1.
I am a country-borne southerner, clothed in low level privilege. I’ve never set foot in Manchester. In fact I’ve barely spent a night north of Crewe, England-wise. In insisting that I’m allowed to have an opinion on him, I’m aware that I make myself a ready facsimile of Mark Smith’s worst enemy. I’m aware of this. If I’m not careful, perhaps he’ll come back and haunt me (which really would make for a strange & frightening world).

2.
I confess I’ve always found the widespread appeal and influence of The Fall - particularly beyond these shores - slightly mystifying. Whilst I appreciate and enjoy their music to a certain extent (see below), learning to love it can be… challenging, to say the least. The band’s music managed to be both rudimentary and threatening, and even his most fervent admirers must cop that the front MES put across to the world was insular and alienating in the extreme. Indifferently recorded and mixed, even their most accessible “numbers” tend to revolve around inscrutable, incessantly repeated playground taunts, led by a man who resembled most people’s idea of a nightmare, closing-time hobgoblin...and yet…. sell out American tours across the decades, with yankees as disparate as Pavement and Nots holding them up as key touchstones. It can’t JUST be purposeful anglophile obscurantism and the insidious influence of Brit-aligned tastemakers, surely?

Whilst I was in Japan last year, I found myself speaking to a highly talented & knowledgeable musician and music fan, and all he wanted to talk to me about was The Fall. How easy was it to get hold of copies of their earlier albums in the UK? Did they play often? What kind of people went to see them? Are they really popular, or more of a cult thing? How is Mark E. Smith generally regarded? Is he a big media figure? Do people realise how great he is? – these are all things he wanted to know. As you will appreciate, trying to find straight answers to these question was a bit difficult when put on the spot by someone speaking English as a second language.

To be honest, I’ve always felt that people born on the same street as MES probably don’t know what he’s going on about half the time, so… what can he possibly be getting across to people from other continents? I don’t know, but, for all the trouble I’ve had with it, the spirit of this music – that wired up, indigestible fury and unfathomable mystery – clearly travels, and travels well. It is kind of fascinating to me.

3.
Though I recognise the myriad qualities of their work, and love a number of individual songs and albums a great deal, The Fall have never really been ‘my band’. Whilst around 75% of male British music fans of an age equivalent to or older than myself treat them with a degree of reverence that borders on the obsessive/irrational, I suppose I’ll never really be one of The Chosen, irrespective of the years I put in on the Peel-taping coalface.

On reflection, I think this failure to grok is just a matter of musical preference on my part, more than anything else. Although I appreciate The Fall’s dedication to simplicity and repetition, I generally tend to favour forms of rock music that aim to achieve some sort of elegance or transcendence, often coupled with exaggerated emotional expression or fantastical escapism… all of which is absolute anathema to the doggedly quotidian aesthetic cultivated by Mark E. Smith, needless to say. All those pre-existing rock clichés he spent forty years excising from his world with puritanical, year zero fervour..? I just *like* them, basically – that’s the root of the problem. I’m more comfortable when bands keep ‘em around to some extent.

In the same way that I’ve never really warmed to The Monks or Pere Ubu, the thunking, ugly, resolutely earth-bound, pointedly comfort-free botheration of The Fall’s post-punk derived sound – heavy, lolloping bass, drums staggering in a circle like a three legged dog, brittle ‘nah-nah-na-nah-nah’ guitar lines - is not a formula that has ever held a sustained appeal for me, warning me off taste-acquiring repeat plays, even as the more sinister, skeletal elements of the band’s admittedly unique conjurations simultaneously tickle my fancy on an equally regular basis.

I like it when the early-era band get their teeth into a really propulsive groove (cf: ‘The Classical’, ‘Flat of Angles’), and they could scratch some satisfyingly grisly noise out of their none-more-basic equipment on occasion (cf: ‘ Put Away’). Other oft-feted songs however just drive me up the wall, particularly those centred around stop-start, call-and-response type shenanigans. Most fans will disagree of course, but, despite their great titles, ‘Eat Yerself Fitter’ has always been a tough one for me to get through, and ‘Who Makes The Nazis?’ approaches a near Residents-like level of fingers-down-the-blackboard annoyance. I suppose I’ll never learn.

4.
THAT SAID THOUGH, I have always really liked Mark E. Smith himself – as a character, as a writer, as an eternally inscrutable/unknowable savant, or as an expertly tuned human bullshit detector, permanently squarking in the red. To the extent that I like The Fall, I like them because of his words and his presence.

