In 1996 I had a disgusting job writing computer manuals (I never got as far as doing any such thing, btw, just flailed around trying to look busy and interested) for a couple of months and I guess I had either a discman or a walkman or both but in any case I strongly recall listening quite extensively while 'working' to the live (-ish) Fall album The Twenty-Seven Points. The Fall had been a great favourite of mine for the previous ten, almost fifteen probably, years, consolidated firmly with their 1982 tour, just after Hex Enduction Hour came out and just before Room to Live. I saw two shows then, including the one after which Marc Riley was sacked. I thought Mark E. Smith was a real iconoclast and if not a hero exactly certainly someone whose pronouncements were worth chuckling over (even when he said he voted for Thatcher which may or may not have been true).
I was having a bad time, without a doubt. But I came to the sneaking suspicion that perhaps The Twenty-Seven Points actually sucked. I remember the track in particular which sent me to this opinion, but I can't figure out which one it is from looking at the track listing, which by the way make this album in itself look like the world's biggest b-side (or worse. For instance, it has an almost 2-minute track wikipedia describes as 'a dictaphone recording of Smith chatting with a friend - likely Mike "The Haircut" Hill'). The track I singled out for hatred was basically a poem about fireworks, I think, which was disillusioning - it was finally clear that Smith could go a long way with half-arsed writing if he allowed it to be garbled and mishearable, but in this case he was fully hearable and it just didn't work. He more commonly advantaged his work using the brilliant musicians around him putting together amazing tunes, often, but he also often wasted their good work in the service of making his crummy lyrics and ramshackle vision more important.
Anyway that was the beginning of a thirty year process where I think I can now safely say, I don't like The Fall anymore and I would rather not listen to them again, certainly not for pleasure. Throw them on the pile with XTC who I had completely grown out of by 1990 and [I'll insert the other group I can't remember right now who also go in that category, later, it's not Gary Numan because I never liked him although I did once own a couple of his records, but I do really despise Gary Numan... obviously as a child I liked Supertramp, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac etc and all of that stuff makes me sick now, but that's different].
House of All make me realise that, well, Smith might have been the candle we all flocked to initially but seriously one of the greatest things he did was attract and showcase talented people, or bring out the best in them, but he also fucked them up and fucked things up for them, and this was ongoing. In fact it got worse and worse in the last twenty (thirty?) years of the group/his life. Ultimately did we need it?
Perhaps it'd be smarter to divide The Fall into at least two eras - so up till about Bend Sinister they were remarkable, with a few missteps (The Twenty Seven Points comes a little after this time) and then it was slim pickings. But of course as previously mentioned here in one of the most-visited entries on this blog, Smith had already crossed the line at least once, to a place no-one should have gone, particularly not someone smart enough to know better. You can fall in love with your own capacity to push the envelope and push it in entirely the wrong direction, IMO.
So let's just confirm: Smith was an iconoclast, but one of those iconoclasts who dabbled in domestic abuse, racial abuse, and he also voted Tory (or claimed to, I can't believe I'm still giving him the benefit of the doubt on that one). I know that Anna Funder's recent problematic* work on Orwell makes quoting Orwell bad in some people's minds but he does spring to mind for me here: 'If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.'** Everyone though, even people who he treated extremely badly and people who he would have treated badly if he'd met them, is ready to give Smith the benefit of the doubt. I am sure if he was still alive he'd be a Trump supporter. (This thoughtful and interesting article makes me less sure.)
So, I looked within my soul and I thought, should I listen to This Nation's Saving Grace one more time and just be clear on this? I might. But at the same time I just got my copy of the vinyl version of At Home With You and that's got all the dynamics and power of The Fall at their best without the scattergun fascism, so that'll do me for the moment.
* Problematic if only because I think she hasn't really uncovered anything anyone didn't already know, and I think there's something about the way men presented themselves in the 1930s-40s that yes, was kind of cowardly and in many ways even cruel, but it's not like Orwell was the only one doing it. They (almost) all did it. It's important, and Eileen Blair should get her due, but the Orwell side of it is simply not news.
** In the Trump Mk II era of course you could say, well, a convicted rapist is in office in the USA and many who voted for him knew what he was/is. I'm sure in Orwell's day many of the people in power were similarly rapists, just not convicted ones. I think this says a lot about people who want to dominate and people who want to cheer on a dominator. But unless you want to draw a line between the kind of Stockholm syndrome ex-Fall members seem to still be suffering from, and the losers who go on to justify stuff like 'The Classical', I think this footnote has already gone too far in an irrelevant direction. Stop reading it.
