The Fall didn’t go in much for style. Scrawny, lank-haired, and typically wearing a scruffy pullover of indeterminate hue, Smith looked like a grown-up version of the runty schoolkid in Kes, Ken Loach’s 1969 social realist film. But the Fall were mad for the other three escape routes—literature, music, and illegal substances. In its earliest incarnation, the Fall resembled a poetry group more than a rock band. They’d hang out at Baines’s flat and read their scribblings to each other. “We all wrote words then, not just Mark,” recalls Bramah. Although they would have spurned the word “intellectual”—too redolent of the despised world of students and higher education—that’s what the four original members of the Fall were, working-class intellectuals. Bookworms, really, making good use of their library cards, devouring everything from Burroughs and Philip K. Dick to Yeats and Camus. Their name came from the latter’s novel The Fall, which bassist Tony Friel happened to be reading.
As for music, the Fall preferred what Smith called the “real heavy stuff.” Drug music, mostly, but not blissed-out pastoralism or cosmic buffoonery. Instead, the Fall tranced out to the primal monotony of Can, the methedrine-scorched white noise of the Velvet Underground, and sixties “punkadelic” bands like the Seeds (who only had one keyboard riff, which they endlessly recycled). “This is the three Rs/Repetition repetition repetition,” quipped Smith on the Fall’s mission statement track, “Repetition.” Scorning “fancy music”—the overproduced mainstream rock of the day—“Repetition” exemplifies Smith’s early goal of “raw music with really weird vocals on top.” The rawness was supplied by Bramah’s thin, wheedling guitar lines, Baines’s wonky organ jabs (played on the cheap ’n’ nasty Snoopy keyboard, rated by Sounds as the absolute worst on the market), Friel’s capering bass, and Karl Burns’s ramshackle drums. The freak vocal element came from Smith’s half-sung, half-spoken drawl and wizened insolence.
Drugs? In an early interview, Smith described the Fall as “head music with energy.” “Head,” in this case, didn’t mean cerebral or anti-dance but referred to the sixties idea of a “head,” someone into turning on and tripping out. Manchester had a strong underground drug culture, not so much a 1960s hangover, says Bramah, as the true, if slightly belated, arrival of the sixties in the early seventies. “We learned from people older than us, like John Cooper Clarke, the Manchester poet who lived in the same area as us, Prestwich. He was ten years older, from the sixties really. We were the next generation. We saw all the hippies who’d blown their brains out and we felt we were wiser than that, but still attracted to the drug experience.”
Circa 1973, a few years before the Fall existed as a musical entity, sixteen-year-old Mark E. Smith used to take acid and go to clubs wearing swastika armbands (a protopunk gesture of pure provocation, not an indication of fascist sympathies). Bramah recalls being given “microdots” and the next day going as a group to Heaton Park, where they dropped the acid and spent the whole day tripping. Later they discovered that Heaton Park was renowned among local heads for its psilocybin mushrooms. “There were just fields of them you could pick, and it was a totally free source of entertainment,” says Bramah. “From then on we were kind of pickled in mushrooms and LSD, really exploring music and discovering ourselves.”
Amphetamines also made their mark on the Fall. Speed stoked the group’s attitude, projected onstage through Smith’s searing, see-through-you gaze and aura of icy arrogance. It also shaped the Fall’s sound, their white-lightning rush of discords, over which Smith sounds like someone speed-rapping, the words spat out with oracular urgency, encrypted but mesmerizing. High doses of speed create a kind of “eureka!” sensation. The user feels like he’s accessed a truth invisible to others and can see occult connections. On Live at the Witch Trials, the group’s 1979 debut album, “Underground Medecin” and “Frightened” evoke the positive and negative sides of amphetamine abuse: the rush that lights up the nervous system (“I found a reason not to die,” Smith exults, “the spark inside”) versus the hypertense twitchiness of stimulant-induced paranoia. Despite these and other downsides to long-term speed use (ulcers, weight loss, schizophrenia), the Fall carried on exalting white-line fervor in songs like “Totally Wired” and “Mr. Pharmacist.”
