An A-Z of The Fall - L
L is for...
The Langham Hotel
London hotel, built in the 1860s in Marylebone. It was taken over by the BBC after WW2, and was used by the broadcaster until 1986.
In 'Fortress', the seemingly random streams of numbers and letters (‘room C-H-1-O-C-H-11’) is actually MES expressing frustration at the arbitrary room numbering system in the BBC building. In April 1981, Smith was invited to appear on Talkabout, a Radio 1 discussion show. In Have A Bleedin Guess, Paul Hanley explains:
'Mark was sufficiently vexed by the experience to pen a satisfyingly splenetic lyric which even takes umbrage at the door numbers - CH10CH11 is presumably a parody of the BBC addressing system. All rooms in Langham Hotel were prefixed LH followed by the floor and room number. Broadcasting House rooms begin BH, in Maida Vale it was MV.'
There's further detail at The Annotated Fall, which suggests a link to Room 101 from Orwell's 1984.
MES made some specific references to the event in a couple of live performances:
- ‘Much discussion in Langham House fortress’ (Chicago, July 1981)
- ‘I spent time in BBC fortress’ (Hammersmith Town Hall, March 1985)
Lauren Laverne
BBC DJ and presenter who was also lead singer in the band Kenickie during the mid-90s, she was referenced in the lyric of 'Alton Towers'.
She undertook a slightly uncomfortable interview with MES for TV show Transmission in March 2007:
LL: 'Your missus is still in there, and she was in the last lot, right? Did you ever think about, sort of, maybe replacing her and then think, oh, I can't go that far?’
MES: 'Don’t get funny now.'
John Leckie
Veteran producer who had been employed at Abbey Road studios in the 70s, working with John Lennon and Syd Barrett, and had produced albums for Magazine and XTC. Despite his hippyish background (‘he had recently walked off an ashram’, Brix described, ‘where everyone had to wear the colours of the rising sun and was encouraged to have group sex’) Leckie quickly established a productive working relationship with the group.
His work on Wonderful And Frightening and This Nation’s Saving Grace played a key role in making The Fall more commercially viable without sacrificing their uncompromising spirit, although the relationship soured during the Bend Sinister sessions.
In this clip, Leckie describes his work with the group (he mixes up 'Draygo's Guilt' with 'I Am Damo Suzuki').
Stewart Lee
Alongside John Peel and Frank Skinner, one of the most famous Fall fans. (Also, in my book, one of the greatest ever stand-up comics.) He has written extensively about the group (for example his 'Primer to The Fall' for Wire magazine) and also contributed a short story to Perverted By Language, a collection of fiction inspired by the group. In July 2007, a Fall gig at The Ritz Manchester (the first following the departure of 'The Dudes') served as a launch party for the book. The audience soon ran out of patience with the spoken word elements of the performance, as Stew described:
‘On the night, 3 or 4 writers had agreed to read from the book, as part of the Festival, before the Fall's set. Alan Wise the manager came back stage and hung around wheezing and snuffling and told us all how Mark hated the book, which freaked the other writers out and made some of them nervous… I read a bit of my story then split for the pit. All the other writers went on too long and the standing audience got restless... The Fall came on and MES tore the book up on stage, which was a struggle for him as it was sturdier than he had imagined. I don't know if MES hated the book or not. Some of the pieces (not mine) were very good, some weren't. It made sense for "the character of MES" to hate the book, whether he did himself or not.’
In 2014, he hosted a discussion about The Big Midweek with Steve Hanley and co-writer Olivia Piekarski:
In many ways, Stew is the stand-up equivalent of The Fall: his consistently uncompromising attitude; his use of repetition; his ambivalent, almost manipulative relationship with his audience; the cyclical way he comes in and out of fashion.
His interview with Mark Radcliffe shortly after Smith's death saw him give one of the most touching tributes to MES:
‘I will miss the adventure of being a Fall fan and of being part of this community of people… who had this begrudging loyalty to it. I would have had an utterly different life without The Fall. It’s hard to know what will replace that.’
Pascal Le Gras
Described by Smith as ‘a sublime genius’, French artist Le Gras first met Smith at a Fall gig in Paris in 1990. He went on to be the most prolific of all The Fall cover artists, designing the artwork for the majority of the group’s 90s output as well as many of the Voiceprint live albums. Perhaps his strangest cover was the one for Live At The Astoria 1995:
Craig Leon
Husband of Cassell Webb (who I'll get to in 'W'), Leon was an American-born producer who played an important role in launching the careers of The Ramones, Suicide, Talking Heads and Blondie. He co-produced and contributed guitar, keyboards and backing vocals to Extricate, Shift-Work and Code: Selfish.
