by Dave Simpson
Another characteristic is the emergence of black-and-white thinking. This is good. That is bad. There is nothing in between. There are ‘food restrictions’. Cult leaders ‘intimidate’ critics, as Smith did to that pesky interrogator from Loaded magazine, who, incidentally, he also branded a ‘fookin’ dead-leg cunt’.
All the above characteristics can quite easily be applied to the group the BBC call the ‘crackpot garage band’ from Salford.
Singer also examines how cult members are recruited. Usually, they are solicited on the street like Tommy Crooks, or in local Rotary Club-type groupings – which would rule in the pubs of Prestwich. Potential members may be depressed, confused by life’s choices or seeking purpose – ‘I was a terrible guitarist before I joined The Fall,’ quoth Ben Pritchard.
Cult members often experience a ‘first fatal step’. For Crooks, that fatal step was suddenly finding himself in ‘the eye of the storm’.
Singer says that, after the recruitment, cults are often reminiscent of a ‘jack-in-the-box – a pretty innocuous container that, when opened, surprises you with a pop-out figure, often a scary one’. Similarly, ‘surprising and frightening’ things pop out over the course of membership.
However, the most interesting areas of her work for me are the sections where she explores ‘brainwashing’, or moulding. One of the foremost tactics is for the leader or upper echelons of the cult power structure to ‘attack the self ’ of new or unconverted recruits. In religion, this may involve calling someone a pagan, with no beliefs, creating a vacuum of spirituality in that person within which the cult can grow. In music, it could encompass something like ‘You’re playing like a fookin’ pub band’ and ‘Get it together instead of showing off’.
In 1950s China, Chairman Mao explored the area of ‘ideological remoulding’, although this was done not with myths, neo-supernatural methods or ‘secrets’, but by the simpler techniques of group pressure and careful choice of words.
One of the key characteristics of cult brainwashing is the members having no idea they are undergoing the process – which is opposite to The Fall experience, whose new musicians know full well what is happening to them and are happy to get with the programme. However, Fall musicians certainly seem to develop ‘dependency on the organisation’, as Singer suggests. In fact, the more I read about cults, I wonder how much the very well read Smith knows about them too, and whether the way his group operates is by design. On the other hand, apart from some cults – financially based, which fleece their members and get them out of the door – members are generally encouraged to stay in the cult at all costs, even if this means taking on authorities. In The Fall, conversely, it’s now generally accepted every member will one day be asked – or ask – to leave.
If The Fall is in fact a cult, and not just a pop group, where does that leave you and me? I’ve read Singer’s book from cover to cover because I’m having trouble sleeping. I’ve become fixated and sometimes irritable. One night, Suzanne comes home while I’m in the middle of typing an email and I uncharacteristically yell, ‘Shut up!’ at the interruption to my concentration, and feel terrible afterwards. Sometimes, I feel I’m slipping further and further into The Wonderful and Frightening World, and wonder where it will all lead.
CHAPTER 17
‘Creative management, cock!’
Everything is a blur before I suddenly realise where I am. There’s a mass of equipment. To my right, two guitarists. To my left, a bass player who is shrouded by a stack of amps. All around there is music. What am I doing here? I get a feeling I shouldn’t be here at all … a feeling forcibly rammed home by a figure walking towards me in a white shirt.
Now I realise where I am.
The Fall’s stage.
His stage.
And I shouldn’t be here at all.
I feel a shove beneath my ribcage. ‘Get off my fucking stage.’ Then all becomes blackness.
I wake up to be confronted by another omnipresent figure in my life – it’s Guinness, nestled beneath my ribcage. I’ve fallen asleep and been dreaming about The Fall.
It’s happening a lot lately. Sometimes, I remember what life was like before I started on this biblical quest, before almost every waking hour was spent finding The Fallen. But I can’t think about that now. I have to get myself together. The Fall are playing 26 miles away at Leeds Irish Centre, which for some reason has become the only venue The Fall ever play in Leeds, and I have to go.
