The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  I try to ask Tom Head about it but he seems to have disappeared. As usual, there is a further complication. Head isn’t usually a drummer at all, but an actor who has appeared in Coronation Street and comedy horror series The League of Gentlemen, one of the few examples of art that is as surreal as The Fall. When acting, Head goes by the name of Thomas Patrick Murphy and I eventually track down his agent in Manchester. Alas, the agent says he hasn’t been in touch with him for a long time. The agent kindly pops a letter through Murphy/Head’s door, but neither of us hear from him.

  CHAPTER 28

  ‘It was like spontaneous combustion.’

  I’d like to find out a bit more about the incident at Reading and run down Neville Wilding – the brother of boxer Spencer who lives in Prestatyn – to a street in London. Unfortunately, his neighbour says Wilding is ‘in Guadalajara’. Fortunately, and because I am now knee-deep in The Wonderful and Frightening World, Wilding’s neighbour was also in The Fall.

  Adam Helal was the thirty-fifth disciple, a guitarist from December 1998 to February 2001, who also played at Reading. He says the Nick Dewey experience was one of his own most surreal experiences while in The Fall. ‘He was very brave,’ he says. ‘“This one goes like this.” “This one goes like that.” “Now play it.” He was great!’

  Helal’s tenure in the group was hardly short of mad events – Reading was only one. He remembers bumping into his old English teacher, Charlie, at a gig in Cambridge and discovering he had been Smith’s best man at his last three weddings.

  There were jaunts like playing the piano in the Rover’s Return at a Coronation Street party, or the gig in Holland where Smith did ‘his Tasmanian Devil impression, there were amps and keyboards flying over’. It seems that after wreaking onstage destruction, Smith managed to tie himself up with whatever leads were left, before even reaching the first chorus.

  Helal gives me another glimpse into Mad Mark’s (as the neighbours had called him) peculiar life in Prestwich. Smith’s house is apparently nicknamed The Vortex: ‘Because once you go in, you’ll be lucky to get out within five days’.

  Like Dave Bush’s experience before him, Adam Helal seems to have found being in The Fall a lot of fun. His route in was slightly different from the usual bumps, chance encounters and sudden career shifts from the road crew, but not that much. He was in a band with Wilding, and their soundman also took care of The Fall. One night, Wilding asked if he wanted to play a gig with The Fall … at the 3,000-capacity London Astoria. In 24 hours’ time.

  ‘Before I could think, the word “yes” fell out of my mouth,’ he remembers. One sleepless night later, he found himself, like Dewey, playing unfamiliar songs in front of thousands of people. Helal had no idea why he’d been recruited but soon found himself being moulded. As he puts it, Smith has a ‘PhD in manipulation’ and being in The Fall could be like ‘spontaneous combustion’.

  ‘Brilliant, hilarious, elevating, tumultuous and shit’ is how he describes the Fall experience, adding, ‘I know most band members will probably identify with this but there’s nothing so drastic as being in The Fall.’

  Because Helal was, like Simon Rogers, based 200 miles from Prestwich, he often found himself without Fall transport. There were times when he found himself, as a member of one of the country’s major bands, having to hitchhike to their gigs in the same way my pals and I used to follow The Fall.

  ‘Always a laugh,’ he insists. The gigs themselves could be anywhere – churches, sweatboxes, festivals. Fall touring schedules never seemed to follow normal routes and he describes finding himself playing venues as disparate as London’s respected Royal Festival Hall and a festival in a valley in Portugal which was on fire while the bands were playing.

  Helal confirms that, amidst all the chaos of this period, creative freedom and spontaneity in the music were stronger than ever. One night in Southend, after a couple of weeks spent ‘getting to know each other’ had spawned various situations, Smith came up with the lyrics for a track called ‘Ketamine Sun’ off the top of his head in minutes, by rapping about his latest band mates and giving them names like ‘Spliffhead’ and ‘Smart ass at the computer’ (Julia Nagle). In the song, Smith tells about a drug addict who stole a television and nailed it to a jeweller’s bench. Moments later, he’s telling someone that their mother’s moustache needs fixing and raging against training shoe culture on the grounds that someone wearing Adidas needs to visit a cobblers four times a month. Fantastic.

