The Fall: On the rise again

[Welsh Rich]

Also from The Independent yesterday, info on The Fall's latest come back album and new line-up!

 

"There was something in the air there. I think I'm pretty psychic, but I should've picked up from it." Mark E Smith - for 30 years now at the helm of The Fall, the group he has driven roughshod through three decades of restless experimentation and assault - is reflecting on a tumultuous year that saw, not for the first time in the group's history, the departure of virtually the whole line-up, midway through an American tour.

 

"They were losing it. Very much. We did a session in Lincolnshire in March. They had eight days in a studio and came back with 10 Eric Clapton-like tunes, and it was just like not good enough. It was flat as a pancake. I should've seen that."

 

Their departure was abrupt. Following a gig in Phoenix, Arizona, three of the band left without bothering to tell their boss. "Me and Elena got up in the morning and they were gone," he says. "I didn't really have any idea. We'd only been there five days." He laughs - it's not unlike the opening shout of laughter on "Over! Over!", the first track from the forthcoming album. "Dead spoilt, the British. They lost the bottle. It was very embarrassing." "Bottle" is something Smith has never been short of.

 

"There were all the usual excuses, that I'm drunk and all this," he says. "I spilt some beer over the driver. Flicked a bit of paper at him. To wake him up, y'know. But I was shouting at them." He leans forward. "I was shouting at them because they were half asleep." We're sitting in a corner of the Malmaison in Manchester, Smith's bar of choice for the visiting press. He's here to talk about the new Fall's new album. Reformation Post TLC, a triumphant follow-up to last year's superb Fall Heads Roll, the title of which now reads like a premonition. Again, nothing new. Smith has long been known for "precog" moments in his work.

 

"I did start the year off wanting to make a personal LP," he says. "Looking at it in retrospect, it does look bitter and twisted." He picks up my promo copy and looks it over. "But there's nothing there, really. Reformation's new, but that's nothing to do with it either."

 

He drops it back down on the table. "You don't see it objectively, when you're doing it. 'Oh, it's all about the group, Reformation's the group.' It does come out, I can see that. Probably a bit of precog. Maybe."

 

The Fall is not a group known for having much of a comfort zone, but his musicians' departure must have been a shock even for a calamity-seasoned Smith. "I didn't really know what I was going to do," he says, "but I wasn't going home."

 

With the bulk of an American tour to complete, and studio time booked in LA, Smith had to work from scratch, and fast. US record company Narnack waded in with its contacts book. "It was through somebody they knew. He was from LA, I can't remember his name, and he just said, 'Do you need help?' and I said, 'Yeah'."

 

LA-based drummer Orpheo McCord was first to answer the call. "It was basically, do you wanna be in The Fall for a US tour," he tells me on the phone from LA. "The first show was the following day." McCord brought with him guitarist Tim Presley and the impressively hirsute bassist Rob Barbato, both from LA psych-garage band Darker My Love.

 

"That night we went in to rehearse for about three hours," remembers McCord, "and did the first show the next day in San Diego." He laughs, with a lingering tone of disbelief. "We'd never met Mark and had heard all these stories. A lot of people said 'be careful', but a lot of what people say about him I haven't found to be true. We didn't know what to expect, but we definitely didn't expect to go in and record an album. That's the intrigue of the band: you never know what you're gonna get."

 

Neither did Smith. "I hardly knew them, and went onstage and I was amazed. Really good. It could have gone horribly wrong. They could have been a bunch of musos. I was a very lucky man." That cackling laugh again. "We were playing before that other fucking lot got home." Reformation was recorded in Los Angeles after just a handful of live gigs, and finished in the summer at Lisa Stansfield's studio in Rochdale.

 

Augmented by a second bassist, Dave the Eagle, the new Fall sound is an opaque alloy of spectral garage rock earthed by Smith's reductivist brio and a thundering bass. The guitar has an echoey mid-Sixties feel, and with Elena Poulou's more prominent synthesiser work, the album's sonic backdrop is sometimes reminiscent of 70s Krautrock or even early Hawkwind.

 

Reformation possesses an intimacy that's a rare commodity on a Fall album. Smith's associational poetics - as if he's uprooted whole landscapes and left only a few jumbled street signs as clues - compels itself into your subconscious despite your not knowing what the words are about. The title track's driving two-note bass riff is pure, unadulterated Smithery, with the drums reversing the rhythm before MES's declaiming, fractured throat-singing ("Cheese states! Black river! Fall motel!") turns the song into a Fall classic.

 

Elsewhere, Merle Haggard's "White Line Fever" finds itself mixed up with the home-brewed Krautrock of "Das Boat", a largely instrumental sonic assault clocking in at almost 11 minutes. "It just got out of hand, that track," admits Smith. "That's me and Elena. I was going to take it off, but people love it." There are self-referential numbers - "Fall Sound", and the wonderfully disrespectful "Insult Song" which charts the journey of his new band from the beaches of LA county to the hills of Lancashire.

 

There's a long history of occult references in Smith's work. The mid-Victorian atmospherics of "Coach and Horses" is another pull on that long-running esoteric thread. "I look through an 1860s' window pane, see coaches and horses moving round in the slashing rain", he slurs, one of the lyrics that haunts the rest of the album in the same kind of way that restless spirits haunt the work of MR James and Arthur Machen - both major figures in the Smith canon.

 

"I used to be in the Machen society," exclaims Smith. "Been a fan since I was 16. Fanatical and all. He's one of the best horror writers ever. MR James is good, but Machen's fucking brilliant. Wrote the first drug story, The Novel of the White Powder. Before Crowley, all of them. Have you read The Great God Pan? Terrifying."

 

The society's monthly newsletters included excerpts from Machen's unpublished diaries, the source of much of his work. "It's like another world. Goes to all these places, like, 'this is where the working class hang out, this is where the dandies hang out... I went in this pub, a bloke comes in with a knife in his back'. Like, the real occult's in the pubs of the East End. In the stinking boats of the Thames, not in Egypt. It's on your doorstep mate. Strikes a chord with me."

 

In 2007, the old John Peel adage, "always different, always the same", still holds true for The Fall. And as a new generation of groups jostle for prominence, Smith stakes out his own unique terrain without compromise or hesitation. "It's a strange business," he comments. "It's an old clich