Several hours later, I’m showered, dressed, Fall Heads Roll ’s on the car stereo and I’m pulling into the Irish Centre car park for my third Fall gig this year, which must be something like the twenty-ninth or thirty-second Fall gig of my life. Soon enough, I’m in the company of around a thousand cult followers. Among the audience are Hells Angels, blokes with strange facial expressions who look like they’ve been released from somewhere for the day, teenage girls, bald men and, bizarrely, most of the cast of Emmerdale. Who would have thought Paddy the vet and Jimmy King the high-rolling, crooked incompetent would spend evenings listening to The Fall? It’s exactly how Kay Carroll described Fall gigs in the 1970s and early 1980s – as if a plane had crashed and the passengers stumbled to the gig.
As usual, there is much speculation over whether Smith will turn up, how long he will be onstage, and in what condition. At around ten, a burly guy wanders through the crowd shouting ‘Five minutes to The Fall’. I’m reminded of the little besuited black man who used to say, ‘Tyson’s coming through!’ whenever the former champion boxer made his latest increasingly unhinged public appearance. At 10.10 p.m. there’s a more familiar voice: ‘We are The Fall.’
He seems in good shape, the best for quite some time. For once, even those deliberately misshapen free-associating vowels are crystal clear, which means the crowd notice when he breaks off from the turbulent ‘Blindness’ – about David Blunkett – to launch into an incomprehensibly withering annihilation of Roy Hattersley. As he works the stage like a comedian, I notice he’s wearing the same jacket he struggled to keep on in Malmaison. On ‘Pacifying Joint’ he starts fiddling with the bassist’s amplification so the booming basslines drown out the group, like some kind of peculiar Fall reggae. Meanwhile, the poor bassist – who, as if his art being tampered with wasn’t bad enough, has to tolerate the humiliation of various prods and shoves – stares ahead impassively, in the manner of a Buckingham Palace sentry.
Smith’s jacket comes off to reveal a zip-up tank top over a shirt – making him look like a businessman who has been dragged by a mad outfitter into the nearest branch of Oxfam – but after 40 minutes the jacket goes back on and the singer beckons the band offstage. They remain in the dressing room for 15, maybe 20 minutes, after which Smith leads them back on, looking rather zonked. But somehow after the break they sound even better. What Clough-like pep talk did the boss give them in the break? Did Smith supernaturally prompt the musicians into playing better by blindfolding them, as Schofield had suggested? Did he attack the bassist with a cattle-prod or indulge in some performance-enhancing substance? Or was he simply dispensing more of those odd instructions we discussed in Malmaison: ‘Hit it harder!’
‘Mark is the master of the cryptic instruction,’ says Simon Rogers. ‘Do you take sugar?’
It’s a few days after the gig and I’m 200 or more miles from Prestwich once again, in London’s leafy Ealing Broadway, where I meet another member of The Fallen. Rogers – the nineteenth disciple – was officially in the cult from 1985 to 1986 but as a producer of The Fall’s albums he was in the camp well into the 1990s.
His house, in a quiet street in the busy suburb, looks like somewhere I’ve previously encountered – Dave Tucker’s tiny abode, but times fifty.
The studio at the back of his house contains more instruments than even Smith’s ex-clarinet player turned jazz man has probably ever seen. A collection of mandolins hangs on the walls. There are computers and a baffling array of sound equipment. A large elephant’s head sculpture overlooks book
s on Wagner and Lord Byron. There are scores of CDs and DVDs. Glancing through them, every so often I come across something by The Fall.
In a sense, the quizzical 40-something with close-cropped hair – the operatic barnet he sported in Fall days is long gone – is Dave Tucker times fifty. He was, and remains, anathema to The Fall – a technically accomplished and highly trained classical musician.
Rogers was not hanging around Prestwich or lurking in American clubs like Brix. While The Fall were treading the boards in smelly clubs between 1977 and 1980, this tea-making Faller was studying at London’s Royal College of Music in London, gaining a coveted ARCM (Associate of the Royal College of Music).
When The Fall recorded Grotesque in 1980, he picked up the College’s guitar prize. In the early 1980s, he played in the Ballet Rambert’s Mercury Ensemble, composed ballet scores and worked on BBC dramas. Somehow, he also found time to form Incantation, who played a form of South American folk and scored hits with music that would normally make Smith retch.