The “pharmacist” in that song, which was originally recorded by sixties garage band the Other Half, is a drug dealer, a street punk dispensing doses of “energy.” The Fall were obsessed with the double standards surrounding drugs, the way some chemicals are proscribed while others get prescribed. Training as a psychiatric nurse at Prestwich Hospital, Baines came back every day from work and disgorged story after story about the mistreatment and neglect she’d witnessed, including the use of downers to pacify the inmates. Her talk filtered into Smith’s lyrics. “Repetition” refers to electroshock therapy (after you’ve had some, alleges Smith, you lose your love of repetition), while the Fall’s 1979 single “Rowche Rumble” gets its title from Hoffmann-La Roche, the multinational pharmaceutical company that dominated the market for antidepressants.
Drugs of the socially sanctioned sort flooded Manchester in the seventies. Numbing and often incapacitating tranquilizers were massively overprescribed to help ordinary people (menopausal housewives, troubled teenagers, wage slaves cracked by stress and boredom) not so much manage their lives as be manageable. In an area like Hulme—whose infamous Crescents were a paradigm of the 1960s housing project gone wrong—antidepressants were dispensed so freely (a quarter of a million tablets in 1977 alone) that they verged on a form of social control. At the same time, Hulme illustrated the double standard (sedatives as prescribed remedy versus stimulants as illegal buzz) that Smith captured in the title “Underground Medecin.” For the Crescents were also where most of Manchester’s bathtub speed was manufactured.
Pills feature in “Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!,” the title track of the Fall’s debut EP, not as a way of coping with soul-crushing mundanity, but of escaping from it permanently. The bingo-master, a man whose job is organizing other people’s fun, looks into his future, sees only encroaching baldness and further years wasted “in numbers and rhyme,” and opts to end it all with a handful of pills washed down with booze. Smith had visited a bingo hall with his parents and was stunned by how regimented and mechanical this incredibly popular form of British working-class recreation was. The evening’s mind-dulling entertainment formed a grim mirror image of the daytime’s labor. “It wasn’t like a place you’d go for your leisure, it was a glorified works canteen,” Smith told Sounds. “And people were going there straight from work.”
Macabre and hilarious, “Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!” typified the Fall’s fish-eye-lens view of Northern working-class life. Bramah says that the Fall’s songs came from their “sitting in pubs, munching magic mushrooms, and observing the daft things people did.” In the grand tradition of British misanthropic satire, Smith’s invective seems to come from somewhere outside the class system, a vantage point from which everything seems equally absurd and ludicrous—the privileged upper class and middle-management bourgeoisie with their pretensions and illusions, for sure, but also the proles with their inverted snobberies, escapist pleasures, and grumbling acquiescence to the way things are and forever shall be. As unsparing toward his own people as everybody else, Smith’s withering gaze scanned society up and down and found only grotesquerie. In many ways he resembled the “judge penitent” of Camus’s The Fall who weighs up everybody’s failings and hypocrisies, his own included. In the song “New Puritan,” Smith declared, “Our decadent sins/Will reap discipline.”
In the early days, the Fall were regarded as heavy-duty politicos. Songs like “Hey! Fascist” and “Race Hatred” got them briefly tagged as New Wave Commies, a misunderstanding partly based on the fact that bassist Friel had once been a member of the Young Communist League. But while Baines says she and Smith did attend “loads of political meetings—things like the International Marxists,” she points out, “We were never members, just interested in checking out the
range of opinions.” Baines was also a forthright feminist who’d rejected her Catholic upbringing while still at her girls-only school, because the Bible was so anti woman. “There was a lot going on in Manchester with feminism then—the first rape crisis centers and women’s refuges, abortion rights were hotly fought for—and we were right in the middle of that.”
In 1977 and 1978 the Fall played numerous Rock Against Racism benefits, but like many postpunk groups they became disenchanted with RAR’s treatment of music as a mere vehicle for politicizing youth. They soon distanced themselves from anything remotely resembling agitprop or right-on trendy leftism. Instead, Smith developed a way of writing about “the real world” that was increasingly elliptical and nonlinear. Equally important as subject matter was rock culture. Songs like “It’s the New Thing,” “Music Scene,” “Mere Pseud Mag Ed,” “Look Know,” and “Printhead” skewered the platitudes and pieties of hipsters. In interview and song alike, Mark E. Smith took on the role of metapop specter, stalking the periphery of the postpunk scene and maintaining a scathing running commentary on the failings of the Fall’s peer groups.
