In The Fall’s 2003 song “Mountain Energei”, Mark E Smith claims “Dolly Parton and Lord Byron said that ‘patriotism is the last refuge’, but now it’s me.” Experts will note that was Samuel Johnson’s line, not Dolly’s and George’s, but the rest is true. By the early 2000s, Smith had attained “national treasure” status in Britain. He’d become the contrary cult hero who could admire William Blake without committing the cardinal sin of being “arty”; could consort with avant-garde ballet dancers and still hold his own in a Prestwich pub. His lyrics were English Romantic rendered caustic by post-punk, cryptic yet loaded with enough vernacular references for it to pass as whatever form of Albion-visionary-wisdom you wanted. Wisdom that could curdle from left to right and back again, like Smith’s own politics occasionally did. The Fall – specifically Smith – were regarded with the same fondness shown for the Shipping Forecast, Strictly and seven pints of Stella on a Friday night. “Theme From Sparta FC” was the soundtrack to BBC Sport’s Final Score programme and Smith could be seen on TV reading the Saturday football results. Whether you were into punk existentialism or the footie, The Fall seemed to offer a bloke-ish middle ground for both. Their back catalogue offered whichever version of its figurehead you wanted. Smith the poet-playwright and Smith the anti-intellectual. Smith the pop star in a silk BodyMap raincoat and Smith the ordinary geezer in slacks and a leather blouson. Smith the punk mystic, separated by a thin crisp packet from Smith the pub bore.
But The Fall, like all Great British pop groups – indeed, like the entire history of the British Isles – would never have existed without overseas influence. Outsiders were this nation’s saving grace. US bands had been saying for years that The Fall were part Dolly Parton, part Lord Byron. America embraced Smith and his gang early. (“From the riot-torn streets of Manchester, England, to the scenic sewers of Chicago…” announces the MC at the top of The Fall’s live album A Part Of America Therein, 1981.) Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Mission Of Burma and a slew of 1980s hardcore bands all worked under The Fall’s influence. (Hardcore was a particularly North American subculture, ideologically “tied to the Puritan ethic”, to borrow from the song “Live At The Witch Trials”.) This forced US rock critics who routinely dismissed British indie groups as “arty”, out of some boorish need to defend the masculine, blue-collar credentials of their homegrown bands, to admit The Fall’s significance. And who better than The Fall to counter the facile idea that working-class bands must never jeopardise their authenticity by being artistic or cerebral, that they must stick to being voices for the disenfranchised or sentimental rough diamonds?
Nirvana were such big fans that Kurt Cobain climbed on their tour bus and begged to come with them. Smith refused to let him along for the ride, just as he rejected the admiration of other key players on the US indie underground. He trolled Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth by saying he should have his “rock licence” revoked. Pavement were written off as “just The Fall in 1985 […] They haven’t got an original idea in their heads.” Of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy he said, “I liked him, but he should stop putting on that American accent.” But Smith was no anti-American, falling in lockstep with received European ideas that the US was only good for capitalism, imperialism and MTV. Not only that, two key members of the 1980s lineup – Brix Smith and Marcia Schofield – were from Los Angeles and New York, respectively. The Fall looked beyond the horizons of their most British songs such as “Hit The North”, “Victoria” and their take on the hymn “Jerusalem”. Certainly beyond people’s wet-eyed sentimentalism for the Manchester music scene. He admitted so himself in 2015: “We’ve always been a multinational group. I don’t like Northern people, I don’t like Mancunians. There’s something about Manchester musicians that’s particularly fucking irritating […] They think they’re superior, but they’re not. Manchester’s only got Freddie And The Dreamers.”
