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There has never been a group like the Fall. I use the word “group” advisedly, as I once made the mistake of calling them a “band” in the presence of Mark E Smith. The combustible singer immediately admonished me on the basis that a band was something that you’d get in Blackpool.
The irreplaceable Smith died in 2018 at the age of 60, immediately bringing to an end the group that he fronted for his entire adult life. The legend of the Fall lives on, though. They have arguably never been bigger, with interest maintained by a slew of reissues, multiple spinoff groups, a variety of podcasts and a steady stream of books; the nine-track Post Script, billed as the band’s “official final album” by former manager Ed Blaney, was announced last week and slated for a September release. So it’s an opportune time for The Fall: Futures and Pasts, a three-day all-Fall festival held at Manchester’s Band on the Wall venue last weekend, celebrating 50 years of the group and attracting fans from as far afield as Australia and the US.
On an average day in Manchester you are rarely more than 12 feet from a former Fall member, and this distance is drastically reduced in the venue’s packed bar as fans rub shoulders with various stalwarts from all eras of the group, some of the musicians meeting each other for the first time. No less than 10 of Smith’s former charges are corralled onstage for a photo.
Entertainment is provided by a mix of interviews, talks, walking tours, a film, a play, a quiz, even a DJ set from the poet laureate Simon Armitage. The live music kicks off with a bespoke group called Lost in Music, comprising Fall royalty and fronted by indie singer-songwriter BC Camplight. By his own admission he is “a six foot two 110kg American” and as such does not attempt to emulate Smith’s onstage persona, instead bringing his own style to a set consisting entirely of songs that the Fall covered (it is one of the perversities of the group that despite creating incredibly original music, a lot of their best songs were cover versions, including two of their three Top 40 hits).
As for the fact that there had never been a credible Fall tribute band, Smith told me “I’m very proud of that”. This is no longer the case, although the Look Back Bores don’t like to be called a tribute act, instead preferring the slogan, “Fall fans playing Fall songs for Fall fans”, largely concentrating on what many consider the classic pre-millennium period.
Closing the Friday night, the accurate recreation of the Fall sound is almost uncanny, with the lines further blurred by a couple of guest appearances from Simon “Funky Si” Wolstencroft (drums 1986-97). Close your eyes and you could be listening to the Fall in the mid-80s. People are genuinely gobsmacked; “Even the wrong notes are note perfect,” says Paul Hanley (drums 1980-85), one of the festival’s organisers. Though the vocals are actually being provided by a two-singer line-up comprising a khaki-clad revolutionary and a good-looking young lad in a pair of box-fresh Adidas: Mark Edward Smith did not wear training shoes.
The majority of Fall fans in Britain probably came across the group through a combination of John Peel and the NME, so it is interesting to hear the origin stories of foreign followers. Spare a thought for Marcel from Switzerland who ordered a record by a London band called the Wall and was accidentally sent the first Fall album, thus beginning a lifelong obsession that ultimately brought him to Band on the Wall for a rainy weekend.
Kevin from San Francisco recalls driving a delivery truck round San Diego while listening to a 51-track Fall playlist: “It awoke something in my brain.” He now runs a record store and has been known to give away Fall albums to curious customers. Ray from LA came to the festival with his wife and has a tale of seeing the group in Manchester 30 years ago when Brix Smith Start (guitar 1983-89 and 1994-96) was in the group: “Three quarters of the way through the show she reaches into her shirt, pulls a candy bar out from right under one of her tits and throws it into the crowd. I’m taller than most of the other people around so I got it. And I still have it.”
Lars and Jesper from Denmark made a Fall documentary and recall Mark having kippers in the kitchen; Kitty from Alabama happened to walk into a record store that was playing Hex Enduction Hour, but never saw the group. Closer to home, Amy from Port Talbot has turned up by way of tribute to her late friend, a big Fall fan.
Frank Skinner is one of a disproportionate number of comedians obsessed with the Fall: “They added an extra-thick strand to my life that wasn’t there before.” Fresh from hosting a hilariously shambolic Fall-based quiz, he tells me he regrets not getting into them earlier.
“I’d done a gig with the Fall at Glasgow University’s Christmas party: it was me, the Fall, Orange Juice and Bad Manners, but the Fall and Bad Manners had a falling out in the sound check and one of Bad Manners, according to Mark, pulled a knife on him so they had to go. This caused a massive delay so I had to do my set and run for the train so I never got to see the Fall.”
Skinner discovered them eventually and was a frequent fixture at London gigs and beyond until the end. “I was just talking to the guy who put together [2004 greatest hits compilation] 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong and it would not be an exaggeration to say that album changed my life. There are some things – books, films, whatever – that you feel so intimately and love so much you feel there can’t be anyone else who gets this quite like you do. I used to go to Fall gigs and I laughed more than I do at most comedy gigs.”
Skinner found something hilarious in “watching a man who’s been doing music for 30, 40 years unable to work out how to get a mic back into that little holder on the top of the mic stand, being a complete stranger to gaffer tape, taking the microphone out of the bass drum … and his unpleasantness, shoving the rest of the band about, obviously messing with their amplifiers. I used to find myself, sometimes on my own, in a little club at 10 o’clock at night; I might have driven to Brighton or Oxford. I really thought I was part of a magical special world. I cried the night he died, it just means so much.”
The baby elephant in the festival room is the fact that a track appeared online mere hours before the festival began, part of the final Post Script album, recorded at an indeterminate time with an unconfirmed line-up. It will be released with the full approval of the Smith estate, essentially Mark’s sisters. One of them, Caroline, is at the festival and indeed orders me to leave her table for eating a pizza before exclaiming “I’m only joking!” with a trademark Smith twinkle.
The album news receives a mixed response from fans, and former members remain tight-lipped, many of them simply unaware of it. There’s an overused misquote in the Fall community whereby Smith is purported to have said, “if it’s me and your Granny on bongos, it’s the Fall”. By this metric Post Script is a Fall album, although the identity of the percussionist, or anyone else, is still shrouded in mystery.
Elsewhere there’s a restaging of Smith’s play Hey! Luciani: The Life and Codex of John Paul I, and comedian Adam Buxton contributes a short film including a previously unseen interview with Black Francis in which the Pixies frontman sings a snippet of Totally Wired: it’s more Dick Van Dyke than Mark E Smith. The latter probably wouldn’t have appreciated this. When I interviewed him in 2015, I informed him that Pixies had been opening gigs with a cover of his song New Big Prinz, and rather than be flattered, he replied: “I hate the fucking Pixies, I can’t stand them.”
Fiercely anti-nostalgia, it’s hard to imagine what Smith would have made of the festivities as a whole. According to Marc Riley (guitar 78-83), who played his first Fall gig at Band on the Wall, “Mark was a contrarian, so if he did like it he would say that he didn’t and if he didn’t like it he would say that he did.”
The weekend concludes with the Fallen Women karaoke show, where audience volunteers sing Fall songs to a live all-female backing band. One idiot has put his name down for Eat Y’Self Fitter, spending the entire weekend with a knot in his stomach. My knees buckle as my name is read out and I take the stage. Going full method, I dip into a plastic bag of lyrics and amble around barking into the mic while dying inside. At one point I pretend to fiddle with an amp and receive a deserved kick up the backside from bass player Heidi Heelz. Six minutes feels like a week but eventually it’s over, to the relief of all concerned. Mark E Smith certainly does remain irreplaceable.
