Rip It Up and Start Again (17 page)

Scott’s voice ended up on the classic Cabs single “Sluggin fer Jesus,” but before that came 1980’s minialbum
Three Mantras,
an oblique response to events in the Middle East. Its two tracks, “Eastern Mantra” and “Western Mantra,” contrasted the evil twins of fundamentalist Islam and bomb-again Christian America, “beloved enemies” locked in a clinch of clashing civilizations. “The whole Afghanistan situation was kicking off,” recalls Kirk. “Iran had the American hostages. We were taking notice. It kind of culminated with our album
Red Mecca
.” Purely through its ominous atmospheres and tense rhythms,
Red Mecca
also seemed to tap into closer-to-home turbulence. The unrest caused by mounting unemployment and police harassment of racial minorities and jobless youths finally erupted in the summer of 1981, with riots convulsing inner-city areas all across Britain, from Toxteth in Liverpool to Brixton in London.

If Cabaret Voltaire had any politics, they were of the anarcho-paranoid kind. They blended a Yorkshire-bred intransigence in the face of badge holders and bureaucrats with the sort of pot-fueled “never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t like” attitude you encountered in squatland. Influenced by Burroughs and his paradoxically depersonalized yet personified vision of Control, the Cabs developed a worldview in which power figured as a demonic, omnipresent force, a multitentacled yet sourceless network of domination and mind coercion. “Being in a state of paranoia is a very healthy state to be in,” Mallinder said. “It gives you a permanently questioning and searching nonacceptance of situations.”

Along with paranoia, Cabaret Voltaire’s other big
P
-word was pornography, something else Burroughs obsessively manifested in his fiction. Yet for the Cabs and other Sheffield groups, J. G. Ballard was even more important in this area, especially the hard-core, experimental short stories (or “condensed novels”) such as “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” both of which were later incorporated into the book-length antinarrative
The Atrocity Exhibition
. Fusing clinically described avant-porn with Marshall McLuhan–esque insights into the mass media, Ballard probed the grotesque (de) formations of desire stimulated by media overload and celebrity worship, delineating with forensic precision an emergent psychomythology in which the deities and titans were movie idols like Elizabeth Taylor, icons like John F. Kennedy, or cult leaders like Charles Manson. Tapping into this Ballardian vision of “the communications landscape we inhabit” as a collective unconsciousness, out of which the “myths of the near future” were emerging, Cabaret Voltaire pioneered what would eventually become an industrial-music cliché, the use of vocal snippets stolen from movies and TV.

If Cabaret Voltaire were like dark-side pop art, mass culture dimly perceived through the murky prism of weed and speed, their friends the Human League were the sunny-side version of Warhol. You could imagine the Cabs watching the TV news with the sound off and a joint burning, marinating their minds in an ambient broth of catastrophe and conflict. Meanwhile, on the other side of Sheffield, the Human League were tuning in to cartoons, soaps, popular science programs such as
Tomorrow’s World,
and, naturally,
Top of the Pops
. The convoluted route by which they got on
TOTP
themselves is another story altogether.

GROWING UP IN CITIES
physically and spiritually scarred by the violent nineteenth-century transition between rural folkways and the unnatural rhythms of industrial life, groups like Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, and, in Manchester, Joy Division and the Fall grappled with both the problems and possibilities of human existence in an increasingly technological world.

Yet as color-depleted and harsh as these postindustrial cities in England and Ohio were, it was possible—perhaps essential—to aestheticize their panoramas of decay. Hence the attraction and resonance of J. G. Ballard’s writing for bands from Manchester and Sheffield. In his classic seventies trilogy of
Crash, Concrete Island,
and
High-Rise,
the traumatized urban landscape serves not only as the backdrop but also, in a sense, the main
character
of the novels. Similarly, Ballard’s earlier short stories and cataclysm novels obsessively conjure an eerie, inhuman beauty from abandoned airfields, drained reservoirs, and deserted cities. In the same way that Pere Ubu romanticized the Flats of Cleveland, Ballard waxed lyrical in interviews about the “magic and poetry one feels when looking at a junkyard filled with old washing machines, or wrecked cars, or old ships rotting in some disused harbor.”

