Nunslinger, Yosemite For Dummies and Life Inside The Fall

The Big Midweek – Life Inside The Fall

Books about life in indie bands are plentiful, but the good ones don’t take up too much shelf space. There’s Luke Haines' account of Britpop, and Tracey Thorn’s bittersweet tale of becoming an accidental popstar. Richard King’s tales of the eccentrics who start indie labels capture the dreams, delusions, backstabbing and lentils – leaving you wondering, why do they do it? But it's not a long list.

So a new memoir by bass player Steve Hanley, who spent almost 20 years in The Fall, along with partner Olivia Piekarski, easily grabs the laurels – and you don’t need to like or even particularly know The Fall to enjoy it.

Hanley endured The Fall’s founder and tyrant Mark E Smith longer than anyone else, ending up as a partner in the business. An offer that came along, funnily enough, just after the band gets a VAT demand for £60,000.

In the mid-1980s, Hanley tops up work at the family pie shop in Wythenshawe. Hanley’s Irish Dad, who takes no interest in the band, watches Live Aid and lauds the philanthropism of Bob Geldof and Bono. Why can’t your Mark have thought of doing that?, Dad asks.

During the 1980s, the band gets a few years of decent label support – they almost crack the Top 40. Colin the roadie, who’s worked with everyone, pays them a great tribute. For the first time in his life he says, “ah hear things for which ah can find no physical point of origin on the stage. It is as if occult entities or beings from another dimension are trying to harmonise with you,” Colin marvels.

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But the break doesn’t come. Alcohol increasingly preoccupies Smith and his paranoia and random violence become routine. His unreliability mean long-suffering supporters won’t work with the band, and bookings dry up. After 18 years Hanley wonders if he’s insane putting up with it all. For no particular reason, he refuses Kurt Cobain (then at the height of his fame, and a huge Fall fan) a seat in their van.

Hanley sees Oasis knocking out “national anthems that pensioners and dissident teenagers alike sing at bus stops across the UK, while we’re still sniping away about Chinese restaurants and tents at acid festivals,” he observes wryly. “I don’t want to be in Oasis, but, after all these years, please could we write just the one song to cross that elusive line, please, and I can die happy.” Isn’t that the indie band lament?

It all comes to an end with a huge fight on stage in New York (captured on YouTube). The Big Midweek is unsparing, but remarkably free from bitterness, and it's great on the details. For example, pyromaniac drummer Karl Burns – a one-man WMD who is sacked so often “it’s almost procedure, now” tiptoes uncharacteristically around the cradle to give the new father Hanley a present: it's a wrap of speed, which turns out to be fake.

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There are some artful and wry put downs of fellow band members. The Big Midweek is actually a bit of an elegy for an era when indie musicians could eke out a living for years without recouping – an era now gone – and it’s as well written as any rock and roll memoir.

A 10-year Fall veteran, Simon Wolstencroft has also written a memoir – You Can Drum But You Can't Hide. He played in an early version of The Stone Roses, and was invited to be The Smiths' first drummer. He turned them down after an audition.  It didn’t feel right. Wolstencroft, a gentle and genuinely nice man, gives an entirely rancour-free account of the indie band life. He moonlights driving taxis in Altrincham.

Of Mark E Smith, the most surprising thing we learn is his knowledge of fancy Venetian restaurants. Touring the USA he notes a highlight was Dennys. "I've harboured a desire ever since to see the chain of eateries start operations in the UK, but it's still not happened yet," he writes sadly – but you can’t really knock it. After flirting with heroin, Wolstencroft is glad he’s still alive.

Today, Mark E Smith is a toothless “national treasure” – his face collapsed 20 years ago from amphetamine abuse. He looks like an ET who got lost in a bookies. After Hanley, the band’s engine room left, Smith was label-less and penniless. But then John Peel died, and Smith was canonised by Tristrams who felt guilty they’d never listened to Peel since they were students: the BBC even gave Smith the Saturday football results to read out.

So he’s become a “national treasure” like Tony Benn was a national treasure: which means, “he’s mad, past it and harmless”. But it’s easy to forget what a mean rock 'n' roll band The Fall once were – here they are playing on a stage the size of a hula hoop in New York in 1981. And easy to forget too what an original writer Mark E Smith once was.

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In 1979, The Fall were startling courting couples in Northern Working Men’s Clubs (the “straight leg Lee Cooper set") with broadsides against Guardian readers and PC small mindedness. Thirty five years later, we really have had a "Middle Class Revolt". Smith was spitting out an expression of English liberalism that isn’t remotely “right wing” and/or Farageist. Perhaps with a few more Mark E Smiths we wouldn’t have Five A Day officers, recycling inspectors, or the backlash against them all (UKIP) today. Or maybe he’d be Frank Field MP with a garage band. AO ®