The Fallen

by Dave Simpson

  When he joined, the writer of modern Fall classic ‘Mountain Energei’ was actually a singer-songwriter as well as a drummer, but he was hurled in along with Blaney and Watts from the Trigger Happy band when Spencer Birtwistle quit (after another New York punch-up, this time with management, not The Fall).

  Milner had an early trial by fire. After his first two gigs with The Fall, Smith started screaming that there was a problem with the drumming – but, true to form, addressed this complaint to the guitarist Jim Watts, not the drummer.

  The following day, Milner chose the risky setting of a motorway café to ask Smith what he wanted and was informed: ‘Keep it simple. When I want you to stop, stop.’ He found this such an interesting concept that he decided to take it to the ‘nth degree’ – creating the most simple, minimal beats possible and stopping songs when told to, even if they were in the middle of the chorus. He loved it – he says the approach was ‘two fingers up to the conventions of playing music’. Milner has more tales of inspired, if irregular creativity – the bulk of the colossus ‘Theme From Sparta FC’ was recorded with one microphone in a bedroom.

  Milner soon realised that musical peculiarities were only the start when he found himself being asked to embark on a full-scale European tour. At the first gig, in Prague, he found himself staring at an empty stage because Smith had a ‘fit’ and missed the flight – although he subsequently made it there. As the tour progressed, Milner feared he would actually go insane and so took up meditation.

  One of the challenges was that The Fall – The Mighty Fall, with 30 legendary years behind them – were actually touring Europe on trains. In this fashion, Milner underwent the ‘crazy’ experience of Smith (who, despite his job, ‘doesn’t travel well’), the musicians he hates, a manager, Ed Blaney, whom he was always arguing with, and a suitcase full of merchandise, hauling themselves around the Eastern Bloc on decrepit trains which sold beer 24 hours a day. They’d invariably get no sleep and then a van would arrive to take them from the railway carriage to the gig.

  No wonder ‘it got nuts’.

  Milner reveals a typical instance in Portugal that perhaps puts a more comical angle on Smith’s ability to predict the future. The Mighty Fall were employing road managers and crew whom Smith became convinced were trying to rob the band. He complained about this so much that two managers finally resigned in exasperation – taking some money with them. As payment, perhaps? Whatever, Smith has since explained that the pair quit after ‘a piece of paper was thrown at them, like a plane or something’; the affair was later documented in the brilliant track ‘Portugal’, which consists of Pritchard and Milner reading out emails from the managers explaining their departure, over a powerful musical backing. These emails perhaps encapsulate what it can be like to actually work for The Fall.

  We had two conversations with you. He would be paid more than he had in fact asked for. No real arrangements were made. Very standard industry procedure.

  You were abusive, way beyond what anybody should have to deal with. Both myself and the crew were subjected to verbal and physical abuse.

  Words fail me. How offensive a human being you are. They are a very professional crew. This complete debacle could have been avoided … Treat people as you want to be treated.

  They were swearing, throwing newspapers with snotballs – band sing ‘SNOTBALLS!’ – and spit at us across the plane and physically slapping members of the band. I had to threaten him, and I told him that if this continued I would have to review my position.

  At 10 p.m. the crew and myself went to our rooms after being out for just an hour and 15 minutes for a bite. We had not had any sleep … began banging on doors and then what sounded like throwing himself against myself and the crew’s doors. This is becoming unbearable.

  Milner regards this as a form of genius but suspects that Smith has got to the point where he actually doesn’t know what’s real. Either way, growing tensions erupted in Italy, where Smith and Blaney had a row that spilled out of the van into the road, along with all the band’s equipment. Blaney quit on the spot, which prompted Smith to decide to get drunker and drunker.

  ‘He got smashed,’ sighs Milner, relating tales of Smith being escorted from bars while the musicians had to reassure worried promoters that the gig would take place. When Smith finally made it to the venue, he took one step onstage and landed on his face. Milner is almost awestruck in his description of – subsequently – one of the best gigs they ever played.

