John Doran, The Quietus, December 2010
New Facts Emerge and The Otherwise: Mark E. Smith and The Fall in the 21st century – a work in progress
- Introduction
In 2017, the seminal cult British “Group” The Fall released their final album New Facts Emerge. Sixmonths later, in January 2018, the group’s leader and singer Mark E Smith would be gone, dead of cancer aged 60. New Facts Emerge, brought to end not only the most stable era in the group’s musical history but also the extensive canon of work of one of the most interesting, unconventional, innovative and enduring groups of the post 1960s British music scene and the work of its leader, the mercurial and often irascible Smith. As an aside Smith regularly rereferred to the “Group” rather than “the band”. Its an interesting term of phrase that locates The Fall within the context in the British pop music past, in a lineage of beat “groups” under the control of mercurial and controlling Svengali figure/manager – in this case Smith himself. Infamous for the everchanging line up (actually this is part of the folklore of The Fall, part of its mythology as between 79 and 2017 there were intermittent periods of stability in terms of line ups), and the hirings and firings over 40 years, with Smith also once declaring that he ran it as a football manager would a team of players.
Since 1979’s debut album Live at the Witch Trials, Smith had immersed The Fall in the arcane history, culture and identity of Northern Britain and of Lancashire in particular. Few other British groups emerging out the punk scene the late 1970, other than perhaps Jaz Coleman’s Killing Joke, could claim to have such an engagement with the arcane and esoteric. The track Lucifer over Lancashire (1986), for instance has been the subject of some debate – the annotated Fall website noting interpretations relating to the fall out of Chernobyl and its impact on the North of England as well as referencing the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. The album’s title Live at The Witch Trials of course also draws a connection with the Pendle Witch Trials, its cover art, by artist and musician John Godbert, depicting a bleak rural folk-horror-esque landscape: a tree rooted in the earth of Northern Britain, a metonym for The Fall itself and perhaps Smiths own uncanny abilities, as well as the bands own rootedness in the arcane North West of England. Smith’s work (particularly the early work) is imbued with a sense of dread when it comes to rural sites – in the track Contraflow (from the 2003 album The Real New Fall LP, formerly Country On The Click) contains the repeated lines, “I hate the countryside so much, I hate the countryfolk so much”).
Part of the mythology of the Smith persona are his apocryphal psychic, cognitive abilities. His first wife, fashion designer and guitarist in the Fall between 1983 and 1989, Brix Start Smith once claimed ““Mark is psychic, and he knows it. He’s a precognitive psychic, able to pick up snatches of future events before they happen.”. Often this becomes an organising principle of the work, textually and extra-textually, and as I will argue allows us to hypothesise and loop a connection between the end of The Fall and its beginning. Smith’s lyrics and writing, demonstrate a Nigel Kneale esque pre-occupation with ghosts of the pasts and the future impinging on the present. The Track “Futures and Pasts” from Live at the Witch Trials is an early indication of this textual interest, in which Smith sings “The Futures in the past” and “I hear voices”. Graham Duff considers the line “ I was sleeping in a dream, when a policeman brought my mother Home”. Duff writes in his track analysis in The Otherwise (2021):
“Then it spins into a drunken dream experienced much later in life. Its almost as if the narrator is seeing the same policeman again, but this time he lost in a fog. It might be the fog of time, or could it be some kind of supernatural experience? Certainly the repeated line of “I understand but I don’t see it” is suggestive of a connection with a presence or energy that is beyond normal perception”
Smith’s own record label that he ran with second wife, Saffron Prior, releasing Fall and Fall related albums, “Cog Sinister” was named for this uncanny precognitive ability. Biographer Simon Ford wrote that in 1987 “Never one to be overly impressed by the way record companies were run, he decided to see if he could do better. He called his label Cog Sinister Records Ltd, a half reference to precognition, the ability to see into the future: ‘I just went Cog…Sinister” he claimed. Brix Smith famously claimed that ahead of a trip to Disney Land, Smith foresaw the tragic accident that both were witness to in which woman was accidentally beheaded while riding the Mattahorn – accounted for in the song Disney’s Dream Debased from the album The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (1984) – the album cover for which, as the blog A Year In The Country: Wandering Through The Spectral Fields notes,
