RIP Mark E. Smith

Oh! The Fall... I only have this excerpt:
Have you ever fallen in love, slowly, measure by measure, without realizing it until you were over the moon? And, surprisingly, the object of your love was once hated and dismissed? That's my relationship with The Fall.

I was 17 when I first heard a Fall song, and I absolutely couldn't stand it. "What is this racket?", I thought, and didn't think twice. Staring at the cover of "The Wonderful And Frightening World" at Al Bum's in Amherst, MA, I just wasn't ready to process what I was hearing. I was just starting to become the man whose head and music tastes expanded, but I was far from being in a place where I could appreciate what Mark was doing. And so I retreated to my safe world of college rock. Along the way, I ran into many references to The Fall, such as the Jazz Butchers' "Southern Mark Smith" and Barbara Mannings' "Mark E Smith & Brix", and comments in interviews, reviews and books. The Fall was a hovering presence in my world, just out of my vision but always in the back of my mind.

Fast forward a decade and my dear friend, a rabid Fall fan, was determined to sway me. She made me a tape of the "458489 A Side" compilation and I played it in my car, as I commuted to work and ran errands. It wasn't nearly as strange as I remembered. Ever so slowly, the tape crept into my regular listening pattern and my thinking began to change. "I like these singles", and off I went to acquire the CD. It was a bit like the first drink of an alcoholic. "I don't need more than this", and yet within a few months I found myself picking up the Beggars Banquet catalog. So many gems beyond the singles - album cuts! b-sides! So many strange sounds but all packaged in a veil of familiar tropes. "But the early stuff is really challenging", thought I, and my dear friend gave me a tape of "Palace Of Swords Reversed". Again, at first I found a few things I enjoyed, but there was the nagging persistence to play it again and again, until I had to find a copy for myself. "I don't need more than this, well, except maybe another compilation from the same era ("Hip Priests And Kamerads"), and maybe a live album ("The Legendary Chaos Tape")". That last one introduced me to the brilliance that is "Spectre Vs Rector", and then I found that the first two albums were tough to find on CD at the time. Which made them more appealing to my collector-scum side. So I tracked them down, and then slowly filled in the rest of the back catalog.

I stopped at "Extricate" because I had found the 90s albums inconsistent. But over the next few years I found more I liked, such as "The Chiselers" single, and I started to trade for tapes of the Peel sessions containing songs that blew my mind like "Glam Racket Star", and my heart grew three sizes that day. And then I saw them perform at the Middle East in Cambridge, the night before it all blew up in New York City. I picked up the 90s compilations "A Past Gone Mad" and "A World Bewitched" and realized just how wrong I had been about that decade's work. That was the final blow, I was just mad for them to the point where they eclipsed everything else. Days passed where I just listened to The Fall. When I met people who appreciated the Fall, I instantly liked them a whole lot more.

Strong albums in the 00's followed, along with an excellent reissue series full of fascinating previously unreleased material. "Room To Live" got the expanded release it deserved! "Fall In A Hole" out on CD without the pops and clicks! I saw The Fall again in 2003, when Mark was at the height of his powers. "Blindness" came out, every bit as great, driving and relevant as the early singles. I learned more about Mark's influences - 50s rockabilly, 60s garage rock and, in recent years, krautrock. Hearing the source material in no way diminished my view of the unique amalgam of sounds that The Fall create. The only artist I can compare with Mark is James Brown - both were able to mold any backing band into their vision, both treated voice-as-instrument, both unyielding in their views.

I'm listening to the Red Box compilation, the only one that does justice to the breadth and depth of Mark's work. I still find things I missed in all my previous listening, and expect to do so the rest of my life.

will love MES forever for saying this in that quietus interview:

I respect Dylan. The only good thing I've heard of his is that LP he did with George Harrison and Roy Orbison.