  He was also thrilled to be at last rid of Blaney, describing being ‘threatened’ by the ‘broker’ and explaining that being on the road with him was like encountering ‘two Marks’. He soon learned the only way to get through it was to laugh – and do even more meditation.

  There was actually a lot to laugh about. He remembers one instance when The Fall were due to fly home but Smith made such a fuss about not being able to take a keyboard on the plane that airport staff refused to let him board the flight. The keyboard then made the journey – in the seat that had been reserved for Smith. Milner can reel off countless similar instances like snaps from a particularly barmy photo album: Smith greeting smiling venue staff with, ‘Where’s the fookin’ gear, cunt?’; Smith catching Ben Pritchard listening to Eric Clapton and bellowing, ‘What’s this Clapton blues shit?’; Smith having an altercation in a car at 70 mph; another – with echoes of Nick Dewey’s story about Nev Wilding – has a tour manager waking Smith to be told, ‘If you come near me again, I’ll stab you!’

  ‘But people get used to environments,’ muses the Fallen drummer. ‘That’s how they fight wars.’ He reveals that one of The Fall’s business team once told him he would survive boot camp because, perhaps due to the meditation, he had a ‘Jedi calm’. If so, this calm was certainly tested. He tells how Smith tried to wind him up by actions like throwing his pizza on the floor. However, a bigger source of frustration was the time Smith had lined up a massive record deal and suddenly, irrationally, pulled the plug. ‘I said, “Mark, do you not get a sense of momentum?”’ He understands, but disagrees with, Smith’s world view: ‘If a record company’s got a big name, they’re “crap”! I’m not saying they’re as pure as the driven snow, but they wanted The Fall to succeed. But he will not let people get that close. Either in a business sense or personally.’

  Which makes Dave Milner different. He did get close. Very close indeed.

  As he tells it, the line-up that made The Real New Fall LP – himself, Archer, Watts and Pritchard – had a closer bond with Smith than most line-ups because they would do anything for him. The drummer asserts that Smith needs it but paradoxically can’t handle it because he needs the distance and control. Milner got close because he was frank with Smith and the boss respected that. Milner was also diplomatic and because he was older didn’t fall for Smith’s usual tricks, such as making musicians feel like paid employees whenever it suited. Yes, there were times when Smith hit Milner through frustration. However, they got so close that on one occasion he ‘crossed the line’ to the point where he could no longer be in the group.

  Milner tells the story: The Fall were playing in Austin, Texas, and had hours to kill before the gig. The musicians, as usual, found a pool table. However, there had been an argument, and because of this Smith later began screaming about the songs the group had decided for the set list – a task the singer usually undertakes himself.

  Because of the hangover from the argument, Milner declared, ‘Mark, if you care that much about the set list do it yourself.’ ‘He threw a bottle of beer in my face. So I stood up, six foot one and a lot fitter then. And he cowered in the corner. It was so sad to see. I said, “What do you think I’m going to do?”’

  Milner says he announced he was leaving – not The Fall, just the environment – and returned to do the gig.

  As he walked off the stage Smith quietly whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Dave.’

  Later, he found himself alone in the dressing room with Smith and Elena.

  �
��I just said, “Why mate, why? You’ve got a friend here.” And he burst into tears and said, “I know, it’s pathetic”.’

  Leaving Smith to get himself together, Milner later returned to find the singer had left him a bottle of whisky. The drummer who wanted to be Smith’s friend but whom Smith could not allow to be his friend had seen something perhaps never witnessed in the history of The Fall. Vulnerability. Like Brian Clough, or any football manager, Smith realised the moment you show weakness to a player, one of you has to go.

  Milner jokes about first becoming aware of his imminent exit via the ‘Mafiosi-style’ gesture of a fish’s head outside his hotel room. I mention Dave Tucker’s arsonist story and there’s a knowing laugh. ‘He’s a man of extremes like that. These things start as a joke but he’s testing you to see which way you’ll take it. But if you think you know which way to react he’ll take you to the cleaners.’

