by Dave Simpson
The only clay guitarist to ever join The Fall went to a tough school in Salford, where one can only imagine the treatment meted out to someone so quirky. Unsurprisingly, he reveals he was an odd one out. Everyone else liked Duran Duran and Wham!, with their songs about yachts and Club Tropicanas, all of which sounded very exotic if you grew up in the shadow of Prestwich Hospital. Flanagan, against all odds, appreciated The Fall because they did what no one else would do: ‘They sang about my area.’ While his New Romantic and 1980s pop-loving schoolmates got their education at Salford’s toughest, Flanagan was educated by The Fall.
A couple of years later, he was offered a sort of apprenticeship at The Fall factory when Smith offered Flanagan’s teenage band some Fall support slots, which he thought was ‘amazing’ even though his band were ‘crap’. Subsequently, he became friendly with Smith’s sister, Caroline.
‘We got talking in our local,’ he reminisces, describing how he became friendly enough with the Smiths to be invited to family occasions such as birthdays and weddings, which would usually end up in post-pub singsongs at Smith’s house. He remembers ‘fondly’ playing Smith’s guitar and singing Kinks’ songs together, during which Smith would regale him with funny stories and correct the position of his elbow as he played guitar.
So, when ‘Whatsherface’ – as Flanagan calls Brix – left for the second time, he suddenly received the call.
‘I was at me mam’s doing my washing,’ Flanagan recalls, via email. ‘He said, “All right, cock, it’s Mark. I want a word,”’ and suddenly the clay man found himself agreeing to fill Brix’s slightly more fashionable shoes on a 30-date UK tour. That was one problem. The other was it began in two days’ time.
Rehearsals consisted of going through 80 songs from ‘random’ albums with Steve Hanley. Then Smith rang to say Brix hadn’t left after all, but could Flanagan tag along for the tour as a ‘sub’, in case of further upheaval. He opted to stay at home, but said, ‘I’ll be there if you need me.’
Sure enough ‘Whatsherface’ did leave again and Flanagan ended up standing in for half a dozen shows in the space of five months. He recollects The Fall being between labels. Flanagan wasn’t given any instructions – although Smith would still wander past and reposition his elbow as he played. Comparing the experience to a ‘Youth Training Scheme in rock ’n’ roll’, Flanagan says his only instructions from Smith were to ‘Come along and give that bunch of oldies of a group of mine a kick up the arse!’
Flanagan may not have been a great musician but in many ways he was a perfect Fall guitarist. He understood he was there to do a job, and as such harboured as few pretensions as a bricklayer or plumber.
‘I’m not going to say he shouted at me or anyone else,’ Flanagan considers. ‘The group were being paid a lot of money by Mark to sit around on their arses all day, then occasionally they’d have to rehearse or do a couple of gigs. He’s every right to shout. He’s the boss.’ Flanagan says he understands the Fall mentality a bit more because, like Smith, his family came from the professions. The Flanagans were builders and, like Smith, he’d often worked for his ‘old fella’. He insists there isn’t much difference between making music in The Fall and making a wall for a team of brickies.
‘You’d get the hairdryer treatment whenever you were not pulling your weight and I’d constantly get told how to hold a hammer,’ he says of his building days. ‘I think his musicians at the time’ – the long-serving Jesuit lads, now minus Craig Scanlon – ‘might have been a bit complacent.’ Which, of course, in Smith’s eyes will never do.
Flanagan describes Smith’s musical input as one might a foreman, rather than a musician. The band would ‘hammer out’ ideas; Smith would have the final say. ‘He’d say, “No, that’s shit, try this”,’ he recounts, adding that The Fall work best when it’s stripped-down music with unpolished vocal melodies.
‘The hooks come from [Smith’s] voice, far more than anyone gives him credit for.’ Which is true.
Asked about the best thing about being in The Fall, Flanagan isn’t sure the word ‘best’ is even appropriate. ‘It’s not a showbiz band, its a working rock ’n’ roll band,’ he says. ‘It’s not about pop ditties or doing silly dances whilst dressed as a lion’ – which apparently his own band, Kings Have Long Arms, is.
