An A-Z of The Fall - K
K is for...
Arthur Kadmon
Real name Peter Sadler, he played in Manchester bands Ludus and The Distractions (tracks from both featured on episode #14 of The Fi5 Radio Show).
As part of Smith's strategy to mixes things up a little during the recording of Room To Live, Kadmon was invited to contribute some guitar to 'Hard Life In Country'. Steve Hanley was perplexed to find a ‘long-fringed sap’ with a guitar in the studio. Mick Middles described Kadmon's part in the proceedings:
‘[He was] told to go and tune up and play a few test samples, which indeed he did: four chords, a tune-up and a finger loosening solo. It took just sixteen seconds.
“Thanks Arthur. That’s superb. That’s just what we wanted. you can go home now.”
“What? that’s it?”
“Yeah, thanks cocker.”’
He was credited as ‘Arthur Cadman’ on the sleeve of Room To Live.
Albert Kahn
French banker and philanthropist, responsible for The Archives of the Planet, a collection of 72,000 colour photographs. There's a reference to a BBC documentary about him, Edwardians in Colour, in 'I've Been Duped' (at 0:21).
Dr Kalman
Right at the end of 'Y.F.O.C. / Slippy Floor' (7:19), there's a snatch of an answerphone message which mentions a Manchester phone number that appears to be that of an osteopath in Salford named Dr. D M Kalman.
Kamera
In 1981, having tired of the Rough Trade ‘hippies’ who would ‘only send review copies to left-wing magazines instead of the daily papers’, Smith signed with Kamera. He described them as an ‘old rockers’ label’, and indeed they had previously released LPs such as Freddie Starr's Spirit of Elvis.
The liaison was a short-term one, only producing two albums and a pair of singles, and by 1983 The Fall were back on Rough Trade. However, in Renegade, MES was uncharacteristically positive about the label: ‘I have few good words to say about record companies, but [Kamera] were very good; a world away from the limp stuffiness of Rough Trade.’
The Kane Gang
A lightweight pop-soul trio from Durham, The Kane Gang had a handful of minor hits in the mid-80s, their biggest success being 'Closest Thing to Heaven', which reached number 12 on the UK charts in 1984. They unwittingly found themselves in the lyric of 'Gut of the Quantifier':
'I'm not saying they're really thick / but all the groups who've hit it big / make the Kane Gang look like / an Einstein chip.'
Kazoo
American inventor Warren Herbert Frost took out a patent for the kazoo in 1883, although it's believed it might date back as far as the 1840s. You can read about the instrument's history here, and should you find yourself in Beaufort, South Carolina, you can visit the Kazoo Factory and Museum.
Fall songs containing kazoo work include 'Put Away', 'New Face In Hell', 'The N.W.R.A.', 'Leave The Capitol', 'City Hobgoblins', 'Marquis Cha-Cha' (In A Hole version) and 'Junk Man'.
Kevin
In 2013, MES made a guest appearance on Error 500, an album by Ginger Wildheart's 'supergroup' Mutation. The video below captures MES at work in the studio, haranguing the hapless studio engineer Kevin Vanbergen: ‘I’m sorry Kevin, in my headphones it sounds like the fuckin’ Smurfs’. (Unusually, Smith eventually accepts that Kevin, not him, is in the right.)
I can't imagine who it was, but someone also made this:
Kid Creole and the Coconuts
August Darnell aka Kid Creole and his Coconuts made a passing appearance in 'Guest Informant': 'the stool pigeons, cha-cha-cha-cha...' refers to their 1982 no. 7 UK hit 'Stool Pigeon'.
Peter Kimpton
In a 2014 Guardian article, Peter Kimpton described an encounter he had with MES that possibly inspired the line 'Same again, sir? / How can you have the same again?' from 'So-Called Dangerous'.
'Several years ago I walked into a pub outside Manchester, and spotted the Fall's Mark E Smith. As a fan of that cantankerous and already half-wizened word sorcerer, and seeing him having almost finished a drink, I spontaneously decided to offer him a pint – of "the same again". He fixed me a wobble-eyed grimace, by then somewhere on a broad spectrum of paralytic, and then uttered this gnomic retort: "Eh? Ow can y'ave the same again?"'
Lori Kramer
Vocalist in US bands The Pendulum Floors and Paper Squares who may have been the subject of 'The Reckoning' according to this interview with her:
‘On one of his records he wrote a song for me, he talked about our thing. And I wrote a song back, on our record, called "Dallas”. We were in Dallas together.’
Krokus
Swiss hard rock band and AC/DC admirers responsible for such classics as 'Easy Rocker' and 'Long Stick Goes Boom'.
Flexipop magazine used to run a feature where artists reviewed each other’s albums. In 1982, Krokus vocalist Mark Storace found himself paired up with MES. Storace considered Hex ‘mindless’ and thought it sounded like it was ‘being played by zombies’. Smith's review of Krokus' One Vice At A Time was complimentary in comparison: 'UK hairies could learn much from this l.p.'
The article is here.
Milan Kundera
Czech writer, best known for his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His first book was The Joke (1967) and it has been suggested that it was the inspiration behind Cerebral Caustic's opening track. This assertion is made on the novel's Wikipedia entry ('the song's refrain is, "The Joke! Five years in a PC camp – The Joke!", linking humourless Eastern Bloc authoritarianism to political correctness') but there's no citation given. The album's Wikipedia entry at one point stated (again without citation) that Dave Bush had confirmed this link, but has now been removed.
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