The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  ‘Mark didn’t work like that so he basically said, “Oh, fuck it”, and they refused to renew the contract,’ he says. After the Top 10 Infotainment Scan in 1993, Fall albums were no longer faring as well, and finances suffered. Wolstencroft also expands on Brix’s suggestion that Smith was in poor health at the time and had suffered epileptic-type fits.

  ‘There were a couple when I was with the band. I don’t know if it was connected with the drink. He always liked a drink, Mark, but I just thought it was catching up with him. His vocals were getting worse, and I resigned in the end,’ he explains, admitting he put his young family first. He still regrets that, after so many great years, he exited on a ‘sour note’.

  After leaving The Fall, ‘Funky Si’ added his funk to ex-Stone Roses’ Ian Brown, although since then drumming work has been harder to come by and he’s had to find other gainful employment, including driving a taxi. Oddly enough, not too long ago he ran into Smith, who was getting out of a taxi – not his own.

  ‘He gave me a big hug,’ he muses. Although he’s been out of the Fall loop for some time, ‘Funky Si’ reveals he too has recently found himself drawn back to their gigs and is amazed how Smith has turned it around again. He acknowledges the Fall experience changed him and still feels the strange, unearthly pull. He’d even consider going back – ‘I’d give it a go!’

  ‘It did affect me,’ he concludes. ‘It wasn’t really my kind of music, I was more into Motown and soul, but he [Smith] taught me to play in a minimal style. But generally I learned so much about people and life, just listening to him.’ As with Adrian Flanagan, Wolstencroft seems to have gained an ‘education’ in The Fall.

  He considers himself a good judge of character now – having seen a lot of them, some more extreme than most – which he wasn’t before.

  ‘I’ve developed a no-bullshit attitude,’ he affirms. ‘The thing I most admire about Mark is that he’s got a way of looking at situations that’s different from anyone and he’s brought that into music.’

  In 1997, with Wolstencroft out of the picture, Smith turned again to Karl Burns for what would be, fatefully, the last time. The next line-up – Burns, Steve Hanley, Edinburgh man Tommy Crooks and keyboardist Julia Nagle – would explode in pieces in New York.

  CHAPTER 26

  ‘He’d knock on the windows or sing through

  the letter-box!’

  I’ve talked to Tommy Crooks, Steve Hanley and American fans, but I want to know more about the New York punch-up and, in particular, the circumstances which led Smith to jail. So, I track down Julia Nagle, who, reverting to her maiden name, is now called Julia Adamson and runs a publishing company, Invisible Girl. Nagle/Adamson is every bit the music industry professional. She is very approachable and friendly, but wary: although we communicate a lot she prefers interviews to be conducted via email – presumably so she can have a written record – and then retracts it all, but thankfully reconsiders. A very tough cookie to deal with: but after all, she has been in The Fall.

  What I know about Nagle is this: she was born on 30 September 1960 in Ontario, Canada. Her family moved to Manchester when she was a child. She was a member of the St Winifred’s School Choir, who scored a British Number 1 with ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’, although Nagle wasn’t on the single. Her first (punk) band were called Blackout, although she made a musical connection of a different kind when she married Chris Nagle – a producer whose studio career took off when he engineered Joy Division alongside the legendary producer Martin Hannett – and had a child, Basil. Basil provides backing vocals on The Fall’s 1998 single, ‘Masquerade’. After forming the band What? Noise and subsequently splitting with her husband, Nagle spent 1995 to 2001 in The Fall and co-wrote ‘Touch Sensitive’, the ridiculously catchy single used in the Vauxhall Corsa advert.

  Uniquely, it would seem, Nagle joined The Fall after taking the trouble to send a CV to the group’s office/label at Cog Sinister, but contradicts Dave Bush’s account that she effectively stole his job.

  ‘I wasn’t aware Dave felt like that,’ she insists, pointing out that, yes, she ‘may’ have mentioned Bush being disillusioned, but only after she had joined. Whatever the ins and outs, Nagle soon accustomed herself to The Fall’s curious but effective working methods. She talks of Smith as ‘brilliant’, ‘creative’, ‘shrewd’ and a ‘leader and employer’, observing that brilliance and being difficult often go hand-in-hand.

