by Dave Simpson
As I’m leaving the house, he shouts after me, ‘If you find Karl, let me know.’ A few days later, the letters from Smith appear on Friel’s personal website but almost immediately vanish.
CHAPTER 7
‘I knew Mark got me in to
fuck off Friel.’
I track down Kay Carroll – now married and surnamed Bateman – to Portland, Oregon, where she’s working as a doctor’s assistant. Even with several thousand miles’ distance, I get an immediate sense of the character who so ‘terrified’ the Hanleys when she emails to ask if I’m ‘a stalker’. Credentials suitably established, she breaks several decades of near silence to mail me an hour of taped Mancunian vitriol.
‘I knew that Mark got me in to fuck off Friel, and it worked,’ she says. Within that one line, it’s easy to see why Carroll and Smith connected – as girlfriend, then manager. They thought and even spoke alike. Perish the thought, but Carroll’s sneering Salford burr sounds curiously similar to Mark E Smith’s.
She makes me laugh when she compares her work in nursing to The Fall – ‘head injuries, retarded people, nothing changes, David!’ – and calls me by the name used only by my mother. As she rants wonderfully on, it transpires she’s answering my emailed questions while driving and, later, while cooking the dinner. ‘Which doesn’t really fit in with the image of Mother Carroll from Hell,’ she shrieks. It doesn’t, really. Maybe, like Smith, she’s mellowed.
She begins by explaining how she met Tony Friel, which didn’t involve herbal tea or vegan suppers. They were both tripping on LSD: Friel and Martin Bramah were talking in a corner, and she thought they were talking ‘nonsense’.
‘I just fired from the hip,’ she spits. Although Carroll occasionally sang backing vocals, her chief role was as Smith’s strategist and attack dog, to be employed against anyone who stood in the way, whether journalists, record labels or musicians.
Carroll is still scathing about Friel, who she labels a ‘poser’: ‘Here was this guy who couldn’t play bass very well and he had a fretless bass.’ I can’t help but smile when I recall Friel’s brand new bass guitar. However, more seriously, she suggests that although there was a personality clash, the real reason Friel was outed was musical. Friel was a ‘serious musician’, Smith a ‘poet’. The twain could never meet and from that moment – with Carroll doing the dirty work because Smith ‘didn’t want to lose face’, Smith wrested control of the early Fall.
Carroll confirms Smith’s suggestion that he has no respect for musicians but adds that he ‘likes his power’. Thus, from the very start, the entire dynamic of The Fall was about tension, musical and otherwise.
Carroll says although she didn’t always agree with our leader, she understood why certain members had to go. Like Smith, she came to recognise very early on that turnover in the group could be beneficial. Every time a member would depart, she’d think the band was all over, but a new member would come in and the band would move up a gear. There were 13 line-ups during her tenure (1977 to 1983) alone. She suggests Smith didn’t start out thinking, ‘Let’s get rid of these musicians,’ but over time realised it could work to his advantage.
Together, the Smith-Carroll team was formidable. Carroll remains in awe of Smith’s mantras about complacency and routine being the enemies of music, and she thinks Smith never let anybody feel a part of The Fall, instilling ‘stress and edginess’ with ploys such as telling the musicians the songs they would be playing mere seconds before they went onstage.
‘They’d be jogging around in the dressing room excited and he’d be still doing the set list … he got off on that edge,’ she says, with the barest hint of a laugh. I’m reminded of a story Waterboys singer Mike Scott sometimes tells onstage about Beatles and Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein who had 150 lawsuits going at any one time, people who were suing him and whom he was suing. This bugged Scott for years – ‘How can somebody live like that? How would you get any sleep?’ he asked – before the penny finally dropped. ‘I realised he liked it. He actually got off on that tension.’
Carroll certainly agrees with what Smith told me about some of his behaviour being tongue-in-cheek, revealing that his more humorous psychological ploys started very early. Once, in Belgium, Karl Burns had been given a load of Belgian francs to spend and given the impression it was an awful lot of money. Carroll and Smith, the terrible twosome, howled with laughter when the naive drummer returned 20 minutes later, exploding, ‘This won’t even buy me a fucking packet of cigarettes!’
