Marxist criticism founders on the jagged rocks of subjectivism. A flight into the subjective is the penance it pays for the ruinous pseudo-objectivity of official communism and the persecution of artists in the Stalin era. Fawning before artists and their creations, particularly examples of so-called working-class subjectivity, becomes a piety of atonement. Music, an attainable outlet for such working-class subjectivity in the 20th century, has been one of the arenas in which left-wingers can assuage their guilt at being on the losing side of history.

One can see Mark E Smith and The Fall being lauded by ostensible Marxists. This poses a challenge; Smith disavowed campaigns such as Rock Against Racism and loudly supported Margaret Thatcher’s war in the Falkland Islands. Mindful of dismissals relating to political surface (this has an old stink of Soviet aesthetics, of course), simple-minded left folk shelter under truisms of Smith being an exemplar of working-class subjectivity. This mirrors the act of hailing contingent responses of political sects to the issues of the day as able to interpenetrate the objectivity of the world at large and make it over with fleeting images. Such practice merely traps such protagonists into the hades portrayed by the narrator of British indie-band McCarthy’s The Well of Loneliness (1987):

I once thought fame and romance could drag me out of hell
But they have only chained me here in a life-like prison cell

Such methods become problematic when used to objectively appraise groups such as The Fall. What is found, when we properly study such forms, is where the subjective presses most insistently; in an oblique anti-music, the objective world of the British factory floor/workhouse reappears, with the very worst type of boss in charge. This is not limited to the history of The Fall. It has long been written into the chronicles of rock groups.

The Rolling Stones

And the guitar players look damaged
They’ve been outcasts all their lives

The Rolling Stones, Jigsaw Puzzle

The Rolling Stones are the archetype of the gang turned into corporation. Although the Stones were manufactured to symbolize a bunch of desperadoes, this couldn’t quite efface that the group formed by guitarist Brian Jones had pre-existed as an actual gang when Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards shared a dingy flat in Edith Grove, Chelsea, London: a gang bonded by poverty, shoplifting, long hair, derision and a commitment to obscure and unfashionable blues music. (This phase is now mythologized in the annals of rock to the point that their squalid flat was once re-created as a museum exhibit.) The Stones’ rebellion may only have been symbolic, but it was taken seriously enough by the British state to result in a series of drug busts in 1967 and 1968, from whose unjust cruelty parts of the establishment eventually recoiled. Until the early 1970s, the Stones were treated as outlaws and bohemians by many proletarian youth.

The notion of the Stones as a gang, beyond PR and remembrance of times past, had significantly fractured by 1969. Already impaired by the ousting of the fragile Jones as group leader by the mid-1960s, Jagger and Richards developed as a songwriting team, solidifying their control with colossal international hits such as (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (1965). At the very moment their creative subjectivity was blossoming, a more squalid relation of dominance became apparent as the other members – Jones, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts – became peripheral. As writers of songs, purveyors of product and publishing revenue, Jagger/Richards became thing-like and set apart. The aftermath of the drug busts and the chaos surrounding the recording of Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) isolated and fragmented members further. Jones’s role as the Stones’ chief musical colourist diminished further, leading to his sacking and death by drowning in the summer of 1969. Although Jones, seemingly in recovery from drug addiction, didn’t want to play with the group anymore, his sacking was for the most prosaic of reasons: Jones was unlikely to be given a visa for the United States, as the group planned to go on the road. He was replaced with the young Mick Taylor.

The Stones appeared to shrug off Jones’s death, and personnel have continually been replaced down the years so that only Jagger and Richards remain of the original line-up. This has been accompanied by the complete disintegration of the group’s aesthetic in favor of a vehicle to recycle golden oldies. After the drug problems of Richards, Watts and Ronnie Wood (who replaced Taylor in 1975) in the 1970s and 1980s, Jagger and CBS Records conceived a more radical solution, with Jagger as a solo artist touring the world with new songs plus old Stones’ material. The public wouldn’t accept the sundering of the old gang so easily (as angrily detailed in Richards’ autobiography Life [2010]), and the venture was a failure in the sense that CBS had been looking for Jagger to become a solo star in the bracket of Michael Jackson. Hence the group reformed in 1989 as the nostalgia roadshow, now more firmly under Jagger’s direction, that rides on until this day.