One of Smith’s most famous pronouncements was his description of the Fall in “Crap Rap 2” as “Northern white crap that talks back.” “I don’t fully understand it myself,” Smith admitted to Sounds when asked about that line. “It’s meant to be, like, mystical.” The attitude still came through clear enough, the basic Fall stance of surly intransigence. In a way, Smith just added a kind of shamanic mystique to standard-issue Mancunian cockiness, which is itself a sort of residual attitude from the city’s industrial heyday, when Manchester “kept all the machinery going for the rest of the country,” as Baines puts it.
Being proud of the city’s industrial might, though, didn’t mean that one sided with the factory boss. Throughout the nineteenth century, Manchester was a stronghold for working-class radicalism, from the machinery-wrecking Luddites to the vote-demanding Chartists. Friedrich Engels, coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, lived in Manchester for a time and was inspired to write The Condition of the Working Class in England by his observations of the textile industry there.
Punishing work in hostile conditions forged a kind of Mancunian mettle, tough as new nails. “Fiery Jack,” the Fall’s fourth single, offered a vivid portrait of one of Manchester’s finest sons, the hard-bitten and indomitable product of five generations of industrial life. Fiery Jack is a forty-five-year-old pub stalwart who’s spent three decades on the piss, ignoring the pain from his long-suffering kidneys. Surviving on meat pies and other revolting bar snacks, Jack is an inexhaustible font of anecdotes and rants. The music sounds stubborn, incorrigible, a white-line rush of rockabilly drums and rhythm guitar like sparks shooting out of a severed cable. Speed might just be another of Jack’s poisons, judging by his refusal to go “back to the slow life” and lines such as “Too fast to write/I just burn burn burn.” Based on older blokes Smith had met in Manchester pubs, Jack was “the sort of guy I can see myself as in twenty years,” he told Sounds. “These old guys have more guts than these kids will ever have.” Jack was the lad who grew old, battered by hard work and harder pleasure, but who never gave up and never gave in.
WHEREAS THE FALL seemed to spring into existence fully formed and with an utterly distinctive sound, Joy Division took a while to find their identity. They began life as Warsaw, a fairly undistinguished punk-inflected hard-rock band. Listen to the early demos that survive, squint one’s ears, and a gleam of difference is audible. It’s a metallic quality, with “metal” referring to both the material substance and the musical genre. “Digital,” the group’s first recording as Joy Division, sounds not a million miles from Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”: a dark, fast pummel, a full-tilt dirge fusing pace and ponderousness.
Sabbath’s Bill Ward claimed that “most people live on a permanent down but just aren’t aware of it. We’re trying to express it for people.” Ian Curtis’s harrowed voice and words offered an equally “heavy” vision of life. Looking at his lyrics, certain words and images appear over and over: coldness, pressure, darkness, crisis, failure, collapse, loss of control. There are countless scenarios of futile exertion, purposes “turned sour,” and doom “closing in.” Above all, there are terminal words, endless ends and finals. But Joy Division’s reference points were less lumpen than heavy metal’s. Instead of pulp superhero comics or bastardized blues, it was J. G. Ballard and Bowie’s Low. Rather than the invulnerable “Iron Man,” Sumner’s guitar evokes the wounded, penetrable metal of Crash, twisted and buckled, splayed and torn.
Joy Division’s originality really became apparent as the songs got slower. Shedding punk’s fast, distortion-thickened sound, the music grew stark and sparse. Peter Hook’s bass carried the melody, Bernard Sumner’s guitar left gaps rather than filling up the group’s sound with dense riffage, and Steve Morris’s drums seemed to circle the rim of a crater. Curtis intoned from “a lonely place” at the center of this empty expanse. All that space in Joy Division’s music was something critics immediately noticed. It would have been hard to miss, even if Curtis hadn’t put up signposts in the form of titles like “Interzone” or lyrical references to “no-man’s-land.”
