THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

I know I said a few weeks back that I’d get this series down to basics, and then last week I offered up a lengthy tale of horror.

But I think that was all necessary as it cleared the decks for more or less the 21st Century version of The Fall, one in which all traces of the band’s roots and beginnings were done away with and it became a vehicle for MES and hired hands, albeit in due course he would come to find a settled line-up again.

Work on the next album got underway in late 1998 and carried over into early 1999.  The musicians involved beyond MES and Julia Nagle on keyboards were Neville Wilding (guitar, backing vocals), and Tom Head (drums), while Karen Leatham and Adam Helal were both tried out on bass.  Indeed, the final few gigs of 1998 had seen the band experiment with two bass players on stage at the same time, but seemingly it only delivered a great deal of chaos. In the end, it was Helal who was kept on as the full-time member once the band took to the road to promote the release of the album The Marshall Suite, which hit the shops on 19 April 1999, once again via Artful Records.

Some four weeks earlier, a single had been released, on 12″ vinyl and CD:-

mp3: The Fall – Touch Sensitive
mp3: The Fall – Antidote
mp3: The Fall – Touch Sensitive (dance mix)

It reached #90 in the charts and largely unknown outside the confines of fans of the band until 2003 when this advert for a car started being aired on the TV screens here in the UK:-

Hey Hey Hey……The Fall were suddenly famous!!

The CD version of this single will set you back about £2 on the second-hand market.  The 12″ single goes for more than £50……

JC

Warning.  This tale is chaotic in the extreme.

October 1996. Brix Smith leaves mid-tour after a violent confrontation with MES in the soundcheck at a gig in Motherwell, some ten miles south-east of Glasgow.  She came back a few days later, after a heartfelt plea to from the booking agent, to play the tour finale at the Forum in London, knowing it would be her last ever involvement with The Fall.

A new guitarist, Tommy Crooks comes on board in May 1997 and two months later work got underway on a new album.  The sessions were messy and difficult, and during them, Simon Wolstencroft decided to quit after ten years as drummer, frustrated by the way MES was behaving.  For the live dates over the summer, Karl Burns came back in yet again (possibly for the ninth time!!)

It was also a year in which loads of compilation albums, consisting of live recordings and alternative versions of previously released songs, were issued by various labels, all the result of the chronic inability, over many years, of MES to sort out his affairs.

September 1997, the album Levitate is released via Artful Records, a relatively new and cheap’n’cheerful indie label.  The songs came from three different sessions at three different locations over an extended period of time.  One way to illustrate how chaotic it all was is the inclusion of a track called Tragic Days, which is credited to MES and Martin Bramah. The explanation provided a few years later by Bramah was that it was really a work in progress, recorded in 1990 as a home-produced jam session between himself and Craig Scanlon; he also added that the song was really more of Craig’s than it was Martin’s…..

No singles were released prior to Levitate hitting the shops.  But in February 1998, something strange happened in that Masquerade, an MES/Julia Nagle co-composition was released as a single, a full five months after first being made available.  The fact that MES and Julia were now an item, may or may not be coincidental.

Masquerade was released on 2 x CDs and on 10″ vinyl, with the latter having exclusive mixes.

mp3: The Fall – Masquerade
mp3: The Fall – Ivanhoe’s Two Pence
mp3: The Fall – Spencer Must Die (live)
mp3: The Fall – 10 Houses of Eve (remix)
mp3: The Fall – Calendar
mp3: The Fall – Ol’ Gang (live)
mp3: The Fall – Masquerade (Mr. Natural mix)
mp3: The Fall – Masquerade (PWL Mix)

Masquerade reached #69 in the singles chart.

Six weeks later, The Fall flew off to America for a tour of America. It was a five-strong band consisting of MES, Steve Hanley, Karl Burns, Julia Nagle and Tommy Crooks. It was their first visit to the States in four years and as there was no record company support, it had been pulled together by Hanley, calling in a few favours along the way.

The first four dates pass off without incident, although MES is sporting a black eye having been hit in their hotel room by Nagle.

The fifth date in Philadelphia is in a venue that is barely half-full. MES takes to the stage exceedingly drunk and gives his mic to a member of the audience. He spends the night making a total nuisance of himself, unplugging equipment and walking on-and-off the stage. Shambolic doesn’t come close to describing it. Hanley eventually snapped and, accompanied by Burns and Crooks, left the stage for MES and Nagle to finish off the show on their own.

The next night is Washington DC. Things are a lot better, although Nagle walks off mid-set for a few songs.

The seventh night is New York, on 7 April, at a venue called Brownie’s. MES was again very drunk, and he began the show by purposely knocking over the drums. He would later again hand the mic to the audience, during Hip Priest, and bumping to Crooks as he tried to play the guitar notes. He then stole Burns’s spare sticks which leads to the drummer leaping out from his kit to try and throttle the singer, only prevented from doing so by Hanley getting in-between them and shouting him down.

