The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  ‘I remember the bus driver one day saying, “So what’s this lot like then?”’ remembers Crooks. ‘The sound guy replied, “This is as weird as it gets”.’

  As the stress of the tour increased, the band had all been drinking heavily, but were desperately trying to stay ‘professional’. But by the time they got closer to New York, things were becoming increasingly ‘berserk’. Smith’s mood was not helped by being trailed by ‘some weird guy from Texas’, who’d been stalking them across the States and was constantly phoning to get on the guest list. Crooks remembers the gig at Brownies as ‘the night it all went apeshit’: ‘I think Mark had been threatened at gunpoint by a taxi driver … and had given him a mouthful of abuse. Mark arrived in a pretty bad mood. The rest is history.’

  An excellent choice of words.

  Peter Messiaen, an American eyewitness writing on the internet, remembers events at Brownies like this:

  MES [Smith] handed me the mic and I took turns singing. Which was a lot of fun, but within two minutes of getting on stage, Mark decided to smack Karl’s cymbal to the floor and fuck up his drum mics. Karl stopped playing and patiently readjusted his equipment, a look of perplexion [sic] and anger on his face … Resumed playing. Two songs later Mark attempted the same thing and that’s when Karl snapped … jumped out from behind the drums and grabbed Mark’s head, which he looked like he was completely capable of crushing if he felt like and screamed at him … Hanley, protective as always, pushed Karl away and got between the two … thereby saving Mark’s life.

  I think most of the crowd were shocked … there were a few assholes who thought it was all a big joke … I guess at a certain point after the Karl incident … after the Tommy incident … I forget what exactly was being played, MES tried to make everyone smile or ingratiate himself back into the band’s good graces and the band seemed to respond a little bit … but then he went right back into asshole mode and flicked a cigarette, which I gave to Mark in the hopes of placating him, and it did for a while, at Tommy and everything went crazy again.

  According to Messiaen, Karl Burns had finally had enough antagonism from Smith, and jumped out from behind his kit and began strangling the singer, in the process completely knocking over Steve Hanley’s bass rig.

  He kept saying ‘I’ll kill you … you bloody cunt!’ to Mark … A short while later after similar harassment from Mark, Tommy [Crooks] kicked Mark in the ass really hard about half a dozen times. Mark was repeating over and over how Tommy was ‘a dead man’.

  Mark proclaimed in a whinging and ephemeral manner [to the audience] that he had been ‘assaulted by a dumb-as-a-goat Scotsman and [that] we were all witnesses’.

  The band quit the stage after six songs leaving Mark to play ‘Powder Keg’ with only Julia accompanying him.

  Hanley looked embarrassed, but determined to get through the show. ‘Powder Keg’ was appropriate. After the band left the stage … Mark made some remarks about how he was waiting for the other three to show up … then he sang something about his ‘Dear … dear New Yorkers’. He seemed halfway sorry … then he started singing something like ‘You better listen! You better listen … the owner of Brownies is not going to like this and I hope he still comes across with at least 4 figures’.

  Which was funny … tragic but funny.

  Another fan, David Auerbach, remembers Smith saying – ostensibly about Crooks, with whom he was apparently at loggerheads throughout the gig – ‘That guy is a Scottish man, a fucking animal on drugs and a fucking idiot. I have been assaulted in public here by two or three people, you be witness to it.’ [At this point Hanley is reported elsewhere to be miming playing a violin and making comical ‘Woe is me’ faces.]

  ‘Bear witness, laddies,’ says Smith to inexplicable cheering from the crowd, ‘they’re very big. I tell you what, these three, I got a taxi, some fucker pulled a gun out on me, some fucking Pakistani or someone. These three were fuckin’ cowering in the fuckin’ dressing room … as usual … they’re nowhere to be seen. They’re very hard … all together.’

  Which almost sounds like a Fall song. In fact, the encounter is obliquely referenced in ‘Dissolute Singer’. The song – on Smith’s solo, spoken word album, The Post Nearly Man, which was released later in 1998 – carries a reference to a club owner looking for three figures at Brownies.