Although the initial inspiration was “Warszawa,” a haunting instrumental on side two of Low, the group’s original name, Warsaw, was chosen mainly because of the Polish capital’s associations with World War II (the uprising of the Jewish ghetto, the razing of the Old City) and the Eastern Bloc (Soviet totalitarianism, the cold war). Like the word “Berlin,” “Warsaw” conjured mind’s-eye imagery of desolate urban space: a city rebuilt rapidly after wartime devastation, all spartan apartment high-rises, government ministries straight out of Orwell’s 1984, and disquietingly wide streets designed to allow for the passage of Russian tanks. But the band’s replacement name had even more dismal connotations. “Joy Division” came from House of Dolls, a 1965 novel written by a concentration camp survivor who took the pen name Ka-Tzetnik 135633 from the prisoner number branded on his arm. The novel is written from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl sent to Auschwitz’s “Camp Labor Via Joy,” the “joy division” where females were kept as sex slaves for German troops fresh from the Russian front.
Steve Morris argues that the name indicated identification with the victims rather than the tormentors. “It was the flip side of it, rather than being the master race, the oppressed rather than the oppressor.” Sumner has often claimed that the group’s obsession with Nazism came from their desire to keep alive memories of the Second World War and the sacrifices of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations in the struggle of good against evil. Still, there’s no doubt that Joy Division played with fire when it came to dabbling in Nazi imagery. On the minialbum Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus—a document of the Manchester punk scene—Ian Curtis can be heard screaming at the crowd, “You all forgot Rudolf Hess!” In June 1978, the group self-released their first record, the EP An Ideal for Living. The sleeve featured a drawing of a blond-haired Hitler Youth drummer boy and a photograph of a German storm trooper pointing a gun at a small Polish Jewish boy. In the early days, Sumner used the Germanic-sounding stage name Albrecht, and the group’s image—gray shirts, very short hair, thin ties—had a monochrome austerity and discipline redolent of totalitarianism.
At a time when neo-Nazis were marching through the streets of Britain’s major cities and racial attacks were on the rise, there were those who believed that any ambiguity in one’s allegiances was irresponsible. According to Morris, the flak the group received (“We knew we weren’t Nazis but we kept on getting letters in NME slating us for harboring Eichmann in the coal cellar!”) just encouraged Joy Division “to keep on doing it, because that’s the kind of people we are.” But the flirtations went a little further than just a “perverse joke.” Years later, Hook and Sumner talked candidly about the fascination with fascism. Sumner enthused about the beauty (the art, architecture, design, even uniforms) that
emerged despite “all that hate and all that dominance,” while Hook admitted the dark allure of “a certain physical sensation you get from flirting with something like that. We thought it was a very, very strong feeling.”
For his part, Curtis’s obsession with Germany stemmed partly from the Berlin chic of his glam heroes Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie. He was also intrigued by the mass psychology of fascism, the way a charismatic leader could bewitch an entire population into doing or accepting irrational and monstrous things. The early song “Walked in Line” is about those who just did what they were told, committing crimes in a “hypnotic trance.” An explorer of literature’s darker precincts, such as Conrad and Kafka, Curtis enjoyed contemplating humanity’s bottomless capacity for inhumanity. Like Una Baines, he also had a keen interest in mental illness. One of his relatives worked in a psychiatric ward and brought back grim stories, while Curtis himself briefly worked in a rehabilitation center for people with mental and physical disabilities. As Deborah Curtis notes dryly in her memoir about her marriage to the singer, “It struck me that all Ian’s spare time was spent reading and thinking about human suffering.”
Curtis’s doomy baritone and obsession with the dark side often got him compared to Jim Morrison. Indeed, the Doors were one of the singer’s favorite bands. Joy Division’s “Shadowplay” is like “L.A. Woman” turned inside out, the latter’s rolling, virile propulsion reduced to a bleak transit across a city that could hardly be less like sunbaked Southern California. Gaping yet claustrophobic, the space in Joy Division’s music is the opposite of the utopian kind you find in sixties rock: the freeway-as-frontier imagery and “explode into space” euphoria of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” the outward-bound cosmic surge of Pink Floyd and Hendrix.
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