by Dave Simpson
This is my only chance. I ask about the notorious ‘torment list’ and his place on it, but he says all this is news to him.
‘First I’ve heard about it,’ he counters. ‘Maybe that’s indicative of how crap it had become in that I didn’t notice any difference.’
Inevitably, I have to clear up what happened with Scanlon’s exit.
Was he really pushed out or was Steve Hanley right to think he’d simply tired of the band and let his exit happen? According to Scanlon, Hanley had phoned him with the news that Smith had fired the entire group. ‘This was quite common,’ he reveals, ‘but it was the first time I’d been included.’
‘Then the story was that he’d sacked just me and Steve. Then it was just me.’
Bewildered, Hanley suggested Scanlon go to see Smith to clear the air. Scanlon duly did so to find Smith ‘hid [ing] behind his girlfriend’ and promising to send a letter. After 16 years’ service, the ultimate Jesuit lad felt he deserved more.
‘I just thought, “Fuck that”,’ he says. ‘“I’m not being treated like that anymore.”’
And the stuff about playing jazz riffs and ‘slovenly appearance’? According to Scanlon, it was a ruse designed to cover up Smith’s faux pas. One of the odder stories I’d heard was that Scanlon had acquired a Jazz Chorus amp and Smith hated the sound.
‘Crap,’ he retorts. ‘I’d used a Roland Jazz Chorus for years – it was Mark’s suggestion after my old amp died of old age. His “wry” statements were just fodder for the press – to show who’s boss – basically a cover-up for the shoddy treatment.’
Scanlon has another revelation: Smith didn’t just regret jettisoning his loyal servant, he asked him back: ‘I had a drink with him a few years ago and he asked if I’d like to come down with him to a Leeds gig the band were playing.’ He turned Smith down.
‘After the three hours spent with him in the pub, it brought it all back home how fortunate I was to be out of all that,’ he says. In what could almost be a line from one of Smith’s own time-honoured mantras, he insists he ‘will never go backwards’.
I wonder how it affected him, all those years in such a bonkers band. Only Steve Hanley – with his 19-year stretch – served longer than Craig Scanlon in The Fall and he’d told me it had taken him years to recover.
‘It obviously turned me into a bitter old man, going by the above answers!’ says Scanlon, suggesting that, after all, his sense of humour has emerged intact. ‘No, it was a fantastic trip most of the time, working with some good, twisted people.’ He has a description of The Fall that tops Hanley’s ‘house of horrors’: ‘It’s like your last tour of ’Nam, with accompanying flashbacks and nightmares.’
I ask him what his job is now and he repeats the line about ‘top secret government stuff!’ but, yes, he did put ‘16 years, guitarist, Fall’ on his application form. ‘That is exactly what I put. It was the truth after all.’
He says he has no regrets, pointing out that ‘unless you’re in a blues/lounge/folk band’ it’s ‘rather tragic’ performing onstage after hitting 40. But, contrary to rumour, he is playing guitar.
‘I have various snippets of music that will eventually become “The Coalman’s Song”,’ he says – it’s unclear whether he means an album or a single – ‘but I’m not exactly feverishly pursuing it.’ His next statement throws down a gauntlet for any music industry Fall fans: ‘If I had free access to a studio I would dabble for my own entertainment.’ So, somewhere, wherever he is living, when he’s not in the Top Secret Department of Work and Pensions, The Fall fans’ favourite guitarist is still working with his guitar. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the loss to British music of one of its most enduring talents. But Scanlon insists people shouldn’t get the impression he’s bitter or twisted. Most of the time, being in The Fall was ‘a fantastic life journey. A very strange upbringing.’
I have one final question. Where is Karl Burns?
Inevitably, he doesn’t know. ‘Sorry, I last saw Karl in the village quite a few years ago – big-bearded, bit scruffy. I thought he was a tramp at first. We did the usual, “Yeah, keep in touch etc”, but nothing since – which is a shame, he’s a nice, funny guy.’
And with that, Craig Scanlon retreats back into silence – which, after all, is an essential job requirement of ‘top secret government work’.
CHAPTER 22
‘He had a face like a mouse’s snout.’