There is a spoken-word number titled “Dissolute Singer”, written by Smith after an onstage fight with his band at Brownies club, New York, in April 1998, and subsequent arrest the following day for assaulting keyboard player Julia Nagle. (Smith claimed to have had a vision of 9/11 whilst incarcerated in the NYPD Manhattan Central Booking jail that week, spitting distance from the World Trade Center site.) He maps Lower Manhattan street names onto Manchester: “The rolling rocks you sneered at seemed like nectar at Canal St subway / Canal sets you pining only name familiar […] Canal Street’s near Victoria, Bridge St connects Dalton.” Manchester’s Bridge Street runs into John Dalton Street. This becomes Princess Street, from which Canal branches off along the Rochdale waterway. In Manhattan, Bridge Street leads into Battery Park, beyond which is the Upper Bay, and Ellis Island, the historic processing station for immigrants to the US. Walk north-east of Canal and you will reach Rivington Street – there’s a parish by that name near Bolton, Greater Manchester, although this one was named after an English journalist who switched sides from Britain to America during the Revolutionary War. Carry on from here towards the East River and you’ll cross Ludlow, Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk Streets. Here is Cooperative Village, a housing community originally run in strict accordance with the Rochdale Principles, the cooperative ideals devised by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844. Some 15 miles to the east in Jamaica, Queens, is Rochdale Village, also named after the Pioneers. “A small alteration of the past / Can turn time into space,” as the song “Wings” goes.
The Fall paid primary dues to US guitarist Link Wray, pioneer of the power chord and leather cool. Wray’s swaggering 1958 recording “Rumble” – banned in some cities for allegedly inciting gang violence – inspired countless aspiring musicians to pick up a guitar. In the case of The Fall, perhaps Smith was specifically enamoured, for whatever complicated reasons, by Wray’s Shawnee Indian heritage. “You know, I like Elvis, I like Gene Vincent, but you were the one that kept me together,” gushed the singer in a 1993 conversation between the two for the NME. “It is spiritual, it’s that Indian thing: dang! Da-na-naanngg! If ever I thought about packing the business in, I’d put on “Rumble”, full fuckin’ blast.” Danny Frost, the moderating journalist, noted that Smith was ranting into the guitarist’s deaf right ear, but Wray graciously accepted him as a kindred spirit: “Who gives a shit if it’s in tune!”
Smith liked to emphasise “the three Rs: repetition, repetition, repetition”, although The Fall’s definitive instrumental sound might be characterised by the three Ts: toms, twangy guitar and tinny organ. Smith reportedly fined drummers for hitting the toms during live shows, yet they’re all over their recordings. The heavy pounding evoked the backbeat of “Rumble”, of course, but also Mo Tucker’s drumming for The Velvet Underground. You can hear their influence clearly on The Fall song “Vixen”. It sounds like a straight nod to the Velvet’s “Run Run Run”, but “Sister Ray” might be the true touchstone. A key part of that recording’s pugilistic groove is an overdriven, tinny transistor organ that immediately evokes The Kingsman’s “Louie Louie” and the cheap noise of 1960s garage punk groups that Smith also loved: The Seeds, The Sonics, Count Five, The Monks. It’s a sound that evokes 1950s and 1960s horror and sci-fi movies too. Smith was a fan of The Twilight Zone, which by the 1980s, when the TV series was rebooted, had formed a charming nostalgic patina that suited the decade’s rockabilly revival. Retro-1950s Cold War paranoia for Reagan-era paranoiacs.
Rockabilly brings us to the twang. The Fall’s sonics drew from American rockabilly, garage and surf. Early tracks especially trucked on rockabilly’s up-down, two-beat rhythm. Guitar riffs sounding as if they had staggered – debased and detuned by speed and lager – out of a broken time machine sent from the rock’n’roll era, bypassing the 1960s and 1970s altogether. Surf music made by a band who had no clue what sun, sand and sea looked like. Rockabilly suited Smith, with his interest in spectres and ghost stories. It is one of rock’s original manifestations that never died. These days, a love of rockabilly can signal both pop connoisseurship and yearning for youth culture’s simpler past. To be into Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent is these days the pop equivalent to saying you admire silent movies, or prefer classical literature over modern. If you didn’t live through its first wave, then perhaps it’s a nod to an older relative who did. A little like The Fall, rockabilly is both unmistakeable yet pliant to being bent to whatever subcultural shape you want it to be. Rockabilly can fit Lana Del Rey or The Cramps. It lends itself to retro-themed weekenders at British seaside resorts and to David Lynch film soundtracks.
