RIP Mark E. Smith

> 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

MES quote from the liner notes to the 2CD reissue of Shift-Work:

"I'm trying to chop off all the esoteric bits, the unnecessary bits, all the time."

been a fan of the fall for nearly 30 years and only realizing there are barely any songs about girls in the trad rock sense. and it’s hard to know the few that might be love songs. maybe none of them are love songs.

not a shocking thing generally — esp in darker genres — but for 32 albums?

when you’re driving around looking for parking, cursing non stop, there’s no more appropriate soundtrack than pretty much any fall album.

I remember working as a temp first few year and a half when I finally got out of college in the mid-90s working in the bowels of telephone, insurance and local government offices usually in big monolithic file rooms, cleaning up and filing with a discman listening often to The Fall. While now it seems some guy with a set of headphones doing some dead end job is kinda normal now, I think it was kinda strange to the stiffs at the time. The Fall seemed to really fit the circumstances, stop MITHERING.

grooving really hard on Extricate & related tracks this evening

with your daft African pop
and the wine that you call Bull's Blood
Hillary
oh oh Hil-uh-ray

Keep me away from the fest-i-val....

MES, the New Puritan after all, could have been mistakable for a second-wave feminist. No lechery whatsoever in his words, and plenty of criticism for 'male slags' and those with overactive libidos in general. I guess there is that 'An Older Lover etc' song, but isn't that sarcastic?

oh the etc is on 'Slags, Slates', whoops

Anyway, this is possibly his most tender moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VUnbPG8i3A

MES, the New Puritan after all, could have been mistakable for a second-wave feminist

well there was the hilarious time he punched and strangled julia nagle but let's not talk about that eh

yeah and then he wrote her the above song

it was a chaotic and shitty time for sure (punctuated by some amazing music) but apart from that fight i think he showed generally good credentials in that department. also iirc she fully forgave him (i know this doesn't absolve him completely)

obviously i don't want to make light of domestic abuse, but it was definitely a single aberration. not that kind of player guv

Maxine Peake
Every Friday in my mid-teens, I used to go to a psych and 60s R&B night at a club in Manchester called the Brickhouse. I remember seeing Mark E Smith there on regular occasions propping up the bar. I never had the courage to go over and tell him how much I admired him; to approach him would take a lot of courage from the steeliest of nerves. Many years later, I went to see the Fall perform at the Cartoon Club in Croydon and I found myself in the tiny dressing room after the gig, face to face with Mr Smith. I was starstruck. Just as I was about to pluck up the courage to say something, Mark turned to Steve Trafford, his then bassist, and said: “What does that slapper want?” For a split-second my heart was broken, but then I thought, “Hey, at least he noticed me.”

yeah ok i said second-wave haha

if anything, that anecdote adds deeper resonance to that eccentronic research council album she narrated a couple of years ago

sub-lingual tablet is sounding really good to me today

this picture also really got to me

http://thefall.org/news/pics/2017-11-04_MES-photo-sm.jpg

29 Truly Excellent and Typically Weird Stories About Mark E. Smith

so now I sleep in ditches

hoooow bad are english musicians?

lol

In 2010, Smith guested on the great Gorillaz album Plastic Beach, despite having no clue who or what Gorillaz was. "I actually thought Gorillaz were some kiddie rap, like helping out Dizzee Rascal or something," the bandleader said in a subsequent interview with Clash. "Where I live in Manchester, Gorillaz mean jack shit, honestly."

um, yeah?

damon got his terrible revenge by naming the next gorillaz album 'the fall'

"That's a fucking drum riff I wrote"

From the Newsweek(!) piece sleeve posted, talking about Pavement.
True though, he/ the fall wrote drum riffs that were amazing - fantastic life, no bulbs, container drivers... loads more where the drum figure was the hook.

As a huge Pavement fan, can anyone point me to the most obvious lifts?

as a fan of both i always felt like the whole thing was pretty overplayed honestly

i don't think i've ever thought about the fall listening to pavement.