by Dave Simpson
One day, Dad sat me down at the WMC piano and instructed me to play, even though I’d never touched the instrument in my life. As I plonked away hopelessly he told me I’d just performed ‘Don’t Cry, Daddy’ by Elvis Presley (a Smith favourite). It’s baffled me ever since: was this a similar example of the psychological trickery Smith uses to coax songs from musicians in The Fall? Or was Dad just kidding me to make me feel better? Or was his choice of that song somehow foreboding? He passed away a few weeks later and there was a hole in my life that could only be filled by 26 – or is it 27? – albums by The Fall.
Other events in that period seem to point me to The Fall. I was a huge fan of Gary Glitter, and The Glitter Band once used a two-drummer lineup like The Fall. Carol took my virginity and a couple of weeks later handed me Grotesque, and we’d listen in my bedroom to songs called things like ‘C ’n’ C-S Mithering’ instead of doing what teenagers are supposed to. I often wonder why she dumped me.
One of my first Leeds United matches was against Smith’s beloved Manchester City, and ended in a baton charge and a massive Fall-like punch-up. I’ve often thought following a football team – especially the troubled Leeds United – is like following The Fall. Periods of greatness – the Don Revie era – are followed by declines and returns to form. There’s a certain amount of suffering involved in being a Fall fan. You put up with bad gigs and the occasional so-so album because you know they will return to greatness.
Then again, like the dark theatre of watching painful tackles in the pouring rain, sometimes even The Fall’s lesser moments can be perversely pleasurable. As Peel said, ‘Sometimes it’s not always what you want. But they’re The Fall, that’s all you need.’
But The Fall don’t figure everywhere in my life. I listen to and like a lot of other music – although always return, like a dog with its tail between its legs, to The Mighty Fall. I met the love of my life, Suzanne, at a Stone Roses gig, not a Fall gig … but I admit the relationship was sealed when she moved in – to my dead parents’ old council semi, in 1989 – with a record box containing Live at The Witch Trials.
While it’s an exaggeration to say our life revolves around The Fall, we do go to a lot of Fall gigs and occasionally over breakfast discuss what may have happened to Craig Scanlon or Karl Burns.
And I wonder what unites us. All of us. Carol, Suzanne, me and all the other Fall fans around the world who wonder what happened to Craig Scanlon. Carol, stubborn, quizzical, even paranoid as a girl, had her own adolescent issues (and a strict, not particularly communicative, disciplinarian father). Suzanne also lost her father at an early age (she was 17) and has been shifted about (from Germany to London to Portsmouth to Leeds to our current country ghost town). She is not quite cynical but probing. Disaffected. With an absence of a knowledgeable, hectoring father figure in Sta-Prest trousers. You can find similar travails in the lives of Bowie (family history of mental illness) and Barnsley miners (their spirits and bodies broken in the miners’ strike). It’s as if we all have a crack in our psyches or a scar in our experiences that makes us susceptible to The Fall. My pet theory on Fall fans is that if such a crack exists, Smith’s music will eventually track you down and indoctrinate you into The Wonderful and Frightening World. The crack in my life maybe grew wider when Mum died three years into my apprenticeship in Falldom. But maybe we’re all in some way looking for leadership and guidance, then along comes Mark E Smith.
I wonder if it’s the same for his musicians.
CHAPTER 4
‘After a while in The Fall you’re no longer
normal.’
A week after speaking to Tommy Crooks I’m in a Manchester city centre pub, to meet the Hanley brothers, Steve and Paul. Steve is the stocky bassist Smith admitted ‘defined’ The Fall until his hurried exit after the same New York rumpus that did for Crooks, and was in the Fall line-up I first encountered in 1981. Over the years, I must have watched the elder Hanley dozens of times and never ceased to be amazed by the sheer ferocity of his work. Mostly, it didn’t look like he was playing an instrument so much as grappling with a wild animal that needed urgent taming.