“features what appears to be a folkloric Mr Punch-esque character tumbling through various parallel worlds of nightmare, by way of some refracted art movement from the earlier twentieth century that you can’t quite put your finger on”
Elsewhere in the Fall canon of work, the track Bremen Nacht, from the 1988 album The Frenz Experiment, deals with Smith’s alleged experience of being visited by the ghosts of children killed in the RAF firebombing during the Second World War. While its not the intention of this of this paper to offer an intimate album by album track by track breakdown of each of the Fall’s albums, my aim here is to establish some context for the direction and aspects of The Fall in the 21st century – as in keeping with their outlook, there is an intimate connection between the past and the present, the uncanny and the presence of the spectral. As well as to understand the emergence of Smith as a cult figure, not simply through his association and leadership of the group, but through his own immersion in and connection to the arcane and supernatural which was consolidated (so I propose) particularly in the last 10 or so years of his life.
Over the past few years there has been a growing body of academic inquiry into The Fall’s extensive back catalogue (something Smith himself would have rejected out of hand) by the likes of Michael Godard and Ben Halligan, Mark Lewis and Dan Wilkinson whose “Mark E. Smith, Brexit Britain and the Aesthetics and Politics of the Working Class Weird” locates Smith’s work within the 21st century context of Brexit Britain, asserting that The Fall “Presage and Articulate particular variant of working class conservatism that has coalesced around Brexit, their work also retains elements of utopianism and intransigent oppositionality”. In their introduction to the book, Godard and Halligan also write that The Fall are a “Lacuna”, they occupied an “unfilled” gap in British popular culture, that they are
“an an interloper caught between these histories, between locations (are they Mancunian or Salfordian?), between the singular and plural (Smith, or Smith and/or group), between past and present (the sound of the old, post-industrial North?”
This cultural position is particularly resonant and is reflected in both the Fall’s final album, New Facts Emerge, and in Smith’s recently published 2015 unmade script, co-written with Graham Duff and published by Strange Attractor Press, The Otherwise –“a screenplay for a Horror film that never was”. New Facts Emerge signifies not only an end to the career of the group but its conclusion arcs back connecting to their earlier work in a final (musical) example of Smith’s (textual and formal) “cog sinister” abilities, catching The Fall in a sort of time loop (I would suggest)
The screenplay condenses and foregrounds Smiths career long arcane pre-occupations and exhibits the influence over his own with the work of writers such as Lovecraft, James, Machen and the TV screenwriter Nigel Kneale. The opening track of The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (1984) – an album noted for its pre-occupation with the wyrd landscapes of the north – opens with a sampling from the 1979 Nigel Kneale TV apocalyptic serial Quatermass in the opening track Lay of the Land ; elsewhere across The Fall’s back catalogue Smith references episodes of The Twilight Zone, not least in “Time Enough At Last” off the 1992 album Code: Selfish. This discussion aims to conclude that through these texts Smith’s legacy exists beyond just being lead singer of The Fall but as a 20th and 21st century totem of the wyrd, folkloric and arcane.
- New Facts Emerge
The last ten years of The Fall were the most stable in the groups history with a steady line up including drummer Kieron Melling, Guitarist Peter Greenway, bass player Dave Spurr, and until the final album, Smith’s third wife Eleni Poulou on keyboard. This period of stability seemed to ground Smith, coming directly after a much more volatile period from around 2004 / 5 and the albums The Real new Fall LP, Fall Heads Roll and Reformation TLC. In what some may call a Smith-esque case of precognition and what others may call an unfortunate co-incidence, the album contains a track titled ‘Victoria Train Station Massacre’. The album was announced days after the bombing of Manchester Arena which is attached to the station, forcing its publicists to make a clarifying statement saying that it had been completed and sent off for distribution well ahead of this tragic and terrible event, the title a reference to the destruction of the stations Victorian façade and architectural facets in favour a new modern design.