  The band went into meltdown there and then. A second gig at Brownies the following night was cancelled following Smith’s arrest and incarceration over an incident at the Quality Hotel Eastside in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park involving Nagle. The singer was held in jail for two days and after release following payment of $1,000 bail, appeared in court on third-degree assault and harassment charges. He was ordered to undergo an alcohol treatment programme and anger management counselling.

  Speaking to the BBC some years later, Smith described the experience with uncomplicated Salfordian logic: ‘They started on me, so I started on them.’

  Although this was apparently a serious bust-up even by Fall standards, Crooks says it was the sort of thing that happened all the time he was in the group. So much so, he thought such behaviour was ‘normal’. In Ireland, shortly before the tour of America, Smith had ‘almost got a mob set on’ the band for reasons which he insists are best left unreported.

  ‘Mark was going through a sticky patch,’ Crooks says of those times, echoing Smith’s own words in Malmaison hotel. But after Brownies, Burns and Crooks had been stranded in New York, their passports disappearing in the chaos. The Scotsman remembers phoning the record company to say ‘Get us the hell out of here’ and suggests they were even considering getting deported ‘just to get out of the States’.

  The night it all went apeshit proved the last time a Fall line-up would contain Messrs Crooks, Burns or Hanley. Crooks spoke briefly to Smith after The Fall leader returned his passport with a note, ‘which was good of him, you know’. But his last sighting of The Fall boss was being hustled into a police car. He comments, ‘I think he was 15 minutes away from [notorious penitentiary] Rikers Island.’

  But all these years later, Crooks doesn’t regret being in The Fall. ‘It could have been amazing,’ he sighs, his granite Scots tones cracking with emotion once again. ‘Mark wasn’t happy for whatever reason; we were all unhappy but it was like “the show must go on”. Steve Hanley was the most professional person, he was totally devoted to it. It was sad for all of us.’

  However, Crooks hints at what will also soon become a familiar theme – the eerie pull of Britain’s strangest band. He says if Smith ever needed him, he would drop everything to play for him again. This seems a peculiar admission after what happened but Crooks seems as awed by Smith as any fan, despite being publicly ridiculed as a ‘fucking animal’. Perhaps to understand the depth of this loyalty you have to have been in The Fall. As Crooks remembers, Smith is an ‘extremely intelligent person, uniquely creative. Some of the things he used to do in rehearsal were inspired.’ He remembers how Smith once handed him a laundry bill with the instruction ‘Sing that’. The results became part of a song on Levitate, ‘Hurricane Edward’, with Crooks and Smith singing a musical short story of a Ross County farm worker whose life was devastated by a tornado.

  ‘You don’t meet people like that often, the genuine article,’ sighs Crooks, who despite Smith’s insistence on not recruiting people who ‘liked the bloody group’ was – and remains – a dedicated Fall fan. ‘I didn’t really bother listening to much else,’ he confirms. ‘The rest was daft pop music. I mean, Mark’s sense of timing was incredible. I’m really sorry about what happened, but it just exploded.’

  Looking back, Crooks says – almost comically – Smith taught him a lot about professionalism even though the singer could be ‘prickly’, before hinting at what may or may not be the source of Smith’s volatile moods.

  ‘It might be frustrating for him knowing he’s one of the best and not enormously successful,’ he muses. ‘I don’t know how many records The Fall sell. I think they’re may
be a bit too sophisticated for the mass market. But there’s nothing I’d like more than to see Mark have a smash hit success. I’ve got no hard feelings towards the guy at all.’

  He also offered his take on the royalties mystery: ‘I didn’t get any royalties because I didn’t write the songs, but I never asked for any. I was just proud to be a part of it, you know.’

  After exiting The Fall, Crooks joined The Ark (‘Mark without the M’, as Smith had sneered to me) with Steve Hanley but it didn’t work out. Crooks says he still feels guilty for having let Hanley down and asks me to pass on messages to the bassist if I find him. This will become another feature of my journey to find The Fallen: I will become the facilitator of an enormous process of healing … of others, if not myself.

  Nowadays, Crooks is back enjoying a career as an artist and has exhibited at several major galleries, although he seems somehow unfulfilled: his greatest art, he insists, was simply being in The Fall. ‘The Fall was more an art performance,’ he says. ‘Conceptual art at its highest level. You could put the whole group in a gallery like you were hanging them on a wall.’

