The Fall: 10 of their best songs
Our Fall lover had a shortlist of 23 songs, which he then ‘whittled down’ to 46. But pity the man picking only 10 from the catalogue of Mark E Smith
Legend of the Fall: Mark E Smith kept swinging to the end
1. The Container Drivers
It’s hard to know where to begin with a back catalogue that takes in 30 studio albums, hundreds of songs and somehow assimilates everything from rockabilly to techno to jazz to krautrock to classical music into a uniquely identifiable and inimitable “Fall sound”. When I first attempted to distil the labyrinthine Fall canon and into a mere 10 songs I started with a list of 23 and by later the same evening had somehow “whittled it” down to double the figure. In the end, I decided to start where it began for me: my favourite track on my first and still favourite Fall album, 1980’s Grotesque (After the Gramme).
An early example of the Fall’s early “northern rockabilly”, The Container Drivers has fascinated me since I first heard it as a schoolboy (and managed to miss them playing it as their opening song at Leeds University soon after because I’d been disoriented by my first ever pint of Tetley’s bitter). Hurtling along like a HGV on rocket fuel, the band sound like they are playing for their lives (and with Smith’s disciplinarian reputation, maybe they were), but with an audible glee, as they explore what was then a new and refreshing form of music.
It’s rockabilly, but far removed from the American original and born of northern pubs, cheap speed and Salfordian back streets. The lyrics are typically great too. Over the years, Mark E Smith’s words have taken on many forms, from intricate, otherwordly science-fiction short stories to barmy one-liners, but this is a brilliant early example of his withering observational style. Almost certainly drawing on his very brief pre-Fall stint as a docker’s clerk, he skewers the trucking existence with withering relish.
“Net cap of 58 thousand pounds / Sweat on their way down / Grey ports with customs bastards / Hang around like clowns / The uh-containers and their drivers / Bad indigestion / Bad bowel retention / Speed for their wages / Suntan, torn short sleeves …” By the time the song literally crashes to a halt, The Container Drivers establishes that the Fall are a force to be reckoned with and Smith is a voice to be listened to, however uncomfortable that will occasionally be.
This video has been removed. This could be because it launched early, our rights have expired, there was a legal issue, or for another reason.
‘Riot in righteousness’: Mark E Smith dies aged 60 – video obituary2. Eat Y’Self Fitter
“Repetition in the music and we’re never gonna lose it,” Smith sang on the 1978 B-side Repetition in what amounted to – and remains – a manifesto. This logic can be audibly heard in this killer opener from Perverted By Language, recorded five years later. The relentless rhythm conjured up by the so-called “Jesuit lads” (guitarist Craig Scanlon, bassist Steve Hanley and twin drummers Paul Hanley and Karl Burns) reputedly caused superfan John Peel to faint when he first heard it.
The song has outlived the 80s Bran Flakes advertising slogan from which the title hails, but Smith typically seized on a contemporary absurdity to build a compelling narrative, this time about social class and consumerism. There are many – including Smith’s first wife, Brix – who believe the Fall frontman has the psychic powers of a seer or prophet, and they certainly seem in evidence here. Fifteen years before most of us would even hear of the internet, Smith seems to fortell how social media will imprison the demoralised worker: “Became a recluse / And bought a computer … On the screen /Saw the Holy Ghost, I swear / On the screen / Where’s the cursor?”
Oh, and what a cracking chorus.
3. Kicker Conspiracy
The Fall-mad journalist Paul Morley once fretted that Smith might not be a genius after all: “What if he was just an old drunken tramp that when he got really drunk started to spout phrases that made a kind of sense, and we read too much into it, you know?” At which point you can almost hear the chorus of Fall fans shouting back, “But what about Kicker Conspiracy?”
I would have picked this anyway, because of the World Cup, but Smith’s brilliant 1983 dissection of football and how it is run seems ever more prescient with every fresh Fifa scandal. The lyrics comprehensively tackle footy issues from boozing footballers to hooliganism, but there’s particular currency in Smith’s uncanny predictions of how gentrification will ruin the beautiful game. Years before Roy Keane’s “prawn sandwiches” outburst or the Premier League, Smith sings of how expensive “Corporate-ulent” facilities will swell with expense-accounted suits (“Hot dogs and seat for Mr Hogg! And his grotty spawn!”) while the disenfranchised former fan stands, “hat in his hands, two lager cans, talks to himself, at the back”. Just call him Salford’s Nostradamus.
4. Wings
By the early 1980s, Smith was fascinated by the idea of “creative tension”, and would employ ever more dark and comical methods to instil it in his musicians. When I tracked down 50-odd of them for my book The Fallen, awestruck ex-members would regale me with tales of flying chairs, being told they’d played “like a bloody pub band”, or drummers being fined a fiver for the heinous crime of hitting the tom tom. And yet all insisted that this “moulding” process meant they could conjure up music way above their expectations. This brilliant 1983 B-side illustrates this unknowable magick. Over a particularly hypnotic, tension-wracked groove, Smith crafts a phantasmagorical, allegorical tale of someone whose attempts to fly using stuffed wings result in him hitting a time lock and ricocheting thereafter through time and space, visiting places that no longer exist. It’s been speculated that the protagonist’s fate is Smith’s reminder to himself that he cannot give up the Fall or allow his powers to wane, lest he find himself similarly sleeping in ditches, hiding away “from nosy kids” or, even worse, joining his contemporaries on the nostalgia circuit.
