The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  Why was that?

  ‘Paranoia and general, unexplainable nastiness,’ says Trafford, going on to describe a typical incident in Wales where Smith had taken exception to the bassist’s sound equipment. After the gig, Trafford returned to the band’s hotel to find the singer had stolen his suitcase.

  ‘I spent two hours trying to get into his hotel room to get it back,’ he frowns. ‘When I got it back, he’d poured water on my clothes … We had to go.’ He says that things around the band were getting ‘violent’. It wasn’t a case of Smith attacking his musicians, but if he’d carried on The Fall would have attacked the singer.

  Despite the numerous bust-ups over the years, actual violence involving Smith is surprisingly rare. As Trafford says, the ‘threat of violence’ is yet another strategy of Fall boot camp to keep musicians on their toes: ‘He takes everything to the limit, he’ll take away any pleasure you have left.’ On the grounds that they’d ‘play better’.

  I tell him that, as Smith told me, it works. The Fall were fantastic on that last UK tour. He agrees, but says that, when the musicians sound good, people tell them they sound good. And then, Smith suspects they’ll begin playing worse because he thinks the band are ‘getting above themselves’.

  I tell Trafford something Pritchard told me: that no matter what happens, the current line-up would never leave.

  ‘He said that?’ He sighs. ‘Ben had a full head of brown hair when he joined. He’s prematurely grey. That moment when we left was the only moment of solidarity between us.’ He says they were friends, but just like the Hanleys had told me, talking about the 1980s, in The Fall you get divided. Elena acts as Smith’s ‘eyes and ears. In the end it becomes every man for himself. So, walking out together was a great moment between us.’

  According to Trafford, the problems in America started after the band mislaid the precious backdrops, which they’d been entrusted to transport to the States. ‘That was really unfortunate,’ offers Trafford. ‘They got lost at the airport.’

  And you got the blame?

  ‘It’s The Fall!’ He suggests Smith actually took it well, but they suspected further trouble.

  Kay Carroll in 1983. The punch-up in 1998. Why do The Fall have so much difficulty in America?

  ‘It’s like he can’t handle it,’ he replies. ‘He gets stressed out.’ According to Trafford, they first became aware something was looming in Tucson, when Smith lunged at Birtwistle in the dressing room with a corkscrew. He missed and everything blew over, but, by the time they got to Phoenix – it had to be Phoenix, The Fall do have a song called ‘Bonkers in Phoenix’, after all – things imploded.

  For no obvious reason, the tour manager – he was ‘really loyal’, although Trafford admits Smith sees outsiders as a threat – had arrived at the top of Smith’s fabled torment list. ‘So, Mark was flicking cigarettes at him, pouring beer over him,’ he recalls. Which wouldn’t have been that bad if the tour manager hadn’t been driving at 70 mph at the time. He left, taking the vehicle with him and leaving the entire band ‘in the middle of nowhere’. Smith alludes to this incident in his autobiography and admits ‘spilling’ beer over the driver. However he says he did this because the fellow was asleep.

  After a discussion, the musicians decided to leave too – Trafford was surprised Pritchard agreed but says ‘everybody has their breaking point’.

  Deciding that Phoenix would be their last ever gig, horror turned to comedy when a member of the support band assaulted Smith onstage with a banana. Trafford describes it as a ‘hilarious farce’, with Smith – who’d been ‘drinking a lot’ – chasing the offender right around the venue and into the car park.

  The moment the gig was over, the Fall-ing trio fled, ignoring the record company people Smith sent to the airport.

  Like most Fallen, he has mixed feelings about leaving, admiring Smith’s ‘almost supernatural’ methods of coaxing performance, but says he doesn’t miss it. He’s now fronting a band called Tycoon’s Follies and playing with The Beautiful South’s Paul Heaton.

  ‘I’m a lot happier than I was then,’ says Trafford of his active service. ‘There were a lot of drugs going on on that tour,’ he says, not necessarily referring to within The Fall. He doesn’t go further. ‘Coupled with everything else going on, it wasn’t a good mix. I’m happier now but I can look back on it as a great experience.’

