From: paul_s@ak.planet.gen.nz (Paul Sexton)
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 12:17:15 +1300 (NZDT)

            --- "Prole Art Threat On The Internet" ---


THE FALL. They've influenced everyone from Nirvana, through Oasis to
Carl Craig, and now they're back with a kicker live album, their
best in an age. At least, they WERE back with a kicker live album
but everyone seemed to miss it. DEADLINE meets THE FALL's MARK E
SMITH, the original skinny, greasy-headed Cardie Man, to check the
score.

For the best part of twenty years now, The Fall have been eating
away at the National Eardrum, testing the best of us with their
funky rockabilly, screaming dissonance and just about anything they
cared to lob out really. These days it seems they come and go, every
second or third album being greeted as a rebirth, a reusurping of
the indie throne. The last album though, the live "27 Points" was
almost wholly ignored, by the press at least. Strange since not only
is Mark E. Smith still the proud possessor of the biggest gob in
pop, but the album was the best Fall product in ages. So, seeing as
no one else was gonna tell us what the hell is going on on Planet
Fall, we thought we'd better go and find out for ourselves.


DEADLINE: Mark, why a live LP? Are you trying to get out of a
  contract or something?

MARK E SMITH: Well, it was the record company's idea and I told them
  "No, no fucking way" like. And then they said "Well, why don't you
  do a definitive one" and I thought "That's not a bad idea" because
  we've hardly sat down for two years with all the touring and we
  had loads of DATs and cassettes. And we had time to do it for a
  change. Normally live albums are thrown together while you're
  away, like, but I could sit down with this one and work on it for
  a couple of weeks. It was great because we used this studio in
  Manchester called Dreamtime which only does black acts, mainly
  just drums and vocals, so it went straight down the middle, suited
  us fine. I think this LP is one of the best we've done, really
  fascinating. I don't usually listen to my stuff too much, but I
  like this one.

DL: Unlike almost every other band under the sun, The Fall are
  fairly well suited to the live format. The much, much earlier
  "Totale's Turn" was a perfectly rough exhibition of their
  growling, snapping, rootsy blues rant. Indeed many believe they
  actually started out that way, that their debut "Live At The Witch
  Trials" was a concert album, an immediate statement of intent. It
  wasn't. A live album, that is. As statements of intent go, they
  get no clearer. Another point worth raising is that, back in the
  distant past, Smith claimed The Fall would endlessly challenge its
  audience, never fall back on old standards, never give the sheep
  the comfort of familiarity. Yet last time round they played the
  hoary (if brilliant) likes of "Hip Priest".

MES: Yeah, but the policy remains the same. A good third of the set
  people will never have heard before and, anyway, that was a
  revamped version of "Hip Priest" from 1990. The idea is still
  always to move forward. We've got about 6 bloody composers in the
  band now, so we can't really help it.

DL: Doesn't that make it difficult to choose suitable material, pare
  it all down?

MES: Well, that's mainly my job. You know musicians, if you let them
  go on and on they won't bloody stop.

DL: You don't consider yourself a musician.

MES: No, I still don't.

DL: A writer then.

MES: Nah, not really. I think that's my advantage really. I can
  always listen to things like the layman hears them.

DL: Isn't that irritating for the musicians?

MES: No, not my lot, they're very good like that. You can just say,
  "Cut all that out, it's crap" and they're alright about it. I know
  I've got a rare lot, I'm very lucky.

DL: It's been said that one of the reasons why Smith's lyrics are so
  thoroughly engaging, such a mass of spiky one-liners, hardcore
  witticisms and arcane couplets, is that he uses (and has always
  used) the same cut-up technique Kurt Cobain employed for "In
  Utero".

MES: Yeah, I've just got reams and reams of paper I write things
  down on. And I do a bit of prose, and some poetry sometimes. Then
  I just cut it down. I keep trying to prune more and more as I go
  on over the years. Around the time of 'Hex Enduction Hour' the
  lyrics were about three pages long - ridiculous. It's quite a
  skill, I think, to pare something down.

DL: Does that ever get in the way of clear meaning? With some Fall
  tracks it's impossible to tell what the fuck they're about.

MES: Yeah, but I don't think that's through pruning. I just don't
  wanna write the normal. I don't wanna write about sex all the
  time, it's boring. That's the whole idea of the Fall, to write
  about different things, different subjects. I can't be that
  objective about it but it's always straightforward to me what the
  songs are about, and a couple of members of the band say that too.

DL: Many do not feel the same.

MES: Yeah, well, you've gotta have a bit of mystery, you know.

DL: Do you ever go out to deliberately confuse people?

MES: Er... YEAH. Now and again. And it's amazing how many misquotes
  you get. Never use the word intuitive in a song, if you ask me.

DL: How about irritating people. The Fall have often been described
  as a thorn in the side of Pop.

MES: I think that's healthy. There always has to be an opposite to
  what's going on. That's the tragedy of music today, it just seems
  to go round in circles and there's no opposites. Now it's all
  indie guitar bands again, it doesn't really seem to go anywhere. A
  lot of people knock this dance stuff but they do take chances.
  You've really got to guard yourself against complacency, really
  keep on top of what you're doing. The Fall is not a laissez-faire
  operation, it's a 12-hour a day thing. You know, The Fall can't
  spend two years making an album.

DL: Why? Because you can't afford to?

MES: No, it's not that. I've just seen it destroy too many groups -
  taking 6 months to remix, taking that kind of attitude. I wouldn't
  want to work that way anyway, it's boring.

DL: Don't you ever take a break?