The restructuring of the Stones spawned a new industry of rock reunions and musical nostalgia. Buried by the sands of time as it is, it’s important to appreciate that such objective hardening was once heavily mediated by the subjective: difficult inter-personal relationships, the fracturing of the old gang, and a reasonable desire to be more than a covers band were all present at the birth of an industry.^[1]

The Jesus and Mary Chain

I’ve seen it all go
And I’ve seen something
I’ve seen my head grow
And I’ve seen something

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Inside Me

Emerging in 1984-85, The Jesus and Mary Chain functioned through the gang/outlaw archetype established by the Stones. In the case of Jim and William Reid, the singer/guitarist brothers who became the center of the group, their initial close bond with bassist Douglas Hart and part-time drummer Bobby Gillespie appeared to be a recreation of a close working-class upbringing in Glasgow/East Kilbride. The group talked of this period as being one in which they were simpatico with one another, on stage at their explosive, anti-musical shows; in interviews; in their dress; and in their opinions on the diseased pop music that had infected the 1980s. They were also bonded by the derision that the Stones encountered, albeit on a smaller cult scale. The group’s visual identity was the tightest of any indie group of the period: a primitive montage of the Velvet Underground and the Beatles in Hamburg. Feedback, noise and reverb were the musical weapons used to kill the cancer of Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Culture Club. The thrilling Psychocandy album of late 1985 was the group’s most dramatic testament to its progress on this score.

The Mary Chain evolved in a less dramatic fashion than the Stones. Bottles were thrown at gigs, instruments were stolen, and PAs got smashed up, but no one died. The early gang fractured quickly. Gillespie, the singer in Primal Scream, left in 1986 after being asked to join the Mary Chain permanently. Hart left later, around 1990, but in the meantime, a succession of journeymen worked for the group. Recording after 1986 became an insular affair between the two Reid brothers, somewhat at the mercy of the Warner Bros company, which allowed Psychocandy to go ahead (the bosses hated it, naturally) on the promise of more commercial-sounding records to come. William Reid said that the idea of employing Gillespie on a bit-part basis and then having a cast of paid helpers was a purposeful, positive move. This direction had consequences: the group’s visual identity visibly frayed from 1986, with blander record sleeves and videos in evidence. When I saw the Mary Chain at Brixton Academy, London, in 1987, they stood in a line across the stage with a pre-programmed drum machine in the wings. It began to look and sound more mechanical, and this became manifest across the Darklands (1987) and Automatic (1989) albums.

The former is treated by many as the ultimate Mary Chain album. In its studied epic miserabilism, it may well be. But the emphasis was now on producing classic radio-friendly rock songs such as April Skies, a big British hit in 1987. The Reids rightly didn’t want to turn into “the feedback band” but the darker, anti-musical sub-Public Image Ltd world they had begun to explore in 1985-86 (on some of the songs you can hear on the Barbed Wire Kisses compilation) was abandoned.

As it became clear that the Mary Chain weren’t about to make albums that sold millions (they were in the bracket of hundreds of thousands), it was more straightforward for them to hunker down as a songwriting duo. Within the vectors of these personal choices came the dictates of the music industry, which always prizes writers (i.e. product) above all else. The group, eventually divided over substance abuse, largely lost its experimental edge.

It speaks enormously well of the early spirit of the Mary Chain that the departure of Hart and Gillespie happened in a relatively loving manner. Gillespie said that the group saved him. Hart had very little negative to say beyond that the glory days of the group were over for him after the departure of Gillespie. In their early days, the Mary Chain were hyped as the “new Sex Pistols”. For many, of course, the Pistols, like the Stones before them, were the group. By becoming less of a group from 1986, the Mary Chain then suffered the ignominy of being a group.^[2]

The Fall

The housing association
The McDonald’s seat
Have prefixed him “frustration”
I'll stick with the gang of one

The Fall, Ludd Gang

The Fall have sparked a batch of interpretations that hypostasize their sprawling project as the product of a particular set of literary intakes from weird fiction (HP Lovecraft, MR James, Arthur Machen). The Fall’s discography of the early 1980s has been canonized by writers such as Mark Fisher for its dense rush of sheer, relentless wordplay (Perverted by Language as Fall leader Mark E Smith might have put it) to the point at which it devours the group’s history. The problem with this over-intellectualization is that Smith was himself intellectually scornful of this practice as set out (gnomically) in songs such as Slags, Slates, Etc. (1981) and Mere Pseud Mag. Ed. (1982).

The literary roots of The Fall also fail to answer why Smith chose to present his written work as a particularly relentless form of rock-and-roll (“country and northern”). We are now able to hear much of The Fall’s live work, and what startles the casual listener is the brutal physicality of that output and its utter unpredictability, from downbeat, dirge-like rants in Britain’s working men’s clubs (Totale’s Turns), to the seminal psychotic hectoring that Smith inflicted on the Antipodes in 1982 (Fall in a Hole). The Fall, then, are an insistent reminder that Hegel’s dialectic, inspecting the war of maneuver in art between spiritual (intellectual) and sensuous aspects, is still the most auspicious starting point for analyzing culture.

Given that The Fall were a partial reversal of the gang/group archetype that this article has explored, one can turn this around and state that what Fisher calls Smith’s pulp-modernism can alternatively be conceived as a declaration of war on the racket that had started to explode around him in the early 1980s; breaking up line-ups and sacking group members was also breaking up sounds and gouging out gaps for the singer’s gnomic, scabrous insights. This also became embodied in the way Smith’s lyrics developed an irreducible element that simply defies description. Who Makes the Nazis? (1982) appears to be a deserved piss-take of some of the stupid left-wing meetings that Smith had attended in the late 1970s.

