Friday 13 June 1980, the Effenaar, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Mark E Smith of The Fall introduces City Hobgoblins  (B-side to How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’, released 11 July, 1980), telling the crowd:

‘We’ll stick punk rock up your fucking arse. Right, here’s a good one – it’s a bit of fucking culture for you. Right, Hobgoblins! Davies! Hit the fucking cowbell quick!’

Davies, not unknown to The Fall since he added conga to their very first Peel session back in May 1978, had temporarily replaced the younger Hanley brother – he was taking his O-levels - on drums and cowbell for the Dutch tour. The rest of The Fall at the time were Mark E. Smith (vocals, keyboards), Marc ‘Lard’ Riley (guitar, keyboards, vocals), Craig Scanlon (guitar), Steve Hanley (bass, vocals) and Paul Hanley (drums, percussion). Three years old at the time of the Eindhoven gig, this was already The Fall’s thirteenth change of personnel since forming after the inspirational Sex Pistols Lesser Free Trade Hall Gig.

This much a little research on The Fall’s unofficial website will tell you. You already know that Smith’s hobgoblin culture reference is to the line ‘Ubu le Roi is a home hobgoblin’ from Alfred Jarry’s play of 1866, Ubu Roi, widely regarded as the start of the Absurdist tradition. You know that Camus, author of The Fall (La Chute), stood in the same tradition: ‘Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion’ (The Myth of Sisyphus). You may agree that the reason that Mark E Smith (MES) and The Fall have been able to keep going all these years is a degree of revolting free range passion that just refuses to do the right thing in the face of the world’s absurdity. It’s crazy that The Fall keeps on being The Fall but somehow it makes sense.

We all know the massive impact that the Free Trade Hall gig had in 1976 on an audience that included MES, Morrissey, Ian Curtis, Tony Wilson, Paul Morley, as well as Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks. If not, read I Swear I Was There by David Nolan which describes this founding moment of the Manchester music scene. In that account, MES acknowledges the influence that punk and the Buzzcocks – instigators of the gig – had on The Fall:

I remember thinking…We could do better than that. The one thing they [Buzzcocks] did do was break things down. (p.94)

But while they may have afforded a leg-up, and it was the Buzzcock’s label New Hormones that funded The Fall’s first EP Bingo-Master’s Break Out, MES soon leapt ahead as original band member Martin Bramah recalls from The Fall’s first ever gig:

‘It was a small room and Mark just let fly with such venom from day one. I remember he just sort of reached into the audience and virtually poked his finger up Howard Devoto’s nose’ (Simon Ford, Hip Priest, p.22)

Punk was never the only influence on MES. He listed some in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer’ (NME, 15 August 1981), which include: Lou Reed; Peter Hammill; Johnny Cash; The Sex Pistols; The Seeds; The Pebbles, Vol 3; 16 Greatest Truck Driver Hits cassette; Der Plan; The Mothers of Invention; and The Panther Burns.

A little bit of Wikipedia is all you need to tell you that Tav Falco’s Panther Burns has had at last count some sixty-nine band members and a list of musical influences that stretches from The Cramps to Marlene Dietrich and Gene Pitney. Maybe The Fall are not alone? Maybe when MES tells Dave Simpson that band turnover is hardly uncommon in orchestras or Northern Soul bands, or football clubs for that matter, he has a point? Aren’t they just hired hands? So why this obsession with the 43 ex-members of The Fall that led the Guardian journalist to produce The Fallen as an account of his quest to interview them all?

If you don’t already know everything about The Fall and you don’t have the Internet, then you’ll find Steve Davies and his cowbell in The Fallen on page 109. You will learn there that Davies has, in his post Fall life, appeared on Phoenix Nights (as Darius); that, before The Fall, he had been in the navy and then in prison; that he claims to have jammed with the original line-up of Bramah, Smith and Baines; that he was into Can. If you have the internet, then you can learn a little more on The Fall unofficial website. Apparently Davies ‘was a member of Gong/Can covers group, Mushroom Tango’.

You could learn even more by looking up issue no. 14 (1999) of The Fall fanzine The Biggest Library Yet – and why wouldn’t you? - in which Tim Wesley interviews Davies and we hear that:

I’ve not actually been to see the band for a while, but I’ve thought about it just lately. I’ve actually tried to make contact with Mark recently but nothing was forthcoming. I’ve shoved little messages through his door.

Interviewed by Simpson nine years later, Davies stays more or less on message:

The bongo man reveals that for some time after leaving the group, he was regularly allowed backstage but one day visited Smith at home to find the metaphorical drawbridge being pulled up. Messages were posted through the door to no avail: he’d been discarded like all the rest. (p.114)

Simpson’s take on the band and himself as needing MES therapy, although very zeitgeist may not be entirely convincing. But what is of some interest is the list of musical influences on those band members that he unwittingly collates in the course of his interviews. Una Baines was into Patti Smith, Yvonne Pawlett liked the Velvet Underground and Tony Friel The Stooges. So much, so of course. The Fallen confirms that MES himself is a fan of Beefheart (‘If you can’t hear the drums, it’s not there’), The Troggs, The Sonics, The Monks, German Krautrock bands Faust and Can (think of ‘Repetition’ on Live at the Witch Trials), Jamaican reggae legend Prince Far I and rockabilly giant Charlie Pride.

MES always had a rule that no band members should be fans of The Fall in case it made the project stagnant and self-reflexive. And so Mike Leigh was a moment of Teddy Boy cabaret and Simon Rodgers dropped in on his way from Ballet Rambert’s Mercury Ensemble on his way to Incantation and a South American folk jazz funk bass. Brix Smith thought punk rock equalled The Dickies, was into Adam and The Ants, Tears for Fears and Culture Club, but loved Slates and Mark at first sight. Dave Bush, keyboards, joined in 1991, brought club culture grooves, claims Led Zeppelin as an influence on ‘The League of Bald-Headed Men’, but was a sound operator with The Clash, The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and The Bunnymen. And now - after so many years - it is almost impossible to avoid a certain amount of contaminating feedback in terms of the influence that The Fall itself has had on the very British music scene that produces its next generation of recruits.

This, the awareness of the danger of parodic self-regard, may be what lies behind Smith’s increasing ‘difficultness’ since the early ‘90s and the accelerating turnover of staff. Certainly, he bewails the youth of today aren’t what they were back in 1976. Maybe he knows that being The Fall has become only a matter of being The Fall? That some of the revolt, the freedom and the passion has drained out? It’s all relative of course and The Fall minus an awful lot of revolting passion freedom would still be no Take That but still. It may be this problem of influences that has led Smith to break another of the rules for band members in recent years, and allow himself to dabble in side projects like Von Südenfed. Which may mean these missing band members Simpson tracks down for us, those fallen may, much as Smith likes to discount them, have an importance, an influence albeit leaden, which the Smithist modern day cult of the individual conspires to obscure. In this respect at least, then, Simpson has done us something of a service, if he has managed to lay clear the dead hand of influence of the fallen, even if he may be outlining the method by which The Fall may someday - and let’s hope it’s not soon - eventually descend, collapse and degenerate.

Read on, Angus Kennedy’s oeuvre on The Fall:
Being Frank, write up of Mark E Smith and Ian Harrison in conversation at the London Literature Festival, CW, 1 August 2008

Mein Kampf for the Hollyoaks generation, review of Mark E Smith’s autobiography, sp!ked Review of Books, July 2008