The Fallen
Page 29
Many years later – when his mum got the internet – he found the Fall website and sent a message to Smith saying, ‘Hello. It’s me!’ But he didn’t hear back. He finished his degree and liked Manchester so much he stayed another year. He remembers going to the opening of the Hacienda when Smith’s favoured comic Bernard Manning played.
As for the drug use, it ‘faded away’. ‘I don’t know if I was experimenting,’ he considers of heroin, a drug which Smith has disapproved of since ‘No Xmas for John Quays’. ‘I think I was just free of my degree and wanted to go mad. Kids do it today. Probably worse.’
He moved to London and started squatting, which in those days was ‘the thing to do’. He stayed for ten years during which time he almost joined Siouxsie and The Banshees, but his friend John McGeoch (the legendary Scottish post-punk guitarist who played with Magazine and PiL) got the job. He wasn’t aware McGeoch – whose extraordinary, driven, angular fretwork lit up Magazine’s classic Real Life and Secondhand Daylight albums, the Banshees’ high watermark of 1981’s JuJu and helped define the post-punk style that resonates through many of today’s groups – is dead now and seems moved.
There were also spells in Sheffield – at one point playing in a punk band – and during one of them he went to see Baines and Blue Orchids play in a pub that had been bombed during the war and was supposed to contain buried bodies. He says Baines ended up coming back to where he was staying in Sheffield. ‘And that’s when it started up again.’ Not just the thing with Baines, but Brown actually joined the Blue Orchids – rehearsing with them, at least – until one day he just walked away and never saw Baines again.
‘Not on purpose, but it was a hell of a long way to go for practice!’ he laughs.
I can’t help liking Jonny Brown and understand exactly what Baines saw in him. He’s perceptive rather than super-intelligent and has an almost childlike enthusiasm that is utterly infectious. Now he has his own two children – aged six and 21 – although he’s no longer with their mothers and one of them ‘ran off with someone else’.
As for work, he was until recently a jeweller – his speciality at art school – but is currently unemployed. He grumbles about kids throwing milkshakes at the window but becomes animated when he remembers seeing Smith on television, in a famously incomprehensible interview on Newsnight the night John Peel died.
‘Had they messed about with it?’ he asks engagingly. ‘I wouldn’t like to be seeing myself on telly. Bloody ’ell!’
His excitement switches to something else: ‘I’ve got a new bass, look. I’ve blown a speaker with this. It’s got a battery in it which gives it a better tone. Isn’t it beautiful? I got it from Cash Converters in Rotherham.’ It turns out he’s still playing music – most recently in a covers band called Nexus who do songs by The Stones and Thin Lizzy. But nothing by The Fall. It seems they’re having problems with drummers too. ‘Go through one every other week,’ he says. I check that none of them was Burns.
We go to the pub. The pub where he did the pop quiz. The pub that brought him to me. We sit, and we drink. Brown tells me how much those few weeks with Una Baines still influence his world view.
‘I’d never looked at adverts and seen [them] as a woman selling a product until she told me about it, but even to this day I can see it like that.’
As we drink up, David Jonathan Brown has a question of his own. ‘Can you put me back in touch with Una?’
And I promise I will.
* * *
‘Who wants to know?’
I’ve gone back, right back to where it started for me. Not the Riley-Smith Hall but the hallowed landscapes of Grotesque and, specifically, the track ‘English Scheme’, which plays on repeat in my car as I drive, in which Smith sings about armchair rebels who talk of Chile while driving down the poky, quaint streets of Haslingden, and points out that if Britons were smart, they’d emigrate.
I am driving through Haslingden, which lies in the hills above Manchester, but I am not talking about Chile, I am looking for Karl Burns. The Steve Trafford connection hasn’t come through, so I’m down to my last remaining leads, one of them being that Kay Carroll thinks that he lives here. Except it’s bigger than I imagined, much bigger, a largely Asian area these days by the look of it, with scores of shops offering things like ‘family footwear’ and, presumably, corrective shoes. He might have emigrated, but if Burns is here, I’ll never find him.
I turn the car around and head for the other destination that comes up more often – the farmland around Rossendale, a mile or two up the road, higher in the hills near Burnley. Here, I watch a sparrowhawk stalking its prey – obviously an emissary from Smith – then drive into a desolate village like something from Village of the Damned. There are two pubs. I head for the first, armed with a tiny photograph of Karl Burns. I order a shandy and do it like The Sweeney.
‘I’m looking for this man,’ I say. ‘He might be older-looking now, possibly with a beard. He’s called Karl. Plays drums …’
There’s a deathly silence in the pub. The barman – big beard, leatherclad, if he was a bit older he might actually be Karl Burns – looks at me suspiciously. He remembers how they do it in The Sweeney too.