Assimilating the bleak Ballardian atmosphere of 1970s Manchester into their sound, Joy Division made music poised on the membrane between the local and universal, between the specifics of a period and place and timeless human fears and longings. The Fall did something quite different, creating a kind of social
sur
realism, a drug-skewed vision of Mancunian proletarian existence that brought out its submerged currents of grotesque absurdity and the uncanny.

In the late seventies, Fall singer Mark E. Smith rode his moped past an industrial estate called Trafford Park en route to his job in Manchester’s docks. Legend has it he often passed a young man, dressed in a similar-looking donkey jacket, on
his
way to work. It was Ian Curtis, future front man of Joy Division. “That was a bit spooky, they both looked quite like each other,” recalls Una Baines, Smith’s girlfriend at the time and keyboard player in the Fall.

Joy Division and the Fall had plenty in common. They shared similar backgrounds (upper working class meets petit bourgeois), similar education (state school, but “streamed” for white-collar work), similar jobs (Mark E. Smith was a shipping clerk, while Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s guitarist Bernard Sumner, and bassist Peter Hook all did clerical work for local government), and loved the same sort of bands (the Doors, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Can). Yet despite rehearsing in the same building and even playing on some bills together, Joy Division and the Fall never acknowledged each other’s existence. As if by unspoken agreement, they engaged in a taciturn struggle to be
the
defining Manchester band of the postpunk era. “We never spoke to each other!” laughs Martin Bramah, the Fall’s guitarist. “I think they’re great now, but at the time the Fall and Joy Division were definitely contending.”

Fronted by singers who exuded a shamanic aura, Joy Division and the Fall conveyed a sense of strangeness and estrangement that travels far beyond the specifics of time and place. Yet it’s hard to imagine them coming from anywhere else but 1970s Manchester. Something about the city’s gloom and decreptitude seemed to seep deep into the fabric of their very different sounds. Although he didn’t identify the place by name, Mark E. Smith immortalized the pollution-belching Trafford Park on “Industrial Estate,” an early Fall classic. “The crap in the air will fuck up your face,” Smith jeers. “That song is a very funny take on Manchester’s history of having been the cradle of capitalism and then, by the 1970s, its grave,” says Richard Boon, who funded the recording of the Fall’s first EP but couldn’t afford to actually release it on New Hormones.

“Grim beyond belief” is how Jon Savage describes his first impressions of Manchester as a Londoner relocating there in 1978. That bleakness endures today in pockets, even after a late-nineties redevelopment boom. A partial face-lift has dotted the city center with flashy designer wine bars and slick corporate offices, but the old nineteenth-century architecture abides. The somber, imposing edifices testify to the pride and prosperity of Manchester’s self-made industrial tycoons. The dark red brickwork seems to soak up what scant daylight emanates from the typically slate gray skies. Those who venture outside the town center will encounter indelible residues of the city’s past as the world capital of mechanized cotton manufacture: railway viaducts, canals the color of lead, converted warehouses and factories, and cleared lots littered with masonry shards and refuse.

By the 1970s, the world’s first industrial city had become one of the first to enter the postindustrial era. The wealth had evaporated, but the desolate, denatured environment persisted. Attempts to renovate only made things worse. As in other cities across the U.K., urban planners razed the old Victorian terraced housing. Long-established working-class communities were broken up, the “slum” residents forcibly rehoused in high-rise apartment blocks and public-housing projects, which soon turned out to be unintended laboratories of social atomization. For Una Baines, this redevelopment figures as a kind of primal trauma. She remembers “my mum crying on the corner of the street when they knocked down our row of houses in Collyhurst.” Frank Owen of the Manchester postpunk outfit Manicured Noise fulminates, “Those planners should be hung for what they did. They did more damage to Manchester than the German bombers did in World War Two, and all under this guise of benevolent social democracy.”

