The Fallen by Dave Simpson

Author:Dave Simpson, [Dave Simpson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781847676405
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2008-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

‘It was like some kind of medieval Italian

principality. Or a Chinese court, full of

would-be sycophants and mandarins.’

When you follow The Fall you get used to travelling around. I’ve been everywhere from dank pubs in Leeds to stadiums containing thousands of people such as Leeds United’s Elland Road, where The Fall played a wonderfully inappropriate set in 1987 supporting U2. I’ve hitchhiked around the country in cars containing homicidal Container Drivers and spanking headmasters, and at one point was given a lift by what is surely Britain’s only team of skateboarding Mohican-hairstyled punk rock Buddhists, who dwell in an old coach with no seats. I’ve met all sorts of characters – the girl who began our friendship as Amanda but ended it calling herself Susan, by which time she revealed she’d never been the same since ingesting the entire contents of a suitcase full of cocaine. But I don’t really travel too far following The Fall any more, I just travel the country trailing The Fall’s former musicians.

West Suffolk General Hospital lies 208 miles from Prestwich. It’s an imposing building like many NHS Trust hospitals, with an endless bank of windows and expansive, leafy grounds. It’s not the sort of place you’d expect to find a member of The Fallen, not employed, anyway, but this is the working environment of Marcia Schofield, the twenty-first musician to join The Fall.

What I know about her is this: Schofield joined in October 1986 and left in 1990, during which she played keyboards and occasionally sang on 1988’s extremely good The Frenz Experiment, the same year’s patchily brilliant I Am Kurious Oranj, 1989’s Seminal Live album (neither entirely live nor seminal) and a thunderous return to peak Fall form with 1990’s Extricate, one of the best Fall albums ever.

Schofield’s input was more than just aural. Dark, striking and leggy, her unmistakable looks brought another twist of glamour to the group. Visually as much a part of the more commercial era as Brix, she always looked slightly more down to earth and approachable. Somehow, it’s unsurprising to discover she hasn’t married a millionaire but a psychiatrist. The couple live outside Bury St Edmunds, recently voted Britain’s leafiest town, where Schofield is stepmother to three children and a little girl she calls ‘the elf princess’. They share their household with no less than 21 lambs, 12 sheep, 26 chickens and a disabled cat – an even more bizarre assembled cast than that which makes up The Fallen. However, Schofield has never quite left The Wonderful and Frightening World. She tells me none of her medical colleagues had any idea she’d once been in a famous group for ages. She only knew the secret had got out when she arrived in work to discover every computer terminal ‘wallpapered’ with images of her playing in The Fall. At the time, she was an anaesthetist. ‘I’m no longer putting people to sleep,’ she reveals from a functional, computer-peppered office. ‘Not intentionally anyway.’

These days, twinkly-eyed and youthful, she’s treating cancer patients.

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