He was always a hoot in interviews – dropping his guard a little - but when it came to his more ‘formal’ public pronouncements (those on record, primarily), he always struck me more than anything as a kind of English working class equivalent of William S. Burroughs. That same calculated coldness, that total rejection of all human sentiment, as if he has put all feeling aside in order to aid the circulation of more urgent and practical ideas; hidden knowledge of such uncertain provenance and fiendish, coded complexity that more often than not it emerged hopelessly garbled from the lips of its cracked and lager-addled human medium.

As such, much of what he announced through a microphone during his career ended up sounding like the pronouncements of some malfunctioning, robotically generated emergency broadcast system – an unholy amalgam of guttersnipe slang, mythic/literary allusion, cut-up fragments of local newspapers, TV ads, council flyers, and sound-bites borne of idiots, slung back toward their originators like spiked balls, dripping with sarcasm and hate – absurdist slogans for an empty world.

Except that is, when it didn’t. Because he’s obviously not going to let some soft-brained cunt like me get a beam on what he’s really up to. Sometimes the words that poured out of him had a care and sensitivity, an attention to detail, a concise thematic focus to rival anything that ever came out between Faber covers.

None of this rubbish comes near to nailing him, of course. How could it? Like Burroughs, his was a mode of thinking so singular, self-contained and unprecedented that it impossible to boil down, contain, predict or catalogue. In the very frustration of its unevenness, it fascinates, and, in their determined refusal to adhere to any fixed viewpoint or cultural norm, his words remain far more dangerous and potent than those of any more conventional rock band front-person.

5.
My favourite album by The Fall by quite some distance is ‘Dragnet’. An unconventional choice, I’ll grant you, but that’s the one that really clicked with me. Full of spidery, quasi-Crampsian rockabilly twang, leering references to Lovecraft and M.R. James, psychic dancefloors and monsters on the roof, night-creeping pulp detective fantasies and nocturnal flights from justice… it’s the band’s “horror album”, and I love it as such. For each individual song, and for the consistent ‘feel’ they create, I think it’s an unheralded masterwork, and always enjoy digging it out a few times around Halloween.

In fact, it is MES’s fondness for macabre imagery and horror stories – and his prodigious skill for creating them – that most often gives me my way in. Of course this is mainly concentrated on ‘Dragnet’, but ‘Impression of J. Temperance’, off ‘Grotesque’, is startling too in this regard – perhaps my single favourite Fall song (although ‘New Face in Hell’ and ‘Dr Bug’s Letter’ are strong contenders). In songs like this, MES really goes *deep* into this horrifying macabre shit, way beyond yr usual ‘horror rock’ signifiers, creating tormented visions to match those of any post-Lovecraft/Ligetti horror scribe.

Taken in-and-of-themselves in fact, some of these songs put me in mind less of the thug-art groove juggernaut The Fall would become in the minds of many, and more of various other ultra-obscurist tentacle-shudderers who were lurking in the dankest corners of the UK underground at around the same time – The Shadow Ring, Rudimentary Peni or Una Baines’ post-Fall pagan cabal The Fates…. none of whom were ever likely to trouble the dreams of NME sub-eds or mainstream-indie radio programmers, you’ll note, which perhaps says something for Smith’s forty solid years of banging on the door with his complaints.

6.
Funnily enough, both ‘Spectre vs. Rector’ and ‘J. Temperance’ feature heavily in this article by Taylor Parkes about Mark E. Smith as a narrative writer, which I read the other day. It’s an excellent piece, and really gets to the heart of what I like so much about MES’s words. Recommended.

7.
That article also served to remind me how much I enjoyed Smith’s spoken word album ‘Pander Panda Panzer’ from 2002. With characteristic unhelpfulness, this was presented on CD in the form of a single sixty minute track, but John Peel was good enough to have one of his minions chop it up into manageable slices, which – finger on the record button as per usual – I loyally put on tape and subsequently enjoyed a great deal, wedged in-between doses of the retrograde garage-rock and plunderphonic/digi-grind carnage that comprised the lion’s share of Peel’s ’02 playlist.

Therein, I heard MES tell of how the nation’s football stadia were being refitted to take account of a surprise resurgence in the popularity of jousting, and note that the streets of certain gentrified quarters of Manchester were now crawling with “bat-eared twats”, communicating with each other through sonar. Elsewhere, he seemed to be describing scenarios for bleak, surrealist films of mysterious import, as if participating in the queasiest, most oneiric pitch meeting in Hollywood history.

