The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  Smith’s trusty antennae had served him once again. However, it was not her last experience of Mark E Smith. When Polythene subsequently played in America she found herself besieged by trainspotter Fall fans interrogating her about the spell in the group. One of them asked her to get something signed by the great man. She phoned him up and, where Steve Davies and others had failed, found herself in the rare position of being an ex-Fall musician allowed past Smith’s front door.

  She remembers a lot of whisky … and those blinds.

  ‘The blinds! They are amazing!’ she shrieks. ‘They’re like something your dad would have.’ Fall trainspotters might like to know that at the time the Smith household contained very little except for two couches and an old Bush stereo.

  ‘Really bizarre decor, as well,’ she smiles. ‘It looked like it hadn’t been decorated since the 1980s.’ Which it probably hadn’t. As for Kate Themen, there haven’t been too many changes in her life either. She’s still drumming with Polythene, although she’s currently finishing her PhD. She zips up her top for the last time as we stroll towards the station, her to go home and me to see yet another Fall gig.

  ‘He just handed me a guitar. It had only five strings.’

  Such was the chaos around The Fall at the time that at Themen’s third gig – at Reading Alleycat, the last of the ‘granny on bongos’ concerts – they actually recruited a guitarist for one song. His name was Stuart Estell. He plays ‘traditional English music’ – most recently in a now defunct band called The Village Wakes – and finding him is as simple as posting ‘Are you Stuart Estell?’ on the Fall forum. He sends me a photo – he is big, with cropped hair and a Roman nose – and emails me the story of one of the more peculiar Fall ‘careers’.

  An avid Fall fan – he knew Smith didn’t like this in musicians but didn’t let it put him off – he realised the group were in big trouble after America and offered his services on guitar or bass. ‘I fired off an email a day or two before the gig. I was chancing my arm, really.’

  He heard nothing back, but by a bizarre coincidence, which he doesn’t think could possibly be connected, he was at the gig when Smith suddenly reached down and handed him a guitar, while he was in the audience.

  ‘I was quicker to take it than anyone else who might have been within reach,’ he says. ‘It had only five strings on it though’. Even so, he thinks he did quite well.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ he says, explaining that it took a few minutes to work out what The Fall were playing. ‘I couldn’t hear the vocals too clearly so all I had to go on was a skeletal keyboard part and the drums. So I guessed it was “Lie Dream of a Casino Soul” and happily played that for a couple of verses before I heard MES sneering, “Yeah, yeah, industrial estate …” and switched songs accordingly!’ Which was certainly the first time in a couple of decades The Fall had played ‘Industrial Estate’ – or, at least, something resembling ‘Industrial Estate’.

  Estell didn’t continue in The Fall. There was no follow-up, no phone call. ‘If I’d had the call, I’d have said yes, without question. Who wouldn’t? But I think I’d have lasted about half an hour – Smith would probably have shouted at me for being a “bloody muso” and kicked me out!’ However, again demonstrating how small The Wonderful and Frightening World can be, he has subsequently collaborated with Julia Nagle.

  With Estell and Themen gone, The Fall were again temporarily a two-piece. But, typically, as two were popping out, another was popping in. Ships in the night – a situation that seems to be spreading to my home life.

  I do feel for Suzanne, and not just because of the outbreak of laryngitis. Sharing a house with a music journalist can’t be an easy task at the best of times. For years, she’s being slaving away at various nine-to-fives (or nine-to-eights) while I’ve been gallivanting off – usually at a moment’s notice – around the North, and occasionally the world, in pursuit of rock stars. It’s difficult to plan social occasions because I never know what I’m doing next week. It’s probably a bit like being married to a policeman or paramedic. However, I think the bigger problem is when I’m at home – which is most of the time, cluttering up the house with CDs and slaving away at a computer to meet yet another stressful deadline. I love my job, but this aspect is definitely not glamorous or exciting. Even her mother struggles to grasp exactly what I do for a living: she often asks, ‘Dave, when you say “reviewing an album”, what exactly do you mean?’