  I ask about the others. Birtwistle is apparently in a band called The Blimp while Pritchard – after a spell installing burglar alarms – is delivering for Parcelforce, sometimes to Dave Milner.

  Ironically, in light of what I discussed with Milner, Trafford says he views Smith now as the ultimate Victorian stepfather, ‘caring but cruel’, who must be ‘pleased’ at all costs.

  Our father who art in Prestwich.

  I arrive home to more upheaval: this time in my own life.

  CHAPTER 36

  ‘You’ve got the curse of The Fall!’

  It’s the early hours of a Sunday morning and we’ve had a meal out with friends – a rarity since I started tracking down The Fall. It’s been another eventful 24 hours and I’ve been on the move. I spent yesterday in Liverpool interviewing Spiritualized singer/mainman Jason Pierce, another mythical musical talent with a reputation for hiring and firing. He drank an inordinate amount during and after the interview, and I couldn’t help laughing at some of his explanations for why he goes through so many musicians – admittedly, most of them are hired for projects, rather than group members. He complained that ‘most of them seem to think they should be playing stadiums by now but that’s not what it’s about’. He sounded just like Smith.

  Pierce was in Liverpool for ‘Silent Sound’, a performance/art installation by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard for which he was asked to provide the score. This is his first classical composition (a serenely beautiful melody which, because he doesn’t read or write music, was hummed down the phone and transcribed, a three-hour ‘operation’ which sounds rather Fall-like). The show partly recreated an 1865 séance carried out by Victorian spiritualists, the Davenports. He said he didn’t believed in ghosts but was starting to believe that life was all a giant cosmic prank. On the way back home, I’d taken another detour through the avenue all lined with trees but, once again, there was no sign of Smith being home.

  So here I am, 24 hours later. It’s two in the morning, I’ve had a bit of red wine but not so much that I couldn’t drive home, and I’m lying awake thinking about The Fallen. I’ve spent the evening telling our friends what I’ve been doing for the last year and one of those friends was Bruce, who was with me at that very first gig at the Riley-Smith Hall all those years ago. In particular, I’m thinking about Karl Burns. I stare at the moon outside the window and I realise that Suzanne, the love of my life, is awake as well, so I give her a hug. She doesn’t respond. She feels warm, but I feel a sudden chill. What’s wrong?

  ‘I’m leaving you,’ she announces, there and then, after 17 years. ‘I’ve stopped being close to you … It started when you were looking for all those people who were in The Fall.’

  I’m speechless – we’ve been together most of our adult lives. She has seen me through poverty, success, a car crash and a beating (not Fall- related). For those 17 years there have been two predominant sounds in my life; the sound of The Fall and the sound of Suzanne’s breathing as we lie side by side.

  And now – because of one of them – the other will no longer be there.

  For days, weeks, months, I am inconsolable. It’s been difficult enough trying to work anyway, but now my life careers further into an abyss. It feels like Dad and Mum dying again, but at the same time. I feel like I have died.

  The trouble with being a Fall fan in these situations is there are no songs to turn to. Smith’s songbook is full of bile about break-ups, not tunes for wallowing in despair. For a while, I find I can’t listen to The Fall and in a really low moment, find myself relating to the lyrics of ‘Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now
)’ by Phil Collins as it plays on local radio.

  At this point I wanted to express the pain I was going through by reprinting the lyrics to Phil’s song about being parted from the only one who really knew him. However, Phil’s ‘people’ feel that using the song here wouldn’t express my heartache but in fact would be ‘derogatory’. And they’re right. Derogatory of me! What greater slur can a man carry than admitting to listening to Phil Collins?

  Anyway, my own editor helpfully slips into Smith mode and gives me an aural clip around the earhole: ‘Get a grip, man!’ And I do, because as some form of clarity takes over, I realise what has happened. You see, for anyone not steeped in The Fall this would be the natural end of a relationship that’s lasted far more than most and has probably run its course. But I am steeped in The Fall. So I know differently.

  Suddenly, everything all makes sense: the car with the MES registration plate in the village; Brix’s warning of Smith’s words to an offending journalist, ‘I fucking curse you! You’ve got the curse of The Fall’; Eric the Ferret’s words to me, ‘There is a cost, a cost to fronting The Fall.’