In the prepunk seventies, Manchester seemed to have all the bad aspects of urban life—pollution, eyesore architecture, all-enveloping dreariness—with barely any of its subcultural compensations. “There really was nothing going on until punk,” recalls Boon. “The industry was dying, the clothes were dreadful, the hair was awful.” Manchester’s starved souls grabbed for whatever source of stimulus or sparkle they could find, be it fashion, books, esoteric music, or drugs.

The Fall didn’t go in much for style. Scrawny, lank-haired, and typically wearing a scruffy pullover of indeterminate hue, Smith looked like a grown-up version of the runty schoolkid in
Kes,
Ken Loach’s 1969 social realist film. But the Fall were mad for the other three escape routes—literature, music, and illegal substances. In its earliest incarnation, the Fall resembled a poetry group more than a rock band. They’d hang out at Baines’s flat and read their scribblings to each other. “We all wrote words then, not just Mark,” recalls Bramah. Although they would have spurned the word “intellectual”—too redolent of the despised world of students and higher education—that’s what the four original members of the Fall were, working-class intellectuals. Bookworms, really, making good use of their library cards, devouring everything from Burroughs and Philip K. Dick to Yeats and Camus. Their name came from the latter’s novel
The Fall,
which bassist Tony Friel happened to be reading.

As for music, the Fall preferred what Smith called the “real heavy stuff.” Drug music, mostly, but not blissed-out pastoralism or cosmic buffoonery. Instead, the Fall tranced out to the primal monotony of Can, the methedrine-scorched white noise of the Velvet Underground, and sixties “punkadelic” bands like the Seeds (who only had one keyboard riff, which they endlessly recycled). “This is the three
R
s/Repetition repetition repetition,” quipped Smith on the Fall’s mission statement track, “Repetition.” Scorning “fancy music”—the overproduced mainstream rock of the day—“Repetition” exemplifies Smith’s early goal of “raw music with really weird vocals on top.” The rawness was supplied by Bramah’s thin, wheedling guitar lines, Baines’s wonky organ jabs (played on the cheap ’n’ nasty Snoopy keyboard, rated by
Sounds
as the absolute worst on the market), Friel’s capering bass, and Karl Burns’s ramshackle drums. The freak vocal element came from Smith’s half-sung, half-spoken drawl and wizened insolence.

Drugs? In an early interview, Smith described the Fall as “head music with energy.” “Head,” in this case, didn’t mean cerebral or anti-dance but referred to the sixties idea of a “head,” someone into turning on and tripping out. Manchester had a strong underground drug culture, not so much a 1960s hangover, says Bramah, as the true, if slightly belated, arrival of the sixties in the early seventies. “We learned from people older than us, like John Cooper Clarke, the Manchester poet who lived in the same area as us, Prestwich. He was ten years older, from the sixties really. We were the next generation. We saw all the hippies who’d blown their brains out and we felt we were wiser than that, but still attracted to the drug experience.”

Circa 1973, a few years before the Fall existed as a musical entity, sixteen-year-old Mark E. Smith used to take acid and go to clubs wearing swastika armbands (a protopunk gesture of pure provocation, not an indication of fascist sympathies). Bramah recalls being given “microdots” and the next day going as a group to Heaton Park, where they dropped the acid and spent the whole day tripping. Later they discovered that Heaton Park was renowned among local heads for its psilocybin mushrooms. “There were just
fields
of them you could pick, and it was a totally free source of entertainment,” says Bramah. “From then on we were kind of
pickled
in mushrooms and LSD, really exploring music and discovering ourselves.”