  Predictably, Helal’s time in The Fall came to a halt almost as abruptly as Nick Dewey’s. It’s widely believed Helal and Wilding were sacked for refusing to play, over a royalty dispute that ended in litigation. Helal says that there was a dispute, but with a record label, not with Smith or The Fall.

  ‘We obviously weren’t happy about that but I think litigation is a slightly over-imaginative interpretation,’ he says. In fact, like many of The Fallen, Helal looks back largely without anger: he had a great time, the experience taught him to be more creative.

  Since leaving The Fall, he’s busied himself producing an album for Gigibaker, made music for adverts and PlayStation, and done sound design for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He would never rule out returning to The Fall. He won’t confirm Smith’s story about phoning Wilding every month but reveals there has been ‘sporadic’ contact with the singer ‘but no gigs so far’. With all this chaos going on, it’s a wonder they made any music, but the two albums by the Helal-Wilding line-up were cracking returns to form. 1999’s The Marshall Suite – containing ‘Touch Sensitive’ – and the following year’s ridiculously innovative The Unutterable suggest ‘creative tension’ had paid off. A few weeks after speaking to Helal, I drop him a line to see if Wilding has returned. But the email address bounces back.

  Maybe Adam Helal’s now ‘in Guadalajara’ too.

  CHAPTER 29

  ‘I’m becoming a travelling minstrel.’

  The list of remaining Fallen is growing ever shorter, but I’m still drawing a blank with Karl Burns. It’s rather worrying. How can someone apparently so colourful simply disappear? Worrying about Burns doesn’t just keep me up some nights but creeps into my days when I least expect it. One afternoon in Bowden, near Altrincham in Cheshire, I’m interviewing Johnny Marr from The Smiths when we get onto The Fall. It turns out the ‘greatest guitarist of his generation’ – as Marr is often called – is a Fall fan too. We talk about Fall guitarists we have loved – he is a particular fan of Craig Scanlon – and gigs we have seen. Marr reveals he used to follow The Fall almost as much as I did. Who would have ever thought the twangy Smiths’ early singles or the darker terrain of later albums The Queen Is Dead and Strangeways, Here We Come could – somewhere in there – bear the DNA of The Fall?

  Karl Burns crops up, because Marr is as mystified as I am. It transpires Marr knew Burns quite well, before The Smiths, when Marr worked in the clothes shop run by Smiths manager Joe Moss. Burns was an erratic customer, obviously before the days when he toured America armed only with a pair of underpants.

  ‘I sold him a leather jacket from the shop, probably about ’81, ’82,’ Marr says. ‘When I bumped into him ten years later he was still wearing that jacket.’ I suppose the moral is: find the jacket, find the man.

  I go home and decide to have another go at being Fallen Private Eye. Buried deep in an old Directory of Enquiries for Manchester is an address for one ‘Karl E Burns’. It’s worth a shot.

  The address is in a rundown estate in Ancoats, just off the Oldham Road, which stretches from the city centre to Middleton and Failsworth. Because my Punto blew up on one of my many journeys to find The Fall, I’ve just invested in a new car – a green MG – that sparkles as I creep through the streets. Lovely car, but the last thing you want to be driving in an area like this, because it sticks out like a classical guitarist in The Fall.

  The streets are strewn with litter. Half the houses are boarded up. I’m travelling at around five miles per hour be
cause I’m struggling to find the street and feel like a kerb-crawler. And I’m attracting attention. Lots of attention. Some of it comes from the disturbingly young but worldly-looking kids who ride BMX bikes on the pavements – the traditional form of courier used by Manchester’s drug gangs. But most comes from the police, who I notice in the rear-view mirror have taken up a similar pace directly behind my car. They follow me at five miles per hour and have just started to gaze even more intently when I decide to cut my losses and head off. If Karl Burns is there, he is safe from me. For now.

  I haven’t yet located Burns, but I have a phone number for another of the disappeared – Brian Fanning, the thirty-ninth person to join The Fall and a guitarist from 2001.

  He joined shortly after Jim Watt, who lives in the same street – being neighbours and being in The Fall isn’t confined to Helal and Wilding. I’ve been told Fanning is ‘a bit eccentric’ and under no circumstances must I phone before 2 p.m. What happens before then? Is he a vampire? Does he turn into a pumpkin?