And yet, through willpower and physical strength, he had the beast under control, lashing out basslines equal in intensity and pithiness to Smith’s ranted words. My favourite gig involving Hanley was at the Fforde Grene in Leeds on 29 July 1983. The big pub was typical of venues The Fall played at the time – rough and unwelcoming, on the outskirts of the city – so you had to make a real effort (in my case, take two buses) to get there. In those days The Fall’s records were getting closer and closer to the charts, but following them still felt like being part of a huge cult. In the sweltering Fforde Grene, with the group lashing out their new songs of the day – such as insistent, bass-driven 1983 single ‘The Man Whose Head Expanded’, about a man who is convinced a soap-opera writer is following him to get ideas and will then kill him – it felt like being a part of a secret society, with everyone in some special, possibly dark secret. That night above all others I was peculiarly drawn to Hanley, who wore first a donkey jacket and then a sweat-soaked blue shirt. He looked focused but somehow pained and even repelled by his hard graft. If his big hands had held a spade and not a bass guitar, he would have looked for all the world like he was burying a body.
Steve Hanley’s melodic bass appears on virtually every classic Fall album of the 1970s to 1990s – from 1979’s dark, vengeful Dragnet through to 1993’s The Infotainment Scan, a playful, dancefloor affair where Hanley’s bass-powered songs like ‘A Past Gone Mad’, in which Smith asks the listener to ‘slit my throat with a garden vegetable’ if he ever ends up ‘like U2’. Generally, if you ask any Fall fan what his or her favourite album was, Hanley will be playing on it. Then, he was gone.
Also onstage at the Riley-Smith Hall in 1981 was Paul Hanley, who doesn’t quite occupy the same position in Fall mythology as the vanishing Karl Burns but is still universally cherished in The Wonderful and Frightening World. Drummer between 1980 and 1985 (and thus on Grotesque), his playing was more minimal and more repetitive than Karl Burns, and Fall fanatics are still prone to misty-eyed reminiscing about the time Paul Hanley and Karl Burns played together – as they did at the Fforde Grene – in a fearsome two-drummer line-up.
The pub is half empty, and I contemplate the prospect of being stood up by my heroes. Suddenly, I see a ghost in an adjoining room. The figure of Steve Hanley seems to appear then disappear, like a mirage. I venture across to the doorway and there they are.
Steve Hanley looks older than I remember – as he would, since hardly anyone has seen him in a decade. Then again, even in 1981 he looked prematurely aged, as if literally being withered by the ardours of playing in Britain’s most demanding group.
As he sits down, I can’t help notice a slight tremor in his fingers as a result of spending 19 years grappling with the beast.
His brother Paul looks much younger, thicker-set and still with his dark hair, but he got out of The Fall after five years whereas Steve served the sort of sentence you don’t even get for armed robbery. However, meeting them is as enjoyable as I could have possibly imagined, as their conversation flits from horror to humour and back again just as ably as they once anchored the Fall sound.
‘It’s a bit like being at school,’ ponders Steve Hanley, cradling the first pint. ‘It’s only when you leave and talk to other people, do you realise what yours was like.’
They’re both grinning but the laughter seems ever so slightly shaky. They don’t look like rock stars so much as manual workers, but in conversation are more like retired soldiers, recalling tales from the wars. ‘It was a house of horrors!’ Paul says, and both of them erupt.
The trendily made-over pub surroundings seem a world away from dingy old 1979, when Steve Hanley joined The Fall. Britain was a grim, industrialised place, exhausted by the musical and social upheavals of the 1970s and crying out for change, only to be dragged into the 1980s and turmoil of another kind by the victorious Mar
garet Thatcher. Conflict was in the air: the Shah of Iran had just been overthrown by revolution and Saddam Hussein became President of Iraq. However, the position of Fall bassist was about to become unusually stable as Hanley began the first of his 19-year term – he’d been in school bands with guitarists Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon, and just hung around with the group until one day he was in.
Ironically, given the fact he’d still be there almost two decades later, in that week – in April 1979 – Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ was Number One. He didn’t think he’d last a week. At his first gig, the PA packed up and Smith walked off leaving the group playing instrumentals. The bassist smiles: ‘The shape of things to come.’ However, he soon realised The Fall was not like any other group. Record companies would be kept at arm’s length and denied influence over the music. They simply ‘got what they were given’. Steve notes that if bands today sold the amount of records The Fall did in the late 1980s and 1990s they’d be doing ‘very well indeed’. However, just like today, every time they seemed on the verge of a breakthrough to the ultra-mainstream, something – or someone – would mess it up.
