About six years after anyone else, we finally get round to reading The Fallen - Dave Simpson's heroic account of his increasingly obsessive quest to track down and interview everyone who's ever been in The Fall. At the time of publication in 2009 that was about 46 people. It's probably significantly more by now. En route, the idea is, Simpson will exorcise his obsession with one of British music's most durable enigmas - Mark E Smith - and decode the mysterious communications which continue to issue from Prestwich, more or less every year.
My own commitment to The Fall ebbs and flows but never quite runs dry. In the last 10 years I've seen them half-a-dozen times. As an idea, they are perfect: mysterious, cantankerous, unpredictable, arcane - and on every occasion properly rocking. "Always different, always the same," noted John Peel, famously. I remember interviewing Peely in the 1990s and asking him what it was about The Fall that had buried its way under his skin. He blinked furiously and fiddled with a huge ring on his finger. "It's very hard to say..." he said.
As an actual, factual entity, however, The Fall can be a demanding proposition. I remember an evening at the Forum - or the Town & Country Club as it was back then - where, after an hour spent bringing a can of Carlsberg to body temperature (by me, not The Fall) the band came on at 10.30, by which point my mate had left to get his train back to Cambridge. This was around the time of Country on the Click and it goes without saying that for the 30 minutes they actually played, The Fall were a magnificently lean 'n' limber machine, krafting their skiffle-Kraut hybrid into half-an-hour of mesmerising im-propaganda (the message: 'I am Mark E Smith-ah').
But back to the book. The quest for lost artists, vanished visionaries and geniuses who fell through the cracks has developed into a genre in its own right. Searching for Sugarman, which our friend Ali Catterall wrote about beautifully here, has been the best recent example, but the internet has made it possible for writers and filmmakers to start tracking myths and filling in blanks which, until now, remained tantalisingly empty. There's something faintly psychogeographical about the notion that signals from the past continue to issue, and that if we just retune our radar, the information will start coming through.
The message - or one of them - in Simpson's book is that although Mark E Smith is probably a genius, no one's sure what he's actually a genius at. Possibly it's just being Mark E Smith, which is no mean feat. You couldn't do it. Neither could I. Running through the story is Simpson's hope that somehow, at some point, he'll find Karl Burns - The Fall's on-off drummer between 1977 and 1998, who left after an onstage scrap in New York.
Simpson loses both his bearings and his girlfriend in the quest, but he never finds Karl Burns, who may or may not be living "on a farm in the hills somewhere" near Rossendale. Where else would you go after The Fall?
In 2015 Burns remains, as far as we know, missing in (in)action. Simpson's book reinvigorated my lapsed obsession with this strange and contrary band and its mutant offshoots. (The delicate psychedelia of Martin Bramah and Una Baines' Blue Orchids is part of an unwritten 1980s history.) Smith, of course, will not be with us forever. As the chaotic (h)experiment in unfree jazz Hip Priest has it: "He... is not... appree...sheated."