walking upstream…
The Fall
sourcesDazed — Mark E Smith speaks to Can's Irmin Schmidt (Can and Velvet Underground testimony) · Vice — The Oral History of Mark E Smith (Bramah on the Velvets; Greenway on the Beefheart cover) · Andrew Darlington — 1987 Mark E. Smith interview (Beefheart-comparison denial, verbatim) · Simon Reynolds — Fall tribute/NYT reprint (Velvet Underground/Can critical framing; formation account) · MOJO — Mark E. Smith final interview (formation, early tastes) · The Fall online — official biography (identity, formation, lineup scale) · Wikipedia — The Fall (band)
In a flat in Prestwich, Greater Manchester, in late 1976, Salford dockworker Mark E. Smith started a band with schoolfriends Martin Bramah and Tony Friel and named it after Albert Camus's novel La Chute. The Fall played its first gig the following May, and for the next forty-two years Smith was the only fixed point in a lineup that churned through roughly fifty musicians, including two of his own wives. Critic Simon Reynolds credited him with inventing "a kind of Northern English magic realism that mixed industrial grime with the unearthly and uncanny," delivered in a style Smith dubbed "country-and-northern" — half amphetamine rant, half fireside yarn. He prized originality so fiercely he'd sometimes deny his own debts in the same breath he was paying them.
the sound in question
1980
Totally WiredThe Fall
walk the tributaries ↓
Can1970s · Krautrock / Experimental rock / Psychedelic rock
Of every band Smith named, Can is the one he never punctured with a joke. At fifteen he was pointed from the Velvet Underground toward Can, mail-ordered Tago Mago, and decades later told founder Irmin Schmidt directly: "Can saved my life. Irmin, you fucking saved my life! And because you saved my life I even bought Soon Over Babaluma." In 1977 he'd phoned Schmidt to beg a joint gig — Can had just stopped playing live and turned him down. In 1985 he wrote "I Am Damo Suzuki," naming an entire song after their singer.
listen: upstream & here
1971
HalleluwahCan
1985
I Am Damo SuzukiThe Fall
listen forHalleluwah runs nearly nineteen minutes on one bass-and-drum pulse — Jaki Liebezeit's metronomic groove under Damo Suzuki's untranslatable, half-chanted vocal, the record Smith said "formed my skills" as a teenager. "I Am Damo Suzuki" compresses that same trick to under four minutes: a rigid, circling riff that never resolves, over which Smith declaims rather than sings, naming Suzuki outright in the title and the lyric. It isn't a cover — it's Smith transplanting Can's engine into his own chassis and crediting the mechanic by name.
The Velvet Underground1960s · Art rock / Proto-punk / Experimental rock
"When I was 15, I was a hardcore Velvet Underground fan," Smith told Can's Irmin Schmidt in 2016 — the same fandom that in turn pointed him toward Can. Founding guitarist Martin Bramah remembers a teenage Smith cycling records on his parents' stereo, unmoved until the Velvets landed. Critic Simon Reynolds later pinned the debt precisely: over "implacable rockabilly rhythms," the early Fall built "a thick wall of droning, distorted guitars in the tradition of minimalists like the Velvet Underground and the German band Can."
listen: upstream & here
1968
Sister RayThe Velvet Underground
1978
RepetitionThe Fall
listen forSister Ray never resolves: over seventeen minutes on one distorted, overdriven chord vamp, the mix pushed so hot the vocal fights to be heard over the guitars. "Repetition" compresses that same dare to under three minutes — a single riff looped past comfort while Smith flatly states the credo behind it: "we dig repetition in the music." Listen for how little either band varies the pattern once it's set; the tedium is the point, and outlasting it is the payoff.
Captain Beefheart1970s · Avant-garde rock / Blues rock / Experimental rock
Beefheart is the one influence Smith fought in public and honored in private. Asked in a 1987 interview whether an album amounted to Beefheart's Safe As Milk "re-recorded... ten times over," he sneered, "Yeah – right. That's rubbish" — then immediately softened it: "but I thought it was quite funny really. It's all horse-shit, in'it?" Nearly thirty years later, with no journalist prompting him, he had his own band learn an actual Beefheart song for a live TV set. Guitarist Pete Greenway remembers the chaos: "we'd only ever played that once and it was terrible... none of us knew what we were doing."
listen: upstream & here
1967
Dropout BoogieCaptain Beefheart
2015
Dropout BoogieThe Fall
listen forBeefheart's original swaggers on a stiff, off-kilter blues riff under his gravel-throated growl — the jagged, stop-start guitar interplay critics reached for whenever they described The Fall's sound. Set beside it, The Fall's 2015 live version sounds rawer still: a band who'd barely rehearsed the song, audibly finding the riff as they play it, Smith barking the vocal instead of singing it. The clumsiness is the tell — Smith chose the one song that proves the comparison he'd spent thirty years publicly denying.