An A-Z of The Fall - F

 

F is for...

Brian Fanning

Played guitar on Are You Are Missing Winner and appeared at a handful of UK dates in the autumn of 2001. Quit because of the group’s eccentric touring schedule: ‘what do you do, just get the fuckin’ darts out and throw them at a map of Britain?’

Fat White Family

At Glastonbury 2015, very visible stain on Smith’s trousers led some to suggest that he had had an unfortunate pre-gig accident, but it was actually the result of a backstage incident involving Fat White Family. Kieron Melling described what happened in a 2020 interview:

'One of them threw a drink, and Mark threw a drink. It was all in good faith. And Mark ended up with champagne down his pants in a place where everyone thought he’d pissed himself.'

MES's version (from The Guardian):

'They came and sat next to us and thought they were it. Big mistake. I was giving a glass of champagne to the lads before we went on and one of them just walks up and I just threw it in his face. He was showing off and there was a bit of a standoff.'

The band had earlier recorded a song called 'I Am Mark E Smith'.

Fredrica Federation

The sleeve of the 'Living Too Late' single credited the mysterious ‘Fredrica Federation’ as guest guitarist. It’s thought likely to be some sort of in-joke pdeudonym for Brix.

James Fennings

A DJ and long-standing friend of Smith’s who provided pre-performance music for the group around the turn of the century. He gets a mention in 'Brillo De Facto' (at 3:29); his name also cropped up in the Peel session version of 'Blindness' ('You expected Aristotle Onassis / but instead you got Mr James Fennings from Prestwick, in Cumbria').

Festivals

A selection of notable Fall festival appearances:

Stuff The Jubilee: 3 June 1977 at The Squat on Devas Street in Manchester. The group's second gig, and Karl Burns' debut. They played alongside local punk bands The Drones and The Worst as well as Warsaw, soon to become Joy Division. 

Deeply Vale People's Free Festival: 20-25 July 1978. The Fall's performance (on the 22nd) was their first at an outdoor festival; it was also the first time that MES met Grant Showbiz. The 22nd was a ‘New Wave’ day compered by Tony Wilson. Other acts on the day included Durutti Column and Alternative TV. Accounts estimate attendance at anywhere between 3,000 and 20,000. 

A live recording was released in 2005; it was reissued (with a slightly different track listing) in 2016 as Bingo Masters At The Witch Trials, which boasts arguably the worst Fall LP cover of all time.

Pandora's Music Box Festival: Rotterdam, 22 September 1984. Part of the performance was broadcast on Dutch radio, and appeared on the 2010 reissue of Wonderful & Frightening. According to the programme, The Fall went on stage at 3:15am.

Reading Festival: 1990, 1991, 1999 and 2006. 

In 1990 they were second on the bill on the Sunday night, with Pixies headlining (video here). Roadie Kevin ‘Skids’ Riddles filled in for the recently sacked Marcia Schofield.

In 1991, Smith sported a striking gold lamé shirt and deployed a headmaster-style lectern for his lyric sheets.

1999 saw Nick Dewey's sole performance as drummer after Tom Head's temporary sacking (see D).

In 2006, Tim Presley and Rob Barbato were unable to perform because of prior commitments with their band Darker My Love, leading to debuts for Pete Greenway and Dave Spurr.

Cities in the Park: Manchester, August 1991. A two-day open-air show held in Heaton Park on the weekend of 3-4 August, which also featured The Wonder Stuff, The Beautiful South, OMD and Buzzcocks. The Fall acted as a last-minute replacement for The Soup Dragons. The gig was most notable for Dave Bush's first appearance as full group member.

In online videos, The Fall seem to have been airbrushed from the event. However, a bootleg of the performance captures the first outing – albeit a highly truncated one – of ‘Two Face!’ which is played at a cracking tempo (about 50% faster than the studio version). There’s also a sound failure during ‘Pittsville Direkt’, leaving Wolstencroft, Hanley and Smith to perform an almost dub version of the song.

Glastonbury: 1992 and 2015.

In 1992, Smith introduced final song ‘Birmingham School of Business School’ with, ‘we're supporting the Levellers. Marvellous, in't it?’ (although The Levellers actually played the day before).

It's a real shame that so many people focused so much on the state of Smith’s trousers (see above) in 2015, as this was remarkable performance. 

Phoenix Festival: 1994, 1995 and 1996.

Video of 1994 here.

Part of the 1995 performance was broadcast on John Peel’s Radio 1 show. The group were fifth on the bill, between Van Morrison and The Wedding Present. It was released as a live album in 2003, which also included four tracks from the 1996 festival. It's often stated that the 1995 performance (see video below) included the sole live outing for 'Rainmaster', although there were at least two others (see here and here).

The 1996 performance, which saw The Fall on the same bill as the Sex Pistols, was also broadcast on Peel's show. Parts of the show appear on live albums The Idiot Joy Show (2003) and Pearl City (2004).

