Incredible band! Richard Witts is now a superb musicologist, lecturer in many excellent universities and author of some truly top books. So today I am delighted that he share with us a part of such an important book for Fall exclusively for Mixgrill.
http://www.richardwitts.com/
Building Up a Band:
Music for a Second City
Richard Witts

They have done so in order to delimit general sequences of events around the specificities of Factory Records, its founder the television journalist Tony Wilson (1950–2007), its original club night The Factory (1978–1980) which was succeeded by its nightclub The Haçienda (1982–1997), and the bands associated with the enterprise, chiefly New Order. By constructing and advancing a received post-punk narrative they have swept bands like The Fall out of that history. Yet the stories provided by practitioners and resources such as The Fall, John Cooper Clarke, New Hormones Records, Rabid Records, Band On The Wall, or the Manchester Musicians’ Collective provide much richer accounts of impacts, scenes, activities, realisations and conflicts than the monochrome frame tightly set around Factory.
This retortive campaign grew from the dismay of Factory associates to a general media critique and marginalisation of their venture in the 1990s. Such a reappraisal appeared to precipitate Factory Records’ bankruptcy in 1992 and the decline around that time of the fortunes of the Haçienda club, leading to its closure in 1997 and demolition in 2002. The singer of rival group The Smiths mocked Factory’s parochial character, while the most successful Manchester band of the 1990s, Oasis, had nothing to do with Factory. Sarah Champion’s modish book ‘And God Created Manchester’ (1990) was a flippant survey of the scene that belittled Factory. She wrote of Joy Division’s impact, ‘[y]et even at their peak… hyped to death by writers like Paul Morley, it was nothing compared to the 90s Manc boom.’ (Champion 1990, 11) In contrast, Champion hailed Mark E. Smith as ‘the Robin Hood of alternative pop’ (Champion 1990, 30).

In each of these films the Manchester conurbation of the 1970s is revealed as dilapidated, derelict and deprived. Row upon row of rain-spattered terrace houses are juxtaposed with shots of demolition hammers smashing them down while mucky kids mooch in the rubble. These highly edited images offer a bewildering message; were the people of Manchester and Salford living in caravans parked out the film crew’s sight? The commentaries add to this depressing vista. In Rodley’s film journalist Paul Morley, in an image he must have taken years to hone, talks of how ‘the street lights somehow made things darker, not lighter’. Both Rodley and Gee, fine directors, told me of the limited range of post-war footage available of the conurbation. Most of what is accessible is held in the North West Film Archive. Both directors used a promotional film from its library shot in 1967 for Salford Council, titled The Changing Face of Salford. It is a ‘before’ and ‘after’ portrayal of improvements to the Ordsall area, and the rubble sequences come from the former section. I have made a table of Rodley’s opening shots (Table 1) which lists the sequences. The year of the filming of each segment is shown in the final column, and the whole reveals that Rodley used material shot over two decades to exemplify an impressionistic image of the central 1970s.
Meanwhile Tony Wilson in his book version of 24 Hour Party People set out the premise of the legend that continues to drive the Factory narrative, of how Factory provoked urban renewal:
This was the home of the Industrial Revolution, changing the habits of homo sapiens the way the agrarian revolution had done ten thousand years earlier. And what did that heritage mean? It meant slums. It meant shite… The remnants, derelict working-class housing zones, empty redbrick mills and warehouses, and a sense of self that included loss and pride in equal if confused measures. (Wilson 2002, 14)

Conversely, let us shine a light on the facts. In the Manchester-Salford complex a period of avid metropolitan modernist planning took place in the 1950s and 1960s, with the objective, first laid out in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan, to eradicate a Victorian heritage of unplanned urban sprawl, one turned to further disarray by momentous wartime damage, and due to which Manchester lacked a vivid civic identity. Instead, the corporation planned a circle of satellite towns in the ‘garden city’ style of 1930s Wythenshawe, the hub for which would be an entirely regenerated city centre of impressive modern offices and prominent civic amenities, a flagship city to compete with other second cities like Chicago, Manchester’s model (HMSO 1995, 11-20).
Meanwhile the post-war pressure for council housing, and the lack of cash and resources had led, instead of garden cities, to a huge inner-city demolition programme. It started in 1954 in parallel with the hurried construction of overspill estates such as Hattersley and Langley (HMSO 1995, 24). Yet the re-housing schemes moved too slowly to meet both national and local objectives. Pressure to find cursory solutions was applied both by Conservative (1951–64) and Labour regimes (1964–70). In the conurbation the Corporation was coerced to produce a hassled second phase outlined in the 1961 Development Plan. Out of this sprouted those inner-city modernist monsters Fort Ardwick, Fort Beswick and the Hulme Crescents, all completed by 1972 and so hastily built that within two years many of the units were uninhabitable (Shapely 2006, 73).