  But it’s been worse these last few months, much worse. The daily task of music journalism is having to battle for my time with the increasingly all-consuming mission. I sometimes wonder if Suzanne – the love of my life – thinks I’m having an affair. I’m never home and when I am I’m buried in my office doing secretive things. Then there’s the constant tiredness and moodswings; the mysterious phone numbers written on scraps of paper; phone calls at all hours and hurried disappearances, usually to Manchester. The hi-fi plays little else now apart from The Fall and on a couple of disturbing occasions I’ve even found myself addressing the dog in a pronounced Salfordian accent, much to Suzanne’s chagrin. I remember Steve Hanley’s words – ‘After a while in The Fall, you’re no longer normal’ – and wonder if they apply to trailing The Fall as well. Still, Suzanne is a Fall fan. We’ve been together since 30 June 1989. I think she’s just going to have to understand that things are going to be a bit weird until this is over. In the meantime, I have another appointment.

  ‘It was like an out of body experience, or being in a movie.’

  I meet Karen Leatham a few days later in another of Manchester’s trendy watering holes. This time it’s Dry Bar, once owned by Smith’s arch rivals Factory Records, and the Fall musician bounds up wearing a long black coat, woolly hat and a Star of David. Now in her late thirties, Karen Leatham is as giddy as Kate Themen and laughs a lot – which is probably an understandable reaction to spending a very brief stay in The Fall. As she tells it, Nagle knew her from her days playing in a band called Wonky Alice and invited her into The Fall as a ‘calming influence’.

  There’s a tiny snigger.

  She remembers how Smith was ‘getting anxious … about everything!’ However, unlike Tommy Crooks, who joined pre-Brownies in the ‘eye of the storm’, Leatham perhaps brought the calm after the storm with her. She described being ‘overwhelmed’ at first but that there was an almost Dunkirk-type spirit in the group, of ‘doing what we had to do’. Smith wasn’t around much at rehearsals, where the group would be left to themselves. Leatham suggests his view was that musicians should ‘sort the music out’, although he gave them instructions such as, ‘Do not play like Bon Jovi or Radiohead’.

  By this point, the ‘all-female Fall’ finally fractured as Smith recruited drummer Tom Head and a pair of guitarists – Adam Helal and Neville Wilding, the latter of whom Smith had described to me as being ‘at it with knuckle-dusters’ with him before gigs. Leatham remembers Wilding as a great guitarist, very confident and a ‘rock ’n’ roll character’, although she also describes a lot of violence around The Fall at this point. There is talk of van drivers being wanted by the police and unwanted visitors to the dressing room being despatched with kicks and punches – the violence didn’t involve the group, but people around them.

  ‘I’m not very rock ’n’ roll,’ she admits, ‘so it was surreal. It was like an out-of-body experience, or living in a movie.’ Which is why Leatham ultimately removed herself from the cast. After spending three months in The Fall, much of it working on the Marshall Suite album – an important comeback record containing ‘Touch Sensitive’, the Vauxhall advert song – things came to a head when bottles hit the stage in Bristol.

  ‘I just thought, “That’s it”. I got in the van and drove home.’ A decade on, Leatham – who now plays in Gabrielle’s Wish (who occasionally support The Fall) and works as a manager of a mental health project for elderly gentlemen (‘the stress levels are like The Fall’) – has no regrets.

  ‘I was 27 but a young 27,’ she says. �
��I’d handle it better now, but looking back it was a lot of fun. I’m glad I was involved with that album, my name’s on it. I’m indelibly Marked.’

  Isn’t everybody? Before we say our goodbyes, Leatham relates a tale involving a visitor to her house while she was in The Fall – founding guitarist Martin Bramah. ‘He came up to where I live and handed me a tape to pass to Mark … ideas for new songs. I asked Mark about it and he went, “Oh, I think I had it in my jacket, I appear to have dropped it down the toilet. Sorry about that.” I didn’t mention it again.’