Amphetamines also made their mark on the Fall. Speed stoked the group’s attitude, projected onstage through Smith’s searing, see-through-you gaze and aura of icy arrogance. It also shaped the Fall’s sound, their white-lightning rush of discords, over which Smith sounds like someone speed-rapping, the words spat out with oracular urgency, encrypted but mesmerizing. High doses of speed create a kind of “eureka!” sensation. The user feels like he’s accessed a truth invisible to others and can see occult connections. On
Live at the Witch Trials,
the group’s 1979 debut album, “Underground Medecin” and “Frightened” evoke the positive and negative sides of amphetamine abuse: the rush that lights up the nervous system (“I found a reason not to die,” Smith exults, “the spark inside”) versus the hypertense twitchiness of stimulant-induced paranoia. Despite these and other downsides to long-term speed use (ulcers, weight loss, schizophrenia), the Fall carried on exalting white-line fervor in songs like “Totally Wired” and “Mr. Pharmacist.”

The “pharmacist” in that song, which was originally recorded by sixties garage band the Other Half, is a drug dealer, a street punk dispensing doses of “energy.” The Fall were obsessed with the double standards surrounding drugs, the way some chemicals are proscribed while others get prescribed. Training as a psychiatric nurse at Prestwich Hospital, Baines came back every day from work and disgorged story after story about the mistreatment and neglect she’d witnessed, including the use of downers to pacify the inmates. Her talk filtered into Smith’s lyrics. “Repetition” refers to electroshock therapy (after you’ve had some, alleges Smith, you
lose
your love of repetition), while the Fall’s 1979 single “Rowche Rumble” gets its title from Hoffmann-La Roche, the multinational pharmaceutical company that dominated the market for antidepressants.

Drugs of the socially sanctioned sort flooded Manchester in the seventies. Numbing and often incapacitating tranquilizers were massively overprescribed to help ordinary people (menopausal housewives, troubled teenagers, wage slaves cracked by stress and boredom) not so much manage their lives as be manageable. In an area like Hulme—whose infamous Crescents were a paradigm of the 1960s housing project gone wrong—antidepressants were dispensed so freely (a quarter of a million tablets in 1977 alone) that they verged on a form of social control. At the same time, Hulme illustrated the double standard (sedatives as prescribed remedy versus stimulants as illegal buzz) that Smith captured in the title “Underground Medecin.” For the Crescents were also where most of Manchester’s bathtub speed was manufactured.

Pills feature in “Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!,” the title track of the Fall’s debut EP, not as a way of coping with soul-crushing mundanity, but of escaping from it permanently. The bingo-master, a man whose job is organizing other people’s fun, looks into his future, sees only encroaching baldness and further years wasted “in numbers and rhyme,” and opts to end it all with a handful of pills washed down with booze. Smith had visited a bingo hall with his parents and was stunned by how regimented and mechanical this incredibly popular form of British working-class recreation was. The evening’s mind-dulling entertainment formed a grim mirror image of the daytime’s labor. “It wasn’t like a place you’d go for your leisure, it was a glorified works canteen,” Smith told
Sounds
. “And people were going there straight from work.”

Macabre and hilarious, “Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!” typified the Fall’s fish-eye-lens view of Northern working-class life. Bramah says that the Fall’s songs came from their “sitting in pubs, munching magic mushrooms, and observing the daft things people did.” In the grand tradition of British misanthropic satire, Smith’s invective seems to come from somewhere outside the class system, a vantage point from which everything seems equally absurd and ludicrous—the privileged upper class and middle-management bourgeoisie with their pretensions and illusions, for sure, but also the proles with their inverted snobberies, escapist pleasures, and grumbling acquiescence to the way things are and forever shall be. As unsparing toward his own people as everybody else, Smith’s withering gaze scanned society up and down and found only grotesquerie. In many ways he resembled the “judge penitent” of Camus’s
The Fall
who weighs up everybody’s failings and hypocrisies, his own included. In the song “New Puritan,” Smith declared, “Our decadent sins/Will reap discipline.”