  A few days after we talk, Crooks sends an email thanking me for taking him back to the ‘wonderful (and frightening) time’ and asking me to consider him my ‘friend, even though we’ve never met’. The following morning, another email: ‘I think we both enjoyed that conversation. It’s made me realise that The Fall are actually THE BEST Britain has ever produced, Beatles and Stones included.’ Then another: ‘If you find out that Karl Burns is alive can you email me and let me know?’

  I’m on my way.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Sorry, boss … I am only a drummer.’

  My life is everything Mark E Smith hates.

  I live in the countryside in North Yorkshire. Smith hates the countryside, according to ‘Contraflow’, the third track on the 2003 album The Real New Fall LP: Formerly ‘Country on the Click’.

  I have a dog called Guinness. Smith hates dogs, having informed the world via 1988’s ‘Dog Is Life/Jerusalem’ (from the album I Am Kurious Oranj) that we don’t see rabbits walked down the street or cats on leads.

  I am a journalist – a breed of whom he once said ‘For every bloke pulling a pint, there’s about 10,000 journalists writing an article about it.’

  And I am a musician, having played drums for years. Naturally, I didn’t mention this in Malmaison, because I know Smith’s opinion of drummers and how he encourages drummers to view themselves. Witness the following exchange with Spencer Birtwistle in the BBC’s Wonderful and Frightening World documentary:

  Smith to Birtwistle: ‘You are only a drummer. I am Mark Smith.’

  Birtwistle to Smith: ‘Sorry, boss … I am only a drummer.’

  Me too.

  I am only a drummer.

  And a journalist.

  On my third dog.

  And a vegetarian.

  And I live in an area where you’re more likely to see a cow gazing over a hedge than a city hobgoblin and where there are absolutely no fans of The Fall.

  In fact, I’m quietly confident you could knock on every single door in my obscure village and among the retired military types and pram pushers not find a single person who’s even heard of Mark E Smith.

  Sometimes, I wonder if I live here to escape from my obsession with The Fall. But I don’t escape. You never do, if you’re a Fall fan. It’s even harder nowadays because much as Smith loathes the internet and distrusts the mass media, The Fall are everywhere. The Wonderful and Frightening World is now universal.

  This is my morning ritual. Get up. Take a pee. Make tea. Read the papers on the internet; check for any news or gossip on my football team, crisis-hit Leeds United. Then read about The Fall. My favourite place for doing this is http://invisionfree.com/forums/thefall, the Official Website Fall Forum where like-minded Fall nutters discuss the burning issues of the day, such as the best way to photograph a set list from a gig at Huddersfield Cleopatra’s Club on Friday, 12 September 1980. (‘It’s a beauty. The lists with Mark’s writing are cherished items indeed,’ notes someone calling themselves Hanley Played A Fender P.) Or what would be the ideal Fall song to be played at a Fall fan’s funeral (‘New Face in Hell’ is understandably popular, although someone suggests ‘Open the Boxoctosis #2’ because of its comically appropriate lyrics about opening a ‘Goddamn’ box.

  This morning someone’s posted a video of singer Jeffrey Lewis’s ‘The Legend of The Fall’, a sung ‘illustrated history’, with accompanying artwork, in which the American performer expounds on how Smith

  didn’t get on with the punk scene at all

  In fact he didn’t get on with most members of The Fall

  So began the underground legend of a strange and driven man

  Who worked hard writing touring and recording then would fire most of his band

  Steve played bass for 20 years with the band whose sound he helped

  create but even he left when Mark went to jail for punching his band-mates in ’98.

  It’s hilarious and very knowing, especially when he talks of Fall fans who ‘get immersed in the whole Fall universe and get obsessed with everything they’ve done’. Which is the reason why I’m on the Fall forum today. Over the years I’ve noticed there are very few people who can take or leave The Fall. People don’t say, ‘Oh, The Fall, they’re okay’. They either loathe or completely fail to understand The Fall’s scratchy, obtuse but melodic racket and Smith’s idiosyncratic lyrics – or they like the stuff, grow to love it and then invariably become obsessed with it and everything else in The Wonderful and Frightening World.

