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The Biggest Library Yet 14

Where are they now? Steve Davis (part-time Fall member; drums, congas) speaks to Tim Wesley TBLY post Post Nearly Man review The FallNet top 100 I/v with Mark E Smith - Spex magazine (Germany), 1981 Lyrics to 'Race Hatred' from Jolt, 1977 fanzine Win a copy of Nottingham 92 CD Dazed and Confused interview, December 1998 Just Step S/Ways Short Fall - Rock Family Trees/ the Del Amitri connection/ Talk Radio's Tommy Boyd/ Halifax Town Quiz answers Personal ads The Fall's Peel sessions 1-22 Fanzine reviews Bootleggers: a guide to the best live tapes 78-83 Reading Festival 1990 Tabs, chords - Tuff Life Boogie, Touch Sensitive, Levitate Exclusive interview with MES and Julia Nagle, by Jessica, 14 Damp Records the Past - retrospectives for look back bores Fall at St Bernadette's Social Centre - reviews by Wendy Cook, Ian Leaver Hey! Jo Whiley Editorial Published: January 1999, 44pp, A5, glossy cover  SOLD OUT

Tim Wesley talks to occasional Fall drummer (featured on their first ever Peel session)... Steve Davis

T: .What instruments did you play when you were in The Fall, Steve?

SD: I played the conga drums and the drum kit, once! On a Dutch tour, I played 11 gigs in 14 nights, but I don't think I really considered myself a member of The Fall. I was more of a friend of the band really. Going back to the early days, I was a friend of Kay Carroll & her ex-boyfriend, they both worked at Prestwich Hospital, in the psychic ward. There were a lot of psychic nurses in Prestwich. Then Kay met Mark, and things sort of went from there. Mark was into music, and I got to hear about his band.
Of course I was a little bit older - I was in my mid to late 20s - I'm 47 now. I don't know whether Kay was the manager or not around that time, it is all a little vague now.
I'd been into Led Zeppelin and all that, but suddenly there was this whole kind of scene. My music placement took this massive leap. My tastes had gone from high screeching guitar sounds, but I was always interested in drums, after hearing Little Feat I got the urge to go out and buy a set of congas.
I remember the conga player in Little Feat, Sam Clayton, and he was playing them in a different way to how I'd heard them played before. I also listened to Santana and Miles Davis.
It was so refreshing to see the punk thing came along, all the energy. The Fall were definitely a part of that, yet they weren't punk, they were somehow kind of more intelligent or something, they just had something more...

TW: Something different that a lot of people connect with. It's that differentness, you can't put your finger on it. Sometimes, you don't want to.

SD: Maybe you would want to, that is what putting these things under the microscope is all about. I could see Mark was very deep, and very talented. I was more embarrassed, because even though I'd played in a band, I never really considered myself as a musician, I was just getting up and doing it. And they (The Fall) came to see my band playing at The Band On The Wall, they did one of their earliest gigs, maybe even their first there. They seemed to really value my opinion, I was a little bit older and I thought they were really, really excellent.

TW: What year was this?

SD: That would've been 1977. And then I don't really remember ever playing with them in a official context, I don't really think it that was until 1980. I'd followed their antics, and went to a lot of gigs. I was in another band at the time called Mushroom Tango, a Gong and Can cover band, and another band called Victor Draygo, a bunch of wannabe posers from Rossendale! We were all in relationships, married with kids even, trying to rekindle something through the punk stuff that had come along and wiped-out all that horrid soft rock option. 'All these long hairs were moaning "punk rock!"

TW: Saying how crap it was.

SD: Yeah! (Laughs) Musically I was still frustrated because in me was a dancer, The Fall were very good but even they didn't produce the right sort of moves for me really. I was more into the Santana, Miles Davis, jazz thing that was going on. The jazz funk fusion thing.

TW: Would you say that Michael Clark connected The Fall thing with dance?

SD: Oh yeah. But that came along a lot later. Like I say, I wasn't a Fall member but Mark asked me if I'd play drums on a Dutch tour because Paul Hanley was doing his exams at the time and they needed someone to stand in. I hadn't actually played a kit, but that didn't seen to bother them. I also had a 7-seater estate car that came in handy for transporting them around! I almost crashed the car within half an hour of setting out too.
I remember the Dutch were still trying to catch up with English culture, they were dressed up as punks and spitting - this was 1980. Our roadies were kicking them off the stage and having a go at them for spitting. They were just so out of fashion really. I ended up borrowing a kit and I basically demolished it because I had no technique at all, I Just hammered the shit out of it, the whole thing was just to keep a rhythm going. Some numbers I played the congas and others I played the kit. I didn't have any of the stops & starts, and I was having to listen to the music, watching Marc Riley and Steve Hanley to keep the timing going.