  Milner has yet another angle on Smith’s drinking, suggesting he runs on alcohol to the point where food would actually clog his system and that if he ate well he would be dead. It’s an interesting take on things, although as Milner is a drummer, not a medical practitioner, it’s probably likely to be pounced on by the NHS. ‘When I see what he’s put himself through, I am amazed,’ he says, expressing concerns about those ‘fits’ which he says always coincide with the start of tours – perhaps confirming what Smith had said to me about getting ‘nervous’.

  He seems to understand the man more than most – he compares Smith to a Goon, a ‘Spike Milligan figure’, more than a Bob Dylan – so I find myself asking about Smith’s father, a figure who has intrigued me since Tony Friel talked about how, in their teens, he’d be in an adjoining room in the pub, distant but watchful.

  ‘That’s one thing I was going to say,’ replies Milner, who seems to have been anticipating the enquiry. ‘There were definitely issues.’

  He reveals that he used to talk to Smith about country life – ‘It’s great living opposite the park. I can boot the kids out’ – and the singer would respond by comparing it to the days his father would boot him out of the house.

  ‘From a few conversations I gathered that there was a lack of closeness with his father,’ he suggests.

  In childhood, his father seems to have been a detached but dominant presence: it was his scolding that sent his son to take refuge in the library and thus triggered The Fall. ‘What you get with unusual people is a combination of events and circumstances that combine to create this person,’ reflects Milner. ‘He’s got this natural intelligence combined with the way he reacted to his upbringing, and then at the age of 17 to be thrust into the limelight and very soon afterwards lauded as a wordsmith. That’s a pretty unusual and strong kind of path.

  ‘The way Mark’s mind works … his growing up wasn’t kicking a football around like a normal guy who craved attention from his dad. It was old school working-class. So, you’ve got a father who’s a plumber and a son who’s reading history books. I think he felt he was not the son his father wanted. I think he was enormously hurt by it.’

  Milner says Smith once told him that one of his greatest moments was finding out his dad was proud of him. As he should have been; after all, Mark E Smith has carried on his very own Fall family firm. However, Milner adds that the first Smith knew of this was when his father’s friends told him at the funeral. Is it coincidental that The Fall’s revolving door and Smith’s drinking seem to have intensified when Jack Smith died? Mark E Smith is from a generation and a class that never had therapy; he is his own ever evolving ‘Rorschach Test’.

  There’s an eerie calm now and we can hear the bees in the garden. Neither of us wants to delve any more. I think we both know this is as close as we will go – or would want to go – towards understanding what makes Smith tick.

  Milner offers me a drink, but I have to go and find another Fallen. Before we say our farewells, the drummer sheds more light on his own exit. There were family issues – his partner didn’t like him much when he was in The Fall, because the ‘state of mind’ produces a certain arrogance. He also mentions he developed a foot problem which made it hard to play the bass drum – something of a career killer when you’ve already stopped hitting tom toms and cymbals. Crucially, he couldn’t work with Ed Blaney, who he thinks ‘manipulated’ himself into The Fall inner circle by providing a Transit when Smith broke his leg.

  ‘That leg break changed the dynamic,’ he claims. ‘If he hadn’t broken his leg, I might still be in The Fall.’

  Bur the detonator for the inevitable expulsion came when Milner had the ‘temerity’ to ask for his money, and was sacked. In a final joke, the execution warrant was delivered by Smith’s sister, Caroline, who Milner compares fondly to one of the factory girls on Coronation Street.

  ‘She phoned me … Mark was in the background,’ he says.

  ‘Erm, Dave, Mark’s asked me to phone you, luv, because we really appreciate what you’ve done for us but we no longer require your services.’

  ‘I said, “I appreciate that. If you ever need me again give me a bell.”’

  He’s laughing.

  ‘To be sacked by Caroline was funny and a Greek tragedy at the same time. But that’s The Fall. Everyone leaves their mark on Mark and vice versa. It’s got everything: it’s a great comedy, a horror film and a pantomime all in one.’

  I arrive home to an answering machine message from Ed Blaney.

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘My job was to stop the musicians having

  fun.’

  ‘’Ere, I hear you’ve been looking for me,’ he begins, sounding like something from an old James Cagney movie, albeit with a distinct North Manchester accent. I’ve been phoning different numbers for Blaney for months to no avail, but he explains that he’s been difficult to track down owing to a spell ‘offside’ after serving two months for drunken driving. He hasn’t seen Karl Burns.