  ‘The last few days, I’ve been up all night jamming,’ he mumbles, bang on 2.03 p. m., sounding as if he’s been up for years rather than hours. He’s not rehearsing for The Fall. He’s planning a new career: ‘I’m becoming a travelling minstrel.’

  Fanning’s in his early forties, which makes him older than most Fallers and almost of Smith’s generation, something the singer has otherwise frowned upon since losing Karl Burns and Steve Hanley.

  Fanning does not claim to be particularly good on guitar. He was working for The Fall as a guitar technician when he found himself being asked to do a gig in Greece. The gig never took place because a storm blew the stage down. But a week later, he made his debut with The Fall at a gathering of Hells Angels in Warwickshire known as The Bulldog Bash (the backdrop of an infamous biker shooting on the M40 in 2007). ‘The Fall are very popular with Hells Angels,’ he says.

  Fanning found The Fall’s relentless touring schedule particularly difficult. It wasn’t just that the dates were Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Dublin, Belfast and Liverpool within his first week, but they were playing them in that order, which makes no logistical sense. When I’d asked Smith about The Fall’s seemingly crazy schedules in Malmaison, he blamed a ‘conspiracy’.

  ‘I said to one of them [tour organisers], “What do you do, just get the fuckin’ darts out and throw them at a map of Britain?” She said, “It’s very co-ordinated, actually.” I was a bit bad-mannered but I said, “Your dad wasn’t a British army officer, was he?”’

  Smith then adopted a perfect English upper-class female voice. ‘“Yes, he was!”’ he howled. ‘It’s funny, the things you learn about people. It was a shot in the dark.’

  But as we can testify, Mark Smith knows.

  Brian Fanning tells me that after the frenetic jaunt round England the group went to Belgium, Germany and Holland – all within a few days. The situation was further complicated by Smith having his leg in plaster following the tumble that landed him in hospital, and Fanning remembers putting the legend of British music in a cart and wheeling him to the stage.

  He felt honoured, though, to be of service. Like fellow local Adrian Flanagan, Fanning grew up in awe of Smith and, like Eric the Ferret, says the more he worked alongside Smith, the more he recognised him as a genius – even though he seems unsure what that genius is.

  He remembers arriving at rehearsals to be confronted with ‘demented’ instructions, but which seemed to work every time. Once, when they were recording a song called ‘Gotta See Jane’ – on the 2001 album Are You Are Missing Winner – Smith suddenly started shouting at the drummer, Spencer Birtwistle, that the music was all wrong, even though Fanning insists it sounded perfectly all right. Smith suggested a ten-minute break, during which Birtwistle started playing a different beat. Fanning picked up the bass and played along. Then Smith started rapping over the top – ‘Spencer is a bastardo, he needs to go back to Rusholme’ – before going on to sing the same song as before over the completely new rhythm.

  ‘And it was perfect,’ insists Fanning. ‘Nobody else would do that, but that’s the way his mind works.’ Perhaps it wasn’t all too perfect though. After two superb albums in The Marshall Suite and The Unutterable, Are You Are Missing Winner was the worst Fall album in years. Well, I thought that when I first heard it in 2001. But a remastered version in 2006 banished the sound quality problems of the original and revealed itself as a fine but flawed return to rockabilly.

  If everything was so rosy, why did the budding minstrel leave after just three months?

  According to Fanning, it wasn’t anything to do with problems with the boss. Yes, Smith was ‘volatile’, but he understands that. ‘People think he’s a miserable bastard, but he’s not,’ he contests. ‘He’s just very good at winding people up. Anyone who knows Mark’s temperament knows he can be explosive. But anyone with that artistic nature is entitled to be awkward.’ He’s another to suggest the hair-raising events are ‘just part of the show’. He says it was the shows that were the problem – there were too many of them and, almost immediately after he joined, being in The Fall was wearing him out. ‘It was a good laugh when we weren’t getting on everyone else’s nerves,’ he says, ‘but it simply got too much.’

  Call yourselves bloody professionals?