Roskilde Festival: Denmark, June 27 1996.  On the way to the festival from the airport, not wishing to share transport with UK hip-hop group The Brotherhood, Smith used the unfortunate phrase ‘get off the bus, boy’. Parts of the performance appeared on The Idiot Joy Show and Pearl City. 

The group also recorded a live session for Danish radio in the backstage area of the festival. It’s not clear when (or even if) it was broadcast, but a good quality recording emerged a few years later. It includes 'U.S. 80s-90s (No Fun At All Mix)', the title possibly inspired by The Sex Pistols’ appearance at the festival, which saw them walk off after being bombarded with bottles.

Primavera Sound: Barcelona, May 28 2004. Drummer Dave Milner's final gig, which is all anyone seems to know about it: no setlist, no photos and no reviews other than this anonymous comment on a Spanish website: ‘The Fall sounded good, though Mark E Smith was a caricature of what he was years ago. Luckily, his vocals are still up to it’.

Feedback Festival: Parc de la Villette, Paris, 10 July 2005. The video footage of the whole gig, shot by Pascal Le Gras, is a fascinating watch (part 1 below, part 2, part 3), which sees Smith in an affable and communicative mood, even handing out bottles of water to the audience. The most intriguing moment comes three minutes in, which captures Smith looking genuinely apprehensive and nervous before his entrance. 

Øyafestivalen Festival: Norway, 11 August 2006. The Dudes (and Eleni) on cracking form: excellent versions of 'Sparta', 'Mountain Energei', 'Bo Demmick' and 'What About Us?'

Hay-on-Wye: Powys, Wales, 26 May 2008. An earlier Q&A event in Brighton to promote Renegade had gone well, undoubtedly helped by the fact that MES drank water rather than beer throughout. His appearance at the renowned Hay Festival did not go so smoothly, as Rob Brydon, writing in The Guardian, described:

'The session with Mark E Smith of the Fall and the co-writer of his autobiography, Austin Collings, was what you might call a car crash. The interviewer had a habit of throwing out richly curlicued baroque questions - often answered by Smith with a long, buttock-clenchingly embarrassing pause followed by a growled "Yeah", "Sometimes", "Nah", or even "Start again?" The audience reacted with nervous titters.'

Beacons Festival: Skipton, 10 August 2014. The group were temporarily pulled off stage due to high winds after only four songs. 

BBC 6 Music Festival: Gateshead, 21 February 2015. Excellent performance, featuring Daren Garratt as second drummer. The standout moment is ‘Reformation!’, which features MES twiddling nobs, using his mic as percussion, directing both Greenway and Melling to sing, and throwing a crumpled-up lyric sheet into the audience. 

Adrian Flanagan

In 1996, a new guitarist, Adrian Flanagan (Smith’s sister Caroline’s boyfriend) joined the group for their final gig of the year in Berlin on Christmas Eve, and would play with them four more times. Fans were divided on the value of his contributions, views ranging from ‘Flanagan adds different nuances and the odd unique angle on the material’ to ‘inappropriate guitar soloing... why the guitarist just can’t play the chords instead of doing little twiddles/noodles is a little odd’. 

Flipside

Flipside was a late-night Channel 4 show presented by Richard Bacon in 2003-04, in which guests would flick through the TV channels live and provide ‘amusing’ commentary. The most amusing part of this particular episode is when MES insists on pronouncing supermarket chain Lidl as ‘Leedle’.

(EDIT: I have subsequently been informed (thank you Alan Holmes!) that 'Leedle' is actually the correct pronunciation in German; whether or not MES actually knew that is impossible to say of course!)

Foghorn Leghorn

The lines from 'Mountain Energei', ‘Dear dope, if you wanna catch us / you need a rod and a line / signed, the fish’ are adapted from the 1950 cartoon A Fractured Leghorn, starring loudmouthed Texan rooster Foghorn Leghorn.

Folk Tales and Legends

The three most famous versions of the Faust legend, in which the protagonist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures, are Goethe’s play Faust (1808), Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus and Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, (c. 1604). Smith, however, claimed that his inspiration for 'Dktr. Faustus' came from ‘a fairy tale book’. Fall detective dannyno unearthed the likely candidate: Folk Tales and Legends, retold by Michaela Tvrdíková and translated by Vera Gissing with illustrations by Vojtěch Kubašta (Cathay Books, 1981).

Sam Fox

Model Samantha Fox, acting as a guest reviewer for Smash Hits, was less than keen on 'Living Too Late': ‘I didn’t like this at all – it’s really crappy…he sounds like he’s been having yodelling lessons. it seems to be the fashion at the moment to like The Smiths and these sorts of groups, and to me the lyrics are really depressing.’ 

From The Basement

From The Basement was a web TV series created by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. The Fall's 2008 appearance is a stunner, capturing the final iteration of the group at their very best.

Black Francis

According to a 2013 interview, MES considered the Pixies front man to be a 'dickhead'.

Anthony Frost

Designed the bold, abstract covers of Extricate and Imperial Wax Solvent; also co-created the artwork for Re-Mit with Suzanne Smith. MES described his work as ‘by far the best stuff I’ve ever been submitted’.

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