By any standards, Rogers is the least likely musician ever to end up in The Fall. Which may be why Smith invited him in. The process occurred by a familiar, obtuse route. Michael Clark – who Rogers remembers as a ‘tearaway’ when they were together in the Rambert – was working on a dance based on the Fall song ‘The Classical’ and asked Rogers to provide the score.
Rogers phoned Smith to ask whether he should use cellos but was simply told, ‘I don’t know, just get on with it!’ At the time, Steve Hanley was briefly absent from The Fall because his wife had had a baby. Out of the blue, Smith phoned the classical musician, 200 miles way.
‘He asked if I played bass,’ Rogers remembers with a grin. ‘I said I had, but only jazz funk.’ Thus, inevitably, the mandolin collector who’d only played bass in the entirely different Incantation would pick up the instrument in Britain’s strangest group.
Rogers had never even been to Manchester, never mind Prestwich, but soon found himself staying with the Smiths and being inducted into the lifestyle. He remembers days lost to dingy local boozers and nights listening to ‘weird records’ like Captain Beefheart and Nervous Norvus – the performing name of the Californian Jimmy Drake, who had a smash hit in 1956 with ‘Transfusion’, a song about careless drivers who receive a blood transfusion after each accident (every stanza ends with the line ‘Never ever ever gonna speed again’).
As the records played, Smith would rummage through plastic bags looking for misplaced lyrics. Rogers’ bed for the night – when he was allowed sleep – was the spare room. He remembers ‘speeding off my head’, unable to rest and gazing at strange images on Fall posters on the walls.
Induction into The Fall was another culture shock. Because The Fall place intensity above technical expertise, he was required to ‘de-learn’ his classical training and at early gigs found himself being given a ‘hard time’ by fans wondering who this odd chap was, wearing a solitary white glove to protect his ‘classical guitar fingernails’. Meanwhile, the musicians called him things like ‘Wendy’ and ‘Ottersley Kipling’ – apparently viewing him as a ‘fat bastard’ for the heinous crime of having a ‘normal’ appetite.
Like Dave Tucker, and episodes such as firing a soundman during the gig, Rogers was another musical ‘spanner in the works’ – someone to ‘shake up’ the other musicians and, ideally, amuse the site manager in the process. Rogers reveals Smith’s justification for any unusual developments – the catchall ‘Creative management, cock!’
However, as Smith explained to me in Malmaison, Rogers came to enjoy the enormous musical freedom of playing in The Fall. Freed from the prison-like disciplines of his training, he enjoyed ‘making some noise’.
He also found a different Smith to the stern public image – someone who was ‘very civil’ and frequently hilarious to work with, especially if he ever suspected the band were becoming complacent, in which case he’d attack the latest drummer or hurl the keyboards off the stage.
Rogers backs up Smith’s suggestion to me that at least some of this was showbiz (among Smith’s few heroes are Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley). Along with ‘creative management’, another of Smith’s mantras is, apparently, ‘Don’t knock The King’.
Another reason he enjoyed working with The Fall was the money, which was comparable if not better than anything he could have commanded in the classical world at the time. He suggests some musicians may feel aggrieved because Smith’s approach to wages was haphazard and similar to that of a nineteenth-century employer: if he felt a musician deserved recompense, the musician would find him-or herself the recipient of ‘bundles of tenners and twenties, out of the blue’. If not, then there were starvation wages.
Rogers says he wasn’t always paid on time but was handsomely rewarded by the boss. In fact, Smith became quite friendly with the classical musician who aroused his intellectual curiosity. Whenever Smith was in London, he’d stay at Rogers’ house and Smith became friendly with Rogers’ wife, Lucy, who potters in the garden as we talk.
There’s a lot of amusement when Rogers tells me about touring with The Fall. He remembers an episode in Rennes when Smith had a boil on his neck and was starting to hallucinate.
