The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  Promisingly, Bush refuses to believe Burns is dead, because he has the ‘constitution of an ox’, although he admits it is a remote possibility. He offers a more reasonable explanation for Burns’ apparent disappearance – that without the money from The Fall, he’d be unable to enjoy the same rowdy lifestyle and so could indeed be living quietly somewhere.

  He doesn’t have any leads for Burns, but pulls an unexpected Fallen rabbit from the hat – the fate of the original Tory drummer Dave aka Steve.

  It turns out Bush had come to know the mysterious Conservative, insurance-selling sticksman on the Manchester party scene in the early to mid 1990s. They were both living in Manchester’s Heaton Park district, where Bush would often ask him, ‘Were you really in The Fall?’ The man had a stock reply to such enquiries: ‘Yeah, so was everybody else in Manchester!’

  Bush remembers him being called Steve. Definitely Steve. ‘He was a bit weird. People used to take the piss out of him.’ In fact, ‘Steve’ had become schizophrenic. He vanished from the party circuit and Bush discovered why – the writer of ‘Landslide Victory’ had thrown himself under a train.

  I feel extremely depressed – a member of The Fallen who has, literally, fallen – and find myself hoping a similar fate has not befallen Karl Burns.

  Bush brightens the mood with other mad talk of Fall experiences in America, this time involving Smith. Once, according to Bush, the great man fell stupidly in love with a girl he met on tour from Salem, the Massachusetts city made infamous by the witch trials.

  Smith was convinced she was a witch. Besotted, he paid for her to fly over to live in Prestwich. Within a week drummer Simon Wolstencroft was employed to despatch her back to America from Manchester airport.

  Bush flips into another story, this time involving Smith overdosing on unidentifiable tablets given to him by a girl, where Smith found himself making his way hurriedly to the evening’s gig after spending an afternoon in hospital having his stomach pumped.

  There was another pharmaceutical-related episode in Switzerland. According to Bush, Smith thought he was procuring amphetamine sulphate but the substance turned out to be hallucinogenic.

  ‘He started tripping, and it’s not his thing, tripping,’ says Bush. Apparently, Smith ‘thought the floor was opening and he was in The Exorcist’, a terror compounded by the sound engineer making faces like the Devil at the man some of them call ‘God’.

  I have my own memories of the comical Dave Bush-era Fall at a gig at York Barbican. Among other mischievous goings-on, Smith concluded the gig by demolishing Bush’s keyboards – returning The Fall to a guitar band in one fell swoop.

  ‘He used to smash up my keyboards quite often,’ shrugs Bush. ‘It was an occupational hazard.’ The explanation Smith gave Bush was, ‘It’s all right, Dave, it’s only showbiz.’

  The keyboards would usually be fixed urgently in time for the following night’s gig, however, one time in Chicago Smith was so ‘pissed’ he rendered them unusable. The following night, Bush found himself attempting to play a synthesiser with broken keys. Smith threw the microphone at his keyboard player and yelled, ‘You have a go! I can’t be arsed.’ Bush took up the vocal challenge and found himself fronting The Fall – with the crowd going bonkers.

  ‘It was hilarious,’ he says, ‘He soon came back to reclaim his throne.’ However, by the encores Smith had disappeared – they later found him in a corridor, fast asleep, and played the encore without him.

  I keep remembering what Brix said about The Fall being a reflection of the person, and perhaps it says a lot about Dave Bush that he views these episodes as comical, where others may find them disturbing. He remembers being told, ‘It’ll be all right, just hit it!’ whenever things went wrong and tells how Smith once fell asleep in the hotel lift, spending the night travelling between floors while guests tiptoed around him on their way to breakfast.

  Never a dull moment. So why on earth did Dave Bush leave? Unusually, he describes yet another cause of Fall execution – being undermined by someone on Smith’s fabled ‘subs’ bench’.

  As he tells it, another budding keyboard player, Julia Nagle, had started hanging out with Smith: ‘She fucked it up for me in the end. She kept telling Mark that I wasn’t happy, and I was, but eventually I got kicked out. She was his girlfriend and there was a campaign going on.’