'Mollusc in Tyrol', from Seminal Live, was based on Leon’s ‘Donkeys Bearing Cups’ from his 1981 album Nommus.
Levitation
Levitation were formed by guitarist Terry Bickers following his departure from The House of Love. They were booked to support The Fall on their 1992 tour to promote Code: Selfish, but only lasted three dates, alleging that it was ‘impossible to work under Smith’s oppressive regime’. MES countered that the band had taken up to an hour and a half sound-checking and were using too much dry ice.
Wyndham Lewis
Writer, painter, and critic who co-founded the Vorticist movement and edited literary magazine BLAST. Smith was great admirer of Lewis, and in 2017 he was booked to appear at an event at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, part of an exhibition called Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War. Smith’s contribution was billed as Responding to a Rebel: Mark E. Smith Agent of Chaos, ‘a performance of speeches, poems and ramblings driven by roaring live percussion, vintage cassette players and large-scale projections from IWM’s archive’. The event sounded intriguing, but sadly never happened, cancelled on the day owing to Smith’s poor health.
Paul Hanley discusses Lewis’ influence on MES in some depth in Have a Bleedin’ Guess, the cover of which gave a nod to BLAST.
Sebastian Lewsley
Studio engineer who delivered the opening lines (‘Awake at 5am / Mr Hughes was right in retrospect’) of ‘Hurricane Edward’.
Live & Kicking
BBC Saturday morning children's TV show that ran from 1993-2001. In 1994, some of the show's young viewers took MES to task for using a lyric sheet during his Top of the Pops appearance with the Inspiral Carpets.
Trevor Long
Became The Fall’s manager in 1989, aiming to make them a bit more business-like. He was given the responsibility of dismissing Martin Bramah and Marcia Schofield in 1990. Smith became increasingly convinced that Long was embezzling The Fall’s funds, which resulted in an unsuccessful court case in 1994. The hearing didn’t start well for Smith when his designated taxi driver (Si Wolstencroft) was late picking him up due to being hungover from a Primal Scream gig the night before. Smith, possibly unwisely, represented himself.
‘…the judge threw the whole thing out of court on account of Mr Smith being unable to remember the evidence he had given in the morning and therefore contradicting it in the afternoon. “Your life is a mess, Mr Smith!” declared the judge…’
Inevitably, the MES version differs from other sources. According to him, his evidence wasn’t heard properly in court (literally) because the microphone in front of him wasn’t working, and the main reason that Long was acquitted was that Smith had ‘quoted a figure of £1200 when the actual figure was £1215’.
Long was the subject of ‘The Birmingham School Of Business School’ and (possibly) ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ and ‘Married, 2 Kids’.
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a writer of supernatural and horror tales and is perhaps the best known of Smith's literary influences. There are a multitude of Lovecraft references throughout The Fall's work:
- 'A Figure Walks' - a journey through terror and paranoia with a clearly Lovecraftian tone; at London's Lyceum on 25 March 1979, MES introduced the song with 'This one's a slow one, dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. The psychologist said that he thought the shadow was his father. The shad was his dad.'
- 'Spectre vs Rector' - mentions ‘Yog Sothoth’, one of Lovecraft’s ‘outer gods’.
- 'Lay of the Land' - 'Eldritch house' references The Shunned House (1937) ('I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated house...')
- 'Van Plague?' - ‘A body's waste 'neath a gibbous moon’ saw Smith deploy an adjective that he had picked up from Lovecraft. Gibbous means ‘marked by convexity or swelling; of the moon or a planet: seen with more than half but not all of the apparent disk illuminated’. Lovecraft uses the word twice in his 1919 story, Dagon. (See G)
- 'Squid Law/Lord' - The squid image has Lovecraftian connotations (Cthulhu is generally portrayed with tentacles) although the image that inspired the song directly was that of the group’s soundman Ed, emerging from the Pacific Ocean covered in seaweed (see E).
- 'Last Commands Of Xyralothep Via M.E.S.' - a reference to Nyarlathotep, another of Lovecraft’s ‘outer gods’.
- 'Hittite Man' - You have no idea about the gibbous morons you have unloaded on this earth'.
- 'Touchy Pad' - 'the tentacles of the Old Ones'.
- 'Gibbus Gibson' - see above.
Despite his talent for creating dark, twisted fantasy, Lovecraft was also an undoubted racist.
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