At least the blow of Scanlon’s departure was partially softened by the prior return of another of the Fall soap’s principal characters – Brix. In Malmaison, Smith had talked of a ‘two-year gap’ between people leaving and wanting to return, although given there was a divorce and a dollop of acrimony in between, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the former Mrs Smith took five.
The first I knew of Brix’s return coincided with the first time I wrote about The Fall in the Guardian – which I joined, as with the music press, by sending in an envelope of reviews. I was as excited about joining a broadsheet as a musician would be joining The Fall, although I had only penned a handful of small articles when I received my favourite journalistic assignment – writing about The Fall.
Not that it was straightforward. Usually, when a journalist wants to review a band, the record company or publicity person simply puts you on the guest list. In February 1995, my innocent request was met by an unusual enquiry from the person representing The Fall at the time: ‘Have you ever had a run-in with Mark E Smith?’
No, I hadn’t had a run-in with Mark E Smith – not then, anyway – so I was allowed on the guest list, only the second time I’ve been granted this privilege (the other being the Bramah-in-silver-shirt gig at Sheffield Leadmill).
I loved the gig at York’s inappropriately sedate Barbican – the same venue where Smith wreaked havoc on Dave Bush’s keyboards – comparing The Fall as I often do to a classic soap opera and perhaps rather cheekily comparing Smith to Coronation Street’s irascible pensioner, Percy Sugden. There, unannounced, was Brix. I’ve still got the review in a bunch of Fall clippings in my garage.
Seemingly recovered from her dalliance with Nigel Kennedy, she smouldered like a rock-chick Elsie Tanner and her brittle riffing added an extra tension to their already compelling Northern rockabilly, which often recalls The Velvet Underground as if they’d been reared on flat beer and working men’s clubs … [I wrote, describing how this time Smith was wearing a silver shirt which made him look more like “an awkward Man at C&A” than a rock star, as had Bramah’s. But then] … spanners flew into the works. During ‘Free Range’, Smith hurled his microphone to the ground and took over his wife’s equipment, getting tangled up in all manner of leads. A hapless roadie attempted to sort it out and was immediately admonished, Smith delighting in hurling the mic stand next to where he stood.
We were then treated to several scenes of which any director could be proud: Smith clatters microphone again, Smith manhandles security man from stage, Smith cuffs roadie round ear, Smith removes microphone from bass drum (rendering them inaudible), Smith rearranges keyboard monitors (rendering them unworkable), Smith storms off, and on, and off. And so on, ad infinitum.
His lyrics were by now almost indecipherable (‘Your mother is a Communist!’ he seemed to sneer at one point), while the band stared resolutely at the floor and Brix gave the impression she’d seen this act a good few times before.
None of this, though, overshadowed the music. ‘Glam Racket’ in particular was a brilliant parody of a Glitter Band stomp. The instalment ended with the unforgettable sight of Smith as Hero Wronged, ranting through ‘Big Prinz’ and its chorus ‘He … is … not … APPRECIATED!’ A point with which one might tend to disagree. But then, one wouldn’t want a run-in with Mark E Smith.
One of my favourite Fall gigs ever.
Brix was in Los Angeles, not Manchester, when she heard the calling to return. The thing was, The Adult Net hadn’t worked out, nor had a relationship with another boyfriend. She’d studied acting a
nd had been in a real soap opera, but was playing bass with her friend Susanna Hoffs from The Bangles when the phone suddenly rang. Hoffs shared management with Courtney Love – the late Kurt Cobain’s wife and singer with LA band Hole – whose bassist had just died. Love’s idea was that Brix should play bass with Hole, but Brix had been thinking about The Fall.
She’d even left a message on Smith’s answerphone saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about all the stuff we did together. It was great. Good-bye.’ She was in Seattle dealing with Love when, out of the blue, Smith returned the call.
‘He just said, “Would you come back?”’ she remembers. ‘“We need you to kick ass. I’ll pay for you to fly back and forth from LA. Anything you want. Just come back.”’ An offer she couldn’t refuse.
Brix had the choice of joining Hole – and being subjected to the strict working demands of Courtney Love – or ‘going back to The Fall, which is the grand-daddy of everything. To go back and not be his wife … but to go back as a guitar player and writer, having power again and not being in the same position where we’re married and it’s fucked up. So I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll go back!”’