  Although, like Schofield and Riley, Bush does concede it may have been time to go. His last album, Cerebral Caustic, was uncharacteristically weak – although it does contain the glorious ‘Feeling Numb’, a pop song so sweet and perfect it could be sung by Kylie Minogue, and the wonderfully spiky ‘Don’t Call Me Darling’.

  Bush suspects that by then he may have emerged as a threat to Smith’s authority – through music rather than insubordination. ‘There was a lot of the music on computer and that’s not what Mark wants, someone with that much input. It had to change. But five years is long enough.’

  It was actually four; maybe it felt like five. He was dispensed with by letter but, as with so many, Bush suggests if the opportunity arose he ‘might’ go back: ‘If it was the same line-up, possibly.’

  Which, of course, it wouldn’t be.

  Like Steve Hanley, Bush says he took a long time to become ‘a normal person’ again after leaving The Fall and the hardest aspect was never quite knowing if it was really the end. There had been several times when he wouldn’t hear from Smith only to be suddenly called back into battle, like a soldier given another tour of Northern Ireland. Between such times, he’d still be getting paid and then, exactly as Smith told me he did with Spencer Birtwistle, the singer would phone and ask, ‘Where the fuck are you?’

  But the call didn’t come.

  There are no bad feelings though and, like Riley, he encountered Smith again. He’d joined Justine Frischmann’s Britpop darlings Elastica, who were recording in London when Bush bumped into Smith in the nearest pub. He cajoled him into joining the recording session, which he did until the beer ran out. Smith delivered spontaneous performances on ‘How I Wrote “Elastica” Man’ and ‘KB’ (Karl Burns?!) – maybe this was a rare instance of Dave Bush and pals ‘moulding’ Mark E Smith.

  More recently, Bush (as ‘Elastica Man’) scored a techno dance hit – a personal ambition – but he admits he misses The Fall, even though he may occasionally look back with rose-tinted glasses.

  ‘For a few years, I was glad to be away,’ he confesses, ‘because it was so tense. But now I look back and it was brilliant music and we went to some brilliant places. It was a lot of fun.’

  These days, Bush’s activities are more ordered. Because keyboard players aren’t in fashion anymore, he’s considering buying himself a bass.

  Lately, he’s been buying and selling stuff on eBay to help fund the web design (he ran a similar business selling hippie trinkets while in The Fall). Unusually, it appears Bush’s post-Fall direction is unrelated to The Fall, until he mentions he’s ‘learning about courses and databases. I just want to work at home with nobody shouting at me!’

  Sometime after speaking to him, I’m browsing eBay when I come across Bush’s ID. It seems he has now purchased a bass – a Westfield metallic titanium model costing £37.

  I guess you never know when a vacancy might come up.

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘It was like your last tour of Vietnam, with

  appropriate flashbacks and

  nightmares.’

  With Dave Bush departed and record sales faltering, there was a lot of tension around The Fall. Except now it wasn’t quite so creative.

  From the outside, with Brix gone and The Fall making more and more uncommercial music once again, it seemed as if Smith had almost deliberately sabotaged his own success; as if he’d started to fear that too much was beyond his control, or that existing in the ultra-mainstream wasn’t very Fall.

  I asked him about this in Malmaison, and he described pop singles – which don’t make money but act as advertisements for groups’ albums – a
s ‘a lot of hard work for very little return’. He suggested that he was more concerned with the bigger picture: crafting art, not pop.

  ‘I’d rather get the LP right, you know what I mean,’ he said. ‘’Cos an LP is a piece of work, you know. The amount of time I spend with the flow [running order] of an LP and the record company’s trying to do it all by market research. They go, “You want all the big tracks at the beginning”, and I go, “Well, by side two you’ll be bored off your tits”.’

  ‘They go, “Ooh, you are funny about your work, Mark”. So you have to fight to get your own fuckin’ tracklisting, so imagine what it’s like with a single. They’ll have about eight people with a clipboard. There’s a lot of clots and clever dicks. I’m sorry! I hate things like that.’

  But, for the first time, the albums were declining in quality. In Malmaison, he’d offered an interesting notion; that for all the chaos around the band he makes his best music when his personal life is settled. And in the mid 1990s, Smith’s personal life wasn’t settled at all.