MES: Yeah, of course I do... No, not often, no. I mean, you don't
  HAVE to put out an album a year but I don't see why you can't put
  out a single every three weeks if you want to. That's what all the
  old rock'n'rollers used to do. I mean, people go on about The Fall
  being around for a long time but at least we haven't split up and
  reformed. I always find that really insulting, when bands reform
  and you know it's because they're skint and they need the cash. I
  find that really shabby. I find the idea that Patti Smith has come
  back really depressing. She's not gonna do anything better than
  she did before, is she?

DL: But you have been going for a very long time and put out a hell
  of a lot of records. Doesn't it ever become a grind?

MES: No, if it did you'd stop, wouldn't you? Besides, I've always
  got other things going on. I'm doing a single with Pete Waterman
  at the moment. He's got this massive studio in Manchester called
  PWL Northwest and this'll be the first single on a new label
  called Coliseum. We've got the best black dance mixer in
  Manchester, Johnny J who's really good, and I just wrote a song
  with him. And that's really interesting, far away from what I
  normally do.
      I do get invited to do guest spots a lot but I usually turn
  them down [the last one he took was with a Scottish folk band
  called Long Fin Killie], and I get a lot of American Nirvana-type
  bands asking me to produce them, but that doesn't interest me. I
  think they all have this preconceived idea of what I like -- it's
  always this really slow, gloomy stuff. I get that a lot, people
  saying "Oh, I didn't think you were gonna be like this, I thought
  you were gonna be really nasty."

DL: Fairly unsurprising, given some of the stuff you've said in the
  past.

MES: Yeah (laughs). I'll give you that.

DL: One thing about which Smith is ordinarily extremely scathing is
  the music scene. Name a year, any year, and Mark's been
  unnecessarily rude about it. So what about Blur vs Oasis, the very
  heart of this year's beast.

MES: I've not actually got a viewpoint on it. I'm happy for Oasis
  actually. I've met them and they're very ambitious. And, for
  another thing, they got me out of a very tight spot when I was in
  Los Angeles. I'd just finished this tour and I was completely
  bloody knackered. I was in this sports bar or something, thinking
  "Thank God THAT's over" cos the States is really gruelling. And I
  get this bloody couple come over, they're from Manchester and they
  were really drunk and really heavy. I said "Just go away" and they
  were like "Oh, you think you're really big, you" and all that.
  None of the band were around, the tour manager had gone home. So
  this girl starts trying to chat me up and her boyfriend's about 8
  foot tall, a big skinhead giving me this look. It wasn't good. So
  suddenly this guy comes over and goes "Oh, you know that meeting
  we've got in my room?" I thought "Who's he?" and he goes "We've
  got a meeting now, Mark, we better go". So I thought "Oh, right,
  good one" and we left unscathed and it was the guitarist out of
  Oasis, Noel. I thought it was really nice. So obviously I'm on
  their side if there's any competition. Though I don't like Blur, I
  must admit.

DL: Too southern for you?

MES: No, no, not too southern. I'd say it's more contrived than
  Oasis. I mean, Oasis is contrived but Blur are VERY contrived,
  it's like Tommy Steele or something like that. They're just one of
  those bands, like the Stone Roses, they've been everything --
  they've been goth, they've been Fall-ish, they've been Joy
  Division-ish, they just change their mask all the time. I mean, I
  understand that they think they've gotta keep changing to stay on
  top but it's just not genuine, is it?

DL: Do you find yourself listing to a lot of new music?

MES: Well, that Britpop thing doesn't interest me. I've been
  listening to a lot of Italian dance music. It's really spooky with
  loads of screams on it, very dark and moody, very much from that
  side of the Italian character. And I like a lot of German stuff,
  Die Krupps and all that.

DL: Living on Manchester, you must've stayed on top of the dance
  thing.

MES: Not really, no. It's funny though that a lot of people who do
  that stuff are big Fall fans. I think they like the weirdness of
  us. It was funny doing the track with Pete Waterman because all
  those guys knew The Fall but, when a couple of The Smiths came in,
  Johnny Marr and that, they didn't know them at all. They just said
  "Sorry, we don't need guitar on this. But if anything comes up..."

DL: Dance and the new technology are things that seriously interest
  Smith. And the Internet. The Fall have their own Internet site,
  put together by fans in Texas.

MES: It's funny because our American record company is always trying
  to explain the Internet to us. They go "Well, you're from the cold
  British northern wastes" like we're dumb Luddites. They don't
  realise that Fall fans had a lot to do with inventing the bloody
  thing, that they've been on it since 1982. And these idiot
  graduate types who work for record companies actually talk
  business on the Internet so the Fallnet guys tap into it and send
  me copies. My intelligence system is vast, man, it's like MI6. And
  yet they still claim not to've said these things even when I've
  got it written down in front of me.
      I don't actually like the Internet myself. I think it's
  illiterate, to be honest. I think often it can be a bad thing to
  encourage people to express themselves. It's the most boring thing
  in the world, if you ask me. I think that's why it'll die out and
  people'll go back to writing letters, which is what I do.

DL: And finally -- Yugoslavia.

MES: I said everything about Yugoslavia in 'Free Range' and 'Zagreb
  Day' a year before it all happened, so I've said my bit. We played
  Yugoslavia just before it went off and you could feel the tension.
  We took these really nice couples from Ljubljana to Zagreb on the
  bus, these really respectable, really cool kids. They were going,
  "You know, we're only coming with you because we like The Fall, we
  can't stand Zagreb." And we're going "Oh, it's like that in
  England, the North/South divide and all that." But they go "No,
  you do not understand. We want to kill them." And we're like "Oh
  right, like Lancashire and Yorkshire?" and these dead cultured
  people are going "No, in all seriousness, we want to KILL them, we
  want to EXTERMINATE them... And what songs are you doing tonight?"
  It all went quiet. So yeah, we could see what was coming, we said
  so...