However, many of the new concrete, steel and glass commercial and institutional buildings were neither varied nor coordinated enough to withstand public disapproval, a notorious example being the complex around the Maths Tower, the Precinct Centre, and the Royal Northern College, where the ‘streets in the sky’ walkways were designed at different heights and so couldn’t be connected up. Thus, contrary to the view promoted in the Factory story, the image that Manchester presented to the world was not of a derelict city but a comprehensively modern one – that had got it wrong. In fact, those were the words that Cllr. Allan Roberts, chair of Manchester Council’s Housing Committee expressed in 1977, adding, ‘Manchester’s not been doing its job’. He admitted this after being cornered by burgeoning sets of tenants’ action groups whose campaigns, and the Council’s reactions, are well documented in Peter Shapely’s essay for the journal Social History (Shapely 2006).
The newly formed metropolitan county, the Greater Manchester Council of 1974, identified a clear solution, which materialised as the default post-modern architectural reaction of the period translated to the housing, amenities and image needs of the conurbation: that is, conversion of existing buildings rather than their demolition, identifying conservation areas such as Castlefields, marketing notions of legacy, pedestrianising the city centre, and making the initial attempts within the city of caging modernism within a bricked heritage, firstly and most sensationally at the Royal Exchange Theatre in 1976, and, in that sense following on, the Haçienda of 1982 and, nearby it, both the Cornerhouse visual arts centre and the Greenroom Theatre of 1983. In other words, Factory’s nightclub represented a commercial contribution to a public post-modern design project.

Existent co-ordinates in the mid-Seventies air informed this post-punk integrative disposition. One such co-ordinate was the resurgent folk music scene of that time, through which singer-comedians such as Mike Harding and Bob Williamson propelled the Lancashire accent. Yet the conscious assertion of a local lingo, in line with the emergent promotion of a heritage culture, turned to deep embarrassment amongst progressive minds with the national success in April 1978 of Brian and Michael’s glutinous homage to local painter L.S. Lowry, ‘Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs’, and, while Ian Curtis of Joy Division maintained his affected American brogue in order to summon ghosts, others, like Mark E. Smith, gradually adopted ironised or embroidered accents, not in order to ‘represent’, but to stress the exceptional act of performance. Nevertheless, in 1978, Paul Morley would excitedly review in the New Musical Express (NME) a Manchester Musicians’ Collective gig under the headline, ‘These are the Mancunion Mancunions’, (see Morley 1978)

Much of the city music scene, even Factory through its proclivity for Situationism, was driven by political critique, and in the experience of many the most class-conscious of all of the bands was The Fall. It always passed a common litmus test for the worth of a band at the time: would it play for free for Rock Against Racism? It would, but Mark E. Smith and Una Baines often stressed that what they believed in formed the content of their work and was not to be confined to a slogan on a banner, for The Fall was critical of both the state we were then leaving and the state that was arriving, and it has remained an agent of broad (as well as picky) critique, the general target of which is, as Smith put it as recently as 26 April 2008 to the Daily Telegraph, ‘the threat of some kind of standardised horrible society run by a bunch of fucking wankers’ (Blincoe 2008).

