‘Victoria Train Station Massacre’: When The Fall stood up for latticework architecture
It was the Bard of Salford himself, John Cooper Clarke, who once declared, “to become universal you must first become ultra-local”.
Throughout their rise to post-punk heroism, while many of their contemporaries sold their souls to England’s capital, Mark E Smith and The Fall always remained firmly rooted to their ultra-local roots of Prestwich and Manchester.
Manchester was the focal point of a musical revolution back in the 1970s, ushered in by the Sex Pistols and their mystical visit to the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Seemingly overnight, the industrial city witnessed a plethora of now-legendary bands spring up, all keen to dismantle the London-centric sound of the music industry. From Joy Division to the Durutti Column, and Buzzcocks to A Certain Ratio, the city’s music scene was thriving, but Mark E Smith never took much notice.
The Fall’s glorious leader had been at that Sex Pistols gig in 1976, but he didn’t often concern himself with what other bands in Manchester were doing, choosing instead to immerse himself in classic works of literature rather than whatever Tony Wilson was promoting that week. Inevitably, then, The Fall ended up having a totally unique sonic outlook which always seemed to put them in their own distinct league. There was no use in trying to emulate the sounds of The Fall – though many have tried – because they were so ingrained in the Mancunian misery of Mark E Smith.
As the years went by and The Fall pumped out an increasingly overwhelming number of records, their subversive genius soon went international, seeing them leave the M60 in their rear view mirror as they travelled around meeting a wealth of exciting, new bands, and telling them that they were all shite.
Like a post-punk boomerang, though, they always returned back home eventually. Even during the late 1980s, when the band reached their commercial peak with hits like their version of the northern soul classic ‘There’s a Ghost in My House’, the band never truly abandoned their roots in Manchester.
Those roots weren’t marred in blind adoration for the city, though. In fact, as was so often the case with Smith’s writing, the band were more often motivated by a resentment of Manchester than an undying love for it. On their final studio album, 2017’s New Facts Emerge, for instance, Smith took the opportunity to lament the city’s penchant for destroying historic architecture, penning the track ‘Victoria Train Station Massacre’.
Speaking to Uncut at the time, Smith rallied against the fact that the station’s beautiful latticework architecture had been cruelly ripped out. “I’m actually very fond of the architecture of Victoria Station,” he shared. “But it’s all been trashed to fuck, and that’s what the song’s about.”
“You know all that beautiful Victorian latticework,” the songwriter continued, embracing the dormant spirit of Paul Calf. “Like they have at Paddington? They ripped it all off. And you know why? Because the students coming to Manchester wanted to have access to north Manchester. We don’t want ’em here! So they put this big canvas canopy up, and about six months ago it fell on all the passengers in the rush hour.”
Perhaps the fury that Smith felt at the destruction of his beloved latticework architecture was remedied somewhat by the thought of those students getting trapped under a fallen canopy. Either way, the song acts as a good bookend for The Fall’s unwavering connection to Manchester and their love-hate relationship with the changing tides of the city.