Smith’s guttural, abstract, vocalisations on the album are worth noting. Comedian and fan Stewart Lee, writing in the Guardian said that “Smith took the persona of the incoherent animal-shaman he’d been perfecting for the last decade to a whole new level of total theatre.” He stated that by the time of the album “Smith had shed the burden of being the clipped and articulate wordsmith in chief to become instead a kind of abstract presence, haunting his own work and with growls and slurs and yammerings and hammerings that reaffirm rock and roll’s primal power to bypass sense.” The mythological image of Smith as a shamanic figure is one that repeats itself in discourse around the singer and by extension the group. For Instance, in her recent essay Paperback Shamanism, from the collection Excavate! Tessa Norton writes that
“For all that Mark E Smith came to be entirely synonymous with the Fall’s body of work, he never announced his intentions to this extent. With Smith you have a sense the world of the Fall just flowed out of him, or rather it seemed to come from beyond, passing through him. The myth formed around the man and grew over him like a concrete bollard, without him having to do anything he wasn’t doing anyway”
And
“Although the focus, as the years passed, was increasingly on Smith, the characterisation of him in the press ossified into something that did not really capture what The Fall represented. The simple characature of the man in the pub hid the fact that The Fall was not simply a proxy for Smith, but not a straightforward group either. Instead, it had grown into something in its own right, like a swirling ball of psychic energy that only Smith, as magus could control”
The image of Smith as a shamanic, occult, ‘magus’ figure, is an interesting one if we were to consider him in terms of the alchemical control he had over the group (alluded to earlier) constantly manipulating its changes. Its an image which also finds credence in his live stage persona, particular in later years where Smith would change the sound of the live performance by playing with the levels on the amps for the various instrumentation – often to the annoyance of guitarist or bass player; or even on occasion vanishing from stage altogether, leaving the band to finish the gig alone, or singing from a mic in the dressing room, becoming an often horrifying and intriguing disembodied voice across the stage.
The 21st century also saw a series of strange and knowing television appearances. This increased visibility happened in the wake of Smith’s gnomic appearance on BBC news in the wake of the death of John Peel in 2004. In 2007 he appeared as a chain smoking foul mouthed Jesus in co-writer Graham Duff’s sitcom I Deal, and during his one of stint reading the Saturday BBC ‘final Score’ football results, his disembodied, voice turning the reading of the results into an occult, ritualistic incantation. Repetition is, of course, essential to an understanding of The Fall’s music which frequently takes the form of ritual incantation.
The identification with horror and supernatural is consolidated by his 2007 Christmas reading of HP Lovecraft’s Colour Out Of Space, for the BBC Collective – one below the line commentator using the following citation from Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” to describe Smith’s reading
“Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied?….so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude…But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken.”
Perhaps more than any other album in The Fall’s back catalogue(certainly in the last 10 years) New Facts Emerge is resistant to any form of conventionally accessible listening experience, Smiths spectral, animalistic vocals growl and grumble and disjointedly and often incomprehensibly. While the tracks themselves may not be in and of themselves horror driven, the experience of the album is driven by a sense of the uncanny. Its is an abstraction of our previous listening experience of The Fall, recognisably The Fall but also not (perhaps knowingly also raising the spectre of the groups biggest champion, DJ John Peel and his often quoted and cliched description of them as being “always the same, always different”) Robert Ham writing for the website Pitchfork, wrote
“Long gone is the untrained yet undeniably charming timbre that barked, squealed, and crooned through his band’s most prominent work; it’s been replaced by a bilious and phlegmy growl struck by age (he turned 60 in March) and many, many cigarettes. It’s not an easy sound to get used to, but on much of the Fall’s recent music, it’s clear that Smith is aware of how he sounds. He seems to take pleasure in drawing out the syllables in a word like “folderol” (“Fol De Rol”) because it sounds especially menacing when he does it—and on the same tune, he gives the phrase “homo sapien electric” the same chilling effect by raising the volume and letting the moisture in his throat rattle away.”
