“I fucking hate Manchester”: How The Fall unknowingly influenced the Madchester scene of the 1980s
“I fucking hate Manchester,” is something The Fall’s Mark E Smith declared in 2013, reflecting on the city which has been forever changed by the impact of his musical output.
Although he only hailed from nearby Prestwich, a vast chasm soon developed between Smith and the rest of the Manchester music scene, to such an extent that you can only imagine him absolutely despising the ‘Madchester’ scene that emerged in the 1980s. Baggy trousers, all-night raves, and a colourful explosion of indie and dance music across the city; it is easy to imagine the Fall frontman summing it all up with a sneer, an eye-roll, and an expletive.
“There’s something about Manchester musicians that’s particularly fucking irritating,” the frontman told Noisey in a separate interview. “They have this sort of God-given right, which Londoners used to have, I suppose.” That arrogance likely began in the wake of the city’s punk explosion, within which The Fall played a not-insignificant role, but it was cemented during the Madchester years – a period which, even now, Manchester’s music scene is struggling to move on from.
In some cruel twist of fate, then, The Fall played a key role in inspiring that particular scene. While the realm of acid house raves and The Haçienda had precious little to do with The Fall’s cynical post-punk experiments, the band did have a colossal impact on the indie scene that morphed into Madchester throughout the 1980s.
Inspiral Carpets, for instance, cited The Fall as a key source of inspiration for tracks like 1989’s ‘Joe’, which Clint Boon readily admits borrows a riff from ‘New Face In Hell’. Not only did that Inspiral track typify the sound of Madchester indie, even if it wasn’t quite as far-out as The Stone Roses or Happy Mondays, but it also formed a key cultural touchstone for the Britpop years that followed, Noel Gallagher’s debt to the Inspiral Carpets being a matter of public record.
Elsewhere, The Stone Roses were fairly open about their appreciation for the Fall, with Mani being a particularly ardent supporter of their individualistic output. Inevitably, the two groups followed different paths within their discography, but the Roses still owed something, however seemingly insignificant, to the pioneering sounds of Smith and The Fall.
Meanwhile, there was a shared appreciation between the Happy Mondays and The Fall, despite what Mark E Smith said publicly about the Shaun Ryder-fronted outfit; namely, a joke published in a Manchester music magazine which read, “What has Manchester cathedral got over the Happy Mondays? The two gargoyles at the front are better-looking.”
Smith’s trademark cutting comments aside, though, The Fall forever changed the musical landscape of Manchester – whether the frontman would admit it or not – and the group therefore had a key part to play in the development of the Madchester scene.
Whether or not Smith actually “fucking hate[d] Manchester,” or was simply playing up his mardiness to The Independent’s interview, as he was known to do during interviews, is up for debate. However, the impact that The Fall had on that Madchester scene that blossomed in the late 1980s is not up for debate.