The Fall is like a Magic Eye poster, you stare at it forever and it looks like a big mess then suddenly some form pops out at you and you become obsessed

50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong is probably my favorite compilation title ever

Adding myself to the list of people who never fully got the Fall. I'd honestly been kicking around the idea of diving back in recently. Guess this will have to be that time. It's been good to read everybody's memories on this thread.

50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong is probably my favorite compilation title ever

but what about the elvis one

that's what makes the Fall one so good

"bill is dead" as incidental music on The One Show just now

frogbs gets it

i wonder what normal people are making of this, how a singer with a band with 3 top 40 singles is getting so much coverage.

(two are obvious, i had to look up the third - Telephone Thing snuck in at number 40)

((also, probably more people know the car advert music and the final score music without knowing who it is))

normal people :)

Was waiting for Geeta's piece

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/01/25/580606173/mark-e-smith-was-an-uncompromising-and-essential-voice-from-musics-fringe

i always thought it was funny "blindess" was car commercial since one of the first lyrics is i was walking down the street

I don't want to get too sentimental about him, and I don't want to forget how cruel he could be (that part of Prince has already been written out of history)

but I think the reason that so many people like myself who have been big fans and dabbled in making underground music react so strongly to him is the sheer guts he had.
i've been in a few bands, i've written professionally as an entertainment journalist and always meant to try something more personal and substantial

but the fact is that i never had the guts, the real nerve it takes to fully devote myself to something the way Mark E Smith did, to forgo a stable life, stable relationships, having a child, my health, sanity or whatever else he sacrificed in pursuit of his vision of The Fall (the band as an idea, a principle to him)....Can you imagine what it took in these last years? To the point where he was doing shows in a wheelchair? How much of his life he ruined because of The Fall?

It's one thing to be Phish or the Dead, living in 4 star hotels and planes and buses, but for the Fall (or Pere Ubu) it's still shuffling into vans, loading into shitty clubs all over the world, getting enough scratch to make it through the next six months....

(not to mention i wouldn't have been capable of anything that great, but that's another issue)

too tired (and sad) to flesh this out right now but "put energy above form" isn't quite right i don't think: he had a ferocious (if highly idiosyncratic and self-evolved) sense of form

(two are obvious, i had to look up the third - Telephone Thing snuck in at number 40)

it was free range that hit 40, not telephone thing.

Was gonna say..

"he had a ferocious (if highly idiosyncratic and self-evolved) sense of form"

just reading the lyrics on a page without the music and you definitely see that right away.

i rly like the balance of geeta’s piece - it contains the cruelty, which was important and good. he was an extraordinarily funny and often very kind and polite man, generous too. but yes. things broke down and “difficulty” could also be “damage”.

on another note, i disagree that there were any absolute failures (obv i do), a thought process that led to this:


i remember a friend and i pissing ourselves to the sketchiest live performance of funnel of love you can imagine. mind you constant laughter through a track is common. not just the lyrics, but the *manner*.

too tired (and sad) to flesh this out right now but "put energy above form" isn't quite right i don't think: he had a ferocious (if highly idiosyncratic and self-evolved) sense of form

speaking for myself, i'd rather listen to the fall than read beckett or stein...

Please keep posting good links, I am on the road for a couple of days and will be glad to have them to follow up later

UMS your last post made me tear up a little ;_;

My stepsister’s got a horrible growth

Byron Coley
‏ @ByronColey1
9h9 hours ago

just last saturday was talking to steve berlin about a fall/flesheaters/blurt show at myron's ballroom in '81. remembering how much mark e smith wanted to go see compton; also, how he and richard meltzer kept praising the work of cw mccall. so long, man.

i fell so hard for Cruisers Creek. it was everything i ever wanted in a song. it felt like a gift. since it came out i have played that song a thousand times.

: )

just on categories the way the not amazing imperial wax solvent album explicitly reintroduced character led songs again for the first time in a decade.