‘I thought it was the drink but, apparently it was so close to his spinal cord and infected, if we hadn’t got him to a hospital he might have died,’ he says, explaining how the doctor lanced the boil and Smith came out covered in bandages. Any other musician would have pulled the gig, but Smith took to the stage, looking ‘like a mummy’. This curious sight prompted the crowd to throw things at the stage and Burns to hurl them back. When the promoter withheld the fee, Burns smeared his body with pâté from a nearby spread then hugged the promoter, smearing him with food paste. The evening ended with Rogers and Burns wrestling in the mud in the middle of the night and spending the rest of it on wooden floors in the local YMCA.
He has lots of stories of fun on the road. He remembers a Welsh road manager whose nationality prompted Smith and Rogers to spend all night in a Novotel hotel filling in hundreds of comments slips reading, ‘Please build more Novotels in Wales, the land of my birth’, all bearing the forged signature of the Welshman.
Rogers had even more fun in the studio. Because he was asked to play a keyboard – an instrument he didn’t take to, having never played one in his life – he retired from the live band to become The Fall’s producer and has more insights than anyone I’ve yet encountered into The Fall’s unconventional approach to making records.
He remembers the studio as being as peculiar an environment as the stage, with musicians being given bizarre instructions. Karl Burns, for instance, was told to play a tom tom – the usual fine presumably having been lifted – ‘like a fookin’ snake!’
How does one actually play a drum like a snake?
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ grins Rogers. Neither did Burns, who just took it as a cue to try something different.
For Rogers, some of the most outlandish recording experiences didn’t take place in a studio at all. He remembers a song called ‘Paintwork’ from Brix-era album This Nation’s Saving Grace. The band had recorded it in at least moderately conventional fashion – a studio was hired, the musicians played and Smith wreaked havoc on the sound desk. The track was finished and Smith took a cassette recording of it back to his hotel, where he placed it in a cassette machine and accidentally sat on the button marked RECORD. The resulting recording – the expensive studio track interrupted by a BBC documentary about stars – ended up on the album. ‘And it sounded amazing,’ laughs Rogers, still incredulous. He describes another track – ‘Crew Filth’ on 1992’s Code: Selfish, a spoof of hip-hop ‘crew’ culture involving what sounds like a toy organ – being recorded with a microphone in the back of a Transit van at 70 mph, which would explain why Smith delivers the lyrics while howling with laughter.
He says Smith ‘never knew when to stop’ and unusual approaches to sound even went as far as the cutting room (where sound engineers make the init
ial pressing of a record), where Smith would decide at the eleventh hour that a certain track needed an extra backing vocal.
He cites the cutting of 1987’s single ‘Hit The North’ – at Abbey Road, the famous London studio where the Beatles recorded – as typical. Engineer Ian Cooper had done a ‘fantastic job. It wasn’t like The Fall at all but it was brilliant, really clean,’ says Rogers. Smith listened intently, then stood up and suddenly declared, ‘Right, cock, in the intro put the top end [treble] right up. In the chorus, take the top end right off and put some fookin’ bass reverb in.’
‘The thing about engineers is that they spend a lot of time on their own and can be a bit weird themselves,’ says Rogers, describing how Cooper went into the kitchen, brought out a ‘fucking great knife and just put it down on the desk and he said, “Right then, shall we cut the track?”’
In the flash of a blade, Smith decided: ‘It sounds great, cock!’ And indeed it did – one of The Fall’s finest singles, still heard on dance floors to this day. Curiously, I have since heard that Lightning Seeds man and former Fall producer Ian Broudie tells a different version of this story: that it was Smith who produced the knife. So either Rogers’ memory fails him, or the Fall leader picked up a useful tip.
Rogers breaks from the interview and starts rummaging in boxes, emerging with a tape of Smith speaking in the studio. The man is delivering his lyrics while adding spontaneous instructions. It’s really mad stuff; ‘Use Pinky and Perky voices’ and the like. The words pierce the comfy environment of Rogers’ home studio: ‘We’re coming, Leo, whoahwhoahwhoah … Crusty mystics!’ and ‘Autobiograph … self-pity crap … Simon, put that bit in if you like’.