While the Fall’s songs were suffused with hauntings and the occult, it is only now that Smith’s talent for strange fiction, in the form of an unmade film The Otherwise, has been revealed
It is the dead of a moonlit night in Lancashire, and all of hell has been unshackled. In an 18th-century farmhouse converted into a recording studio, a rock musician berates a hapless sound engineer because his band’s master tapes have been recorded over with ancient folk song. Outside, the fields are strewn with the bodies of poisoned cattle, slaughtered by Jacobite agents of chaos, who have time-travelled from the English civil war. In a barnyard nearby, four Hells Angels stand around the figure of a burning woman holding a broom hovering above the floor; outside, a couple cower at the advance of a monstrous thug, who bears down on them unimpeded by the shovel buried into his skull. In the boot of their nearby Honda Accord is the body of a dead cyclist. There has already been one murder and there will be more before dawn.
This chilling scene is from the pen of Mark E Smith, the frontman and creative force behind the UK rock group the Fall, who died just over three years ago. At a time when the band’s reputation is being burnished by a clutch of new books charting different aspects of Smith’s creative practice, and four record labels are releasing their back catalogue and live LPs, it would seem there is little left to say about this northern, working-class phenomenon.
