The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  ‘My job was to come on and create chaos. Sometimes, I’d just get shoved on during a song I hadn’t written and [was] expected to come up with lyrics. Mark likes spontaneity.’ He admits he was always rowing with the singer – ‘constructive arguments’ – but they’d always sorted things out.

  So, why did you part company with The Fall?

  ‘Er, when?’

  It seems there have been quite a few partings, and not just the occasion in Italy where they were shouting at each other in the road. It seems the final exit was the local difficulty encountered by drunken driving, which put him off the scene. He says he’s owed money but they’ll sort it out.

  Of the wider confusion over royalties, he thinks The Fall have recorded so many songs people who collect the royalties ‘make mistakes’. He says so many of them are Fall fans they start chatting about the band and get ‘confused’. Then there are the ‘people who think they wrote summat that they actually haven’t’. I take up Dave Milner’s suggestion that he was sacked for asking for his money. ‘Overpaid, Dave Milner!’ he laughs, suggesting the drummer’s problem was that he ‘wanted to be a singer’.

  Like Smith, Blaney seems to regard ex-members with disdain, suggesting they never get over leaving The Fall and that being an ex-member is ‘like an illness’. ‘They’re all on the internet under false names,’ he says, and it’s certainly true that some ex-members (Jim Watts and Julia Nagle, for example) post missives on the Fall forums. He believes few of them can accept the loss of income or that they’ve peaked – asserting that his biggest job in The Fall was keeping ex-members out of the dressing room because they are all ‘stalking’.

  I try to clear up the fate of one of them – Brian Fanning. I’m still not sure whether he leapt or was pushed.

  ‘Oh, that,’ shrugs Blaney. ‘We were in the middle of nowhere and Mark suddenly asked the driver to stop and said, “Right, you, off the bus!” We were in Sweden, in the middle of nowhere. I think he got home in the end.’

  And now it’s my turn to try and get home in the end. I’m still perturbed by Karl Burns, but as the list of those yet to find is almost blank, I find myself thinking how far I’ve come. As an obsessed journalist-cum-private detective, I can hardly believe I’ve found all these musicians – most, if not all, of the 43 on the original list, with one or two alluring leads yet to be fully pursued.

  But there’s a parallel, much longer-lasting journey as well.

  It’s over 25 years since I stood on those university steps waiting for Smith and I wonder now how I would have reacted as a teenager if I’d known how far The Fall would take me, before I even started unearthing The Fallen. As a fan, The Fall have whisked me to smoke-filled working men’s clubs and open-air festivals in the twilight. Sometimes, in quiet moments, when the phone is off and the computer is finally shut down, I see my Fall life as a series of snapshots: The Fall accompanying and even directing my rite of passage from boy to man, in what Craig Scanlon described as a ‘very strange upbringing’. I see myself in 1980, the ridiculously naive schoolboy in Kevin Crotty’s cellar about to hear ‘Totally Wired’ for the very first time. Then I’m in Carol’s parents’ tiny dining room, taking delivery of the holy Grotesque in the brown paper bag. There are all those gigs, those wonderful gigs: a spiky and predatory Fall at the Riley-Smith Hall in 1981; tense and all-pervading in the dusk at WOMAD Festival in 1985; those concerts with Victoria, a relationship that quickly blossomed and dwindled like a classic Fall line-up; Suzanne moving in with that record box; and moments – even one as recent as the Leeds Festival in 2006 – where we were together, watching The Fall, and nothing else mattered.

  I wonder at what I’ve learned – never to take anything at face value and never assume the obvious path will be the one to take – and what The Fall have yet to teach me.