To begin with, Smith was on his ‘absolute, best, best behaviour’ and Brix tells how she was ‘really happy’ to be back and ‘everything clicked again’.
‘Everything was perfect,’ she says. ‘There was enough money that we were touring in a nice style. We wrote some good songs …’
However, very quickly, ‘things began to deteriorate with Mark’. To be fair to Smith, while his idea may have seemed a good one, it can’t have been easy in practice sharing the stage with an ex-wife, especially one who was dating millionaire Philip Start after meeting him in a lift at designer store Harvey Nichols. Every time he looked side-stage, there was the thing he hates most – a reminder of his past. Perhaps, even, something he’d lost.
‘He became more irrational, more difficult,’ Brix remembers, describing how touring with The Fall again quickly turned into a ‘fucking nightmare’. She remembers how Smith would be passed out, drooling, before gigs: ‘We’d be 45 minutes late and having to get him on the stage,’ she grumbles. ‘It was awful.’
She mentions ‘various incidents’ but doesn’t wish to elaborate, although she does add that like Marc Riley she’d started standing up for herself. For a start, there was going to be no subscribing to the carrot-and-stick treatment. A further development was that, although Brix was no longer married, she found herself in a bizarre romantic square involving Smith, Lucy Rimmer and Julia Nagle.
‘The two of them [Rimmer and Nagle] were at each other’s throats with me in the middle,’ she complains, making this episode of the Fall story sound more like a romantic farce. ‘So, Lucy would book the rooms in the hotels but make sure I slept in the room with Julia!’ she shrieks. Finally, something occurred which was so ‘bad’ she literally ‘couldn’t take it’.
Brix doesn’t want the precise details of what took place made public, but it’s enough to know The Fall were playing at a Danish festival, by which time Smith’s drinking had again degenerated to the point where he’d begun having epileptic-type fits. Before each attack he would become ‘unreasonable’ and in this instance he managed to get into an awkward altercation with a hip-hop band who had become so irritated by his behaviour they beat him to a pulp. Ironically, the singer was booked into an establishment called The Friendly Hotel at the time.
‘I was calling my boyfriend on the phone saying, “You’ve got to get me home”,’ remembers Brix, describing how Smith was nowhere to be seen and they began the gig without him.
‘Eventually, he turns up, badly beaten, and his face is so swollen he had the snout of a mouse!’ she remembers. ‘He could hardly speak. It was shocking. We went onstage, him completely fucked up.’
Any other performer would have pulled the gig. Smith is not any other performer.
Amazingly, ‘it ended up being a really good gig,’ remembers Brix. ‘He pulled it off. Again!’
I’m reminded of an ironic heckle from 1980’s Totale’s Turns: ‘Call yourselves bloody professionals?’
Smith may not have been a professional, but he was certainly bloody. However, for Brix, this was ‘the clincher’. Incredulous at what it now meant to be in The Fall, she decided, again, to leave.
‘I left three quarters through that tour before it broke me,’ she sighs, going on to describe a night in Glasgow: ‘It was a huge Mecca ballroom place. We went to do the sound check. He was nowhere to be seen, then he started berating everybody and breaking stuff. He screamed at the monitor guy and I said, “Please don’t speak to him like that.” I held my guitar up to hit him. Steve Hanley took me away to have a chat and I said, “What’s wrong with him? I can’t deal with this any more.”’
When I’d asked Smith about this period in Malmaison, he’d been unusually candid. He had been desperately unhappy: ‘Losing it? A bit, yeah.’
‘He was completely crazy,’ she concurs, remembering the next gig where Smith was so drunk he didn’t notice somebody had tied his shoelaces together until he tried to walk. The promoters ‘begged’ Brix to do the London show and it was ‘really good’. However, she last set eyes on Smith onstage at that gig – London’s Kentish Town Forum, October 1996. Fan reviews on the internet are mixed, but Gavin Eastley sums up the mood when he writes – somewhat disjointedly – ‘What a bad gig. A muddy beat combo no less and Brix crying through and some embarrassing bloke coming on and mumbling something about “Sing along you know all the words”. Silence from the cringing audience as they checked their incontinence knickers. First time I can remember that they sounded better on record.’
