Throughout 1992, I’d got progressively more interested in music from the 1960s. One of the bands which I started to become curious about was Manfred Mann. My interest having been piqued by watching footage of their rather campy performance of My Name is Jack on an episode of Sounds of the Sixties in late 1991. By the autumn of ‘92, I’d bought a vintage compilation album which gathered together all of their hits and would have been content to leave things at that until I heard, by chance, on the radio that over December 1992, the band would be going out on a tour in support of a new compilation album with a lineup that featured both Paul Jones and Mike d’Abo as well as a number of other musicians that had been part of the band during the 60s. They were calling themselves The Manfreds, ostensibly because Manfred Mann himself was not participating. On December 29, the band were due to wrap up the tour with a gig in Torquay, so I asked if tickets for the show and a trip up there with my parents could count as a Christmas present. It was a cracking night, even if me and my mate Martin, who came with us because I'd been due to go to the pub with him that night, so we offered him the chance to come to the gig instead, were the youngest people there. Nevertheless, Martin’s comment about the then 50 year old Jones, “I hope I look like him at that age” will hopefully give you some impression of how joyous and fun the night was. The bulk of the tunes were recently familiar to me, but they played a couple of songs I hadn’t heard before. In one instance, Jones went into a spiel about how gratifying it had been to have hit singles (3 UK Number 1s, a US number 1 and 12 other singles which charted in the UK between Number 2 and 11 over a 5 year period between 1964 and 1969), but that the band had always maintained that if the listener wanted to get a true sense of who the band were and what made them tick, they had to turn the single over and listen to the b-side. And then they launched into, arguably the best of their b-sides, I’m Your Kingpin, a bluesy, misogynistic, slightly threatening track which is a million miles away from Do Wah Diddy Diddy
They may seem unlikely bedfellows, but it struck me while listening to Hit the North (Part 1) that The Fall were another outfit who were perhaps ill-served by judgements made about them based on their hit singles, even though they were more modest than those achieved by Manfred Mann. Hit the North scraped into the Top 60, though it arguably deserved a higher placing due it’s splendidly distinctive sax sample which propels the track forward but is insanely catchy enough to merit afternoon radio show play. However, the track sidelines Mark E.Smith to the extent that he sounds like an interloper in his own band, bawling on about nothing very much at all. This may have worked well in terms of releasing something palatable to wider markets, but it doesn’t make the track especially distinctive as a Fall song.
Nevertheless, it’s a good example of the way in which writing a hit, of any description, is a tough thing to pull off. As Smith confessed in his 2008 memoir, Renegade, There are times I’ve wished I could knock out hits. But I can’t. There’s a skill to it and it’s not in me.....I always try to write a Eurovision every two years but there’s no way it’s going to happen. (Smith, p.63, Renegade, Penguin, 2008).
However, The Fall had in their midst a musician who was subtly guiding them towards both a minor hit and an increasing integration of machines into their sound. Simon Rogers had joined the band in 1984, initially on a short-term basis to cover for bassist Steve Hanley during a spell of paternity leave, but he proved so versatile and enjoyed a good relationship with Smith that he remained in the band once Hanley returned and by the time The Fall came to record Hit the North (Part 1) in 1987, he was entrusted with production duties for the track, as well as the attendant album which the band recorded at the time, The Frenz Experiment. The distinctive opening riff was cooked up by Rogers while he was experimenting with a new sampler. It was a random collection of sounds, but one which Smith picked up and ran with straightaway. As Rogers explained in a 2015 interview with Sound on Sound, I’d just got this [sampler] and literally the first thing I put into it was a bass and a snare just on two pads, a little tiny Indian bell -which I’ve still got - and a sax note and a bass note from a Gentle Giant record. Mark came round to my bedroom studio and I said, “Oh here’s the new sampler, have a look at it,” and just pressed play and out comes the basis for Hit the North. He said, “What’s that music?” And I said, “Well that’s the first thing I put in.” He said, “I’ll have that, just do me a tape.
Once in the studio, the band saw their instruments, especially the drums, going through the sampler and even Smith’s vocals were not immune from this - a process of necessity in some cases given that Smith’s preference was to sing into a hand-held microphone. Rogers is particularly proud of the hi-hat sound being fed through a vocoder left in the studio by Marc Almond. Although, Rogers left The Fall after the release of The Frenz Experiment in early 1988, he would return to produce two Fall albums across 1992/93. The work done on Hit the North (Part 1) would be put to even more impressive effect on the single, Free Range which would crack the Top 40 in 1992.
Video courtesy of indiedancepop.
No comments:
Post a Comment