In crate-digging for The Fall’s American connections, it’s easy to get lost in academic minutiae. Conduct a close read of “Rollin’ Dany”, The Fall’s 1985 cover of “Rollin’ Danny” by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and report back on the title’s missing ’n’. Examine the descending chord progression of “Elves” and its relationship to The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. Live At The Witch Trials: Pendle, Lancashire or Salem, Massachusetts? Discuss. But the risk with concentrating on the text is that you can miss the emotion: states of mind, friendships, love, loss and the ineffable atmospherics that draw you to a place. Focus on The Fall’s external influences and you will find that all routes lead to Smith, whose cult of personality occludes ideas brought by other members of the band. Specifically, in the American context, Brix Smith.
She put a comb and Brylcreem through the band’s unkempt surf licks. Her backing vocals – for instance, on “Stephen Song” and “LA” – evoked 1960s American girl groups, bringing The Shangri-Las alongside all-male garage influences. Brix gave Smith a dash of personal style, encouraging him move on from tank-tops and polyester shirts. As his partner, she dealt with his mercurial moods. Two songs in particular stand out, both addressing the US. “Disney’s Dream Debased” originates from a trip the couple made to Disneyland. Brix describes in her memoir The Rise, The Fall And The Rise how Smith had a powerful intuition that the Matterhorn rollercoaster was “evil”. Just hours later, a woman named Dolly Regene Young fell from the ride. Her body got trapped on the tracks and she was decapitated by an oncoming rollercoaster car. The song moves on a typical Fall swing and a bed of bright, chorused guitars, which shift between cheerful major and uneasy diminished chords. Brix’s voice drifts over the music like passing clouds, as Smith pulls an allegory of innocence lost from the narrative: “And though Minnie and Mickey, and Brer and Pluto / Secretly prayed / There was no doubt at all / No two ways about it / Was the day Disney's dream debased.” Smith’s voice, glossed with chorus effect, sounds more plaintive and tender than usual. He reaches for melody rather than snarl.
If ever The Fall did a road song, “LA” would be it. A shimmering electronic sequencer and motorik bass line are its propellant. Sparse lyrics flash past like landmarks glimpsed from a car window. “Odeon” intones Smith. The name of the British cinema chain sounds dowdy out here in Hollywood. “Bushes are in disagreement with the heat.” It could be a deadpan vision of the city’s future wildfires or the feeling of Southern Californian sun on a body more accustomed to the Manchester damp. Brix pays tribute to Russ Meyer’s trash masterpiece Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, quoting directly from the film the line, “This is my happening and it freaks me out.” Indeed, this is Brix’s happening, her home. It is almost as if Smith is deferring to Brix as his guide, a tiny figure capitulating to the vast, grotesque American landscape. This is a white-knuckle drive along the 110 to Pasadena, not the A56 to Prestwich.
If one image sums up The Fall’s relationship to the US it’s a short clip shot by artist Charles Atlas during the band’s performance of the ballet I Am Curious, Orange with the Michael Clark Company at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988. It might even capture something of British pop’s complicated transatlanticism too. They begin the song “Cab It Up!” The centre of the chequerboard stage is clear, save for two dancers stage-right. The Fall are pushed deep in the rear of the stage, next to a big, frowning “smiley face” (this was the summer that acid house hit), and a backcloth depicting the houses of parliament. Performance artist Leigh Bowery, wearing a frightening-looking mask with lightbulb ears helps push on stage a huge, squishy replica hamburger on wheels. Brix sits on top, dressed in a leather BodyMap leotard and ballet pumps, grinning and strumming her white Rickenbacker guitar. They spin the hamburger around, weaving Brix between the dancers and The Fall, like a UFO from Planet Pop. An alien zapping those who would, as the song “English Scheme” puts it, “point their fingers at America” yet cannot resist the pull of its gravity beams.
Excavate! The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall (Faber) edited by Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton is published on 1 April. The editors will be in conversation with Rough Trade on 1 April. Click here for tickets.
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