Donald Clarke: Is The Fall’s new album legit or ‘just a collection of some sh*t from the cutting room floor’?
‘If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall,” Mark E Smith once remarked. To this point nobody has much argued with this classification. Since their formation in 1976, the abrasive postpunk band have gone through something like 66 members, but Smith, foghorn prophet of Greater Manchester, was always to the front, always growling in blank verse. It seems even death could not silence him. The first serious challenge to the bongos rule comes with the recent release of a new album, titled Post Script, from an artist called The Fall. Mark E Smith, despite dying in 2018, is certainly on it. The gurgling vocalisations, yelled as if from the other side of a wide street, are characteristic of the singer in the last decade of his life. So this is actually The Fall. Right? It transpires that the album was salvaged from vocals recorded by Smith from 2001 to 2014. Ed Blaney, former band member and tour manager, and Simon “Ding” Archer, sometime bassist for the band, then added musical arrangements to create nine suitably cacophonous new tracks. The two men have experience engineering and producing late Fall records. Not everybody is happy. “Mark’s life was complicated and Mark was very disorganised when it came to any sort of protection for his legacy,” Pamela Vander, who was in a relationship with Smith for the last three years of his life, is quoted in the Guardian as saying. “I was the manager and I’m not even sure who owns the name ‘The Fall’. It’s a cash grab; just a collection of some shit from the cutting room floor.” “Is it The Fall?” Archer pondered on Facebook. “Well, I know that when Mark was delivering his vocal takes and directing me in what he wanted, he was being Mark, from The Fall. He was in charge and being The Fall in his demands and expectations.” Mark E Smith: bingo masters, witch trials and totally wired, his genius remembered Never mind the semantics. Was this project worth attempting under any name? Speaking as a Fall fan of some decades, I would say we are better having it than not having it. Blaney, on guitar and vocals, and Archer, on bass, guitar and keyboards, deliver a cleaner, more conventional rock sound than we encounter in most earlier Fall records. (There are more than 30 of them. So such generalisations are tricky.) Smith’s diction was never confused with the crisp delivery of Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, but here it is rougher and more swampy than ever. The first single, 30 Degrees, lollops along at the speed of a wonky shopping trolley. Retro Song finds Smith pursued by a wall of sludge metal. Unsurprisingly, this writer was most drawn to a track titled Irish Northern Man. Beginning as a sinister sludge, it eventually gives into a sort of call and response, the latter part of which has Smith bawling the title to the unlucky heavens. It is utterly mystifying and borderline magnificent. The record now joins a longish list of recordings released after their creator died and before the work was properly honed. Fully six albums by Tupac Shakur emerged following the rapper’s death. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk by Jeff Buckley, as the title suggests, was fashioned from unfinished work for the singer’s second LP. Buckley planned to scrap the recordings, made with Tom Verlaine, and, when he drowned in 1997, was contemplating starting again from scratch. Mary Guibert, the singer’s mother, initially objected to Sony’s plans, but she and the record company came to a compromise whereby a double album was released featuring both the Verlaine recordings and later demos. It remains an interesting curio. Less contentious was the release of what one might generously refer to as The Doors’ final album. Released as late as 1978, while the Sex Pistols were disbanding and Siouxsie and the Banshees were forming, An American Prayer found the living band members playing beneath the late Jim Morrison’s notorious spoken-word recordings. It received decent reviews at the time, but it now seems like a grand folly: the sort of thing that might have started a punk revolution if one hadn’t just ended. Mark E Smith: passionate, occasionally psychotic high priest of post-punk Some artists care deeply about their legacy. Anderson .Paak, the California rapper, has a tattoo reading “Please don’t release any posthumous albums or songs with my name attached.” Agatha Christie, eerily, wrote the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels – Curtains and Sleeping Murder, respectively – in the early 1940s, with instructions for them to be published after her death (which didn’t arrive for another three decades). That would never have been Mark E Smith’s way. It seems appropriate that the coda to an extraordinary career would be shrouded in some creative disharmony. Would he have wanted it any other way? Would we? Awkward is an energy.