  Like many Fall recruits, she was dropped in at the deep end, playing her first gig on keyboards in front of 2,000 people in London. Although she was nervous, she confesses Brix (who was in her second spell) later told her if Smith hadn’t taken her to task on anything, she was doing fine. She found the whole experience ‘thrilling’ – although was suffering with nerves enough to be sick on the bus as they drove back up to Prestwich.

  She also became used to Smith’s fabled amp-fiddling. Brix had told her how she loved it when Smith put a microphone to her amp, because this meant she was ‘super-amplified’. But Nagle mostly found it funny. ‘Occasionally, he’d drop instruments to the floor,’ she adds, ‘which didn’t impress me, then I’d just walk off.’ She soon realised these shenanigans were intrinsic to The Fall, along with various examples of Smith’s unusual, psychological approach to musicians, such as instructing Simon Wolstencroft to play drums while standing on the drum stool.

  ‘I didn’t know what to make of it, as I was new,’ she says, ‘but I wouldn’t put up with it. That sort of thing doesn’t make me “perform”. It just upsets me.’

  She reveals that in her early days Smith tried to show her how to play guitar: ‘He was pulling it aggressively. I just unbuckled the strap and let him keep it.’ However, she soon understood the logic. ‘He hates low-slung guitars because he thinks it looks like you’re playing your sex organs and, when I thought about it, he’s right.’ Ever since, she’s kept the instrument at hip height.

  Other curious aspects of The Fall at the time included accommodation – one night they might find themselves staying at a posh Hilton, the next a Brighton bed-and-breakfast where the plumbing kept ‘gurgling’ all night.

  Although it would be years before she’d share a room with Smith, Nagle’s partnership with the leader had begun a decade earlier, when she’d engineered the Bend Sinister album. She barely remembers him in the studio and hardly made eye contact. Nevertheless, once she was in the group, something developed.

  Almost a decade on, Nagle doesn’t seem happy about the way history and biographies have cast her as ‘Mark Smith’s girlfriend’. She’s particularly irked about the various enquiries she still fields from disturbed Fall fans asking about Mark E Smith. ‘I’ve had a bloke ask me, “What’s Mark’s penis like?” Another said he wanted to “take me to bed and pretend to be Mark E Smith”!’

  She insists they were an item for only eight weeks – she remembers she was very poorly afterwards but doesn’t elaborate or apportion any blame. She does describe the process by which The Fall’s latest office romance developed and gives some insight into Smith’s apparent red-hot sex appeal. The appeal, it appears, is the same as it is to Fall fans – apart from those interested in the details of his penis. His ‘voice and lyrics’. She witnessed the ‘groupie experience’ on tour, where ‘practically all’ the women wanted to ‘shag the pop star’, although she insists Smith should not be seen as some sort of Casanova, commenting that two divorces are difficult to deal with.

  She should know. When Nagle joined The Fall, she was recovering from her own split from Chris Nagle and making her son a priority, not looking for a relationship. But she reveals how her resolve started to weaken once she started receiving Smith’s voice and lyrics through unfamiliar means.

  Apparently, the Fall boss would turn up at her house – often late at night – and perform an unlikely serenade. ‘He’d knock on the windows or sing through the letter-box,’ she recalls. Eventually, Smith started knocking on Basil’s window and she let him in to avoid dist
urbing the boy’s sleep or, indeed, the neighbours’.

  ‘He was seducing me, as well as telling a few fibs about his fiancée [Lucy Rimmer] moving out …’ she says. Nagle felt ‘unsure, but flattered’. Although they didn’t date for very long, Nagle got close enough to throw a different light on Smith’s drinking. She doesn’t think Smith is an alcoholic at all. According to Nagle, The Fall rarely drank before gigs and insists she saw him go ‘quite a few’ days without drinking. She believes Smith uses alcohol – as fuel for conjuring up ‘Lowry-esque’ observations – rather than alcohol using him. Something else she is also keen to emphasise is that by the time of the fateful tour of America, they were again just ‘colleagues’.