The final track “Nine out of Ten” ends with Smith putting down the mic for the final time (it was the last track recorded for the album) while Peter Greenway’s guitar carries on for 12 more minutes leaving an empty void in the group where Smith’s voice used to be. While this recreates on record the live listening experience of The Fall (frequently Smith would simply leave the stage unnannounced at the end of a gig, leaving the band to play on) listeners are returned to the opening of Dragnet (1979), and the opening track Psykick Dancehall which opens with Smith shouting into the void, ‘Is there anybody there?” – “Yeah” comes back a ghostly response Is the disembodied response that come back at the singer, his own displaced ghostly response, calling back from the spectral void left at the end of the final track on the final album? Smith calling to himself from the future, Smith literally becoming “The Man Who Haunted Himself” – the past and future colliding. Much has been made over the way Bowie encoded his own death within the imagery, intertextuality and language of his final album, Blackstar, also released just days prior to his own passing. Is it too much of a stretch to think that Smith, someone also aware of the limited time he had left, had attempted similar. In “Psykick Dance Hall” Smith pointedly sings “When I’m dead and gone. My vibrations will live on. In vibes not vinyl through the years. People will dance to my waves”.
Although the second album, Dragnet is popularly considered to be the real start of The Fall and establishing a series of horror connections, including the track A Figure Walks Behind You and Spectre vs Rector. As Rick Leach points out there is an immediacy in the horror of the album:
Combined with a crystal-clear production by [BBC producer] Bob Sergeant ), Live at the Witch Trials is a good Fall album, a great debut album, but one that misses the essence of The Fall….pen and transparent. [With Dragmet There’s no studio trickery to hide behind, no atmospherics, no shades of darkness and light. It’s simply there. This is what makes Dragnet. It’s the matter-of-fact sound combined with Smith’s tales of the unworldly and fantastic, of horror and visions and of dread and foreboding.
The album is suffused by the supernatural, embellished by haunted feel of the album’s production. It establishes the groundwork for the following albums, Hex Enduction Hour and Grotesque (After The Gramme), the former of which contains the track Hip Priest (chosen by Jonathan Demme to soundtrack Agent Starling’s blind descent into Buffalo Bill’s lair at the end of Silence of the Lambs), and the latter of which contains the epic track the NWRA (The North Will Rise Again) and its dystopian depiction of the North of England as Smiths Alter ego ‘Roman Totale’ (another Bowie parallel there) tracks across the ravaged landscapes of Manchester, Darlington, Newcastle to Edinburgh. The song contains Lovecraftian imagery:
So, R. Totale dwells underground
Away from sickly blind
With ostrich head-dress
Face a mess, covered in feathers
Orange-red with blue-black lines
That draped down to his chest
Body a tentacle mess
It is as Mark King puts it
“a tale of cultural political intrigue that plays like some improbable mulching of T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, H. G. Wells, Dick, Lovecraft and Le Carre. It is the story of Roman Totale, a psychic and former cabaret performer whose body is covered in tentacles […] The form of ‘N.W.R.A.’ is as alien to organic wholeness as is Totale’s abominable tentacular body. It is a grotesque concoction, a collage of pieces that do not belong together. The model is the novella rather than the tale, and the story is told episodically, from multiple points of views, using a heteroglossic riot of styles and tones (comic, journalistic, satirical, novelistic): like ‘Call of Cthulhu’ re-written by the Joyce of Ulysses and compressed into ten minutes”.
