BOOKS
TheFall’s “symbol of strangeness”: Mark E Smith at the Electric Ballroom, London, April 1980
DAVID CORIO/REDFERNS
“I T’S a common fallacy that great writers, bands and footballers ‘go soft’ with extreme fame,” wrote Mark E Smith in a letter on August 11, 1980. “I contradict this and say the people love a decline and become very vampiric towards their heroes.” Given that he proudly stated that he burned his copy of The Fall(en), Dave Simpson’s book about tracking down all the ex-members of The Fall, one can only imagine what Prestwich’s favourite son – who died aged 60 in 2018 – would have thought of the mere pseud mag eds picking over his bones in Excavate! The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall.
Edited by Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley and Wire writer Tessa Norton, this collection of ephemera and essays strives to pin down the mightiest post-punk phenomenon of them all, taking a psychogeographical creepy crawl around Smith’s hometown and investigating – among other topics – his “new puritan” work ethic and love/hate relationship with “professionalism”. Meanwhile, a succession of writers rummage through Roman Totale’s bookshelves to see how his eldritch literary tastes – MR James ghost stories, Wyndham Lewis Vorticist weirdness, HP Lovecraft and Philip K Dick – helped to make The Fall what Ian Penman calls “a kind of occultprole Big Youth, backed by stock-carsmash rockabilly”.