An A-Z of The Fall - H
H is for...
Halifax Town FC
The lyric of the 1996 single 'The Chiselers' has an unusual fascination with shortness, the description being applied to ‘The Stones’, ‘Mr. Grumbly’ (with his white Ferrari), and Pink Floyd. There are also several references to money, including the entertainingly nonsensical ‘ninth richest country in the world bar none’. None of this is explained by the message printed on the back cover of the 7” - ‘This song is relevant to the recent experiences of Halifax town football club’.
Happy Mondays
In 1990, the Mondays joined the long list of bands to be on the end of a withering MES comment: ‘The Happy Mondays upset me very much… they practise their north Manchester accents’. Shaun Ryder also makes a memorable appearance in the session version of 'Hey! Student': ‘masturbating with your Shaun Ryder face’.
Blaine Harrison
In April 2012, the NME published a joint interview with MES and Mystery Jets' vocalist Blaine Harrison. The Mystery Jets' recently released album, Radlands, referenced The Fall in the song ‘Greatest Hits’, which I discuss in episode 4 of the Fall in Fives Radio Show.
Haunted Palace
It seems likely that the inspiration for the cover image of Dragnet was the opening credits to The Haunted Palace (a 1963 adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, starring Vincent Price), especially given that the film was shown on ITV three months before Dragnet’s release.
Hawkman
Side one of Shift-Work was subtitled ‘Earth’s Impossible Day’, a reference to a 1962 edition of the DC comic Hawkman.
Heck cattle
The repeated references to ‘longhorns’ in 'Who Makes The Nazis?' may have an indirect link to Nazism via the breeding experiments of the Heck brothers. Heinz and Lutz Heck’s ‘Heck cattle’ were an attempt to breed back aurochs, an extinct species that is the ancestor of all domestic cattle. Although their experiments began in the 1920s and pre-dated Nazi government, they certainly fit with the ideology of recreating a ‘super-race’. Modern accounts of the breed often reference their Nazi associations, for example ‘Devon farmer forced to offload aggressive Nazi-bred “super cows”’.
Here & Now
When Smith first met Grant Showbiz, the latter was at that time the sound man for space-rockers and Gong collaborators Here & Now. The Fall toured with them just before the recording of Live At The Witch Trials.
Chris Hewitt
Organiser of the Deeply Vale festivals (see F) and owner of the Ozit record label, responsible for dubious Fall releases such as Mark's Personal Holiday Tony Tapes.
Hilary
The identity of the title character in the Extricate track is a bit of mystery. Some think that she was Tony Wilson’s ex-wife; another proposition is Hilary Moss, who directed the video for 'Shift-Work'. It has been suggested that these two characters are one and the same: however, Tony Wilson’s second wife was actually called Hilary Sherlock, and has no known connection to The Fall. Furthermore, Hilary Moss didn’t do her video work with the group until the year after Extricate was released.
Steve Hitchcock
Produced and provided string arrangements on The Marshall Suite. Later known as Steve Sharples, he took Smith to court in 2015 regarding the royalties for ‘Touch Sensitive’. Judge Amanda Michaels concluded that Sharples was entitled to royalties, but only awarded him 20% rather than the 33% he was after. The media took great delight in reporting the judge’s expressed difficulties with examining the song: 'Mr Smith delivers the lyrics in a manner which at some points makes it hard to hear the words'.
Kazuko Hohki
Kazuko Hohki of Frank Chickens (Grant Showbiz’s wife) contributed the vocals to 'Cyber Insekt' without actually ever meeting any of the group.
Jools Holland
In 2005, The Fall made an unlikely appearance on long-running TV music show Later… With Jools Holland (three years earlier, MES had disparaged the very notion of appearing on the show when it was suggested to him by Mick Middles: ‘Never fuckin’ appealed… I wouldn’t wish to put the lads through that… all getting together and jamming… Fucking musos… The Fall have never been about that.’)
Reputedly, Smith insisted in advance that the host would ‘not play fucking boogie-woogie piano over any of his songs’. Sources vary on the exact wording, but the message was evidently clear, as Holland was nowhere to be seen when The Fall were playing.
According to pop gossip website Popbitch, Smith ‘delayed filming several times by wandering in and out of shot, calling Robert Plant c*nty and just generally behaving like what he is, The Last Great Englishman… Robert Plant turned up in a bullet-proof limo, the Fall were transported by Salford Van Hire’.
Hot Line
Tracking down the source for the Pete Tong magazine article section of 'Dr Bucks Letter' took obsessive Fall researcher dannyno nearly twenty years, and is his proudest Fall detective moment. Dan discussed his remarkable find in this interview.
It comes from Hot Line, ‘the complementary magazine for Virgin Trains passengers’, no 8, Autumn 1999.
Doogie Howser
The teenage physician, played by Neil Patrick Harris of How I Met Your Mother fame, makes an unlikely appearance in 2010's 'Mexico Wax Solvent' - '12-year-old doctor / a fresh faced physician'.
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