  There is also a cost to finding The Fallen. I have gone in search of Smith’s secrets and ghosts, and now I must bear the price, delivered from Prestwich within 24 hours of my latest sojourn outside Smith’s front door. I have got the curse of The Fall.

  Over the next few months, everything that can possibly go wrong does. I drive my new shiny MG car into a river. Leeds United are first relegated, then deducted ten points for going into administration, then deducted another 15 for the circumstances of it, and the club teeters on the brink of existence. Finally, I am struck down by a particularly nasty type of food poisoning called Campylobacter. I have surely been cursed as effectively as if Smith had delivered a fish’s head to the front door.

  And all the while, the ringmaster is mocking.

  He gives a wonderful interview to Stool Pigeon music newspaper in which the subject of my article is raised.

  * * *

  I wanted to talk about the LP. He [me] kept going, ‘What’s happened to blah blah?’ For two fucking hours! After two hours, he fucking cracked. [Mimes crying.] ‘I’ve had about [enough] of this. I can’t get anything out of you.’ I’m saying, ‘Have you heard the new LP or not?’

  I gave him a few whiskies. Then I took him to the pub over the road and got it all out of him. What it was, his boss had said, ‘Get the dirty on Mark E Smith.’ The editor. Because he [me] used to have an office in London. Then they have a bit of a cutback. He was kept on but he had to go back to Yorkshire. They said, ‘You’ve got to get a fucking scoop.’ I’ll tell you a funny story about that. As he was going back to the train station, by which time I’d got more out of him than he’d got out of me. But as we went in this fucking pub, I couldn’t believe it. There was Karl Burns’s mum! She’s like, ‘Long time no see.’ And he gets his fucking notepad out! ‘What’s Karl Burns doing now?’ ‘Oh, he lives on the farm in the hills somewhere. Looks like that bloke out of Emmerdale [Shadrach Dingle?!]. Ha ha.’

  I love this story, because as well as demonstrating that Smith still has a vibrant imagination – which I suggest in a friendly letter telling Foggy Notions, another magazine in which he makes similar claims, that Smith should remember I have a digital recording of the interview – it is another piece in my jigsaw. It illustrates perfectly how tiny pieces of reality distort and refract back through smoke and mirrors, and then either become lyrics or myths in The Wonderful and Frightening World.

  Having said that, a lot of people are saying Burns lives on a farm in the hills somewhere.

  Meanwhile, back in my own Wonderful and Frightening World, the curse exacts another cruel twist when I discover what the love of my life’s new partner does for a living.

  He does deliveries for their warehouse.

  He is a lorry driver.

  Yes, I have been dumped for a Container Driver. So I play my favourite Fall song on my first and favourite Fall album for hour upon hour – relishing its gloriously malicious portrayal of the empty lives of truck drivers.

  They sweat on their way down

  Grey ports with customs bastards

  Hang around like clowns the

  Uh-containers and their drivers

  Bad indigestion

  Bad bowel retention

  Speed for their wages

  Suntan, torn short sleeves.

  SWEAT.

  BASTARDS.

  CLOWNS.

  BAD INDIGESTION.

  BAD BOWEL RETENTION!

  I have never loved any song as much as I love this song right now. As I peer into the abyss of my once blissful rural life, the cruel but caring cult offers me a lifeline.

  ‘Are they still doing “Bingo Master’s Break-Out!”?’

  A work email arrives from head office, but at the bottom it has a tantalising PS: ‘A man called Johnny [sic] Brown called for you regarding ex-members of The Fall.’

  And there’s a phone number.

  I stare at it in disbelief. It can’t be? Surely this isn’t Jonnie – not ‘Johnny’ – Brown, the near mythical bassist who lasted three weeks in 1978, who embarked with girlfriend Una Baines on that ‘mad, drug-crazed’ adventure? Who hasn’t been heard of for 30 years and who I tried so desperately to find by ringing every Brown in Rotherham?

  I ring the number. It is indeed the long-lost Jonnie Brown, who describes how he popped into his local pub quiz for the first time and there was a question about the number of people that had been in The Fall.