‘I can never work that out,’ sighs Paul, only to be contradicted by his brother.
‘I can. It’s Mark!’ he explodes. ‘We were either really loved or really hated. Which is exactly how he liked it.’
Steve suggests that what Smith called ‘detachment’ was there right from the start. He says he never knew which Smith he’d get. One minute, the singer would be tearing him to pieces, the next quietly asking if he fancied a pint. Which may be part of the Fall psychology, but Hanley suspects something more.
‘There’s a lot of pressure, being Mark. He’s not an angry person all the time,’ he says. ‘In the music industry, people get what they want by being unreasonable. The clever bands have someone to be unreasonable for them. To his credit Mark’s never done that; if something nasty needs to be said he’ll say it, that’s why he’s never really had many friends. He’s always been the one carrying that burden.’
The pair had numerous late-night conversations but one subject never discussed was the direction of the band: it was as if it had its own life, something relentless, bigger than the members.
Like Tommy Crooks, the Hanley brothers remember huge creative freedom and a lot of the time would come up with all the music for Smith to merely sing over the top. ‘There was never any question of him saying, “I write all the songs”,’ says Steve. One of the singer’s methods has always been to work continually on new material, the life-force of the group. ‘The thing about The Fall is they’re never jaded with the songs,’ says Steve, explaining that songs would come and go almost as rapidly as musicians. But the trump card was threatening the sack. Paul remembers one of Smith’s favourite jokes, taking new members abroad so he could send them home.
‘Tension is created, manufactured … Mark winds people up. It keeps it interesting for him, but he wants to get a reaction from musicians to get a performance. On a 20-date tour he’d rather have 10 shit gigs and 10 great gigs than 20 that are middling. That’s what he hates most. Sometimes he’ll walk off, and the audience know that, but are willing to take that chance.’
His brother nods sagely, noting that Smith ‘doesn’t do average’.
‘You’d come off thinking it was great and Mark and Kay [Carroll, Smith’s girlfriend, who was The Fall’s only long-term manager from 1977 to 1983] would be going, “You were fucking terrible. You’re playing like a fookin’ pub band!”’
‘Chairs would fly,’ laughs Steve, describing gig post-mortems that could go on for hours and then degenerate into ‘guerilla warfare’. He recalls how John Peel had once said on the BBC he’d ‘never seen such an air of malevolence’. Everyone assumed Peel was referring to the gig – in fact, he meant the dressing room. Paul Hanley remembers how the musicians would stand with backs to the wall as Smith and Carroll reached the kind of fever-pitch fury normally associated with Manchester United’s manager Sir Alex Ferguson, whose famous ‘hairdryer’ bawl-outs have reduced many young players to jelly.
‘A couple of my mates came into the dressing room once and it was all going off,’ remembers Paul. ‘They were like, “Jesus!”’
Carroll’s role in The Fall has been almost forgotten in the mists of time and punch-ups, but in the early years she was arguably as important as Mark Smith. As manager, mouthpiece, ideologist, occasional kazoo player and backing vocalist (meaning she is on my list of Fallen to track down), Steve suggests he was ‘terrified’ of Carroll and – when he was 16 – she was even scarier than the singer.
‘She was in her thirties and had seen everything,’ he says. ‘I’d never met anybody like her. I mean, she was very nice, but she was intimidating. Physically aggressive, in your face. She was The Fall then, more than Mark was. A lot of the things that people associate with The Fall all came from Kay.’
Steve remembers Carroll’s favourite phrase was ‘No sell-out’.
However, after growing arguments, Carroll abandoned The Fall outside an American bar in 1983, and Hanley argues that The Fall never again had strong management. Instead, the burden on Smith just became heavier. There had been a ‘string of people who Mark tells what to do’ but this had led to mismanagement and that, for him, was the root of the New York fall-out.