Carroll suggests that although Smith’s antics could be very funny, they were tinged with darker relish: ‘Mark’s the sort of person who likes pulling wings off flies.’
She tells an eyebrow-raising story suggesting Smith’s manipulation and domination began in early childhood. When Carroll was 18, her brother had been at primary school in Prestwich and the eight-year-old would often come home ‘totally unglued’ after telling Carroll about a boy in school who’d been making his life a misery. She’d suggested confronting the boy but her brother said, ‘No, he’ll deny it. He’s really, really sneaky.’ So it was left.
Ten years later, her brother came to visit when Smith and Carroll lived together in Kingswood Road and ‘Mark just went, “Noddy!”
‘My brother went white,’ she continues. ‘I went, “Do you guys know each other?” Afterwards he just said, “Kay, that’s the bully. That’s the guy who made my life miserable!”
‘It was amazing and really telling,’ she says pointedly, although bullying is hardly a cardinal sin. Involvement in a similar outrage managed to get me expelled from school. It’s what kids do. Admittedly, few of us carry on into adult life.
Nevertheless, the discovery that Smith was her brother’s school bully didn’t stop Carroll falling for his charms. All these years later, her sentiments seem to flicker between love and hate, mirroring Fall devotees who try to give up on the group but always, always return.
It’s weird hearing Carroll talk. Now almost 60, her accent has been roughened by years of ‘the weather, and the cigarettes’. But she sounds sad and genuinely surprised to hear the Hanley brothers found her terrifying. In fact, if Carroll is firm on one thing, it’s that there was camaraderie in The Fall. ‘Camps’ certainly existed within the band, but the musicians had Smith ‘on a pedestal’ even before they joined the band, which might explain why they put up with stress. But however intense things would get, it was always The Fall against the world. Even now, Smith routinely begins Fall gigs by stating, ‘We are The Fall’ – whoever is actually in the group at the time.
Carroll is proud of being associated with The Fall. She also insists she ‘loved’ the musicians and has her own spin on the group’s continuing appeal: ‘The Fall are interesting because it’s not about music. What was created was atmosphere and tension. You’d go to a gig and it was like the audience had all been in a plane crash and ended up in a field. They had nothing in common whatsoever. Some people loved the music, others the “Fuck you, arsehole” attitude, others the intelligence. The Fall were and are an enigma.’
Her comments about people in a field strike a chord with me. When I used to see bands other than The Fall, I’d wear whatever fashions were appropriate – long raincoats and (later) camouflage gear for Echo & The Bunnymen, a leather jacket and embarrassing bondage trousers for anything vaguely punk. And yet, when it came to The Fall, all of us would dress as nondescriptly as possible, like labourers. The Riley-Smith Hall audience even included builders in their hard hats. It was as if to display any interest in fashion or show any form of kinship with a recognised youth culture would somehow fall below the standards expected while following The Fall.
Carroll was yet another who seemed to be drawn weirdly into Smith’s orbit. In 1977, she was working at Prestwich Psychiatric Hospital, alongside Una Baines.
‘I tried to score drugs off her, to tell you the truth,’ Carroll explains while mashing her potatoes. ‘She was incredibly political and tenacious, and I liked he
r a lot. If it hadn’t been for Una I don’t think The Fall would have happened. Una told me this story that when they were at Mark’s parents’ house they had a tape, and Mark started talking prose over it. Yeah. Mark was a rapper, really, before they invented it.’
For Carroll, Baines – perhaps one of the more overlooked characters in the whole Fall story and certainly one of many since disowned by Smith – was ‘pivotal’ at this early stage. Perhaps if it had not been for her Smith might never even have become a singer.
‘It was Una who got him to do it into this tape machine,’ Carroll insists. ‘He’s always had great women in his life – including me – who fought for him and gave him confidence.’