  Finding The Fallen has been no less an education and has provided another very different series of mental snapshots. As I sat in Malmaison what seems like many moons ago, I had no idea I was about to embark on this quest, never mind where it would take me. I travelled from dark, police-patrolled streets in Manchester to deserted London streets and, above all, to Smith’s hallowed Prestwich, a place I’d never been entirely convinced existed outside Smith’s feverish imagination, until I went there and discovered what was real. I never made it to Guadalajara, on the trail of Neville Wilding, but I wouldn’t rule anything out in what has often felt like my own personal shadow of the assault course musicians must undergo if they’re to survive The Fall. I’ve probably developed psychological problems. I’ve wreaked havoc on my relationship. I’ve developed more intimate relationships with internet search engines than I have with friends. I’ve developed unusual ailments like ear infections and lost weight through not eating properly and wrecked my work and social structures. But compared to The Fallen, I’ve had it easy. Sometimes, in fleeting moments – as fatigue, stress, mental anguish and a sense of not quite definable achievement dovetail into each other – I’ve even felt something of what it must be like to be in The Fall.

  But the question nagging me now is this: I’ve found all those musicians, but have I managed to find Mark E Smith? In fact, I’ve found many, as each Fallen musician has given me a different insight to The Fall’s absolute ruler, from Tommy Crooks’ depiction of a crazed genius to Hanley’s portrayal of a benevolent dictator. I’ve heard about Smith the disciplinarian father figure, English eccentric, unrivalled pop comic and prankster; the school bully, cruel factory owner and even arch-feminist. I’ve heard about the loyal friend; the understanding shoulder to cry on; the grafting tradesman; the myth-maker; the loving husband and vengeful lover; the damaged, deranged, out-of-control drunk; and the consummate showman and master craftsman vocalist.

  I think, is Smith still driving The Fall or is the beast now controlling him? Is he really a drunkard? Or is he just someone who uses alcohol to its maximum limit, sometimes using what appears to be drunkenness as a smokescreen for yet more creative sleight-of-hand? Is Smith really cruel, or just insanely hard-working? Is he somehow indestructible or is he somehow ill? From talking to The Fallen, it seems that even to those who know him best – even an ex-wife – Smith remains truly elusive, as unknowable as any ghost. However close, or far from close, I have ventured, I sense that The Wonderful and Frightening World hasn’t yet given up all its secrets.

  It’s New Year’s Eve, 2005, and Suzanne and I have been invited to a family party, the sort of thing (with balloons and party hats) that’s taking place across the nation. Except I can’t relax. It doesn’t help that I’ve got to stay sober – to drive home, and because I have a task tomorrow – but I’m still a world away, thinking of Prestwich and Karl Burns. While uncles throw nieces over their shoulders and people play hide-and-seek, as I’ve been doing these last few months among The Fallen, Suzanne and I end up in a room alone, experiencing again the familiar loneliness of the long-distance Fall fan. Sometimes, I wish we were like everybody else. I wish I could talk about golf and quantity surveying and throw a niece or two over my shoulder. But once you hear The Fall you’re not like anybody else. I think, or at least hope, Suzanne knows this. Anybody else hasn’t experienced the electrifying thrill of watching Smith onstage, or felt the almost primeval pull as the latest line-up power into the drumbeat or unveil a new song. For the Fall fan, an urban landscape is not a morass of black and grey but an unexplored fantasy land of evil flats, poisoned lager, rampant conspiracies and sinister city hobgoblins. Life is something not to be celebrated but suffered, on the way to some higher glory that can only be provided by the knowledge passed on by The Fall. Music isn’t something to entertain you but to provoke, chide, dictate and inspire. If the price that must be paid to experience all this is to abandon the ‘normal’ world and submit to The Wonderful and Frightening one, then it is a price worth paying for as long as humanly possible. For me, though, it looks like it’s time to stop, and I feel glad, in a way, to face the prospect of returning to something like normality.
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br />   Part of me doesn’t want to leave the new psychological environment this quest has brought me, a land new to me. As a vegetarian I’ve always been fiercely opposed to fox hunting, but these last few months I’ve gained some insight into the appeal. Not that I’ve ever yearned to chase a Fall musician around a field accompanied by a pack of hounds – unless it’s Karl Burns – but I’ve started to understand the meaning of the ‘thrill of the chase’. There’s the illicit pleasure of the unearthing of tiny secrets. But another feeling looms even larger: the feeling that, like The Fallen, I have been indelibly Marked. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but I have this nagging sense that, somehow, things will never be the same again.

  And I am scared.

