The Fall
BIOGRAPHY -
Weathering the original wave of British post-punk in the late '70s to emerge as the longest-lived and most prolific band of the genre, The Fall frontman Mark E. Smith’s uncompromisingly abrasive music and bitterly cranky persona made him a cult icon in underground rock circles, and even if The Fall's appeal was far from universal, their harsh experimentalism left a huge imprint on '90s indie rock. Notoriously confrontational and difficult to work with, Smith had a penchant for firing band members on whims, yet The Fall's sound remained essentially the same: odd, spare, cranky and repetitious – composed of jagged, angular guitars, tense rhythms and stabbing keyboards, all overlaid with Smith’s snarling, vitriolic monotone rants.
Defiantly working-class, provocative and alienated, Smith’s archaic, alchemic intelligence and misanthropic lyrics were often held as the anti-floral centre piece around which the band’s gruesome riffery and exothermic drumrolls were arranged. His narrative style of writing was filled with complicated wordplay, bone-dry wit, cutting social observations, and general distaste for the world around him.
The band’s choice to name themselves after Albert Camus’ existential novel The Fall, a collection of dramatic monologues by (fictional) wealthy Parisian defense lawyer and self-proclaimed "judge-penitent" Jean-Baptiste Clamence detailing his “fall from grace” as a self sufficient and popular member of society. As a consequence of its narrative first person stance, the novel implicates the reader into Clamence’s existential quandary by positioning them as both witness to the factuality of his account and as juror to his final descent. The corollary of this novel and the band’s turbulent history is manifest in the bipolar humanity of Smith’s lyrical mode – the way he shifts between an open heart and mocking, robotic scepticism.
This paranoiac duality is indicative of a man who clearly sees himself as a cynical, aphoristic autodidact, but one that finds it hard to hold any conviction in his own beliefs because of the seemingly arbitrary and violent nature of the world around him. Though less direct – and more postmodern than surreal – his lyrics come from a similar place as Lennon’s ‘I Am the Walrus’, a form of Dadaist rebellion against the constricting form of semiotic sense.
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
Smith however chose less to dwell in nonsense, but rather to push for a form of lyrical ambiguity and narrative direction - each song forming a small postmodern poem. Like Beckett’s disparate works of verse, Smith’s poems were made up of strong visual images and threaded with an eschatological longing for some sort of finality, a conclusion to the abstruse equivocation of suburban / city life.
Lay
Lay
Lay
Armageddon
This beautiful tree
Boo hoo
Give up living
Ample
Eye
They give in
On The Buses, up the stair
By the television
Pretend to learn
We'll leave this city
Hit a quick coach, take the town in Surrey
There's no-one here but crooks and death
Kerb-crawlers,of the worst order
(‘Lay of the Land’, The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall - The Fall)
Though somewhat sparser, there is a similar feeling that both men were/are trying to disentangle sense from every day objects that have lost all solidity or “suchness” when held up to the horrid lens of world events.
Persecution, loss of innocence, imprisonment, non-existence and truth are all themes explored in Camus’ The Fall, the conclusion of which turns the eye of the camera outwards to the reader, demanding they re-assess themselves and their lives. Though he would never admit it, Smith was and still is asking for the same thing. For all his vitriol and bile Smith’s lyrics have always been aspirational, pushing people to escape or at the very least understand the tug of the city. Towards the end of the novel, Clamence laments
“Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life — and hence its crimes — becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle.”
A sentiment reflected in Smith’s somewhat dystopian lyrics.
When the off license asks
I've been 2 months
Checks the crack
On their forehead
Should comb a hair
Over that
And these Czech shoes
Are a bloody reminder
And this town
Is not much different
The clothes, the stooped appearance
Over the hill
goes killer civil servant
Apt?
The band have released 27 studio albums, and more than triple that counting live albums and other releases. Their 28th (!!!!) album ‘Your Future Our Clutter’ is to be released through Domino on the 26th April 2010 and can be bought directly from DOMINO RECORDS.
READING LIST
As this is by no means a comprehensive enough view of such an important band, I recommend you pick up at least one of these books for a bit of a read.
The Fallen: life in and Out of Britain’s Most Insane Group - Dave Simpson.
Fittingly for a band who John Peel famously claimed “They are always different; they are always the same” - self professed Rock Journo Dave Simpson carves out a wryly written account of The Fall’s open door policy to musicians. Though not the best written of accounts by any means, it certainly gives an excellent insight into the sub-culture surrounding one of Britain’s most prolific, interesting bands and the obsessive following it created. The book is full of soundbites and anecdotes from a number of artists, probably best read alongside Smith’s autobiography.
Renegade: The Lives and Times of Mark E. Smith – Mark E. Smith
‘Mein Kampf for the Hollyoaks generation’…The autobiography of Mark E Smith, working-class autodidact and vitriolic frontman of The Fall reveals a man not afraid to offend people in order to attack modern taboos and liberal hypocrisy. Smith's uncompromisingly abrasive music and bitterly cranky persona made him a cult icon in underground rock circles and has led to a spine-full of apocryphal stories but for the first time the enigmatic lyricist speaks out on the hyperbolic twists and turns of a band as notorious for their in-house fighting (physical / psychological / otherwise) as their angular, passive aggressive music and a life that has dragged him through prison in America, drugs, bankruptcy, divorce, and the “often bleak results of a legendary thirst.”
LIVE DATES
Sat 24th Apr 2010 - Studio 24 (Edinburgh)
Sun 25th Apr 2010 - Warehouse (Formerly Moshula (Aberdeen)
Sun 2nd May 2010 - Keele University / KUSU (Staffordshire)
Tue 04th May 2010 - Rock City (Nottingham)
Fri 07th May 2010 - Shepherds Bush Empire (London)
Sat 08th May 2010 - The Palace - Aldershot (Hampshire)
Sun 09th May 2010 - Concorde 2 (Brighton)
Tue 11th May 2010 - O2 Academy [1, 2 and 3] (Birmingham)
Sat 15th May 2010 - The Cheese and Grain (Somerset)
Wed 19th May 2010 - O2 Academy 1 & 2 (Liverpool)
Sat 22nd May 2010 - The Canteen Media and Art... (Cumbria)
Sun 23rd May 2010 - The Castle - Oldham (Manchester)
VIDEO
The Fall - Blindness - John Peel Session
Mark E. Smith - Newsnight Interview
The Fall - Blindness - Jools Holland
words and thoughts by Samuel Smith