex has turned sleuth too. He discovers Brady is playing with former One Dove vocalist Dot Allison, and it’s confirmed on her website. Then he forwards me Brady’s email address, but nobody replies. Several months later, I get a message – fr
om Kenny Brady.
He sends an email – which means I can’t confirm the story of the glass eye – and describes how, during Smith’s exile in Edinburgh, when he lived just up the road, they became friends. They had already met in London at a do organised by dance tearaway Michael Clark. Months later, Smith phoned Brady out of the blue and asked him to contribute to 1990’s Extricate album, which The Fall were recording in Oxford. Brady fulfilled Smith’s requirement. He told him he wasn’t a Fall fan (although he now admits he loved ‘Totally Wired’). He supplied off-kilter fiddle to Extricate and 1991’s Shift-Work, sang on a track called ‘Book of Lies’ and toured for about three years.
‘The gigs were always great … great energy,’ he says, and that particular band – ‘I know there’s been a few!’ – were incredibly tight musically, which allowed Mark free rein. Brady says he ‘felt privileged to be part of what was and still is, I think, one of the biggest cult bands in the world’.
So why did he leave? For once, an exit that’s almost normal. Brady is under the impression he was the only one who wasn’t sacked, which isn’t true, however, he explains that he left of his own accord because his domestic life was suffering from going all over the place with The Fall.
‘Also, the band were having financial problems and I thought it would be one less thing for Mark to worry about if he didn’t have me on the payroll,’ he says, reasonably. He adds, ‘Mark himself was really stressed out and it led to a lot of tension within the band, so it wasn’t as enjoyable.’
Although he refuses to be drawn on what these tensions were, Brady says he took the unusual decision to step out of the fray because he didn’t want to end up with Smith and himself hating each other. As a result, he’s one of few Fallen musicians who can say he counts Smith as a friend – even though they haven’t seen each other for a long time.
Like Eric the Ferret, Brady has unstinting respect for the leader, admiring Smith for carrying on through various adversities and admiring his ‘amazing’ body of work. One of Brady’s favourite lyrics is ‘Check the record, check the guy’s track record’ from ‘New Big Prinz’ on the I Am Kurious Oranj album. ‘I think Mark’s track record speaks for itself in terms of originality and output,’ he says, before disappearing into the ether once again.
CHAPTER 19
‘I neither left nor got sacked.’
I do another email interview with Charlotte Bill, the next 1990s exit, who very briefly played the rather un-Fall instrument of the oboe live and on Extricate. I find her via Martin Bramah, because she’s played in his Blue Orchids band.
She recounts how she ended up in The Fall via Una Baines. They met at a music session in Manchester in 1982 entitled ‘Women Make Noise’, where Baines noticed Bill playing the flute and liked her sound enough to invite her to play in Blue Orchids, where she switched to oboe. Curiously, a tape of her playing oboe with Blue Orchids found its way to Smith who wasted no time in getting her to join The Fall.
‘Mark liked the sound and asked me to come and record with The Fall,’ she says, making it sound as if she was recruited by an insurance company or group of Buddhists.
The way Bill describes Smith’s creative process sounds a bit like those old adverts for PG Tips tea, where two chimpanzees dressed as humans sit at a grand piano and one goes, ‘You hum it, Ah’ll play it.’
‘If he liked it, he’d say carry on.’ And that was that. No blindfolding musicians or commands to play like snakes. She loved hearing her flute and oboe ‘slicing across their sound’ and describes the Fall line-up back then – Smith, Hanley, Scanlon, Schofield, Wolstencroft, Bramah plus Brady – as ‘loud, relentless’. As for surreal situations, she remembers one when the police boarded the tour bus looking for an escaped prisoner, but otherwise isn’t saying much more than Bramah, whom she’s worked with, after all. On her departure, she emphasises she was a ‘guest, so neither left nor got sacked’. Which is another new one.
Lately, she’s made experimental films for a band called Nocturnal Emissions, who released CDs and played shows in Canada, the USA and UK, and made animations and documentaries for the BBC. She took a break to have a daughter, then returned on Blue Orchids’ 2003 album, Mystic Bud. There are no revelations about Bramah’s take on Smith either: ‘Martin and Mark have a very deep relationship’ is all she’ll say.
CHAPTER 20
‘He smashed up my keyboards quite often.
It was an occupational hazard.’
Somehow, I think I’ll get more than I got from Bill out of Dave Bush, the third 1990s departure whose November 1995 exit marked the end of a relative period of stability and continued chart success for the line-up.
