among the fallen

Ex-members of the Fall unearthed:

All the while, I was gathering stories. Smith's mantra is "creative tension". Members could be given wads of cash one minute, then thrown out of a van in Sweden the next. I was told of drummers being told to play standing on stools, of recording sessions where carving knives were drawn. To keep the Fall relevant, Smith believes he has to destroy each lineup whenever the band edges towards the mainstream. But the discarded members can take years to recover, turning to acupuncture, meditation - and even, in extreme cases, free jazz. …More particularly, I wanted to know what caused an entire lineup to abandon Smith in America, in 2007. According to bassist Steve Trafford, Smith went Bonkers in Phoenix - to quote the song title - and poured beer over the group's driver, who was doing 70mph at the time (Smith would later claim the driver had fallen asleep). The group fled after the evening's gig, during which another musician assaulted Smith with a banana.

Simpson gives puts the number of ex members of the Fall at 43, surely an underestimate. There is considerable evidence that I am an ex-member of the Fall. I live in Manchester, am unable to play a musical instrument and on a couple of occasions can’t remember what I did when I was drunk. These occasions were few and far between and lasted for very short periods of time, but that is no objection. People are signed up to and thrown out of the Fall within minutes.

I’ve never met Mark E Smith, but that is no objection either. Ex-membership of the Fall has already colonised the real, the metaohysical and the cosmological. As it expands towards the event horizon it envelops everything in its path. I am an ex-member of the Fall in the sense that I am a current member of humanity, or of organic physical composition. Universal ex-membership of the Fall began with the big bang. It will end with the heat death of the universe.

Comments

[Alex]

The wonderful thing about the Fall is that all the good bits are available in the meta-Fall phenomenon, so I don't actually have to subject myself to the unlistenable dross this singular creative process, unsurprisingly, generates.

[dsquared]

There's a short and distinguished list of good bands that are best experienced through the medium of press clippings and cultural studies essays rather than the actual records they put out - I'd certainly put the Ramones into this category, also Sonny Sharrock and perhaps more contentiously, the vast majority of Curtis Mayfield too.

[jamie]

There's a clear bright line with the Fall: excellence right up to and including the song titles.