  Blaney – who’s been at liberty for a few weeks – was part of Trigger Happy with Watts and Milner, although he says that Smith had originally heard his demos and asked him to be tour manager, which suggests Blaney was being groomed. He did a tour with ‘Helal and Nagle and all them’ but when they walked out he did the short notice gig in Dublin. ‘I like a challenge,’ he says, ‘although that was a bit ridiculous.’ Trigger Happy’s guitarist, Tim Scott, didn’t make it into the Fall like the rest of them: ‘Probably because he was a Scouser.’ Soon after, Blaney was asked to manage Smith – not The Fall, just Smith. He was offered ten per cent, stuck out for some more and they came to a deal. I wonder aloud what the precise difference is between managing Smith and managing The Fall. Blaney responds that Smith is a ‘spiritual man’ who should receive a knighthood, although he’s heard the stories – like him sticking tapes up promoters’ noses. He says that managing someone like that requires you to be ‘Jack of 94 trades’ but his biggest task – certainly the one demanded most by Smith – was stopping the musicians having fun.

  I start to see why Milner and Pritchard don’t like him. He says his role model was Peter Grant – the infamous Led Zeppelin manager who was known to carry a baseball bat. Blaney says a typical job was the one where Smith had spied the musicians ‘stuffing their faces’ in a restaurant and Blaney was instructed to cart them back to the hotel.

  ‘Their heads have to be kept level,’ he barks, suggesting that musicians had to be smart and ‘well-turned out’ and sounding like a sergeant major. The problem, he argues, is that band members become accustomed to being in a famous band and start ‘thinking they’re Oasis’.

  ‘We soon put a stop to that,’ he cackles, echoing Milner’s description of ‘two Marks’ by explaining it was him and Smith versus the band. ‘But in a friendly way. Methods of keeping the musicians in line ranged from sending them to addresses for ‘celebrity parties’ miles out of town which did not exist, having spies everywhere ‘like the CIA’ and feeding musicians so much misinformation they would no longer know what was real – which could explain the b
affling and differing stories about Smith’s drinking. Or some of them. But Blaney says his responsibilities extended to ‘counselling’. ‘I’ve had guitarists threatening to jump out of windows,’ he says. ‘I’ve said “Go on then, jump.” They soon get their act together. Couple of whiskies and they’re all right. It was my job to fire them up.’

  I ask about the incident where Pritchard and Co. were supposedly dumped in Houston. Blaney replies that when he joined the tour, it was a ‘shambles’. Smith was in a wheelchair and promoters weren’t leaving him room to get onstage. The tour was pulled and the broker’s responsibility was ‘to get the boss and his wife home’. The musicians? ‘They’re grown adults. They were more interested in meeting their new friends off the internet in LA.’

  Blaney certainly sounds as if he was devoted to his job. I ask about some of Pritchard’s more extreme suggestions, like the one about the ‘broker’ fighting with promoters.

  ‘Er, well, there was one night in Derby,’ he reveals. ‘The promoter offered us less money than we’d agreed. He was stood there with three doormen, one that had an eye missing. I wasn’t scared. I gave one of the doormen a crack cos he went for me. There was a bit of a scene. We got full money.’

  What about fighting with Fall audiences?

  ‘There was one incident in Sheffield. The police were called. The bloke’s uncle was an MP. The police said he was a tosser, that it would go no further. All I did was push him off the stage.

  ‘You’ve got to be tough like me and Mark,’ he says of life around The Fall. ‘It’s not Take That. You’re on edge and that’s the buzz. Everyone has their way of preparing for a show and sometimes he [Smith] lets a bit of tension out. If you’re smart you’ll keep out of the way.’ He suggests the musicians were ‘jealous’ over his alliance with Smith. However, Blaney seems to have been on the end of the boot camp treatment himself. When I ask him about being ushered off in Stourbridge because it ‘wasn’t working’, he insists it was ‘mutual’ – it was actually his guitar that wasn’t working.