TW: That was a unique period, so it's quite good you were around at that time, not that I'm discounting anything that's gone on since. But everybody seems to refer to it as a golden time.

SD: Earlier than that I actually appeared on the first Peel session with The Fall. I probably would've liked to have become a member of the band. It was just the timing. I was a bit older, a married insurance man. I'd passed through a few things, I was into fitness in a big way, I used to go off and do Thai boxing exercises and jog, while all these kids were falling around drunk. I've kept in touch with The Fall at a distance. The last time that I saw them was at that Liverpool gig for Derek Hatton, with New Order and The Smiths. That was about 84 or 85.

TW: Have you heard them recently?

SD: Yeah I've heard tracks on the Peel show and such like, 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.
In terms of percussion I feel that dance music has moved on, and it's now all Cuban and African type rhythms. I think at the time that I really would have liked to have crossed it with African music, which I was really getting into a lot, but technically I don't think I was good enough to inject that into the music. I was just going along with time. When I look back at that tine I was probably disappointed with myself musically but it's all a progression. You've got to go through those stages. I don't think I've started to learn professionally until the last ten years actually, but I feel people are picking up other rhythms of the world, and that is music is going.

TW: It's like Mark says; that most people who play instruments just play them one way, there's only so much you can do with it. People even say the guitar ended when Jimi Hendrix did it, and really that's nearly 30 years ago. Even keyboards, there's sampling and stuff, it's like you say, it has to move on.

SD: But when you listen to music, contemporary music, I hear The Fall all the time. They've had such an influence on the scene whether other people realise it or not. The only people who would probably ever realise it are actual Fall fans. That would apply even to people like the Verve and all that, the music, the bass-lines the whole lot. That's why I really take my hat off to Mark, I suppose. It wasn't the fact that everything went, it's just that the music was everything, it didn't really matter how you got there, Just get there. There were no sort of musical traditions in that sense, it was really just get up and have a go and if you can pack into it the attitude and dealing with yourself in that situation, and you can get through the drugs and drink and still produce music at the end of the day, that's what it's about. I think lifestyles are different nowadays.
I'm sure that fame drove people on back then, but it seems to me a lot of these things are put first and the other stuff matters less.
My life at that time was that I was trying to live a straight life, but I was drugged up to the eyeballs and trying to be something that I probably wasn't. You're walking around in a suit during the day, and at night you're doing gigs and being in bands.

TW: I don't think you were alone in that, it's like cabaret (in the old sense) used to be, where you'd do your shift at work and then go off and do your turn in the evening. Not like so-called cabaret nowadays. I see The Fall like that, I think that's why some people like the Fall, and even people who do not like The Fall accept them due to that lack of pretension. They can see something there that's real. This isn't some pop group with dry ice and flashing lights. It speaks to you. The lyrics communicate.

SD: To me, it's never been about the lyrics, it's the rhythm. Mark's voice is an instrument. I have a lot of respect for Mark, I saw when he was 18 he had the nous to know a Building Society manager was not the life for him, yet he could have been that, he was smart enough and had a Grammar School background, but he knew himself well enough to be able enough to walk away from that. Whereas I always struggled with two worlds, not confronting the world head on. I only ever subverted my happiness at that time. Mark had the balls to go out and get what he wanted. There's Just nobody else like him.

TW: And he's stayed with it too. There's one thin that annoys me as well, it's really strange that the NME gave his solo album 2 out of 10, and they really gave it a rollocking, like kicking him while he was down. I think they'd been wanting to do it for a while, he's been going for so long, and he had done so much other stuff that other bands could never do. Apart from Bowie perhaps. There are the obvious ones who keep going, but they don't keep using new sounds.

SD: I really think right now, that I could really offer the Fall something - I know Mark can be fairly gritty and unco-operative, but I think basically people project all their own shit on to his. When in fact, his shoulders are broad and he's thwarted quite a lot of shit over the years and not really taken time out for himself. But if you're out there Mark, you've got a friend out here.

TW: What are you doing now Steve, music-wise?

SD: Well, I'm running a Samba school in Chorley. Which is basically a voluntary group set up by me. Samba is a really dominant percussion form in Europe, and it's all about carnival and it's about getting out onto the streets, about anybody having a goods time at any time they choose. Just by picking up a spoon and fork if they want, and banging a rhythm out on it, but there is a whole kind of spirituality around Samba or any kind of percussion music, if you pick it up and get into it you find a kind of spirituality, because you trace the rhythms and they tend to back through Cuba, Brazil and the Latin American countries, and they go right back to Africa. The impact that African music has had on Western music and vice-versa, there's an whole impact of exchanges going on. Y'know, you get the boardroom level this horrible pipe music that is being squeezed out, all the drum rhythms are stripped down, you can't even hear them. It's like some kind of Hammond organ. Then you've got the other extreme, which is hardcore percussion, that's what I'm into, that's the stuff that I aspire to play. Using drums from Brazil or wherever.
That's where I'm at!