  ‘And people were saying, “It’s on the internet! In the Guardian! You’re the long-lost Fall member!”’ he says. He phoned the paper, and the paper has brought Jonnie Brown to me.

  24 hours later, I’m happier than I’ve been for months, hurtling towards Rotherham, where I find the bassist in a very small flat above a newsagent. The walls are peppered with arty designs and an enormous tie-dye-pattern sheet – he was an art student, after all. There is a computer, and – just like Tony Friel – a solitary bass guitar. Standing amidst them all is a 50-year-old who looks a lot younger than Mark E Smith. Something tells me he hasn’t really kept up with The Fall.

  ‘Are they still doing “Bingo Master’s Break-Out!”?’ he enquires.

  I don’t know where to start, but try my best to fill him in on 30 years of Falldom. No, his old love Una Baines is no longer with them, nor is she dating Martin Bramah. ‘Has she got loads of kids?’ he asks, then changes the subject to Bramah. ‘I always liked Martin. He was really good on guitar but he never had the energy for the business side.’ It’s a perceptive insight, which makes up for his thinking that Smith is married to an oriental violinist.

  I’m worried that if we go much further down this road I’ll end up telling him we’ve gone through several prime ministers and John Lennon is dead. Still, it’s not just Brown who’s suffering from misconceptions. I scan the flat for drug use but there is none and I feel guilty at being influenced by his old ‘junkie’ reputation.

  ‘Oh, the drug thing,’ he sighs, unhappy that it’s in ‘every biography’. He’s carried that reputation for 30 years even though it was just a phase. The drug thing isn’t the only thing the world has got wrong about Jonnie Brown – he spells his name Jonny but is actually called David. ‘My dad was called David John but my mum wanted to call me Jonathan,’ he explains, pouring some tea. ‘So, I’m David Jonathan! But we switched it around to avoid confusion with the postman.’

  He also says he was in The Fall ‘a lot longer than three weeks, which everybody says. We rehearsed a set of 11 songs.’ It turns out he designed the ‘Bingo Master”s sleeve (a strange voodoo image). He didn’t get paid. In fact, he didn’t even get a copy.

  So what did happen to Jonnie – sorry, Jonny – Brown?

  As he tells it, he joined The Fall after seeing an advert in Virgin Records – making Yvonne Pawlett not the only one to join from an advert – and was supposed to be the guitarist, but by the time he got there
the guitarist (Bramah) wasn’t leaving but the bassist (Friel) had.

  Brown said, ‘I’ll have a go.’ He soon realised he wasn’t joining a normal group. They were ridiculously hard-working, Smith was very ‘into himself ’ and modelled himself on Elvis and Lou Reed, although their rehearsals included a version of The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’. They rehearsed for weeks on end although he only did one gig – at Huddersfield Polytechnic, supporting Sham 69 – where he remembers not being able to hear what anyone else was playing.

  ‘We got some good write-ups,’ he says, his South Yorkshire accent sounding incongruous among The Fallen, ‘although we could have played owt!’

  But then he got the sack. As Brown tells it, The Fall were in the habit of listening to John Peel’s show religiously and one of the early rules was that they all had to be back at the Kingswood Road flat for the ten till midnight programme.

  One night, Brown was in the pub with Baines and ‘the next minute Una was on top of me’. Brown didn’t just miss the Peel show but took Baines ‘home, away from them’ and so began their wild, drug-crazed adventure.

  ‘Of course Mark used to go out with her,’ he says with regret. ‘My lifestyle at the time … I was into drugs and all sorts. Una came back, and she told Mark, and he took one look at her and sacked me. He got rid of me like that. But that’s fair enough. It’s his group.’

  Nevertheless, Brown was devastated: ‘I nearly cried when he told me,’ he confesses. ‘I shut the door and it really hit me hard. It was worse than your best girlfriend finishing with you.’ And not long after that, he lost Una as well. In all these years, he never knew Baines had a breakdown. He seems concerned and asks if she’s all right now.

  But that wasn’t quite the end of Jonny and Una, nor of David Jonathan Brown and The Fall. A while after being booted out he went to see them play in Sheffield but found himself stumbling into the road and falling on his face into the path of a taxi. He missed the gig.