5. Cruiser’s Creek
The Fall had seen off most of their punk-era peers as the 80s reached their midpoint, and Smith had realised keeping the group fresh and relevant required a turnover of musicians in the manner that a football team will “every so often, replace the centre forward”. This tale of office-party excess typifies the seismic creative shift that Smith’s first wife, Brix, brought to the lineup. Out went nights in workingmen’s clubs in Prestwich and Smith’s beloved Oxfam chic; in came Brix’s twangy guitar, an Armani suit and (God forbid) Smith in eyeliner. While retaining the doctrines of repetition and tension, the Brix-era Fall brought in a pop sensibility that took them ever chartward. The Fall have had more top 40 hits that haven’t entered the top 20 than any other group and Cruiser’s Creek illustrates exactly why: it’s leftfield and outsiderly, yet the insistent tune is surely as catchy as anything by the Beatles.
6. Living Too Late
Several Fall songs have an uncanny ability to transport you into a parallel universe. In this 1986 inversion of a country song, Steve Hanley’s brooding, malevolent bassline acts as the launchpad into a netherworld of inner-city Manchester, late-night parties, flat pints, hard men and hard living. Smith envisaged the track as a commentary on ageing, frustrated males: “I was thinking about suburbia, upper-working-class suburbs, and I was just wondering about these guys walking around the streets, whether they ever got pissed off.” As ever, it’s tempting to suspect an element of autobiography in the lyrics: “Crow’s feet are ingrained on my face / And I’m living too late / Try to wash the black off my face / But it’s ingrained / And I’m living too late.” Still, the Fall leader’s own punishing lifestyle didn’t stop him unveiling a nifty falsetto.
7. New Big Prinz
It’s intrinsic to their mentality that Smith, despite near-constant acclaim for the Fall, aligns his band against everybody else and retains the mentality of the unheralded underdog. That logic surfaced musically in 1982’s Hip Priest – in which Smith grumbles “he is not appreciated” over a backing so eerie it’s no wonder Jonathan Demme used it in The Silence of the Lambs. Although Smith railed against “look-back bores” and refuses to bow to the nostalgia industry of playing the oldies, he couldn’t resist returning to the lyrics for this piledriving glam stomp from 1988’s I Am Kurious Oranj. Although the song is ostensibly about William of Orange, there’s surely a double entendre as our underappreciated seer invites – nay, commands – listeners to “check the guy’s track record”. By this point, 11 albums in, you wouldn’t want to argue.
8. Bill Is Dead
Whether appearing with ballet dancers, employing a kazoo solo or abandoning a guitarist in a Swedish forest, the Fall are nothing if not unpredictable. But this sublime cut from 1990 finds Smith doing the last thing anyone expected, as he cast off the whiskey-fuelled ringmaster image to reveal a rare glimpse of a vulnerable and very human being underneath. The previous year had been an annus horribilis. Smith’s marriage to Brix had collapsed and his father died suddenly of a heart attack aged 59. From the following year’s Extricate album, Bill Is Dead (the title actually references his father’s late friend) is untypically candid, reflective and melancholy, as the great Craig Scanlon provides a beautiful tune for Smith to sarcastically but movingly croon: “These are the greatest times of my life.”
9. Lost in Music
The Fall have done many covers of the years – most successfully of the Kinks’ Victoria and R Dean Taylor’s There’s a Ghost in My House – but this one’s a bit special. By 1993, the music scene had changed dramatically as the rave generation took hold. A cover of the Chic Organization’s disco anthem – on The Infotainment Scan, which reached the top 10 and is the highest–charting Fall album ever – seems an unlikely vehicle for a renaissance, but so it proved. The original – a hit for Sister Sledge in 1979 – sounds like a hymn to clubby euphoria. However, with another new recruit – computer man Dave Bush – providing “techno shit”, Smith unearths a darker meaning to the phrase “lost in music” and pours thinly concealed scorn on those “caught in a trap” of empty-headed hedonism. It’s quintessential Fall: simultaneously capturing the energy of the times while emphasising an opposition to them.
10. Blindness
Like a musical Alex Ferguson, Smith seems to instinctively know when to dispense with his musicians, often just as they have reached their creative peak. Sometimes, simply sacking them seems too easy and he often prefers to terrorise them into running off. The final straw for this 2005 lineup came in the Arizona desert, when the great man emptied a bottle of beer over the tour bus driver’s head as he was doing 70mph. Appalled band-members (bar Smith’s loyal third wife, Elena) quit en masse, but they left behind a truly great – and, under the circumstances, mischeviously titled – album, Fall Heads Roll. Blindness is the dizzying highpoint, a pulverising groove that builds to a keyboard-sozzled climax in a blaze of splattered invective and baffling one-liners which supposedly refer to David Blunkett, state control and masonic rituals. It’s hard to resist a song which throws down all manner of possibilities in the opening line alone, “The flat is evil …” Since then, of course, another hastily assembled Fall has proved the most stable lineup in their 38-year history: Smith, as ever, is pop’s supreme contrarian.
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