  Like a condemned man, I savour my last few hours. As the nation settles down to dinner and Suzanne disappears out with the equally long-suffering dog, I spend New Year’s Day 2006 alone in my room, writing about The Fall and wondering if all this is really over, or ever will be.

  It’s 5 January 2006, and the piece is finally in the newspaper, spread across four pages with a fetching picture of Brix on the front cover. It gets a huge response – not just from within and without the paper but in my email inbox, which bulges with missives from The Fallen. Emails flood in from people as diverse as Marc Riley – who says he had a great time at the photo session meeting ‘all those people!’ from The Fall – and Dick Witts, their first manager in 1976. The first, and one of the nicest, messages comes from Tommy Crooks, the first one I tracked down many moons ago: ‘I’m impressed by how you’ve managed to convey the weirdness and excitement,’ he says. ‘In fact, it’s brought back feelings to the extent that I’ll be frightened to answer the door today in case Mark’s there! I’ve said to people before that it’s impossible to conceive of the utter gravity of strangeness unless you’d been there. So well done.’

  Marc Riley describes the weirdness of the photo session – when ex-members spanning four decades came together in a Manchester bar, some seeing each other after many, many years and some meeting for the first time: ‘I had a very interesting conversation with a chap called Dingo.’

  One of the stranger missives comes via the Fall forum from Ed Blaney, who rages, ‘Where’s the fuckin’ money, cunt?’ I’d normally be bothered but take the language as a form of tribute to The Fall’s 2001 track, ‘Where’s The Fuckin’ Taxi, Cunt?’ – an account of an ill-fated Fall attempt to procure transport. In any case, Blaney mails again a while later to tell me about his new projects (he was managing another band, and has subsequently popped up on Salford City Radio) and says, ‘All forgiven’.

  Someone on the official Fall website – which will shortly become the unofficial website after a fallout with Smith – even claims to have spied Karl Burns at Manchester Piccadilly station.

  Inevitably, the most bizarre response comes from Smith himself, who takes the rare step of releasing a ‘statement’ – like the ones from Downing Street – via Fall magazine Pseud Mag, in a way the publishing arm of The Wonderful and Frightening World.

  Hiya cock,

  A word for you to ponder on the state of British Journalism in the modern age.

  Given the hatchet job carried out by a Guardian journalist on Fall members past and present yesterday; I would like it to be known that any future dealings with the press by The Fall will not be through the aforementioned publication, but through a more worthy journal of a much higher calibre … such as the Daily fucking Star!

  Happy New Year.

  MES

  The Daily Star line makes me smile. Any other rock singer would have been delighted to have his band on the front page of a national newspaper for perhaps the first time in his career. But they would not be Mark E Smith. It crosses my mind Smith may be feeling like he did when he saw that billboard of Marc Riley – ‘all the people I’ve ever known flashing before my eyes’. Then I remember something Dingo Archer said: ‘If you think something is good, Mark will see it differently and vice versa.’

  I decide to take Tommy Crooks’ advice: ‘Go and take a break and stop listening to The Fall for a while, give your head a chance to recover.’ However, within weeks, there’s another earthquake in boot camp. The entire line-up has imploded in America yet again. On 9 May 2006, it emerges that all that remains of the latest Fall line-up is Smith and wife Elena. Precise details of the split are unclear; rumours blame an incident involving a banana. Even the ultra-loyal Ben Pritchard has allegedly departed, and two new names are added to my list: Spencer Birtwistle and Steve Trafford. I feel like a retired safecracker, called back into active service for that one, possibly final heist.

  ‘You don’t join a band, you join his world … That’s us,

  thieving lying cunts!’

  In the aftermath, Smith carries on their American tour using picked-up East Coast musicians, who subsequently record The Fall’s twenty-sixth studio album, Reformation Post-TLC. The album gets noticeably less excited reviews than Fall Heads Roll, with some critics suggesting that turnover may be harming the music, not helping it. By this time, Smith is fronting not one but two Fall line-ups – the second being an entire British ‘subs’ bench’ who fill in when the Americans are unavailable and will no doubt be on hand should he dispense with them entirely.

