Three Books About The Fall

  

        The death in January of The Fall's Mark E Smith, and the subsequent internet deluge of tributes and reflection pieces has rekindled my interest in this most unusual and perplexing band. As well as re-visiting the music, I have read three relatively recent books about The Fall, two by former members and one by an obsessive fan.

                Steve Hanley and Brix Smith Start’s autobiographies couldn’t be more different. At times in The Big Midweek, Hanley, The Fall’s bassist from 1978 to 1998, might be writing about working on a building-site rather than touring the world with a highly combustible art rock band. He is so low-key and self-effacing, it’s no surprise to read that he enjoys his current job as a school caretaker. It’s also easy to see how important he was to the band as a calm and solid presence willing to tolerate the often provocative and domineering Smith.  The latter needed good, but passive players to realise his vision and Hanley and guitarist Craig Scanlon fitted the bill. Co-written by Olivia Piekarski, this is a matter-of-fact account of twenty years in The Fall that contains several good-natured anecdotes about Scanlon and Marc Riley (Hanley’s childhood friend).

                As befits someone whose childhood was shaped by regular trips to Disneyland and visits to Hollywood sets, Brix Smith Start’s memoir The Rise, The Fall and The Rise is a lively, technicolor affair in which the erstwhile Fall guitarist charts her journey from broken homes to college band to the fateful concert in Chicago where she met Mark E Smith, her future husband and band-mate, to her later career as the co-owner of a fashion boutique.  Smith Start has a sharp eye for details relating to clothes and locations and for Fall fans, her description of Mark’s flat in Prestwich in 1982 will be worth the price of the book alone. Smith presented such a formidable public image over the years – alternatively derisive and defensive on record and in interviews – that it’s fascinating to read about ordinary details such as his home life, his working habits and the cruise he went on with Brix’s family.

                Dave Simpson’s The Fallen is primarily about Smith as seen through the eyes of some of the sixty-plus people who have been in The Fall. In interviews, Smith often described himself as ‘bloody-minded’ and that is borne out by the testimony of the various ex-members whose memories create a picture of an artist who controlled whoever was in the band like a cantankerous sergeant-major and who exerted his control even to the commercial detriment of The Fall. Hanley and Smith Start both refer to Smith’s tendency to self-sabotage, regularly following up albums that had commercial appeal with harsher sounding, slap-dash, efforts. 

                Of the three books, this is the funniest and the one that would be of most interest to the non-fan. Such is the wealth of recorded material and accompanying stories, a mini industry of books about The Fall might yet emerge.

               

Mark E Smith (1957-2018)

Maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked to hear of the death of Mark E Smith in February. The evidence of hard living had been etched on his face since he was thirty, and since I had become a fan, in the early 1990s, he had always looked at least fifteen years older than his actual age. But having lost contact with The Fall I hadn’t known he was gravely ill, wheelchair bound and had been struggling to fulfil concert dates at several points during 2017.

                Like many fans of the band, I suspect, I went through a spell of intense interest in The Fall (from 1992 to 1994) before moving on and rarely listening to them again. I was in my final year in school walking from one class to the next when a friend offered me a listen through one of his earphones to a snatch of ‘Birmingham School of Business School’. Over a scuzzy electro keyboard, a sarcastic voice slurred its way through a chorus. It was strange and unattractive but interesting.  

                My next exposure to The Fall was their ‘B Sides 84-89’ album, to which I listened to constantly over a period of six months until Smith’s voice and words imprinted themselves in my memory. My friend and I would often say snatches of the lyrics to each other and the one we quoted most often was ‘Slang King’.  A song that contains a bizarre and rib-tickling mixture of ideas, it begins with Smith declaiming ‘Whip wire!’ and ‘Hawk-man!’ before turning into a song that appears to be about ‘Lord Swingo’ and ‘his triumphant procession’.  But then there’s mention of a ‘lime green receptionist’ and ‘Horst the viking’, and a reference to three little girls whose fifty pence doesn’t cover the cost of their chocolate purchases:  and so they ‘had to take, had to put, the Curly Wurley back’. All of which Smith sing-speaks with complete conviction over typical Fall music: a muscular guitar riff accompanied by thunderous bass and drums and spooky circular keyboard motif.  It was a combination I found baffling, hilarious and exhilarating.

On another song from the same album, ‘Clear off!’, skeletal keyboards and liquid guitar  create a suitably eerie soundscape over which Smith, shadowed by a witchy Gavin Friday, repeats the sinister chorus ‘Over the hill, goes killer civil servant’. But then, at the end, it turns colloquial when Smith says, as though he is shouting at someone across his fence: ‘Who’s there? What’s wrong? Clear off!’  This blend of the strange with the prosaic was one of the hallmarks of Smith’s endlessly intriguing lyrics.  At times the songs sounded like Coronation Street on acid or a Kes/Dark Crystal crossover.

Around the same time, I discovered the NME, the highlight of which was always the occasional interview with Smith, who espoused views that you would normally associate with people twice his age and who often launched attacks on other bands including U2 (most memorably when he claimed that Jesus would throw bottles at the band). This was delightful for any U2-sceptics like myself, as in late eighties and early nineties Ireland, the blanket media cheerleading of U2 was suffocating.

Smith carried the confidence that was so apparent on the songs and in the interviews onto the stage where his apparent disdain for, and indifference to, the audience was utterly compelling. The Fall were a legendarily erratic live band and I had the great fortune to witness just one bad show out of the five I attended.

Over the years, my interest in the band waned and was replaced by other sounds though I continued to marvel at Smith’s productivity as I noticed that hardly a year went by without the release of a new Fall album. I had seen his obvious physical decline over the years but it was a tremendous shock to see footage of a wheelchair-bound, cancer-wracked Mark, his body twisted and misshapen, his face entirely unrecognisable, on-stage in Glasgow at The Fall’s final gig in October.  But after the feelings of amazement and pity passed I felt more admiration for Mark than ever before. While most people with such debilitating health problems would (understandably) be keen to hide themselves away from the public eye, Smith put the music first and chose to fight on until it just wasn’t possible anymore.