  After divorce from Brix, he’d recruited not a musician but a second wife – marrying Saffron Prior, the Cog Sinister secretary from Prestwich he’d taken up with after Brix. The marriage floundered and after their divorce in 1995, Prior kindly gave away Smith’s typewriter to a fan on the internet. In 1995, he dated Fall fan club organiser (and, briefly, backing vocalist) Lucy Rimmer. There were other band-related problems. Smith sued one ex-manager, suspecting fraud, but was unsuccessful (Smith’s suspicions inspired a very bitter song, ‘Birmingham School Of Business School’). It perhaps isn’t surprising that Smith seems to have drowned his sorrows in drink. Even more than before.

  A fan called MadVespa posted on the Fall forum about seeing The Fall in Glasgow at the time:

  I was standing at the bar near the door when it swung open violently and Mark E Smith staggered through, bounced off the wall and fell through the bar hatch. On standing up he found himself facing the

  queue at the busy bar (all of whom were there to see the band). I don’t know who was more surprised – Smith or the crowd. A cheer went up, he muttered, ‘F*ck’, and exited out the front door.

  Other live reviews of the period comment less humorously on Smith’s condition, noting how he was suddenly looking aged and was often visibly drunk while performing. Shortly after Dave Bush’s departure, a sense of imminent explosion in The Fall erupted with the loss of one of their most precious ever members.

  I’m staring at one of the most perplexing names on my list, Craig Scanlon, who has been ‘missing in action’ even longer than Karl Burns.

  What I know is this: born on 7 December 1960, The Fall’s most venerable guitarist was the ultimate ‘Jesuit lad’. If Steve Hanley defined the Fall sound, Scanlon’s rhythm guitar built the chassis and in person he typified their spirit. From 1979’s Dragnet to 1995’s Cerebral Caustic, his trademark low-key style – memorable but subtly, beautifully underplayed – formed The Fall’s finest music.

  In the early days, his rockabilly rhythm powered the likes of ‘Fiery Jack’ and ‘Container Drivers’. When The Fall were at their most commercial in the Brix period, Scanlon was always there – quietly sculpting the sound and happy to let Smith’s wife take the spotlight. Onstage, Scanlon’s posture – head down, grim-faced, holding his guitar like a piece of industrial machinery – was quintessentially Fall. Even the name Scanlon sounds like it should be written on a big sign above a firm of building contractors.

  His was the most abrupt departure of that turbulent time, when after 16 years of hard labour he was suddenly given the boot in 1995. Smith insisted his most loyal servant was sacked for his ‘slovenly appearance’ and the crime of ‘failure to maintain amps’. He later changed this explanation to ‘trying to play jazz or Sonic Youth-style stuff over good simple songs that he’d written himself’.

  Since then, more debate and discussion has centred round the mysterious disappearance of Scanlon than any other Faller. He’s never given an interview. Even the BBC’s Wonderful and Frightening World documentary failed to coax him from wherever he is hiding. He may or may not be holed up with Karl Burns, but at least Scanlon can claim the dubious distinction of being the only Fallen musician mourned by Smith – publicly at least.

  Our leader admitted in a rare 2001 moment of candour that sacking the Jesuit had been a ‘bad decision’. ‘I still see him knocking about in Manchester,’ he said of his once loyal henchman. ‘I miss him, actually.’

  If Smith was really bumping into Scanlon in Manchester city centre, he was doing better than anyone else. Since 1995, Fall fans have had to feed on mere scraps of rumour and purported sightings: Scanlon going into council offices, or a man who possibly could be Scanlon emerging from a supermarket with bags of beer. Some reports had him working for the council, others in the dole office. Eric the Ferret told me he had spied him and he was looking ‘like a broken kid’. Ominously, Marc Riley told me that even if I were to find his fellow ex-Jesuit, ‘no way’ would Scanlon talk.

  Having so far drawn a total blank with Burns, I’m wondering what to do about Scanlon when an email arrives from a similarly frustrated Simon Ford, author of Hip Priest. He’s just spotted Scanlon.