TW: When I first met you, we were doing a dance and theatre course at Salford University. Do you think the dance will help you to create this Samba and South American music as well?

SD: Yeah, well it's all about the dance, it's music for dance. I actually played in a band that was playing this stuff at a recent Verve concert in Wigan. We were entertaining the crowd before and after the concert, they danced to us, but they didn't dance to the Verve, they sang along to them, but they danced to our African rhythms. I couldn't get enough of it - whatever they got from the Verve they still had a lot of energy for us.

TW: Without sounding too 'muzo' it is like unlocking something. Those Verve fans couldn't understand it but it unlocked something, and they weren't scared of it.

SD: Yeah, they were open to it. A lot of people are closed to it. I suppose we still need idols, but for me it's about getting people into it, anybody can do it. It is about carnival now. And get back into some of this tradition.

TW: Any final Fall memories?

SD: Yes, playing at Finsbury Park Rainbow, prior to the Dutch tour. Mark took a lot of risks using a drummer like me, I'm not sure what Marc Riley and the rest of the band felt about it though, they were more musically paranoid. I don't listen to retro music but The Fall are an exception, Gong as well, they were years ahead of their time too.

Thanks to both Steve Davis and Tim Wesley for taking the time and trouble to provide us with this interview.

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The Fall - St Bernadette's Social Centre, Whitefield - 21 Oct 1998

In a hall designed for 60-somethings teetering on Saturday night heels, where a crucifix hangs ludicrously directly above the bar, half the patient inmates watch the TV with a degree of disbelief as Man. United play Brondby and every time someone goes to the loo there's another goal. The entire audience are wearing dodgy jackets, blue denims as the final urban revolution. Everyone's a refugee, a one-time rebel. The place half fills with aging rough boys, hair cropped short to match their growing bald spots. A few have brought their molls in overtight leather and prominent curvy bits. Then there's the kids, the unhip musos with ponytails, the quiet ones whose grannies love them and their girlfriends who might teach Sunday school and maybe they think it is a standard youth club night. But you never know.

And what are you going to say to a support band who will spend the rest of their lives saying "We supported The Fall" without, of course, it meaning anything at all. And at half past ten and the football's finished (it was 6-2) and everybody's done grumbling about the two Schmeichel let in, and the support band have fallen mercifully silent, and two girls have made the inadequate stage, in the centre of a long wallpapered wall, tidy. And the tiny PAs have been propped on beer crates on top of formica tables. And he's still not here... And we fear an 11 o'clock curfew. And at twenty to he's ushered in and slouches through to the back. Two minutes later two girls come out, followed by a bloke and they become a bassist, keyboard player and drummer, followed by the famously infamous Mark E. Smith, for whom the word shuffling was invented.

He yelps. And the universe quivers ever so gently. The band yank away, satisfyingly solid rock and periodically and apparently at random, Mark E. Smith yelps. It's a note that's his. God gave it to him and when he hits it something happens to the fabric of the universe. Every damn time he hits it. So he does it again. And again and again. And it never fails him. And by the time the band stop - because you can't really call it a song or say that it ends - things have been given a thorough shaking up. Sometimes, for a bit of a change, he holds up one hand and with baby size amazement inspects his fingernails. And once he scratched the side of his head and once he passed an inadequate hand over the back of his hair.

He crouches on the floor, tips his head through too many degrees, trying to read the drummer's set list. Then he's off again like a puppet and whatever he thinks he's doing seems inescapable. The only words I heard all night were a repeated "Are you proud?" and "Listen to me". He was singing something but it passed me by, too busy surviving the primordial sound of his voice. A voice so scary, so raw, so completely inhuman, so searingly human. And he paces to and fro. In his incredible fragility, this gaunt frame, hunched shoulders, the ET-like face. And once or twice when the music stops he manages to lift his face to the crowd and grin - a massive black toothless grin.

It's evident there is one song just as there is one note and it is played on and on while the assembled nod or jig or dance in their own private worlds. And at one point Mark E. Smith pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and stares at it while he's singing, rubbing it through his fingers and finally managing to turn it the other way up. But, in fact, it is still folded in half as the song finishes and so little help as a lyric sheet.

There's every reason not to get it. Every reason to say they're doing nothing and it sounds awful. Yet and without understanding what is happening it remains shattering, terrifying, desperately sad. Beyond human, the distillation of human.

I saw The Fall for the first time. And I'm sorry you weren't there.

Wendy Cook

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