An A-Z of The Fall - M (part 1)
M is for...
Bernard MacMahon
Associate producer on The Marshall Suite, it's possible that he was the original source of the nearly-always-misquoted line, 'if it's me and your granny on bongos, then it's a Fall gig' (see G).
Richard Madeley
TV presenter best known for hosting the long-running daytime show This Morning alongside his wife Judy Finnigan. When discussing online impersonators with Q's Ted Kessler in 2015 ('I had these fellas saying they were me... three on Facebook, two on the Twitter’) MES made the unlikely claim that he had used technology invented by Madeley to deal with the problem.
Mansell Rooms / The Manzil Room
Scene of the infamous dust-up between Marc Riley and MES that resulted in Smith sporting a black eye when the pair were interviewed on Australian TV the next day. In The Big Midweek, Steve Hanley says that the incident took place in a nightclub called the Mansell Rooms - however, it seems likely that the name of the nightclub was actually The Manzil Room (as referenced by Australian hard rock band Rose Tattoo).
The first gig of the summer 1982 Antipodean tour, at the Musician's Club in Sydney had been less than successful. Suffering from jet-lag after a 36-hour flight - exacerbated by copious alcohol consumption - the group turned in a sub-par (or as Smith put it, ‘shit’) performance where they struggled to stay awake.
According to Steve Hanley, he, his brother, Craig Scanlon and Marc Riley headed to a club called The Mansell Rooms after the gig. Their body clocks still awry from jet lag, they suddenly found themselves wide awake and decided to hit the dance floor, ‘throwing shapes’ to The Clash’s ‘Rock The Casbah’. When Smith arrived, he was enraged by the scene – ‘you’re not too tired to dance… [but] you were too fucking tired to play a decent gig!’ – and proceeded to slap Scanlon and both Hanleys across the face. When his attention turned to Riley, however, the guitarist showed no sign of the ‘soft mitts’ he’d been accused of having and floored MES with a punch to the face.
Inevitably, Smith’s version of events is very different: the group were in a ‘heavy metal disco’ whereupon he tried in vain to preserve their dignity by discouraging them from dancing to ‘Smoke On The Water’ - a version somewhat undermined by the fact that surely no one has ever actually danced to 'Smoke On The Water'.
Marillion
British prog revivalists, fronted by Fish throughout most of the 80s, when they had some chart success, and by Steve Hogarth thereafter. Coincidentally, also the first band that I ever saw live (Newcastle City Hall, 20 February 1984).
They got a mention in 'Guest Informant': 'the miserable Scottish hotel / resembled a Genesis or Marillion 1973 LP cover'. (The original members of Marillion would have been aged around 12-14 in 1973.)
Matterhorn
A Disneyland ride that was the subject of 'Disney's Dream Debased'. Smith and Brix visited Disneyland on the day that a woman died on the ride. According to Wikipedia:
‘On January 3, 1984, a 48-year-old woman from Fremont, California was killed and decapitated when she was thrown from a Matterhorn bobsled car and struck by the next oncoming bobsled. The spot where she was killed is now called "Dolly's Drop" by cast members. An investigation found that her seat belt was not buckled. It is unclear whether the victim deliberately unfastened her belt or if the seat belt malfunctioned.’
It is one often cited as evidence of Smith’s ‘pre-cog’ abilities, as he apparently told Brix repeatedly that the Matterhorn rollercoaster was ‘evil’ shortly before the accident occurred.
Ian McCulloch
Like Julian Cope (see C), the Echo and the Bunnymen front man was a loyal supporter of the Fall in their early days. A series of letters between MES and Ian McCulloch were auctioned in 2020 - see here for more details.
Burgess Meredith
American actor, best known for his portrayal of The Penguin in the 60s TV version of Batman and as Rocky's trainer Mickey Goldmill. He also appeared in several episodes of MES's favourite TV show, The Twilight Zone (there's a Twilight Zone-themed Fall playlist here).
Meredith's first Twilight Zone appearance came in 1959, when he played bookworm Henry Bemis in Time Enough At Last, which inspired the Fall song of the same name. [Spoiler alert: don't watch the video link to the show if you haven't watched it but intend to!]
His last appearance on the show came in 1963's Printer's Devil, dialogue from which appears at the end of 'Wolf Kidult Man'.
Metal Mass
Referenced in 'I've Seen Them Come' (at 3:23) 'metal mass' is, believe it or not, a heavy metal religious service popular in Finland.
Middle Class
The object of Smith's derision on several occasions, the most obvious being the title track of 1994's Middle Class Revolt, in which he mocks their culinary pretensions - ‘exhumes the cooked pigeon / his words indignant because it was cooked wrong’.
Rough Trade were criticised for being bourgeoise hippies: ‘I’d had enough of them and they’re all middle class. They don’t know what The Fall was about.’ Also: 'You go into Rough Trade and they're trying to say to the Fall, "Oh, you're not funky enough!" It's so condescending. Middle classes always, like, take working class culture'.
'Middle Mass' has been subject to a range of interpretations, one of which is that it expresses contempt for middle class orthodoxy - the title itself may be a play on the German word 'Mittelmaß’, meaning average or mediocre.
Bend Sinister's title may have been inspired by Nabokov’s 1947 novel of the same name, in which the hero is persecuted by the totalitarian government of the ‘Party of the Average Man’. Simon Ford suggests that ‘this theme of antipathy to middle-class conformity recurs throughout Smith’s career, from “Middle Mass”… to “Bourgeoise Town”’. Smith touched on this topic in more than one interview. ‘What really annoys me is that people can’t really get it into their head that there really isn’t any threat from the left or the right. The threat is some kind of standardised horrible society’; ‘People forget that the SS weren’t skinhead thugs, they were doctors and lawyers, guys with a grudge.’
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