  ‘Our eyes met and he had that look which said, “I do not want to talk about how I used to be in The Fall”, so I walked on by’ is how Ford describes the encounter in Manchester city centre. Then he explains how he ‘almost’ got to interview him for his book: ‘First of all, he told me to get lost, then he said he might talk to me and then it was too late. It was a shame ’cause I rate him so highly and he hardly did any interviews when he was in the band. Anyway, I guess this is all no use to you, but, surprise, surprise, he looked older, had grey hair and was quite tubby.’

  I’ve given up all hope of ever reaching him when Marc Riley gets back in touch to say he might know someone who knows someone who might be able to get in touch with Scanlon. I’m starting to feel like an agent in MI5.

  Over the next few days, this feeling increases as I take several peculiar phone calls from someone called Moey who also says he ‘might’ be able to get me to Craig Scanlon. I’m asked to email any questions and then wait – for what, a demand for ransom?

  I’m then told the guitarist is now in ‘top secret government work’. A couple of days later, an email arrives from the Department of Work and Pensions.

  Although Scanlon first suggests he might be ‘too traumatised’ to answer questions, he’s surprisingly forthcoming. Mind you, he says he can only do this by email and won’t have his photograph taken because ‘my hatred of cameras is up there with my loathing of phones’.

  The first question on my list was musical. I ask about his trademark guitar style, which was supposed to have been learned by him from his predecessor, Martin Bramah.

  ‘I taught myself,’ he replies. ‘Steve [Hanley] and I were in a band before joining The Fall and I wrote most of the songs [The Fall poached one – “Chokstock”]. When I first saw the band I thought he [Smith] had a great, distinctive sound but this “mentor/idol” thing is nonsense.’

  So not all The Fallen view Mark E Smith as ‘God’ then.

  The obvious next question is to ask what it was like being in The Fall. I mention that so far accounts have been diverse, ranging from ‘a professional, hardworking unit’ to ‘really weird’, with tales of fights and paranoia.

  Scanlon agrees all these views are true, adding, ‘when we were on form, there was no one to touch us’. However, he suggests the latter years ‘did deteriorate into a negative chaos’. The below-par Cerebral Caustic wasn’t just Dave Bush’s last album. It was Scanlon’s farewell too and he isn’t the album’s biggest fan: he says by this point, Hanley and himself had become ‘wetnurses for some psychotic changeling – it just grew tedious’.

  He cheers up when asked about his song-writing input, which even in the maze-like world of Fall song-writing credits seems enormous. Scanlon is even credited with penning the tune for ‘Bill Is Dead’, w
hich on certain (wistful) days usurps ‘The Container Drivers’ as my favourite Fall song.

  ‘I wrote quite a few,’ he says, admitting he can’t remember which ones exactly – ‘my memory is shot’. But some favourites were ‘The Classical’, ‘Petty Thief Lout’, ‘Paintwork’, ‘Iceland’, ‘Winter’, ‘Haven’t Found It Yet’, ‘and, yes, “Bill” is a fave of mine’.

  Despite some grumbles, Scanlon remembers good times writing with Steve Hanley and Dave Bush at Bush’s house; hanging out with Hanley, Bush, Schofield, Riley and the missing Burns, ‘all good people’.

  ‘We were travelling the world knowing we were exporting a different subversive take on most music,’ he says, remembering the sheer joy of ‘hearing one of my songs after the input of the above people’. He admits some of this was countered by having to cancel gigs, ‘sometimes minutes before we were due to go on’. Then there were the ‘3 a.m. phone calls from a pissedup paranoid Mark’.

  I can almost hear the frustration. ‘The whole Jekyll and Hyde thing wore me down.’

  I move on a little and ask about creative tension.

  ‘Mark created tension mostly because he was bored, drunk or couldn’t hack it,’ he writes. ‘He was surrounded by a great band who put up with a lot of shit. It was Mark’s way of motivating himself – we didn’t do complacency.’

  The line about complacency was familiar but the rest was something new. In all the discussions with The Fallen about creative tension, neither I nor anyone else had considered this could be Smith’s tool of motivating himself, not his musicians.

  If Scanlon’s theory is true, it undermines everything that has been suggested for 30 years about the whole dynamic of The Fall. I wish I could meet him and talk more, but he’s adamant that personal contact is off-limits.