‘But the experience taught me you can’t replicate The Fall,’ he says. He confesses to once making the faux pas of moaning to Smith that his own group needed a break. Smith’s response was typical and very Cloughie: ‘You don’t deserve anything. Just get out there and do it.’
‘I just realised I was going on to this bloke who for years of my life had been fighting to get out these great pieces of uncommercial art and how pathetic I must have sounded,’ admits the man of clay, adding that Smith always looked out for him. He’d read the ‘nasty stories’ about Smith but insists he was always ‘very good to me, very generous and wise’.
In fact, Smith – who Flanagan regards as ‘a man amongst musicians, the only true original English rock ’n’ roll poet’ – did the job for Flanagan he’d expected done for himself. ‘He was the oldie who gave me the kick up the arse to do it myself. So that’s the best thing for me about once briefly being in The Fall.’
He reels off his recent activities: six singles in the last couple of years; ‘cult status’ in various countries; working with The Human League’s Philip Oakey; and a spot as a ‘face’ in Harpers & Queen. A Prestwich boy made good, and like Marc Riley years before him, the crucial kick came during Falldom.
CHAPTER 24
‘We’d had abuse and death threats!’
Early 1997 saw another fleeting guitarist – Keir Stewart. I track him down at Inch Studios in Manchester, where he’s working on an album with fellow Mancunians, old school veterans The Durutti Column. In fact, it was Inch Studios that indirectly led to him to The Fall.
As Stewart tells it, he and studio partner Simon Spencer were desperate to produce the Fall album which turned out to be 1997’s Levitate. They worked with Smith as DOSE on a track called ‘Plug Yourself In’, which was extracurricular to The Fall. When asked to join the group – as the twenty-fourth member – Stewart said no, but he was coaxed into accepting by Spencer, who thought it might land them the job of producing an album.
Even as a veteran of studios and the peculiar habits of musicians, Stewart says he has never worked in a band like The Fall. When he joined, they were bang in the middle of Smith’s phase of heavy drinking and ‘losing it’ (Smith’s words).
Stewart remembers rehearsals as ‘structureless’: ‘Mark wouldn’t turn up, or he’d turn up and refuse to do any vocals. He was very paranoid at the time. It was pretty odd.’
With young Flanagan out of the picture, Stewart describes the group as divided into two battalions. Mark and Dave Bush’s replacement, Julia Nagle, formed one camp; recent recruit Tommy Crooks along with veterans Simon Wolstencroft and Steve Hanley formed the other. Stewart found himself ‘stuck in the middle’ and shot straight to the top of the torment list because he was a ‘studio nerd’.
Stewart seems to have encountered particular difficulty being paid and has some surreal reminiscences of the way The Fall – yet again constantly switching labels – undertook business at the time.
Early recordings took place in West Hampstead at a studio owned by Scottish solo artist Edwyn Collins. Stewart and Spencer negotiated a producers’ fee, but Smith never signed the contract.
‘He kept saying, “I’ll sign it tomorrow”,’ remembers Stewart, ‘but he never did.’ Instead, Stewart remembers Smith doing vocals while reading lyrics off a bit of paper and then disappearing to the pub.
‘As the week went on we were getting more pissed off over the lack of money,’ he says. ‘By the Thursday, I said to Simon, “If he doesn’t sort it out tomorrow, I’m off”.’ However, Stewart says when this news was relayed to Smith, the boss seemed shocked.
‘I phoned him and he said, “What do you mean? It’s going really wel
l”,’ he laughs, still astounded. ‘This was after we’d had abuse and death threats!’
Death threats?
‘He was doing a vocal and he was terrible,’ he says, admitting the great man’s wrath may have been provoked by the production pair playing ‘sneaky’ tricks like recording Smith’s conversations unbeknown to him and then playing them back over the studio loudspeakers. But he remembers recording ‘take after take’ of Smith’s vocals. ‘He’d say, “I tell you what, lads, the track’s going really well but I know lads in Salford who will kick your heads in”.’ Stewart could have found this terrifying, however, he admits to thinking it was ‘hilarious, actually’.
According to Stewart, Smith called him ‘Short arse’ and dubbed Spencer ‘Fatso’, and was so vociferous even the long-suffering Steve Hanley was taken aback, while drummer Simon Wolstencroft confided he’d ‘never seen him [Smith] that bad’.
