13.
The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour
I’ve read since that Hex Enduction Hour was going to be the last Fall album and that Mark was going to split the band up if it didn’t work. The rest of us weren’t aware of this. I guess it could have been like David Bowie splitting up the Spiders From Mars onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, but obviously this proved not to be the case.
I put this in here because it was the last Fall album that I did, and everything that we’d learned just came together. I was on Live At The Witch Trials, but that was a pop album. It sounds like a totally different group… well, it did have different musicians on it, I guess. Mark obviously wasn’t clear on what he wanted The Fall to sound like at that point in time; Dragnet was just the sound of a load of kids who couldn’t play being thrown in a studio and being excited and being in their favourite band but… [laughs] well, Dragnet is a mystery to me, that album… I remember recording it and the production… it never sounded the same twice. I realised that wasn’t how we sounded live. It didn’t sound like The Fall. It sounded amazing in its own way but it didn’t sound like The Fall. It didn’t capture what we were doing.
But with Hex Enduction Hour, everything came together at that one point. We did some of it live in a cinema in Hitchin and some of it in a studio in Iceland that had lava walls. Apparently it’s still talked about to this day, The Fall’s stay in Iceland. No one went to Iceland then, The Stranglers had played there, Jaz Coleman ran off there to find the ley lines, but that was it. I think we first went there because we were invited by Einar from the Sugarcubes. He instigated it. It was so bleak there. There was no tourism. And the mentality of the Icelandic people was like that of The Fall, to be honest. It was a real case of us versus them. They were out on a limb. Iceland didn’t integrate. It was a really strange community of people. They were really nice but otherworldly.
That was my swansong really. I mean I’m on that Room To Live album as well, but I listen to Hex and I hear a glorious racket. I think that’s when Mark really got to grips with what he wanted The Fall to sound like, and ironically you find out later that it was going to be the last Fall album. Mark’s stream of consciousness really comes together, the way he makes words up like in the title, he really got a handle on where he wanted to take his own art. And with the band it was all because we’d been playing together for a long time. Steve Hanley couldn’t play bass when we were together in [pre-Fall group] The Sirens, I taught him the root notes and I couldn’t play guitar either… I still can’t, if I’m honest. Steve found his feet and found his sound, so he became the engine room of The Fall. The sound of it is right, despite being recorded in these two totally different environments.
I remember when I heard ‘Hip Priest’ on Silence Of The Lambs, because I was the only person left in the cinema when it came on… I tell a lie, it was just me and the wife. Jonathan Demme was a massive Fall fan. Yeah, it was peculiar that… but then again it’s the music that a serial killer’s playing in his house, so is it really that weird?
Mark’s given me grief over the years, but how can you take any of it to heart? Anything he says is water off a duck’s back. He’s a character… almost a cartoon character. I’ve got a massive soft spot for Mark and I’m a massive fan. Round the corner from here there used to be a venue called The Arches Bar and a mate of mine was having his birthday party in there in the mid-80s. I was upstairs, and my mate said Mark Smith’s downstairs and he wants a pint with you. So I thought, right, well, we’ve both grown up since then, let’s have a drink and put it all behind us. So I had a couple of pints with him, and we had a really good time together. I’d been listening to The Fall, he said – and he’ll deny this – I’ve got your album and I’m keeping an eye on what you’re doing and I think it’s great. I mean we were both drunk, but by the end of it we were kind of mates again. Then about three months later they reissued a load of Fall albums on Cog Sinister, so I rang him up and said, ‘Am I going to get paid for any of this?’ And he said, ‘No you’re not!’ [makes noise of phone being slammed down] So it was straight back to square one.
And I think part and parcel of it is that if anyone left The Fall he wanted them to sink without trace, as if to say, ‘Without me they’re nothing.’ His contempt for musicians is well known, but he’s done albums on his own [Post Nearly Man 1998; Pander, Panda, Panza 2002], and they’re just a joke. He was trying to prove that he could do it without musicians, and all he proved was that he couldn’t. So what rankled Mark more and more was that I just wouldn’t go away, even to the extent that one day he was driving to the train station and there was a massive billboard with Mark Radcliffe and I on it… it probably made him want to drive his car straight into the canal, because there’s this bloke from his past who just won’t go away. But I’m not a thorn in his side, he’s got a lot going on in his life, and he’s a very clever bloke, but he does say things for effect. But me and him had ding dongs in the press, and it was just so childish it was untrue, and we wrote songs about each other. I wrote ‘Jumper Clown’ and he wrote ‘Hey Marc Riley’ and ‘C.R.E.E.P.’, and so on. It was daft, really.
Mark was even cagey around us when it came to the subject of what his influences were. When we were doing Hex, he said he wanted a song like Bob Dylan so we wrote the music to ‘Iceland’ – which doesn’t even sound like a Dylan song – and I mentioned this in an interview once and he went bonkers. He didn’t want that wall to be broken down, he didn’t want any of that stuff to be revealed to anyone else. I mean, the song is a kind of a folk song and is about us being in Iceland, and it doesn’t even sound like Dylan, but he went bonkers. Influences-wise Mark was similar to John Lydon though, they had similar tastes: krautrock, Hawkwind, Beefheart… so there were two people on the same path, both with very skewed views on the world, and both very clever and an awful lot of suss about them. And I learned a lot from Mark. I was 16 when I joined The Fall, and they were really formative years for me. To be in a group with someone like Mark was a real education.
