![]() “He would, for example, write a six-page-long scene of pure dialogue, and not all of it supernatural some of it very naturalistic about relationships and everyday stuff.” “People have the misconception that Mark would be spouting crazy stuff and I’d be forming it into a coherent script, but that’s not how it worked,” Duff says. Influenced by both the format and themes of The Twilight Zone and the spirit of Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 class allegory O Lucky Man!, it was to be set against the backdrop of northern mill towns, taking in Todmorden – the UFO-sighting capital of England – and the witch-haunted Pendle Hill among other locations.Īfter several knock-backs, the pair changed focus in 2014 and began work on a film script. Initially they devised a TV series called The Inexplicable. He laughs: “Mark was very tolerant of my sobriety.” After their first script-writing session in a Manchester bar, Duff was nearly knocked over by a cyclist while stumbling back to his hotel and from that point on stuck to just having a couple of pints when meeting Smith down the pub. During their years of working together – which developed into a firm friendship – they made an odd couple while Smith was notoriously hard living, Duff wasn’t much of a drinker and is now teetotal. Like many people who aren’t ex-members of the Fall, Duff found Smith to be courteous and convivial, and, sensing a unique opportunity, broached the idea of a collaborative writing project. The show’s head of wardrobe confided to Duff that she was shocked at how “rough” Smith looked, before adding: “I can’t believe Britt Ekland ever found him attractive,” having somehow mistaken him for Rod Stewart. The singer was also the cause of surreal scenes off camera. They persevered, and ended up with a memorably surreal scene: Smith playing Jesus appearing to a devout Christian builder having a nervous breakdown. Getting Smith to appear in the show in 2007 was a career highlight, even though the singer had a cavalier attitude towards learning his lines and refused to do retakes. Her publicist said she wouldn’t do anything involving drugs.” ![]() ![]() The cult status of the show and Duff’s can-do nature meant that he persuaded big names such as Paul Weller and Alan Yentob to take cameo roles. Ideal, Duff’s sitcom starring Johnny Vegas as Moz, a small-time Salford drug dealer, ran between 20. They connected you to different worlds.” He transcribed and studied their lyrics in school exercise books exposure to their work, he says, ultimately helped steer his adult career as a writer. “I liked punk, but the Fall felt as if they were from a different realm somehow. Duff sums up the narrative of the film: “Essentially, the Fall are trying to record an EP at a studio on Pendle Hill, while the surrounding countryside is at the mercy of a satanic biker gang and a squad of Jacobites who have slipped through a wormhole in time.”ĭuff grew up in the shadow of Pendle Hill and has been a fan of the Fall since 1978 he was a 14-year-old schoolboy when he sneaked into a Manchester pub to watch the band play live. At a time when the band’s reputation is being burnished by a clutch of new books charting different aspects of Smith’s creative practice, and four record labels are releasing their back catalogue and live LPs, it would seem there is little left to say about this northern, working-class phenomenon.Ī book published this week, however – The Otherwise: The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was, co-authored with the TV writer Graham Duff – shines a light on the idea that Smith was an unexplored writer of strange fiction. This chilling scene is from the pen of Mark E Smith, the frontman and creative force behind the UK rock group the Fall, who died just over three years ago. There has already been one murder and there will be more before dawn. In the boot of their nearby Honda Accord is the body of a dead cyclist. In a barnyard nearby, four Hells Angels stand around the figure of a burning woman holding a broom hovering above the floor outside, a couple cower at the advance of a monstrous thug, who bears down on them unimpeded by the shovel buried into his skull. Outside, the fields are strewn with the bodies of poisoned cattle, slaughtered by Jacobite agents of chaos, who have time-travelled from the English civil war. ![]() In an 18th-century farmhouse converted into a recording studio, a rock musician berates a hapless sound engineer because his band’s master tapes have been recorded over with ancient folk song. I t is the dead of a moonlit night in Lancashire, and all of hell has been unshackled.
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