  Shortly after these developments, I’m in a Manchester bar meeting Steve Trafford – bassist in the last, fateful line-up who, alongside Pritchard and drummer Birtwistle, has the no doubt temporary honour of being the last musician to exit The Fall.

  Sipping coffee, denim-jacketed and in possession of a full head of hair, he looks relaxed and surprisingly healthy – neither of those being qualities too often associated with The Fall. But, of course, he is no longer in The Fall. He begins his first interview since departing by insisting, ‘I’m not here to slag Mark off,’ but it’s obvious he has things to get off his chest. Later, he’ll tell me of another strange induction into The Fall. He was in a toilet in Manchester when someone approached him, admiring his pinstripe jacket: ‘This lad came in and said, “I love your coat, can I try it on? I’ll get one of these for when I’m onstage.” I said, “Are you in a band?” He said, “Yeah, I’m in The Fall.” I said I was a musician. He went, “You don’t play bass, do ya?”’

  The lad was Ben Pritchard.

  ‘I lied and said, “Yes”,’ laughs Trafford. ‘I’d only played guitar. The next thing I knew, I was touring America.’

  But I begin the interview by asking him what it was like in the cult, reminding him of an email he sent me when he was in The Fall describing it as being like ‘the film Full Metal Jacket being made into a chess game – and you’re one of the figures’.

  ‘It was quite regimented in some ways,’ he nods, sipping a cappuccino, but the problem with being a ‘figure’ now is the chessmaster’s paranoia.

  ‘That’s the biggest thing to deal with in The Fall now,’ he says of the singer. ‘He’s paranoid beyond belief. Ridiculous situations. But it was time for us to go. He [Smith] sent the record company bosses to the airport begging us to come back, saying he’s really sorry, he’s changed. He did everything he could to get us back, but we’d made our minds up.

  ‘Have you seen that stuff he’s been saying in the press?’ he blurts. ‘He’s been saying that we were writing country and western songs! That he could see the writing on the wall, that the new band is tons better.’

  Trafford suggests that far from that being the case – and, to be fair, fans and reviewers seem to support him – the last line-up had actually recorded an album that was ‘miles better’ than the hallowed Fall Heads Roll. They recorded ‘16 to 17 tracks and it was amazing’.

  ‘That’s what I’m most gutted about,’ he sighs, divulging that at least two copies exist. He has one, along with producer Grant Showbiz, but Smith never finished adding vocals to it because the line-up split. According to Trafford, the opening track – ‘Over! Over!’ in which Smith darkly reproaches, ‘I think it’s all over now’ – on Reformation Post-TLC is cull
ed from those sessions, but Smith has ‘done something to it’. Another revelation is that, contrary to popular opinion, the ‘TLC’ in the album title does not refer to Tender Loving Care.

  ‘That’s what you’re supposed to think. That’s us,’ he says, referring to himself, Pritchard and Birtwistle. ‘Thieving Lying Cunts!’

  He at last allows himself a grin. He’s used to this sort of stuff from Smith, soon reeling off familiar tales of being mis-credited for songs (‘Blindness’ – Fall Heads Roll’s best track – is built around his hypnotic bass riff but is credited to Spencer Birtwistle, the drummer).

  ‘Anyone who hears that knows I should have got a credit on it. This is what it’s like!’ he says. ‘Dave Milner somehow got the credit for “Open the Box”, because he sang backing vocals on it! There’s so many injustices and a lot of the songs are in dispute.’ He suggests royalties for many Fall songs are currently bound up in litigation.

  You never really know what to believe in The Wonderful and Frightening World but Trafford doesn’t seem to have a particular axe to grind. Like many bass players – who have the task of anchoring a band’s sound – the early 30-something seems solid and dependable.

  In fact, like Dave Milner, he insists he and Smith actually became quite close – and that Fall Heads Roll track ‘Early Days of Channel Führer’ originally included a lyric about ‘My best friend, Steve’ before Smith suddenly wiped it prior to release.

  ‘Mark’s a great bunch of blokes and one of them I really liked,’ he says. ‘We had some great times. But he lost it.’

  I want to get onto what happened in America, but first want to know more about something Ben Pritchard told me – that the last UK tour, prior to the fateful US visit, was the most stressful ever.