‘Who wants to know?’ he asks, fixing me with a beady stare.
I lie like I have never lied before, making up some unbelievable story about once being in a band with him – wish fulfilment, probably.
‘Nah, mate. Not ’ere.’
I drink up and head for the other pub, which lies at the very top of the hill. It’s called The Deerplay, an obvious code for 1982 Fall song ‘Deer Park’. This must be the place. Crack the code and find the drummer. Except it’s shut down, doesn’t look like anyone’s been here for days.
The wind is blowing over the hills. I feel like Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, especially when I become aware of being watched. I turn around slowly. There are two of us in the car park. Just me and him: hairy with weird, staring eyes.
Except it is not Karl Burns.
It’s a sheep.
The painful truth dawns that I will probably never locate Karl Burns, but I realise that that might not be a bad thing. Whatever terrible fate has or has not befallen The Fall’s missing drummer, I’ve become obsessed with the myth. One of my few clear memories of my father was one night before Christmas, when he sat me at my bedroom window, pointing at the sodium lights of distant street lamps which he said were ‘fairy lights’ which would guide Santa’s sleigh to my bedroom. And I believed that because I wanted to, like my adolescent fascination with the myths of Lord Lucan and the Loch Ness Monster. And now I believe in the myth of Karl: the greatest unsolved mystery of The Mighty Fallen.
I came in search of The Fall’s lost drummer and found a sheep. I came in search of ‘God’ and found a human being. But I discovered something else. I discovered the motivations and travails of musicians, and the art of survival and deep enduring love and obsession, and what it means to make music in intolerable conditions. I honestly have no idea how close I’ve got to Smith – every time I think I’ve cracked him there are 25 times when I fear I got nowhere near at all.
And what of The Fallen? Right at the start of this journey, Steve Hanley said something in the pub: ‘Mark’s had all these talented people in the band, but not many have done anything without him. He must have something …’ Which he has, but they have done something, all of them, whether it’s Marc Riley on the radio or Ruth Daniel with her record label or Una and Jonny with their various children. All of them have done something none of us will ever come close to doing. They have survived The Fall. When I began all this, Mark E Smith was my hero. They are all my heroes now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible if it were not for the faith of the Guardian’s Charlie English, and his willingness when arts editor to allow me the time and space to go with the original idea. I am also enormously grateful to Jamie Byng and all at Canongate Books for proposing that my
journey could be turned into The Fallen. Thanks to my Fall-obsessive editor, Andy Miller, who has been brilliant to bounce ideas off and with whom I have enjoyed many – probably far too many – conversations about The Fall. Thanks also to Canongate editor Dan Franklin, who has followed the path of what I hope will be a typical reader, from someone who had vaguely heard of The Fall to someone who is now, like we all are, drawn by the unearthly pull of The Wonderful and Frightening World. Thanks also to copyeditor Alison Rae, who did a wonderful job and confirmed that violinist Kenny Brady does indeed have a glass eye.
I am grateful to all at The Fall’s (now unofficial) website/discussion forum, The Fall Online, especially Conway Paton, for contacts and help on what has been a very strange but fascinating trip. I am grateful to all the Fall fans who post on the forum, for allowing me to quote on occasions and for providing stimulating reading over breakfast. I thank The Fall Live Gig Repository for providing information on gigs I sadly missed, and Rob Waite for the generous donation of handfuls of live CDs. I thank Dorothy Howe for arranging my interview with Mark E Smith, and Fall producer Grant Showbiz for providing me with my first contacts for former members of The Fall. Also in this respect I thank Hip Priest author Simon Ford, and Guardian colleague Helen Pidd, whose journalist ex-boyfriend Neil Cooper put me in touch with Kenny Brady after bumping into him in a club. I am grateful to the array of internet sites and publications which have made it possible to do endless research into The Fall and events around them, from Margaret Thaler Singer’s book Cults In Our Midst to NME, Stool Pigeon and Loaded.
I am, of course, grateful from the bottom of my heart to The Fallen, the former members who have been so generous with their time and reminiscences, whether for my original Guardian article or this book. I have nothing but respect for them all. I would particularly like to thank Marc Riley, and his mysterious pal Moey, for leading me to the holy grail of Craig Scanlon; the inestimable Steve Hanley, for similar contacts; Simon Rogers for access to his personal photographs; and Kay Bateman, née Carroll, who has been a continual source of enlightenment and amusement and never once lived up to her reputation as ‘Mother Carroll From Hell’.