- Conclusion: England’s Darkness and The Otherwise
The last ten years of The Fall not only saw a period of relative stability within the group but also a more prominent cultural repositioning of Smith himself as a cult figure, against a variety of extra-textual, horror inflected Fall “paratexts” – earlier we cited his reading of Lovecraft for the BBC for instance, In 2014 Stephen Barber wrote him into his horror infused dystopian novel England’s Darkness (Elektron Books), as an embodiment of the northern spirit of punk resistance. In Barber’s novel, the collapse of “digital infrastructures, networks, transmissions, storage systems, together with the rendering obsolete of all systems of digital communications” has wiped clean the cultural identity and memory of England, which had been uploaded to said systems. The result: civil collapse and unimaginable Goyaesque violence. Drawing on his connection with the disrupted and depleted land of north west England in the Thatcher ridden 1980s, Barber writes Smith into the novel as the “Gnarled and alcohol” addled leader of Manchester’s rebel brigade – “a legendary punk-rock veteran” who had “just comprehensively wiped out the Liverpool brigade in factional infighting, and powered by elation, led his brigade directly into a governmental conscripts ambush on Saddleworth Moore”
The unmade screenplay The Otherwise, written with Graham Duff was the culmination of a set of script ideas that the pair had originally conceived as a Twilight Zone-esque portmanteau Television series titled The Inexplicable (also printed in the collection). The Otherwise, according to Graham Duff in a recent edition of the Fall podcast Oh Brother! emerged of the ideas for two of the episodes. The script contains a distillation of Smiths career long pre-occupations and concerns, pointedly opening on Pendle Hill. It’s narrative centres around a recording studio, in darkest rural Lancashire, its myths and histories – notable the spectral legacy of the 1715 Battle of Preston, in which Jacobites came south to England and lost to the government forces. The narrative takes place at a recording studio in darkest rural Lancashire called The Otherwise which, eschewing modern recording technology has opted to use vintage analogue recording equipment – reel to reel tape recorders, old fashioned mixing desks etc (very Nigel Kneale). The Fall themselves and Mark E Smith play a large part in the narrative as do Smiths supernatural abilities to commune with spirits. In this case the ghosts/displaced Jacobite soldiers, responsible for the fiery death of a cleaning woman around the time of the Battle or Preston, and whose fiery apparition is worshipped by a biker cult called The Sons of Witches. The plot also involves the apparent legacy of the Pendle Witches, homages to Kneale’s The Stone Tape (in the appearance fiery screaming apparition) and the breakdown of technology – by the end of the script, all The Fall’s tapes containing the new recording have been mysteriously wiped and replaced with the spectral voice of Mary, an old folk singer (and a folk spirit of the land). It also registers Smith’s preoccupation with time fractures, loops, and spectral anomalies – a group of ghostly Jacobite soldiers have fallen through time. Although not the main character in the text, Smith’s psychic abilities are foregrounded in the script and as Graham Duff writes in his introduction,
“The sequence where Mark encounters the ghosts was inspired by real life instances he recounted of visions of ancient spectral presences. He told me that the first time he visited the Hacienda nightclub he had visions of Victorian poorhouse children in chains”
The script makes frequent use of spectral disembodied voice overs, eerie folk songs, and The Fall’s music itself as a spiritual driving force and engine for the spectral events occurring around them, at one point the directions read
The unsettling music continues to play. The mood is more like a séance than a recording session. Mark intones into the mic:
Its truth was amazing. O Joy!
Solaris Like! White and translucent forms. It squirmed
Unfettered, energised in wondrous coil
To conclude I would like to suggest that the cult persona of Smith and the Group is both consolidated in the 21st century through television appearances and his final work. The supernatural is reaffirmed as an organising principle of The Fall’s work and history. This is the beginning of some pontential work and writing on the last 10 years of the Fall, a work in progress, and will be updated and developed.
Art TV Film 