Ever since, I’ve found myself wishing he might put The Fall aside for a few years to concentrate on writing, or speaking. Prose, verse, I don’t care – I’d buy it. Even a well curated lyrics book would be lovely. Clearly though, MES was never in the business of fulfilling anyone’s wishes, so why should be give a fuck for mine? As we can now appreciate more than ever, he clearly lived and breathed the ideal of The Fall, and had little time in his latter years to be distracted by tangoing with editors and publishing agents. Can’t say I blame him, but let’s hope there’re some good PAPERS they can get their fangs into once they smell a sellable, recently deceased name.

8.
Perhaps said PAPERS may once have been torn from the typewriter featured in the photo gracing the front of the mid ‘80s single cover I’ve used at the top of this post. Originally reproduced in the CD booklet for ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’, this has always been my favourite MES/Fall photo, and I’m really glad I could find a scan of it (albeit, a pretty murky one) online.

Looking at it again after all these years, I wasn’t even entirely sure it was Smith at first – he just looks a little too handsome, that hair a little too curly… don’t you think? Careful comparison with other image results for “mark e smith 1985” make me fairly certain it is our man, but thought I’d best include this paragraph as insurance in case I’ve ballsed up and headed up an obit post with a picture of his (entirely hypothetical) brother or something.

Anyway – something about the wonderful mundanity of his working environment here – the giant mug of (cold?) tea, the pointedly displayed packet of crappy-looking chocolate biscuits and what looks like a letter from the council, as he sits there looking like the tormented accounts clerk for a haulage firm he might have been had – ahem – “punk rock” not got in the way…. It’s always struck a chord with me.

9.
Moreso than the kind of jarring shock and emotional outpouring that often follows the news that someone who(se work) you care about has died, what I’ve experienced this week has been a feeling I’ve unfortunately been required to become very used to in recent months: the slow realisation that something that has been there for the entirety of my life is now no longer there.

Whether you loved them, loathed them or were entirely indifferent to them, if you live in the UK and like music, you will have been aware of The Fall. You’ll have known that they were always there, somewhere in the background, usually putting out a new record or getting up to some low level, NME-headline generating mischief, always offering interested parties a cryptic, weaponised response to whatever fresh hell the world had been throwing at us recently.

Now - suddenly - they’re not there anymore. It might take some getting used to.

10.
The Fall Quote Generator. (Best used for divining purposes.)


11.
I just remembered an old friend-of-a-friend story from many years back, about how somebody knew somebody who had once seen Mark E. Smith crossing the road outside a venue where The Fall were playing. He described him as “..walking sideways, like a crab.”

R.I.P.

Labels: deathblog, Mark E Smith, The Fall

As you might well have anticipated, I was sad this weekend to hear about the passing of ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke.

I’ve been listening to Motörhead a lot over the past few years, and Clarke is not only the best guitarist they ever had, but perhaps even my choice for the definitive guitarist of the whole 70s/80s hard-rock-into-heavy-metal trajectory.

His combo of slurred, thug brutality and sudden technical flash was *perfect* for that band, and I think he had as much to do with defining their trademark sound as Lemmy did, to be honest.

Obviously I don’t need to remind you that it was he who laid down probably the ultimate, all time #1 school playground air guitar moment (….and don’t forget the joker..), but fuck it – that one’s overplayed. Instead listen to him go on ‘No Class’, ‘Bomber’, ‘Metropolis’, ‘Stone Dead Forever’, ‘Stay Clean’… dozens of others. I *love* that unnamed instrumental cut that turns up as a bonus on their self-titled album too.

It’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that Motörhead’s classic line-up are now all gone.

Just like The Ramones are all gone, The Stooges are all gone [with the exception of Iggy, who always seemed to want to differentiate himself from the rest of ‘em anyway, so fuck him, with all due respect], Dead Moon two thirds gone. Life has not been kind to definitively brilliant, leather jacket-uniformed rock bands, has it?

What a fuckin’ world.

Labels: 'Fast' Eddie Clarke, deathblog, Motorhead

After spending a lot of time with his first two solo albums a few years back, I’d kind of drifted away from Greg Ashley’s work as he moved from creeped out psychedelia toward more straightforward acoustic/confessional stuff.

Last year’s ‘Pictures of St Paul Street’ – which I listened to for the first time today – however turns out to be a master-class in hate-filled, grand guignol singer-songwriter type business; a few wannabe Leonard Cohen moves gradually suffocated by the glowering ghost of Alex Chilton, leering distantly in the darkness.

Lyrics “go there” in a way they probably shouldn’t, but the settings are so swell they can swing it for me.

Check it out, why don't you.

Just imagine, had I heard this one earlier, I might have had to slot it in at, ooh, I dunno, number #6 or #7 or something on the list I posted last month. A shocking upset for you all, I realise, but you'll just have to live with it.

Labels: best of 2017, Greg Ashley