Drama turned into farce when Spencer and Stewart wiped all the tapes they’d been recording. And they couldn’t resist one last practical joke. They’d recorded a track called ‘Inch’ with Smith. Packaging it carefully, they mailed the track to John Peel and various major record companies, along with a covering letter purporting to be from Mark E Smith, using language more likely to come from a band Smith hated, like REO Speedwagon or The Eagles.
‘We wrote, “Hey guys, check out the sound of my new album”,’ says Stewart, still laughing about it all these years later. ‘“This is the brand new Fall sound and I think you’ll agree – it rocks!”’
As Stewart tells it, the confused Fall leader then arrived home to find his answerphone full of messages from the music industry, but didn’t know anything about any new record. Stewart claims they then found themselves getting visits from ‘black BMWs in the middle of the night’. It all sounds very weird, even for The Fall.
‘I don’t think I’d have been killed over a tune,’ insists Stewart, ‘but it was pretty mad.’
Stewart and Spencer got a deal for the track themselves with EMI – inked by the A&R man who signed Coldplay – and a meeting was arranged with Smith in a Manchester bar, to iron out the details. Therein, things got even stranger.
‘He brought this absolute nutter with him, a complete psycho,’ says Stewart, describing a man who looked like ‘Bobby Ball on crystal meth’. In these perhaps less than desirable conditions, a deal was struck, but perhaps inevitably Stewart never laboured in The Fall again, after just a handful of gigs.
The Spencer-Stewart-Smith tie-in had another unfortunate twist. One of the tracks they worked on ended up on Levitate as ‘Spencer Must Die’. In 2003, Simon Spencer died of respiratory failure while waiting for a lift at the end of the Glastonbury Festival.
Yet, when Stewart subsequently ran into Smith, he saw a ‘different side’ of the Fall frontman: ‘He was very humane, in the things he said. A totally different Mark E Smith, really.’
When I mention the elusive Karl Burns, Stewart says he did spot the missing drummer – four years ago. The mythical Faller was on the street in Manchester city centre where, Stewart reports, he ‘wasn’t looking very well’.
1997 – the year Flanagan and Stewart joined and then departed – was, elsewhere, a year of fallout, change, upheaval and death, especially in August. On 2 August 1997, Fela Kuti, whose drummer Tony Allen had told me about discipline, died of an AIDS-related illness. His funeral in Lagos was attended by two million people. In Paris, on 31 August 1997, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. Death was in the air – even in the boyband-era pop charts, where Puff Daddy and Faith Evans’ ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ strode the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, turning a Police sample into a lament for slain rapper Biggie Smalls aka The Notorious BIG.
But, in The Fall, there was another, far more significant exit in August 1997.
CHAPTER 25
‘I’m proud that I survived three
years before the first punch-up.’
Simon John Wolstencroft was born on 19 January 1963 and occupied the Fall drum stool for 11 years. He joined in July 1986 for that year’s stellar Bend Sinister album. While he drummed away through classic mid period Fall albums like Extricate and Shift-Work and so-so ones like Middle Class Revolt, The Stone Roses rose and fell, and 1980s yuppie culture gave way to the bleary optimism of Cool Britannia. Through it all, the angular-faced sticksman from Altrincham kept on drumming, never doing interviews or taking the spotlight but acquiring enormous respect in the Fall fan base, who gave him the nickname ‘Funky Si’ for his nimble drum patterns and long service for the cause.
Wolstencroft had originally worked in Smith’s other favoured environment – a chip shop – but had somehow managed to avoid joining two of Manchester’s greatest musical exports of the period before joining The Fall.
He’d been in a band called Freak Party, whose line-up included Morrissey, Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke, who went on to become The Smiths. He’d also drummed with Ian Brown and John Squire of The Stone Roses in a band called The Patrol. Wolstencroft had somehow managed to sidestep two of the most charismatic and demanding rock taskmasters of all time only to land a job with Mark E Smith.
Contact is made through Marc Riley, who one evening slips me a cheery email: ‘Si Wooly wants to talk.’