Instead of Brix’s usual ‘Good night’, she said ‘Goodbye’.
Almost a decade later, she’s again almost tearful – it’s not just the cold – reliving this stuff, and reveals she has contacted Smith since.
‘I’ve written to him and said, “If you ever need me, we’ll always have something together”. But he hasn’t responded.’ Despite everything, she feels considerable affection for her ex-husband and her loyalty is clearly very personal. She frets that he should be making more money, be more comfortable in life. As Dave Tucker remarked, Smith has what he needs – perhaps comfort would remove the edge of The Fall that has always set them apart. But Brix worries.
‘He’s not a businessman,’ she states. ‘He does deals with people that aren’t kosher and they know that he’s an artist and take advantage. People are greedy. He’s been ripped off a lot. When you’re so busy being artistic and making up stuff the other part of your brain which should be counting the money is switched off.’ Another sniffle. We’ve been talking for an age but she wants to carry on, while making it clear, as with Craig Scanlon, this is my one shot at an interview.
I change the subject to her much less taxing life now.
After leaving The Fall, Brix gradually abandoned music although she tells me she recently recorded a low-key Adult Net album with The Fall’s ‘Glam Racket’ – a song she says she wrote (it’s credited to Smith/Hanley/Scanlon) cheekily ‘reverted to its original state’ and titled ‘Star’. The very tuneful track subsequently appears on 2007’s Neurotica album, released as Brix Smith. She giggles at the lyrics: ‘They say you’re a star but I don’t give a fuck/ I watch your head expanding as you’re running out of luck’. It’s meant as an amiable swipe of the Smith variety, rather than anything nasty.
‘That’s got him back for “Bad News Girl”,’ she laughs. Otherwise, things are going well. There’s Start, ‘which people say is one of the best shops in London’, there’s the pilot for a comedy series where she plays herself as the manager of a rock band and the fashion shoots in Elle. But I can’t help getting the feeling Brix seems slightly troubled, that what she really wants is to be able to revisit The Wonderful and Frightening World.
‘I’d like to see them live but it would bring back so much emotion. I wouldn’t like to go unless I was completely welcome, or embraced, really. I
mean, I’m happy. I don’t want to tour any more. But I miss it.’
And The Fall miss her.
CHAPTER 23
‘Dear Mark, you’re my hero. Maybe when
I’m of legal drinking age we could go for a
drink?’
Adrian Flanagan was the twenty-sixth musician to play live in The Fall. I find him via his current band Kings Have Long Arms but nothing about him seems straightforward. Despite not having been heard of for a decade, he says he’s ‘flat out’ busy and can only answer enquiries via email. Then he goes AWOL because his phone connection has been lost owing to moving house from Manchester to Sheffield. When contact is resumed, he says he was a ‘triangle player’ in The Fall.
Then he sends a photograph of ‘himself’ – a small plasticine doll. ‘I can only be seen in clay. I am not human, Dave,’ he explains, curiously evoking Fall song ‘Horror in Clay’. And so I conduct what is surely the first internet interview with a former member of The Fall who might be rolled up into a ball and made into another shape at any given moment.
Flanagan wasn’t in The Fall for long – two months – but he’s known Smith for years, and so has his own unique opinions. One of them, which I haven’t really thought much about before, is that The Fall have actually become one of the most vital cogs in the Prestwich area economy as a regular employer.
‘He was always the one to give local kids a break,’ says Flanagan, who wanted to be in The Fall for as long as he can remember. In fact, unlike so many who stumble into Smith’s orbits in pubs in adult life, Flanagan was making overtures to Smith before he was even old enough to go in the pubs that are the traditional recruiting grounds.
‘When I was 15, I’d put notes through his door saying, “Dear Mark, you’re my hero. Everyone else is rubbish. Maybe when I’m of legal drinking age we can go for a drink?” I’d stick it through his door then run off scared just in case he came out and told me to clear off.’ He knows it sounds ‘pathetic’ but he is unbowed, pointing out that at the time, ‘he really was my hero’.
