Band Sinister

The Fallen: Life in and Out of Britain's Most Insane Group
By Dave Simpson

Back in the early days of the Web, a friend of mine started reading a forum dedicated to the Fall, but he quit after just a week or two. He said he knew the Fall had a cult following, but the cultishness of the fans on the forum creeped him out. He described the forums as "all guys saying things like, 'I dumped my girlfriend because she didn't understand the Fall.'"

That kind of obsession is a theme in this odd and fun book by Guardian critic Dave Simpson. A longtime Fall fan, he decided to track down 40 or more of the long-running band's ex-members, whom he refers to as "the Fallen." He organizes the book around this goal, which becomes more and more like an unhealthy quest as time goes on. He starts having paranoid thoughts that he's being followed, he starts stalking through dangerous neighborhoods looking for lost drummers. Ultimately, his marriage falls apart. Still he keeps going. So does the Fall. And it keeps falling apart, too. By the time he wraps things up in this edition of the book, the number of the Fallen has risen to over 50.

Each new member of the Fallen he finds tells Simpson something he doesn't know about the band and its enigmatic leader (and only permanent member) Mark E. Smith, but these pieces of information don't really add up to a whole. Simpson has an interview with Smith himself, but it doesn't do much to dispel Simpson's suspicions that the band he has spent so much of his life studying is really just an ongoing project performed by a hopeless drunk who occasionally utters something brilliant. When Simpson publishes some of his findings in the Guardian, Smith -- perhaps fearing that Simpson is coming too close to some personal revelation -- starts slamming Simpson in the press.

I won't try to describe the Fall here. If you've read this far in the blog post,  you've probably been intrigued by the enigma of Mark E. Smith already. Although the Fall is far from a household name anywhere, the band has been around long enough that it is considered an institution in the UK, despite the fact that it seems to shed musicians the way guitarists break guitar strings. (At one point, the lineup is described as "Mark, Elena (his wife) and your gran on bongos.") The Fall has even had hit records in different decades, although as Simpson writes, that fact comes with a catch: Supposedly, the Fall have had more "hits" that didn't reach the top 10 in Britain than anyone. This tells you something, but I'm not sure what.

You don't have to be a Fall obsessive to enjoy this book. Personally, I'm not: I still enjoy just about every Fall record I hear but I don't feel like I have to own more than the few 1980s-era Fall records I have already owned for years. (Well, maybe a few more...) Still, I really enjoyed reading the crazy stories told by the Fallen, and Simpson's own story of obsession and self-doubt. I kind of skipped over the parts that, as an American, I didn't understand -- the soccer (sorry, football) references, the bits about old TV commercials -- but I don't think it's entirely necessary to understand what Simpson is talking about all the time here. Heck, I don't understand what Smith is going on about most of the time, either. Even reading the song titles is a futile exercise in deciphering code. What is "To NK Roachment: Yarbles" supposed to mean? (Especially when the song is basically a weird version of "Every Day I Have to Cry Some.") Why is "Big New Prinz" spelled like that? (Especially when the lyrics are about a priest, not a prince?) All that mystery is part of the appeal.