It is for this reason that I persist in calling The Fall a band, meaning that a band is a team of musicians singled out by a corporate name. The individual identities of the musicians contribute to the integrity of the overall sound, but those identities are of less interest than the aural result. A band is closer to, say, Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, which will take in deputies and visiting players, while the audience, so long as expectations are satisfied, will consider it’s heard the Hallé at 100%, not 90%. Conversely, I consider a group to be an assembly of named personalities, who work together but may individually harbour creative ventures. When a group loses a member, it often has difficult in finding a replacement who will satisfy an audience of the group’s fresh integrity. Perhaps The Rolling Stones was the first British rock band to become a group, prompted by the maverick behaviour of Brian Jones, while The Fall is a band that’s stayed a band. A tension arises between a band mediated as an entity and the needs of the media to attend to it within the conventional expressions of personality. The person in a position to assume identity on behalf of the band is not necessarily the one in control but the one who can most directly presume authority.

Smith has alleged in his 2008 autobiography, that ‘They [the band] didn’t want to be in The Fall. The whole concept of The Fall back then was mine. They didn’t get it. The audience did, but not them’ (Smith 2008, 46). In fact its bass player, Tony Friel, started The Fall in 1976. Friel resigned on a matter of principle around Xmas 1977 when Mark introduced his new girlfriend, Kay Carroll, as the band’s manager. The result was that the singer took control, turning a once collective venture into a business enterprise under his leadership.
It is this sense of entrepreneurism that most chimes with Manchester’s recent history, one which might be crudely termed the Thatcherisation of the city. Manchester’s Labour-led administration was a target of the (1979–1990) Thatcher government’s plan Streamlining the Cities (1983) which resulted in the 1986 abolition of the Greater Manchester Council and in its place a directive to elevate economic dynamism through the privatisation of resources which in turn would generate competition in services, a formulation known as ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ (Ward 2003, 116; Williams 2003, 53- 56). This was a move from government to governance, an ideology that New Labour in power (1997–) persisted with as eagerly as the Conservatives (1979–1997). But it was also designed to impel an assertive urban consumption economy, one which measured prosperity by possessions and which emerged forcefully through the flowering of two related reactionary phenomena in the late 1980s and 1990s – ‘Madchester’, ‘laddism’ – focussed around the leisure market, mainly in football, alcohol and drugs, and epitomised in the local music scene first by Factory’s band The Happy Mondays and then supremely by Oasis. Tickell and Peck point out how the privatising shift of power from elected local authorities to business-led bodies led to the naturalisation of male power ‘as the legitimate conduit for effective local governance’ (Tickell & Peck 1996, 595), signifying how far the story of the Manchester conurbation’s apparent resurgence may be read as a reversionary one. There are no happy women in the Factory story.

If my remark about Thatcherization and entrepreneurism suggests that Smith is a free market kind of guy, then it needs correcting. He criticised the selfishness of her era, arguing, ‘Thatcher’s an antagonist… but people voted her in for their own greed, all looking at rewards’ (Ford 2002a, 97). Yet he supported that side of Thatcher’s project that promoted an ethic for gainful work as a personal obligation, as opposed to a unionised one (an undeniable irony in Thatcher’s case, as her policies were the cause of dramatically high unemployment). In his autobiography he declares: ‘The more you make of your life, then the more you fucking do… Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish writer, said, “Produce, produce – it’s the only thing you’re there for.” This is what I’m talking about’ (Smith 2008, 32). Smith adds that he has a ‘very desk-job attitude’ to The Fall (Smith 2008, 32). Here the ideological link is rooted more to ‘old’ Labour principles which through its very title promotes the centrality of the concept of productive endeavour.

Mention of the Velvets connects The Fall with Joy Division, which the Factory story does not permit, although Ian Curtis was almost as much the autodidact as Smith. The Factory story so flattens Manchester that only the Factory and its tenants are left standing. Yet, as Wilson’s beloved Situationists declared, ‘Beneath the pavements – the beach!’ It is through the rubble of what is left, once the Factory story has been foisted on us as the received narrative, that The Fall and the others will provide, as an alternative, the richest, most potent, most kinetic history of that city. As I said, this is the worst possible reason for writing about The Fall, and so I am sorry for wasting your time.
References
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Ford, S. (2002a), Hip Priest: the story of Mark E. Smith & The Fall (London: Quartet Books).
____, (2002b), ‘Primal Scenes’, The Wire, No. 219, May, 28-33.
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