As he tells it, the group were suddenly in financial trouble after receiving an enormous tax bill. Smith was depressed and worried about money, as he told me, but Steve Hanley says it went much further – both he and the boss were in danger of losing their houses. The paradox still haunts him – a band who were hailed as a national institution facing letter-boxes clogged with bills.
‘Whether you’re in it for the money or not, you need to live,’ Steve ponders, adding, softly, ‘It shouldn’t have got to that.’
After the onstage meltdown, Steve abandoned Smith in New York and walked out on The Fall, something he’d vowed never to do. He wanted to be there playing at the end – if there ever is an end to The Mighty Fall – like the band on the Titanic. He appreciates it ‘wasn’t nice’ to leave Smith, but he’d simply had enough. In his 19 years in The Fall, the world outside had changed beyond recognition. Thatcher made way for John Major and then Tony Blair. The bassist made his exit with hip-hop, in the form of Jason Nevins vs Run DMC’s ‘It’s Like That’, at Number 1. Meanwhile, through it all and beyond, The Fall trundled on and on, as Peel had said, ‘always different, always the same’.
Paul Hanley had left twice, in 1983 and finally in 1985, the year The Fall released the classic, dark, spiky This Nation’s Saving Grace, as the parallel mainstream universe softly rocked to Jennifer Rush. But there was no ‘Power of Love’ within The Fall. Paul Hanley quit after a row in which Smith blamed him for the band’s gear getting stolen. He sips his pint, breathes in and exhales deeply: ‘I was 20 and thought I could go off and form my own band and we’d be bigger than The Fall!’
Over two decades later, he still regrets it: ‘I should have stayed.’
Steve thinks he left too late; Paul, too soon. The expected musical career never really happened. For the last 21 years, he’s been working as a computer operative. But he insists being in The Fall ‘changed me completely’.
‘It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I mean, I’m all right at my job, but I was really good at playing drums. The bloke next to me can do my job better than I can, but he couldn’t play drums in The Fall.’
Paul Hanley is not the only one carrying scars. Steve says ‘you never get over’ being in The Fall and reveals that when he left it took him two years – and acupuncture – just to ‘calm down’.
He’s now working as a school ‘site manager’.
‘I’m a caretaker, basically,’ he explains, adding that his name hangs on a sign outside the school, where it must be the ultimate collectors’ item for rabid Fall fans. It seems a cruel fate and it’s a mystery why one of British music’s greatest bassists is not musically in demand. For a second, I’m
haunted by the thought of the ultimate Fall musician being taunted in the school playground by pesky kids singing Fall lyrics: ‘Eat yerself fitter!’ ‘Mister, are you Totally Wired?’
But then, the more I think about it, he probably deserves a quiet life. And where can you possibly go musically after playing in the Mighty Fall?
I ask the same question I asked Tommy Crooks. Would either of them go back?
‘I would,’ says Paul in an instant.
Steve wouldn’t. Too much has gone on.
His younger brother reconsiders, and he’s smiling. ‘I would if he would!’
In fact, they both still play together occasionally – as the rhythm section of The Lovers, a band fronted by ex-Inspiral Carpets singer Tom Hingley. One night onstage, Hingley made the mistake of grabbing Hanley’s bass. ‘I said, “Gerroff, I had 20 years of putting up with that in The Fall!”’ Hingley hasn’t touched the instrument again.
Steve admits he misses the Fall lifestyle, perhaps he even misses Smith.
‘He can be very funny,’ he says. ‘Hysterically funny.’ However, Steve was hurt by Smith’s assertion in a BBC documentary that the 1998 Fall line-up were past it: he’d been ‘carrying three old fellas who were shite’.
‘A disgraceful thing to say,’ says Steve, and while Smith ‘wasn’t bothered’ about losing Crooks or even Burns, he reveals that the singer had tried to get the legendary bassist back.
‘He just has that attitude that he can get someone else in, like he said, “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall!”,’ he considers. ‘But he would never have sacked me. If I was such a twat for leaving him in New York he wouldn’t have tried to ring me.’