Unbelievably, the show got going again, but before long it was Crooks’ turn to be on the receiving end of MES’s temper, leading to the guitarist swinging his instrument at the singer’s head. In a similar ending to the Phily debacle, the trio of Hanley, Crooks and Burns walked off, leaving MES and Nagle to finish the show.

It gets worse. Back at the hotel post-gig, the police are called, and they arrest MES for third-degree assault after he hit Nagle. He was held for three days until his $1000 bail was posted, and it would take until Tuesday 14 April for him to appear in court where he was ordered to undergo an alcohol-treatment programme and anger-management counselling. There was also a limited order of protection afforded to Nagle, the terms of which enabled them to continue to work together. MES was finally able to fly back to the UK on Saturday 18 April, by which time he had learned that each of Hanley, Burns and Crooks had quit.

Steve Hanley would later say the American tour had been the final straw, especially given he had put so much work and effort into making it happen. MES’s antics with walking offstage had seen promoters refuse to pay a full appearance fee, only adding to his stresses and strains. After 18 years, he’d finally had enough.

The really incredible thing was that just ten days after getting back to the UK, The Fall were back on stage in London, as a three-piece with MES, Julia Nagle and a temporary drummer in the shape of Kate Leatham. By necessity, the next time the Fall went into a recording studio, the line-up would be much changed. Somehow, the next single eventually become the best known of all their songs here in the UK…..hey, hey, hey.

JC

Last week’s post took us up to August 1994 and the expansion of The Fall to seven members, consisting of Mark E Smith, Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley, Simon Wolstencroft, Dave Bush, Karl Burns and Brix Smith, all of whom had either been a constant or frequent member of the band over many years, a good portion of which, particularly in the previous decade, had threatened to make them a commercial only for MES to continually thwart things.

The next few years proved to be a crazy period.  Band members came and went at a ridiculous rate.  The live shows all too often bordered on the shambolic.  Financial troubles saw far too many poor quality releases issued in an attempt to generate income.  The lowest point may well have been when MES found himself locked up after a post-show fight in New York in 1998. But, just as you thought these various implosions had to mean the end, The Fall always somehow seemed to find a way back to win back the hearts and minds.

It’s actually quite difficult to make sense of it all.  There are conflicting accounts depending on whose book you read.  I’m inclined to put my faith in Steve Hanley whose The Big Midweek – Life Inside The Fall (2013) is an informative and entertaining read, one in which he is regularly as hard on himself as anyone else.  Brix’s tome, The Rise, The Fall and The Rise (2016) is a bit flighty in places and very prone to portraying MES in the worst possible light, which in many cases might well be nearest the truth.   MES didn’t get round to penning his own memoirs, and the best out there is the ghostwritten Renegade (2008), but one which feels as if it should be taken with a pinch of salt.

From this point on, I’m going to just give the facts behind each single, such as date of release, who played on it, chart success etc, rather than go into any of my own thoughts and views.  This is, in the main, due to being quite unfamiliar with most of the songs, only picking them up via later compilations or, in the very late years, looking to fish them out simply for this series.

The new line-up of The Fall released the album Cerebral Caustic in February 1995, again on Permanent Records.  No singles were lifted from it, but whether that was down to MES or the record label I’m unable to say.  The album certainly got a bit of a mauling in many parts of the music press, with perhaps too many feeling let-down that the return of Brix to the band hadn’t seen a return to the more pop-orientated tunes of the Fontana era.  The album turned out to be the end of The Fall’s relationship with Permanent.

It also saw Dave Bush sacked after five years with The Fall.  It had been a period in which the keyboards had been an increasing part of the band’s sound, but they were largely missing from Cerebral Caustic, which gave MES the ideal opportunity to elbow him out.

It didn’t, however, mean that keyboards were out altogether, as Julia Nagle was brought in as his replacement. Her first contribution to a Fall record came via a single released in February 1996.

mp3: The Fall – The Chiselers
mp3: The Fall – Chilinist
mp3: The Fall – Interlude-Chilinism

All three tracks are a variation on one tune.  It seemingly took an eternity to record in the studio.  It was issued on 7″, CD and cassette on Jet Records, a label that I have long associated with Electric Light Orchestra. I actually thought it might have been a different label altogether, but it seems not. As it turned out, the label would issue just this single and the subsequent album, The Light User Syndrome, released in October 1996.  The Chiselers reached #60 in the singles chart.

Oh, and is if to illustrate the sort of chaos I was referring to earlier, Craig Scanlon, who been with The Fall as lead guitarist since 1979, was sacked from the band in November 1995. He had played on The Chiselers in the studio, but MES decided to wipe out his contribution prior to the final mix. For someone who had writing credits on more than 120 songs by The Fall, it was a sad and inglorious ending. MES did subsequently say that he regretted his actions, suggesting that his own increasing dependence on alcohol had very much clouded his judgement.

JC