  For the apprentice travelling minstrel, The Fall ‘weren’t professional enough’. ‘We were all a bit tired and emotional, pissed really,’ he continues, explaining that after three weeks in Europe he didn’t want to be around ‘these people’.

  ‘I still go for a pint with Mark, but I wouldn’t go back,’ he declares, unusually in both aspects. ‘You hear these stories about Mark, but he’s always been great with me. We’re both Pisces, maybe that’s why we get on.’

  Fanning reveals he was one of the people who interviewed Smith for the FC United fanzine, and thus indirectly responsible for postponing my interview with Smith, by taking him to the pub.

  He signs off with an ominous warning for the current line-up: ‘He won’t keep this line-up for too long. Most of them get sacked, left in motorway caffs or whatever. As soon as he detects a lack of freshness, they’ll be gone.’

  When I put this opinion to current guitarist Ben Pritchard, he suggests Fanning was fired himself – for banging on The Fall’s hotel room doors.

  CHAPTER 30

  ‘Come on, cock, you can do it. We’ll have a

  rehearsal before you go on.’

  Jim Watts lives on the same road as his ‘eccentric’ neighbour but is another kettle of cuttlefish entirely – a straight-up chap, large of frame and with a dusting of facial hair. He seems too normal, far too normal to have ever been in The Fall. Perhaps Smith suspected this and set about changing his condition.

  As part of the boot camp process, Watts was required to make sure the Fall backdrop was correctly positioned onstage – an intricate process that often involved moving it several millimetres while being ‘colourfully’ shouted at by the leader.

  Like an army private, he was also given the duties of retrieving the group’s intro music from the sound desk after gigs: ‘I kinda fell out with Mark because I kept losing it,’ he says. ‘The thing is, it wasn’t a proper intro. It was just a looped piece of music. At some gigs it must’ve gone on for hours.’

  Watts’ entrance into the group was a classic Fall baptism of fire.

  In 2001, he was in a band called Trigger Happy with Dave Milner and Ed Blaney, who it turns out also lives in the same road as Watts and Fanning. Trigger Happy were meant to support The Fall. However, in the February following the Helal-Wilding meltdown, Trigger Happy were suddenly subsumed into The Fall. Watts remembers his induction – which has echoes of Nick Dewey’s – as ‘one of the most intense things I’ve done in my life’. ‘It was a big crowd in Ireland. They [The Fall] hadn’t rehearsed or anything. The night before I was packing my stuff – the first time I’d ever been abroad – and suddenly I get a call [from Blaney] saying, “You’re playing bass
in The Fall”.’

  Like Dewey, Watts protested, pointing out that he only knew four Fall songs, but he was similarly press ganged with the instructions, ‘Nobody else can do it’.

  It was 11.30 at night. The ferry taking The Fall to Eire was due to leave at six the following morning. Watts protested so much Smith even rang him up himself. ‘Come on, cock, you can do it,’ he told him, entering Cloughie mode. ‘You’ll pick it up. We’ll have a rehearsal before you go on.’ Inevitably, the promised rehearsal amounted to little more than ‘a short strum’. The situation was made more complicated because Ben Pritchard – another recent recruit – had only rehearsed four songs too.

  ‘We sort of struggled through seven or eight songs, but it was a big crowd and was very intimidating,’ recalls Watts. ‘There were about 800 people who’d all paid £20. After eight songs we went off, but people were going, “You’ve got to go back on!”’

  He reveals that in the end Smith was literally shouting out titles and the band were making it up as they went along. ‘We’d be going, “Uh? How does that go?” and he’d go, “It sounds like [Led Zeppelin’s] ‘Kashmir’ …” I’ve done gigs before where things have gone wrong but to actually play for an hour where you’ve no idea what you’re playing is trial by fire!’

  To add insult to mental injury, he came offstage to be confronted by seasoned Fall fans asking, ‘So, do you think you’re as good as Steve Hanley?’

  According to Watts, Ben Pritchard had joined the group by being on the subs’ bench, and Smith had recruited him as ‘additional guitarist’ alongside Neville Wilding with a view to replacing the knuckle-duster man.

  ‘Sometimes people get this idea that he [Smith] sacks people willy-nilly … which he does!’ laughs Watts. ‘But he was always planning to replace Neville Wilding.’