> it was free range that hit 40, not telephone thing.

gah, i looked it up and forgot it in less than a day 8(

(by normal people i mean the people i work with, or my parents, people who listen to radio 2 rather than 6.)

Front Row podcast (the extended download-only version) includes Grayson Perry's thoughts on MES - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09nrsg1

WFMU continues to play a lot....

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/77089

and i'm catching all the sneering Mark-critic quotes, eg "I don't sing I just shout," in "Your Heart Out."

Good work from Nate here

https://www.stereogum.com/1980231/wonderful-and-frightening-remembering-andor-rediscovering-mark-e-smith-and-the-fall/franchises/sounding-board/?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral

you can call it a bubble or whatever but i kinda dig that its like a head of state dying on my facebook. this massive response. we make our own worlds.

xxp one of my favorite lines

?? nate famously hated the fall i thought "mingering shit" iirc

Read on!

i did and it was pointless

sorry that was mean, music nerd hand-wringing does seem kinda pointless tho, the fall had plenty of catchy tunes

if someone didn't know where to start i would tell them to buy i am kurious oranj. so much fun and such an awesome rock record and tons of hooks/great songs. it's like the last great post-punk record. r.i.p. 1980s.

it's weird but the fall were never a band that i ever really picked apart or analyzed or dissected. i never wondered what MES was listening to. i knew he liked krautrock and 50s rock and garage rock and i guess that's all i needed to know! the clang was there. the beat. the roughness. pretty self-explanatory. it DID take me years to realize what a good writer he was. which is strange. but i just let the words wash over me and for a long time it never dawned on me how hard it must have been to write stuff like that. i just saw him/them as a force of nature. raising a ruckus. such cool sounds.

“If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.”

somehow never ran across this quote

This was, IIRC, in response to being challenged about a Reading festival performance where they pulled up backstage, MES having drunkenly sacked the drummer halfway up the motorway, and asked if anyone knew how to play drums. The Chemical Brothers' manager had not played since he was a teenager, and didn't know any of the Fall's songs, but went on and played them to tens of thousands of people.

the chemical brothers should have played drums! they had that big beat.

xp that's amazing, never heard the backstory there

i should also say that ned has a lot of reviews of fall albums on allmusic and they are great reading again

I think that Reading festival show was one of the 2 times I saw the Fall, although I only watched a few songs before wandering off because it was pretty bad.

xpost Too kind. As always I'd probably like to rewrite them but I'd like to rewrite pretty much everything I've ever done anyway.

loll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2euHrKaRW4

Beautiful. Are those saucepans in the foreground part of the instrumentation?

J0hn D0lan:

"MES meant a lot to me. A reckless courage that was beyond my imagining, bloody-minded persistence immune to attacks of conscience, and muttered backhands that could floor a target while barely brushing them with a knuckle:

'She consigns them all to Hell,
She's the Littlest Rebel...'"

probably not - this was for Ginger Wildheart's album and probs a home studio lol

xpost

That Reading/Fall story shows up in that Guardian piece from 2006 where the writer tries to track down every single former The Fall member:

One of the strangest entrances is that of Nick Dewey, who attended the 1999 Reading festival as the manager of the Chemical Brothers and ended up on stage with the Fall. "This drunk man [guitarist Neville Wilding] came backstage asking if anyone played drums," he says. "The band had had a fight and left the drummer at motorway services." Dewey hadn't played for 10 years, but once a Chemical Brother put his name forward, Wilding refused to take no for an answer. Dewey was led to a darkened tour bus to meet Smith, "passed out with his shirt off. The guitarist had to punch him in the face to wake him up. Then they began fighting over whether or not they should teach me the songs. Mark said no!" With a blood-covered Smith offering occasional prompts, Dewey pulled it off.

I tried to ask Wilding about this incident but his neighbour said he was "in Guadalajara". The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.

I just ordered "The Fallen", looking forward to it

The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.

omg haha

how many posters in this thread have played in the Fall