The Taplow-born keyboard player joined in 1991 and for a while was a pivotal Fall member. Appearing on Code: Selfish (1992), The Infotainment Scan (1993), Middle Class Revolt (1994) and Cerebral Caustic (1995), Bush brought with him keyboards and electronics that revolutionised the Fall sound, without losing sight of who they were, as effectively as Brix had when she’d arrived bearing pop riffs. This was the era of club-friendly and commercial dance music, and, backed up by remaining Jesuit lads Steve Hanley and Craig Scanlon, Bush’s keyboards ensured The Fall dipped a toe into club culture while Smith’s lyrics, often deriding that very culture, were as ever a step apart.
Bush was the twenty-fourth musician to join The Fall, but Smith’s doctrine of ‘turnover’ was nothing if not successful. Losing both Marc Riley and Brix Smith should have been insurmountable setbacks but, with Bush in tow, The Fall became even more successful than they’d been before. Code: Selfish – their last album for major label Phonogram – reached Number 21 before Smith took the contrary route of exiting the label (after disagreements) and scoring a Top 10 smash with The Infotainment Scan on Permanent, a smaller indie label. Once again, his perverse instincts were proved right. I love The Infotainment Scan: it’s one of The Fall’s most mischievous, playful albums. Highlights include an inspired version of Sister Sledge’s ‘Lost in Music’ where Smith sounds more like he’s lost in a pub cellar than the disco, and a track rejoicing in the title ‘The League of Bald-Headed Men’, which seems to steal a Led Zeppelin riff despite Smith insisting unconvincingly he’s never heard the rock band’s music. ‘Glam Racket’, which just missed the Top 40 when released as a single, sees Smith pouring bile on an unnamed pop star half-wit who eats too much chocolate. ‘Paranoia Man in Cheap Sh*t Room’ is possibly autobiographical but allays any concerns that Smith was ailing, brilliantly depicting a leather-jacketed man at the zenith of his powers but going down fast. It hurtles along on one of the group’s most hypnotic guitar lines – yet another Fall classic.
However, towards the end of Bush’s tenure, the Middle Class Revolt album seemed overburdened by cover versions (3 in 14 songs) and patchy, although it contained the particularly catchy, insistent ‘Behind The Counter’ and fan favourite ‘Hey! Student’, in which Smith threatens violence on ‘dead brain’ students who wear sneakers and long hair. Middle Class Revolt was less successful – scraping to Number 48; the subsequent Cerebral Caustic contained just one Bush writing credit (‘One Day’), fared even worse at Number 67, and Bush was gone – far from the only departure in what proved to be a period of exceptional turbulence, even for The Fall.
I find him studying web design in Wiltshire, where the voice answering the phone yells, ‘Dayyyyyyyyve!’ He answers a few moments later sounding breathless and excitable, and 30 minutes later he’s still breathless and excitable. For Dave Bush, being in The Fall was ‘very tense … but hilarious’.
The breathless man joined The Fall by the most tried and trusted method. After learning to operate sound with bands like The Clash and Echo and The Bunnymen, he joined The Fall’s sound crew and subsequently joined the group. He wasn’t a Fall fan but became one after watching them onstage and dutifully – one expects breathlessly and excitably – informed Mark E Smith.
‘I told him he sounded brilliant and I’d do anything for them on keyboards or computers.�
�� In keeping with his professed reluctance to employ fans, Smith ignored him for weeks but then relented. ‘He just came up and said, “All right, you’re in”.’ Once ensconced, in August 1991, Bush found he developed a taste for what Ben Pritchard called the ‘frame of mind’.
‘It’s an attitude, and once you’ve got that it’s brilliant,’ he explains, describing the process of writing a melody and thinking, ‘Is that a Fall tune? No. It’s too nice. Let’s change it.’ Times were good at this point. The Fall may have left their major label, but because less money was spent on marketing there was more for the musicians themselves. He remembers ‘good times and good money’.
I’m breathless myself because Bush played alongside Karl Burns – who returned, in 1993, for the first time in seven years – and another drummer, Simon Wolstencroft, in a second hallowed two-drummer line-up. Together, they sounded like Smith was backed by both The Glitter Band and Adam and The Ants. However, Burns’ latest stint didn’t last too long. He arrived for the gig at Clapham Grand on 15 May 1993 but had already gone by the time The Fall toured America, just four months later.
Bush has a similar tale to the one Simon Rogers told me about the AWOL drummer going on tour with one pair of underpants in a suitcase. In his version, Burns turned up for the American tour with two drumsticks and a hat. ‘No T-shirts, no underwear, nothing!’ he laughs. Burns was soon sacked for ‘stinking the place out!’ However, according to Bush, Burns wasn’t about to let the minor distraction of being fired from Britain’s greatest alternative band get in the way of his enjoyment of America. With The Fall reverting to a single drummer line-up and continuing on tour, Burns hired a motorbike and had ‘the time of his life’ riding around America. ‘Then months later he flew back to Manchester using his tickets for the same flight as the band,’ grins Bush, confirming that, as far as his nose told him, Burns was wearing the same underpants as two months before.