  And I wonder … why?

  So, today the question I’m asking the Fall forum is: why are there no Fall ‘fans’, only Fall obsessives? Predictably, most responses contend it’s ‘the music’ – that The Fall are ‘the best and most challenging band for most of the last 30 years’. Which, of course, they are. But there must be something else, something that not only demands obsession but can make Fall followers out of everyone from Barnsley miners to David Bowie. Maybe we were all dropped on our heads as children, or had terrifying formative experiences with a man with a half-deranged Salford accent.

  David Hughes aka ‘Divvey’ hits on the sort of thing I’m looking for when he reveals he is ‘completely well balanced, can see both sides of an argument, am moderate in my behaviour. I am not into drugs, drink responsibly for the most part, have a good relationship with my parents … And I like The Beatles almost as much as The Fall.’ Then, crucially, he adds: ‘But my colleagues don’t get me.’

  Another Fall fanatic, My Balloon, thinks there are two types of Fall fans: ‘those that just like the music and then those that relate more to the outsider aspect’. MikeyBoy refers to his Falldom as being ‘my dirty little secret. I never tell my girlfriends about them. I’m afraid that they’ll think that I’m not all there mentally.’ Meanwhile, someone called Stevoid tells of ‘Something in Smith’s voice …’

  However, most Fall nutters are uncomfortable with the question, as if pondering something like this would betray the stiff-upper-lip, emotionless posture Smith specialises in and which you’re implicitly expected to adopt if you’re a Fall fan.

  Swiss Gnomes comments, ‘I don’t usually go that deep’, while Tobydynamik confesses his reasons for being a Fall fan are ‘too personal’ for public airing.

  And I think that’s the point. Being a Fall fan is deeply personal. Sometimes, I even feel my entire life has been a succession of avenues and events that have led me, like a lamb to the slaughter or a Cliff Richard fan to Jesus, to The Mighty Fall.

  Like Smith, I grew up in the suburbs – of Leeds, rather than Salford.

  Like Smith, I had a largely absent father, although unlike Jack Smith – who would boot young Mark out of the house – my dad was absent because I only knew him for the first six years of my life.

  He was an income-tax collector who had been a hairdresser and a chiropodist, so at a tender age I had
nice toenails and a nice, perfectly combed hairstyle before it all went horribly wrong with punk.

  But Dad was obsessed with the English language and I sometimes wonder if my Falldom started there. He made sure I could spell before I was even old enough for school. Every morning when he went to work, he’d leave me a new word on a blackboard alongside some kind of picture or cartoon of the type I’d later pore over on Fall albums. Tax collecting was just Dad’s job: his real love was music.

  He played piano in the local working men’s club – exactly the sort of hard-bitten working-class enclave that hosted the early Fall gigs amidst thick fag smoke and very smelly bitter. Grotesque, my favourite Fall album, includes a track that is basically a tape of someone singing in a WMC as captured for posterity on a cassette recorder under the table. As well as playing piano and occasionally compering in exactly that type of club, my dad was the venue’s bingo caller. Can it really be coincidence that The Fall’s very first single, ‘Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!’, is about a bingo master?

  Dad took me to the WMC a lot, where I’d encounter the smells now familiar at Fall gigs and larger than life musicians like the jazzy drummer Jeff, a cabaret type who I’ve since thought was probably a lot like lost late 1970s jazzy Fall drummer Mike Leigh. Jazzy Jeff had a shiny red sparkly kit and gave me a pair of sticks which I stared at for years before actually getting around to using them to play a drum kit.

  Only the drummer, but maybe my own interest in music started there. I often think if Dad had known this would lead me to attempt to track down 40-odd former members of The Fall, he’d have taken me to football. Still, sometimes the musicians swapped stories and I learned Dad had been a gunner in World War Two and played piano in an army theatre group called the Bangs ’n’ Beans, who literally played on as the bombs fell around them in The Blitz – much in the same manner Fall musicians are required to perform in the face of psychological or physical torture from Mark E Smith and his ideology of ‘creative’ tension.