  Nagle confirms Steve Hanley’s portrayal of the backdrop to the 1998 tour being financial trouble. ‘Skint’, as she puts it. One of the problems was the group were in dispute with a label who she says owed her alone £12,000. But the biggest difficulty was the arrival of an unexpected VAT bill which meant Smith and Steve Hanley were on the brink of having their houses repossessed. ‘They were quite desperate – under tremendous strain – and it was sad to witness.’

  As we know, the strain and desperation erupted onstage, but I wasn’t clear about how the scuffling had continued to the hotel.

  ‘It was a bonkers time. The incident was distorted, and made out to be about Mark and myself, but there was a lot more to it.’ The situation has often been portrayed as domestic violence, however, Nagle insists not only were her and Smith not ‘together’, but it was the hotel staff – not her – who called the police.

  ‘Mark had been acting the goat all night,’ she explains. ‘I was in the room when they arrived, and they said, “Did he hit you?” When I said, “Yes”, they said, “You should charge him if he has hit you.” I said, “Okay”, and they had reason to remove him without further ado.’

  It’s worth mentioning that Smith didn’t target Nagle – according to her, he was lashing out angrily in all directions and it was unfortunate she was in the way. He could just have easily belted a nearby standard lamp or, indeed, the policeman.

  Nagle suggests the whole thing – which still clearly troubles Smith when it is brought up in interviews, as it often is – was ‘blown out of perspective’. After spending time in the cells – during which time he acquired a lawyer, a new suit and a haircut – Smith played on, following a restraining order aimed at keeping him from aggressive contact with Nagle which she says ‘was meant as a warning to him, from which he has learned’.

  In fact, she stayed loyal for another three years, until 2001, when she says she deliberately ‘priced herself out’ of being in The Fall because she needed a break and to spend time with her son. After the New York implosion, the other members fled to England – according to Nagle, taking the tour proceeds with them. When I put this to Steve Hanley he responds, ‘We were only ever going to break even on that tour anyway … there weren’t really any “takings” to take! I’m not saying this was anyone else’s fault but mine, by the way.’ It’s significant that Nagle, who remains proud and loved being in The Fall, stood the boss’s bail.

  But, in 1998, for the first time in his career, Smith was on the brink of losing everything – his house and his group. It wasn’t quite ‘Me and yer granny on bongos’ but The Fall were temporarily down to a two-piece. Smith’s response – urged along by Nagle – was to perhaps sheepishly return to his feminist roots and unleash the intriguing prospect of an all-female Fall. I want to ask Nagle more about this period – in fact, lots more in general – but she proves increasingly elusive. She doesn’t show up for one meeting – at a Fall gig, no less – but texts the next day to say things had become rather fuzzy after a friend kept giving her whisky. Other proposed get-togethers come to nothing and – partly because I don’t want to push it or fall out, partly because emails go unanswered – communication fizzles out. Then again, this is not the only area in which I’m experiencing communication problems.

  There’s been an argument at home. Like a lot of arguments, I’m not really sure how it started, I just know Suzanne and I haven’t spoken for a few days. I can remember this happening before in our years together but never for this long. The situation is further complicated by Suzanne having a really heavy cold and not even speaking to the dog. Almost immediately after stopping talking to me, she literally loses her voice. I wonder what to do and consider popping her autographed copy of Look, Know on the mantelpiece to cheer her up, but suspect it might not go down well with all the time I’ve been devoting to The Fall. In the end I buy a packet of Lemsip and place it by her side. The ice is broken but it’s an uneasy peace. In the meantime, I’m shooting off over the Pennines once again.

  CHAPTER 27

  ‘So what do you do?

  Are you in a group?’

  The choice of drummer to replace Karl Burns was Kate Themen, a Mancunian whom, typically, Smith had already spotted, before New York. He was in the audience when Themen’s band, Polythene, played at Manchester University and he may already have been considering her for his ‘subs’ bench’. When the band gathered together in a city centre bar, Themen found herself and colleagues being given a ‘group hug’ by the passing Faller. Shortly after it all going off at Brownies, Themen got the call.