Thank you, Kevin Crotty, for first playing me The Fall, and thank you Carol Stubbs, for giving me my first Fall album. Thank you to Suzanne Underwood for cups of tea and helping edit down my original Guardian article on what was a very hectic New Year’s Day, 2006, and to her, Bruce Paget, Alan Bilson, Susan Ackroyd and Victoria Cullen for accompanying me to Fall gigs over the years.
Last but not least, whether he welcomes it or not, I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to Mark E Smith, for giving me such an exhaustive interview in the first place and for getting the beers in. And, of course, for leading The Fall on such an idiosyncratic course for the last 32 years, without which this book would never have been possible, and without whom we’d have all led quieter – but duller – and far less enriching lives.
Dave Simpson, the wilds of North Yorkshire, February 2008
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS AND
PERMISSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
15: Mark E Smith by Christopher Thomond. Copyright Guardian News and Media Ltd, 2006
29: Tommy Crooks, courtesy of himself
39: Dave Simpson with his father (holding chisel), courtesy of the author
41: Setlist from a Fall gig at Cleopatra’s Club, Huddersfield, Friday, 12 September 1980
47: Steve and Paul Hanley doing their impression of the Krays
57: Ben Pritchard and Mark E Smith, courtesy of Dave Milner
67: Author’s father as Bingo Master. Tony Friel played on ‘Bingo Master’s Break-Out!’, released in 1978
75: Kay Bateman, aka Kay Carroll, courtesy of herself
87: Brian Clough with assistant Peter Taylor, 1981. Courtesy of Action Images/Sporting Pictures
91: Una Baines, courtesy of herself
99: Martin Bramah, photo taken by author at a Fall gig
103: A ferret
109: Steve Davies by Christopher Thomond. Copyright Guardian News and Media Ltd, 2006
117: Marc Riley, courtesy of Stephen Wright/Redferns
139: ‘Welcome to Prestwich’ sign by the author
145: Brix Smith onstage, courtesy of Simon Rogers
157: Marcia Schofield, courtesy of herself
165: Mark E Smith with hearse, courtesy of Simon Rogers
169: Simon Rogers, courtesy of himself
179: Kenny Brady, courtesy of himself
183: Charlotte Bill by Christopher Thomond. Copyright Guardian News and Media Ltd, 2006
185: Dave Bush, courtesy of himself
193: Craig Scanlon, courtesy of Simon Rogers
201: Brix Smith, courtesy of Simon Rogers
213: Keir Stewart by Natalie Curtis. Copyright Natalie Curtis 2008, www.16apr79.com
217: Simon Wolstencroft with Steve Hanley, courtesy of Simon Rogers
223: Julia Adamson aka Julia Nagle by Christopher Thomond. Copyright Guardian News and Media Ltd, 2006
229: Kate Themen by Neemo. Copyright Neemo, 1994–2008, all rights reserved, www.acomfortableplace.co.uk
232: Stuart Estell, courtesy of himself
235: Karen Leatham, courtesy of herself
237: Nick Dewey, courtesy of himself
243: Adam Helal, courtesy of himself
247: Travelling Minstrels
253: Jim Watts by Jon Super. Copyright Guardian News and Media Ltd, 2006
259: Ian Brady
261: Simon Archer, courtesy of himself
265: Ruth Daniel, courtesy of herself
269: Dave Milner, courtesy of himself
279: Ed Blaney, courtesy of himself
287: Steve Trafford, courtesy of himself
293: Dave and Suzanne at Sudbury Hall by Helga Totale
298: Jonnie Brown, courtesy of the author
302: Karl Burns with Mark E Smith, courtesy of Simon Rogers
Epigraph on p.1 by AC Grayling reproduced by kind permission
Lyrics on p.41 from ‘The Legend of The Fall’ by Jeffrey Lewis, reproduced with kind permission
Extract on p.89 from ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat’ by TS Eliot, © The Estate of TS Eliot, reproduced with kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
Lyrics on p.123 from ‘Jumper Clown, Warts ’n’ All’ by Marc Riley, reproduced with kind permission
Lyrics on p.129 from ‘An Older Lover Etc.’ written by Mark E Smith, Craig Scanlon, Marc Riley, Stephen Hanley & Paul Hanley. Published by Minder Music Ltd © 1981
Lyrics on p.297 from ‘Container Drivers’ written by Mark E Smith, Craig Scanlon, Marc Riley & Paul Hanley. Published by Minder Music Ltd © 1980
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Dave Simpson, 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
For photography credits and permissions acknowledgments please see
p. 293. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders where
appropriate, but please contact the publisher if there are any errors or
omissions
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 640 5
www.meetatthegate.com
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