However, Carroll says that when she became involved, the Smith-Baines relationship was already ‘on the down curve’. Carroll insists both singer and keyboard player would confide their troubles about each other. ‘So, I could see the demise coming and it got really freaky.’ Carroll suggests that Baines was paranoid, but blames Smith, saying that later ‘He almost drove me insane telling me it was in my head. So Una and Mark split up.’ She remembers one night when Baines came back to the Fall house in Kingswood Road accompanied by a man and, whatever the significance of this, ‘Mark was like a bull in a china shop’.
Her voice sounds rawer now. Nearly 30 years later, these are powerful emotions. According to Carroll, her relationship with Smith began innocently in Kingswood Road. Smith was so anxious about Baines coming back with other men Carroll had offered her bed, but as a friend.
‘It was done with that naivety,’ Caroll emphasises, but ‘something happened’. Carroll believes it worked out for the best. ‘Una always said that she hoped me and Mark would get together.’
The progression from friendship to bed to co-conspirator to manager-backing vocalist was speedy. When Carroll took the reins, she’d started to get to know Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon and had learnt from his mistakes.
‘We were all trying to walk this goddamn line where we wouldn’t give up any creative control,’ she says of the early Manchester punk and post-punk scene. According to Carroll, Smith was the only Fall musician who realised how important this control could be. Thus, from a very early stage, the idea that Mark was The Fall and The Fall was Mark began to permeate from the music into the business.
Carroll suggests the band had innumerable offers from record companies and could have ‘sold out’, but neither she nor Smith would bite: ‘The guys [musicians] were pissed at me but I tried to get a deal where we wouldn’t have to compromise,’ she says. ‘They weren’t going to mess his art up. Those guys wrote his licks and they weren’t given enough respect by Mark, but at the same time they wouldn’t have got anywhere without him.’
Perhaps history hasn’t given enough credit to Carroll. An arch-manipulator and provocateur, she suggests The Fall’s entire ‘no sell-out/outsiders’ stance was her creation … her ‘musical instrument’.
‘I brought an ideology to The Fall and Mark carried it on,’ she says while driving. The rumble of the American freeway seems light years away from the hardline politics of dealing with the British record industry in the 1970s. From the outside, it’s always looked as if The Fall often changed labels because Smith was difficult to deal with, but Carroll insists it was all a grand design. One-off deals with labels meant heightened creativity and more control.
She tells a story about approaching Richard Branson’s Virgin label with the first EP ‘Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!’. According to Carroll, Richard Branson’s label offered £26,000 – a lot of money for a new band in 1977 – but on the condition The Fall went back into the studio to remix Friel’s bass. Carroll was appalled.
‘I thought, “Are we selling a car?”’ She grabbed the tape of the band’s music and returned home to a disappointed Fall. ‘Mark knew what happened but I never told Tony and that’s why it’s so ironic that Tony resented me,’ she says.
Maybe if Friel had known, he’d have stayed and adapted, and the entire history of The Fall would have been quite different … or maybe not. So, Friel played on the first ever Fall single, but was out of the group by the time it was released. The Step Forward Records deal dismissed by Friel certainly suited Smith. If it didn’t work, The Fall could up and leave, and The Fall retained the publishing rights, which was unheard of at the time.
Carroll notes that over the years Smith has been very careful to retain ownership of songs. Underpinning this was a notion – which seems to fire Smith to this day – that signing to a record company for any length of time meant a band would become ‘soft’.
The other big dynamic driving The Fall in those days – and almost certainly to this day – was drugs. According to Carroll, the manager and singer took amphetamine ‘the whole time’ they were in The Fall together: six years in total.
‘It definitely has an edge,’ she says. ‘You do get paranoid.’ Carroll describes an atmosphere around the early Fall completely different to the innocence portrayed by Friel. There was tension; there was weirdness. Things got ‘really crazy’.
The first notable casualty of this drug use was Baines, who had taken up with Jonnie Brown – a Rotherham student who was, for all of three weeks in January 1978, Friel’s replacement. Baines was using acid. Brown was on heroin, a drug Smith has always given short shrift. The combination of Baines and Brown and two very different narcotics was as volatile as nitroglycerine. Carroll insists she ‘had no idea’ that Brown was using heroin but admits if she had, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.