A couple of nights later, Wolstencroft describes how he was recruited after Smith had dispensed with Karl Burns for the umpteenth time – apparently this time for having a disagreeable girlfriend. ‘Wooly’ was playing in a band called The Weeds and they’d supported The Fall. With Smith’s eye for talent running over his opening act as usual, the man who became Funky Si was offered a six-month contract that subsequently lasted 11 years.
Wooly loved being in The Fall. He recalls mostly happy times, wonderful music and says, unlike some members, he didn’t generally have to chase the money. ‘It was really good. I was never a fan, which he [Smith] liked. He basically said, “Keep the drums simple, cock”.’ Unlike Burns, Wolstencroft was never fined for hitting the tom tom but he recalls similar battles with the singer, which at least didn’t appear to have anything to do with creative tension.
‘We did actually have fights,’ he reveals. Smith would interfere with his drum kit ‘all the time … knocking over cymbals and so on’. One particular time wasn’t very funny. Wolstencroft’s mother had just died, and Smith – who a few years previously had lost his own father – suggested, ‘Oh, cheer up, it fuckin’ happens to all of us.’
‘And a cymbal stand went over,’ recalls Wolstencroft. He says they ended up fighting onstage. ‘Steve Hanley broke it up.’ But at least he can laugh at the memory now. ‘He didn’t sack me!’
In fact, as Smith hinted in Malmaison, Wolstencroft agrees a lot of Smith’s colourful onstage antics are part of the show. Some of the time, at least. ‘He was really into the showbiz side, microphone technique and so on,’ he says, suggesting that underneath everything Smith sees himself as a crowd-thrilling entertainer, like his beloved Elvis. Punching a microphone stand over, for instance, would ‘entertain’ the crowd. But other foibles are possibly to entertain himself. As Wolstencroft describes it, one of Smith’s odder stage preferences was for a single microphone hanging over the drum kit – much like they used in the early days of rock ’n’ roll. These days, with more advanced technology, engineers tend to use at least one mic for every drum, so Smith would invariably spend entire gigs knocking over or removing their microphones.
‘He really thought it sounded better his way,’ chortles Wolstencroft. ‘It didn’t, really.’ He agrees this may have been part of Smith’s psychology of keeping musicians ‘freaked out’, although he insists he never took much notice – the longer he was in the band the more the creative tension became ‘water off a duck’s back’.
Such complacency would normally incur Smith’s wrath. In fact, they became, unusually, ‘very close’, especially after Smith’s break-up with Brix, when the singer and the drummer would often hit the town.
He shares a colourful anecdote
from a tour in 1993. The band were in Vienna. On a previous date in Chicago, they’d all been given a ‘pentagram, some weird witchcraft thing’ by an American fan. Smith had gradually become convinced the objects were bringing evil on the band and instructed the musicians to dispose of them immediately. All complied, except Dave Bush (who was still in The Fall on keyboards at the time). One afternoon, Smith discovered the offending item and was not best pleased.
‘Of course, it became another reason to attack Dave,’ says Wooly, suggesting another angle to the odd Fall dynamic when he says some musicians – certainly Bush – seemed to perversely enjoy being badly treated by Smith.
Wolstencroft remembers the bad times of 1994 and 1995, when the leader’s mood swings were not so amusing. Smith was cancelling gigs through illness and it reached a point where promoters ‘wouldn’t touch him’.
‘Sometimes it would be really bad,’ he admits. ‘Mark would be like a time bomb waiting to go off. Somebody just had to say the wrong thing. It could have been totally innocent, but in Mark’s opinion he was a dickhead and shouldn’t be in the dressing room. If you’re an idiot, he’ll let you know about it.’ Thus, Wolstencroft insists he’s ‘rather proud’ he survived three years before he and Smith had their first punch-up. As for his 11-year tenure, he jokes he should have got a ‘carriage clock’.
So what went wrong?
Like Adrian Flanagan, ‘Funky Si’ seems to have viewed being in The Fall as primarily a job of work and says in 1997 the factory was experiencing problems with cash flow. Contradicting Dave Bush, he insists this began once The Fall left Phonogram and reveals the reason for their exit. As he tells it, the label had requested demo tapes for ‘the accountants’ to listen to, which went against the way The Fall had operated since the days of Kay Carroll.
