Text Enduction Hours
Three ways to access the shadow world of The Fall. By Ian Harrison. Excavate! The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall ★★★★ Tessa Norton & Bob Stanley FABER & FABER. £25
The Otherwise ★★★
Mark E Smith & Graham Duff STRANGE ATTRACTOR. £17.99
Slang King: M.E.S On Stage 1977-2013 ★★★★
Bob Nickas & Nikholis Planck AT LAST. £30
“WHY DON’T you get your shit together,” declared Mark E Smith, on-stage in Birmingham in March 1980, “and make it bad.” Don’t ask what the late Fall autarch meant: what made him tick has remained quantum-level elusive, existing in multiple states prismed through alcohol, antagonism and slanted autodidacticism. Helpful, then, that these three books stir up the psychosediment by avoiding straight biography (the above quote is from Slang King, a collection of on-stage MES adlibs).
Blockiest and most free ranging is compendium/scrapbook Excavate! Therein, essayists including Michael Bracewell, Adelle Stripe and the late Mark Fisher chew over such Smith centralities as his class consciousness, sense of place, the everyday “weird”/ occult that gave his output such fortifying strangeness, and beyond. There’s much fun to be had: Ian Penman, reflecting on substances and addiction, compares MES to Margaret Thatcher, and wonders, “Does any contrarian start to repeat themselves just by being consistently contrarian?” Co-editor Stanley, by contrast, relates The Fall’s “nonprofessional” status to lowlevel football and persuasively casts Shakin’ Stevens as the anti-MES.
It’s punctuated by fabulous ephemera, vintage interviews and carbon-copied original lyric sheets – Smith rarely sanctioned this, so there’s something almost indecent about seeing them – plus near-indecipherable handwritten notes from 2017, a poignant reminder of his courageous, boots-on last years. (Some readers may rebuff the more scholarly contributions with: “Academic male slags/ Ream off names of books and bands” from 1981 fan-fave Slates, Slags Etc.)
Presenting Smith’s 2015 script for a Fall-starring horror film, The Otherwise suffers from no such mitigation. With echoes of undead biker flick Psychomania, it finds MES depicting himself as spooked but composed when Jacobite ghosts appear. A touching foreword by Smith’s wife Elena reveals his refreshingly broad telly habits (Eurovision, Keeping Up Appearances), though the real shocker is his plan for a musical where characters would lip-sync Fall songs.
Compiled by New York art curator Nickas and illustrated by Planck, Slang King is the lightest volume here, but its collection of verbal riffing gets you there anyway. As years and venues pass, lyrics escape their moorings into whatever was annoying Smith at that moment: cracked grist includes digs at Julian Cope, band splits (in real time at one 1998 NY show) and music biz perfidy. Quieter after 1983, in meltdown year ’96 he confesses, “brother, I cannot write these signs any more,” but a few pages later he’s confounding a Cardiff crowd with the trenchant instruction, “Litmus stained. It was nutmeg. Hup!”
All worth a Fall watcher’s attention, these books add to a vaster, ongoing, partwork biography, alongside such essential reads as bassist Steve Hanley’s The Big Midweek, and volumes still to be written. The group’s last album was 2017’s and in this ever-shifting musical dimension it seems they always will.