  The exciting prospect of a second Bramah return was unfortunately not to be, but there were plenty of other candidates lining up to join the ranks. From here on in, life in and around The Fall would get even more out of control. Meanwhile, I take a break from The Fall and head off with Suzanne and Guinness for a much needed country break. Quite why we’re taking a country break when we live in the country is a moot point, but I suppose it’s just become part of our routine from when we lived on the outskirts of the city. For the first few days I can’t relax. A lorry driver dents my car before we even get there and I feel stressed out. But for the last two days of our week away, I do relax. We enjoy endless, sunny walks into the Peak District; a German tourist takes a photo of us together outside Sudbury Hall stately home. It’s just like old times. I feel a long way from Prestwich and the Fall obsession. Then we drive home, and I set about finding a drummer who was in The Fall for 35 minutes.

  ‘It was the sort of thing I’d dreamt of as a kid – the drummer being passed over the crowd’s shoulders.’

  I’ve started to wonder if any other employer in modern British business operates like The Fall. Searching around for comparisons only throws up the extremes of casual labour – strawberry pickers and the like – who can be recruited at an instant and don’t require an interview or audition. You’re just put out straight to work and probably last only a few days. But that kind of work is barely comparable to being around the ‘Rorschach Test’ of Mark E Smith.

  In many ways, The Fall operate just like the mills in Victorian England. Smith hates being called a ‘mill owner’ but in 2003 he told the Observer how his grandfather owned a mill and would stand outside the local prison waiting for recruits. ‘That’s kind of how I recruit musicians,’ he said. ‘It’s like, “You’re on bass, so get cracking”.’

  But another historical comparison is creeping into my Fall-addled consciousness. Impressment was a notorious form of recruitment used by the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although as early as 1664 it was legally sanctioned by Edward I. The practice gave birth to the sinister term ‘press gangs’ – whereby groups of soldiers would scour the streets for employees in a not dissimilar way to Smith’s psychic radar scanning the streets around Prestwich. To qualify for impressment into the navy, men had to be between 18 and 55, with little or no seafaring experience required. They would then be ‘moulded’ into sailors in the same way Smith ‘brainwashes’ The Fall. Although many press-ganged victims appealed to the Admiralty, they were usually unsuccessful. Tales persist of hapless men dragged off to sea without any warning. Similarly, if you think about it, to how people end up in The Fall.

  I’m back in Malmaison’s bar. This time, I’ve reverted to rock reviewing mode to cast a critical opinion over James Dean Bradfield, the Manic Street Preachers’ frontman, who is about to play his first solo gig in the Roadhouse over the road. It’s a side project he’d never be allowed in The Fall. The assembled gentlemen, ladies and illiterate scumbags of the press have assembled for a pre-gig meal and schmooze – the sort of thing rock journalists frown upon morally but otherwise lap up, as it’s one of the few occasions where we’re guaranteed a decent meal. Bradfield’s PR girl, Gillian Porter, is running through the list of his musicians, when she suddenly announces, ‘Drums, Nick Dewey’.

  I know that name. I tell her as much, and she asks, ‘You know him as manager of The Chemical Brothers?’

  No, I tell her. For me, the name Nick Dewey can only mean Nick Dewey Who Spent An Afternoon In The Fall.

  A couple of hours later, I’m in Bradfield’s dressing room sharing stories with a tall, gangly 30-something who has the most wonderfully startled grin. Which you would if you were him and had been involved in one of the most demented Fall entrances/exits of them all. Dewey was in The Fall for eight songs, the duration of their set on 27 August 1999 at the famous Reading Festival, which makes him the second shortest-serving Faller ever. After Stuart Estell. But Dewey’s story is even more bizarre.

  As the grinning man tells it, he was at the festival with The Chemical Brothers. Everyone was hanging out backstage when this ‘drunken bloke’ came in who turned out to be Neville Wilding, the guitarist who Smith had told me was ‘at it with knuckle-dusters’ with him at that very festival.

  According to Dewey, Wilding had been sent on a mission to find a drummer – not unlike a press ganger. The story Wilding was apparently putting about backstage – subsequently in doubt – was that The Fall were short of a sticksman after Tom Head had been abandoned at a motorway services station. Things were rather urgent, not least because they were due to play in front of a tent containing a thousand-odd people in an hour’s time. Dewey reports that Wilding asked all manner of people if they would drum for The Fall that day, including Justine Frischmann who was headlining with Britpop superstars Elastica. When all Wilding’s enquiries fell on deaf ears, he descended on Nick Dewey.