Who makes the Nazis?
Balding smug faggots
Intellectual half-wits
All the Os

There’s no literal, particular meaning in the following other than perhaps a very general one of mockery of hysterical far-left obsessions leading to an intellectual house of cards. (I must be honest and tell the reader that it may not be about this at all):

Who makes the Nazis?
Motels like three split-level mirages
Who makes the Nazis?
Buffalo lips on toast, smiling
Who makes the Nazis?
I put a finger on the weird
This was real Irish know
Joe was then good as gold
And told of the rapists in the Spa Motel
The real mould

This collision and cut up of words can’t ultimately be explained by textual analysis and a hunt for literary precursors. It can’t be abstracted from a factory floor of brutal musical repetition and shabby inter-group relations. It refuses to be a vehicle for musicians, and is the living antithesis of country blues artist Fred McDowell’s line: “If you pay attention – what I sing, the guitar sings too, and what the guitar says, I say.”

One of the key battles in Smith’s forever war against musicians was in 1982. In recording the Room to Live: Undilutable Slang Truth! album, Smith seemed determined to deliberately exclude the whole group from certain tracks or bring in other musicians. In the splenetic New Zealand shows from the same year, one hears the musical backdrop beginning to overwhelm the words. One wouldn’t call The Fall a professional sound in this period, but there are times when the racket becomes too sonically compelling for an orator of Smith’s part-literary complexion. (Exhibit: The Container Drivers on Fall in a Hole – claustrophobic country ‘n’ northern rockabilly that has started to sound noticeably tighter than earlier rickety versions.) Young guitarist Marc Riley was then sacked, and Brix Smith joined in 1983. In that year, the group had been opening shows with Words of Expectation, where Smith now sounded like a deranged beat poet, riffing lines over a punishing bass/drums/noise workout (Tempo House ran to a similar formula). Brix’s subsequent guitar work offered a solution to a sound that Smith knew was running out of rope. While it didn’t quite propel The Fall into a commercial space, the sound developed in more lush psychedelic directions. Songs, and minor hits, such as Hey! Luciani (1986) showed off these brighter pastures, with chiming guitars and keyboards, albeit with a typically deranged lyric. (How many pop songs have you heard making John Paul I, a pope for 33 days in 1978, a hero?) The music of The Fall was not quite tamed, but a battle had been fought and won.

Through the group’s many subsequent line-up changes, Smith always loved the idea of The Fall but had zero attachment to the musicians that brought it to life. It was Smith’s own overlord-like commitment to The Fall’s factory discipline that made this world, not commercial pressure or industry diktat (ballets based on the life of William of Orange – I am Kurious Oranj – are not selling out). His subjectivity, if you can call it that, was his upbringing and experiences as a shipping clerk on the Manchester docks. A world of repetition and sackings that The Fall turned into a brutalized art form, into critique, but still a contingent world of sausage and chips, Bo Diddley and the rancorous bile of working men’s clubs.^[3]

Coda – Sabbath’s heavy industry

The Fall were not the only British group to reproduce an industrial environment. Black Sabbath are perhaps unlikely bedfellows, but the group often spoke about how the industrial sounds and dank interiors of the post-war Midlands infected their dark, claustrophobic music of the early 1970s. The brutal, pulverizing sound of the debut album, Black Sabbath (1970), and early demos (recorded as Earth) put them in a similar league to The Fall. While you wouldn’t call Sabbath a literary group, their imagery was channeled through hipster readings of the popular black-magic fiction of Dennis Wheatley (in fact, an arch-conservative writer who pictured his satanists and their dark forces as convenient allies of communists and fascists). The life of a pop group, unlike the conceit of the rock biography, is as much someone else’s story as their own, and this is particularly true of Sabbath – who conspired to recreate a world they were in desperate flight from. There, the comparisons run short. When Sabbath engaged in critique on songs such as War Pigs, the target, the military-industrial complex, was notably abstract and distant. It was a topic for the song rather than the song. None of this dislocation was immediately apparent in The Fall. A reproduction and critique of the world that had produced them through garbled literary intakes; a brutalizing, sensuous experience that refused the bounds of rationalism; and a critique of the very idea of the rock group itself, cast as a gang of one in Mark E Smith. Sabbath were always capable of laughing at themselves but never of doubting themselves as an institution. It is the supreme achievement of The Fall that such self-doubt was a constituent part from the very outset.

1. Stanley Booth, Dance with the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times (New York: Random House, 1984); David Dalton, The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); Paul Trynka, Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones (New York: Viking, 2014)

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2. David Cavanagh, The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize (London: Virgin Publishing, 2000); Bobby Gillespie, Tenement Kid (London: Orion, 2021); Jim Reid and William Reid, Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain (London: Orion, 2024)

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3. Mark E. Smith, with Austin Collings, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith (London: Viking, 2008); Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley, eds., Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (London: Faber & Faber, 2021)

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