‘I was putting everything up my nose so who am I to judge? Funnily enough, I think he came in to take Una away. Jonnie was one of the sweetest people, I certainly had concerns about him and Una. They were just out of their heads, doing cough medicine and whatever. They were two drug-embracing human beings enabling each other.’
Baines apparently had some form of breakdown, but Carroll refuses to blame Brown: ‘He became the scapegoat, but ironically for a time he was the sanity in the madness. He got a raw deal like all the ex-members.’
‘They were strange times,’ she comments, before admitting she could have easily gone the same way as Baines.
Gradually, her relationship with Smith encountered problems. They were ‘very driven’, the manager loved the singer and the whole thing was fuelled by amphetamine. Later, Carroll says she started finding ‘love letters’ in the flat to the increasingly high-profile vocalist, who by now was being photographed by NME.
‘I could fill up another tape with instances,’ she sighs. She became convinced that Smith was cheating on her but the singer would say she was paranoid, due to the drugs she was taking. Sometimes, she says, she’d come back from meetings in London and catch him in bed with women. But, contrarily, she insists Smith wouldn’t let her go.
Like Smith, possibly, Carroll has a more vulnerable side. It seems strange listening to this stuff – it’s personal detail I didn’t expect to hear. But Carroll is clearly benefiting. Like Pritchard, she suggests this is ‘therapy, David!’
By the end, the manager and the singer were having ‘major fights’. Carroll remembers ‘punching out’ a couple of girls, until finally she could take no more. After co-sculpting The Fall, she eventually walked out on them after a row outside an American bar in 1983.
What made the partnership ultimately destroyed it.
‘Mark is powerful,’ she ponders. ‘Sometimes you have to meet people in your life to work your karma off. I’d done horrible things before I left The Fall and maybe it was my karma. He did get the better of me but in the end I got the last laugh because he’s still not paid for the amount of damage he’s done. Or maybe he has.’
Even with 25 years’ distance, Carroll keeps in touch with Fall gossip and suspects Smith is ‘very lonely’. Her voice lifts as she says she prefers to remember the good times, and there were many, like recording 1979’s classic ‘Totally Wired’ single in a studio in Rochdale. She says the version the Fall world loves only came about be
cause she rejected the first draft – ‘I went apeshit. It had no balls’ – and convinced the band to let her remix it herself.
Then there was the time Smith was attacked onstage at London’s Lyceum – ironically during ‘A Figure Walks’, his prophetic discourse about stalking – presumably remembered as a ‘good time’ by Carroll because the memory appeals to her sense of humour and unquenched thirst for vengeance.
Carroll remained in America, where she last saw Smith in 1986. The Fall were playing in New York and she spied Smith wearing a leather coat. ‘Who do you think you are, Marc Bolan?’ she asked, and was inevitably turfed out of the dressing room just as she had once turfed others out.
She remembers the moment The Fall came onstage. The New York Mets had just won the title. ‘Everyone was cheering and bowing, and Mark thought it was for him,’ she howls. ‘That was a really funny moment.’ She laughs some more as she remembers an interview with David Bowie in which he’d said he thought The Fall were really interesting but he ‘didn’t like them as much after 1983’.
‘When I left!’ she shrieks. ‘I can’t tell you how great that made my heart feel.’
When she ran out on them, Smith told the media she had contracted ‘a physical illness’ – before he knew she had contracted cancer. (She’s all right now.)
Carroll has regrets – ‘That I didn’t hit him more!’ – but confesses, ‘God love him, even though he is an arsehole.’
According to Carroll, The Fall were and remain virtually unmanageable, but she was the one person who almost pulled it off. She frets that with all the fallouts and punch-ups Smith is turning into a parody. However, she suggests The Fall’s crazy turnover of personnel appeals to ‘that side of us we all have where we have to peek at an accident that just might happen … I’m not sure if Mark knows that one or not but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did.’