  Fatefully, for Dewey, one of The Chemical Brothers remembered that many years before he’d been in a ‘shoegazing’ pop band called Revolver and played drums. Wilding’s eyes lit up. ‘Brilliant,’ he slurred. ‘Come and play drums in The Fall!’

  The problem for Dewey wasn’t only that he didn’t know many Fall songs and really wasn’t prepared to play such a high-profile gig: ‘I said, “Look, I haven’t played drums for ten years”.’ To which Wilding apparently responded, ‘Don’t worry about that, we’re all pissed anyway’.

  Wilding duly switched into press gang mode.

  ‘He wouldn’t take no for an answer,’ says Dewey. ‘He said he’d have a look around [for another drummer] but I saw him go into the bogs. Ten minutes later, he came back saying, “Nah, no one else can do it”.’

  Far from feeling he’d been press ganged – which he had been, in effect – Dewey considered it the ‘sort of thing I’d dreamt of when I was a kid, the drummer being passed over someone’s shoulders’.

  Moments later, Dewey found himself being led onto a tour bus with blacked-out windows. Mark E Smith was on one of the tour bus benches, shirt off, ‘passed out’.

  ‘They’d obviously had a skinful,’ roars Dewey, describing how Wilding tried to wake up Smith and couldn’t rouse him, so punched him in the face. After two or three blows, Smith finally woke up to be informed by Wilding, ‘Mark, this is Nick. He’s going to be playing drums for us!’

  Dewey describes how Smith put his face right up to his own and said, ‘Right, let’s have a look at you, cock!’ while Dewey tried his best not to look like a prisoner-of-war about to face a firing squad.

  Things became even more unreal when Wilding started to show him the songs, and Smith tried to stop him. ‘They started fighting over the guitar,’ says Dewey. Eventually, Smith got Dewey drumming on a guitar case with the instruction, ‘No, don’t look at him [Wilding], that’s the only way you’ll learn.’

  Shortly afterwards, Dewey found himself setting up an unfamiliar drum kit in front of the Reading crowd and waiting for The Fall, who appeared ‘at the very last second’ before they were due onstage.

  ‘They’d had another fight,’ remembers the reluctant drummer. ‘Mark E Smith’s nose was cut open with blood everywhere. I said, “Are we going on, then?” and they ignored me. I grabbed the guitarist and said, “Tell me when the songs start and finish”.

  ‘He said, “Don’t worry, mate. I’ll be stood right next to you”.’ Dewey then recalls Wilding immediately disappearing to the other s
ide of the stage. Unbeknown to Smith, though, Dewey transgressed the usual requirements – he was a Fall fan. He had ‘tons’ of the records. Sadly, this proved irrelevant because, as ever with The Fall, virtually all the set was made up of new material.

  ‘I didn’t know a single song,’ he laughs. ‘It was a mental experience. I was the last to end every song because obviously no one told me!’ Smith spent much of the set fiddling with the keyboards and amplifiers, occasionally turning his attention to Dewey’s drum kit. But the gig was a success, in a way, even if those who were there remember an ‘excellent shambles’. The day-long Faller remembers it as ‘an amazing, amazing experience’ and something he relishes telling family and pals about to this day.

  A year or so later, a mate of Dewey’s bumped into Smith at a party, where the Fall leader had brushed it off saying, ‘Yeah, I remember him. Quiet bloke. Didn’t say much.’

  Dewey is in hysterics. ‘He’s a genius!’ he raves of Smith, still not knowing how he managed to be ‘moulded’ into pulling that gig off but realising he had a unique encounter with ‘one of the great British characters’.

  ‘He reminds me of Bob Dylan,’ he says. ‘You know he’s in control, but his band members haven’t a clue what song’s coming next and are just waiting for that nod.’ Dewey didn’t get that nod again – Tom Head managed to get back for the festival’s second leg at Leeds and The Fall’s reluctant stickman returned to managing The Chemical Brothers, basking in the knowledge he would forever hold a special, if slightly unsteady, place among The Fallen. If Smith can take a musician in such circumstances and make him into a member of The Fall, surely he can do the trick with anyone? Maybe he could even do it with me.