  ‘I was basically asked if I’d do some gigs,’ she recalls as we sit in drizzle outside Manchester’s Atlas Bar. The female drummer who was handed the gigantic task of filling Burns’ not inconsiderably-sized Doc Martens and place in Fall legend is a tiny, bubbly character with curly hair, distinctive teeth and a habit of unzipping and zipping her brown tracksuit as she talks, which may or may not suggest a nervous or at least excitable disposition. She zips and unzips it faster as she recalls ‘the most bizarre phone call ever’, then a typically surreal rehearsal as Smith demonstrated the drumbeat to ‘Hip Priest’ by tapping it out with a Biro.

  Very shortly afterwards, the kid with the nervous zipping habit found herself delicately taking the stage in Camden as part of a three-piece miniature Fall, alongside Smith and Julia Nagle. She remembers the moment Smith walked onstage behind her kit as the one where her brain went ‘Zap!’ and she suddenly realised she was playing in a British institution. Themen’s nerves weren’t helped by not being able to hear anything onstage. The sound system was so bad she just had to hit the drums in some sort of time and hope for the best.

  ‘I started playing one song and he [Smith] obviously decided at the last minute not to play it ’cause he walked up and slapped his hand down on my drumsticks,’ she remembers, admitting she’s never dared listen to the gig again on the freely available bootlegs. A further problem was the audience – having paid to see The Fall, they were not overly impressed with what had gone on in New York and the fact that their favourite band were suddenly down to a haphazard trio. Without warning, and with echoes of the very early Fall gigs when the ‘Northern white crap that talks back’ took on hostile audiences in WMCs, the audience turned against this notso-Mighty Fall.

  ‘I got pelted with cans,’ remembers Themen. ‘All sorts of stuff was coming over, landing on the drum kit. Something, a bottle, I think, was headed straight for my head, but luckily it hit the cymbal at the last moment. I didn’t really understand the reasons. I’d had half an hour’s practice in front of people who’d paid. It wasn’t my fault what happened in America.’

  Although Smith is no doubt aware such episodes fuel the Fall myth, Themen remembers his mood as being downbeat, perhaps one of those moments when – as he’d suggested in Malmaison – he really thought the game was up. Themen says he was unhappy with the gigs, so unhappy – and broke – that, as Nagle suggested, post-gig drinking was limited to a ‘few beers’ at the second gig following ‘some sort of a do with Julia’.

  Themen had a further insight into the odd band she’d joined when Smith locked her in the dressing room and refused to let her out. Shortly before her third performance, at Reading, he shoved a wad of cash into her hand as the mini-Fall took the stage
.

  ‘About two grand or something,’ she smiles. ‘I wouldn’t have dared steal any of it. So, there I was, playing with this enormous wad in my pocket and wondering what on earth would happen next!’

  At this delicate point in their history, life around The Fall sounds more like a Carry On film than a legendary rock group.

  Themen remembers Smith moaning at the sound man that the drums sounded like something ‘made by [toy manufacturers] Chad Valley’. She relates how The Fall were in such chaos they had to use Polythene’s rehearsal room and travel to gigs by phoning a man who lived up the road and had a minibus.

  ‘And he was two hours late,’ she grins. ‘Three of us piled in this minibus with all the gear, we paid him in cash and rang him up later to fetch us back. I remember the driver said, “So what do you do? Are you in a group?” And Mark E Smith – without a hint of irony – said, “Yeah, we’re called The Fall”.’

  On the bus, she remembers Smith catching her reading New Left Review and erupting with scathing laughter. ‘He said, “I vote Tory”.’ To this day, she has no idea if he was joking – which must have first Fall drummer Dave/Steve, author of rejected Fall song ‘Landslide Victory’, spinning in his grave.

  Despite the tomfoolery, Themen didn’t last longer than three gigs, making her reign behind The Fall drum kit one of the shortest ever – if not as brief as Nick Dewey who lasted 45 minutes in 1999 (and who I’ve yet to find). Although Julia Nagle raves about Themen’s drumming, the girl herself suggests she was growing ‘more reticent’ with each gig. And then Smith stopped phoning.

  ‘I don’t know if I could deal with being in The Fall,’ she admits, candidly and reasonably enough. She suddenly looks wistful, toying with her orange juice and pondering what might have been. ‘I think he knew that, even though it was unspoken.’