When Damo Suzuki Played With the Last Fall Line Up in an Industrial Wasteland

Salford, Saturday 12 May 2018. Doors at 16:45, the last band on at 02:15, and in the middle of it all, from 21:15 to 22:30, a line on the flyer that still looks unreal to me: Damo Suzuki + Imperial Wax (The Fall).

Mark E. Smith had died on 24 January. Less than four months later, Pete Greenway, Dave Spurr and Keiron Melling, the last and longest serving line up of The Fall, were back on a stage for the first time without him. They had a new name, Imperial Wax, and in front of them stood the man who sang on 'Tago Mago', 'Ege Bamyasi' and 'Future Days'. It only happened once, and I was lucky to be there.

Can, Mark and the man from Munich

The story goes back a long way. In 1970 Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit saw a young Japanese drifter busking in the streets of Munich and asked him to sing with Can that same night. Damo stayed for three years, sang on the records that made Can's name, and then walked away from it all in 1973.

In Manchester, Mark E. Smith never forgot him. Mark always said Can saved his life in the early days (I'm sure it did, you can hear Can in the repetition of so many Fall records), and in 1985 The Fall put 'I Am Damo Suzuki' on 'This Nation's Saving Grace', a homage from one singer who refused to sing properly to another.

So when Damo invited Greenway, Spurr and Melling to be his Sound Carriers for one night, the circle closed. Greenway later told the filmmaker Michelle Heighway that playing with someone Mark respected that much simply felt right. "It'll never be The Fall," he said at the time. Nobody in the room expected it to be.

The White Hotel

The White Hotel is not a hotel. It is an old industrial unit on an estate in Salford, with razor wire on the walls, warehouses all around and, next door, Strangeways, the most famous prison in British music history, thanks to The Smiths. Austin Collings, who wrote 'Renegade' with Mark in 2008, co-founded the place with Ben Ward, which made the choice of venue feel less like a coincidence and more like a wake. It closes in January 2027, a big loss for Salford.

Inside: white painted brick, cables hanging from the ceiling like vines, a roller shutter behind the stage, a rusted wheel bolted to the wall and a toilet lit completely red. Outside, in the yard, a lad with an acoustic guitar played to a brick wall. It looked like the end of the world, and it was exactly the right place for this.

An all day ordeal

Interior billed it as the Damo Suzuki All Day Ordeal, and the billing was accurate. The flyer, which I still have, lays out the whole day: Thee MVPs at 17:15, Wedding at 18:00, The Common Cold at 19:00, Girls in Synthesis at 20:00, then Damo, then an intermission, Sex Cells at midnight and Afghan Sand Gang at 02:15. In the second room, Monk played two parts, 'Improvised Exorcism' and 'Lucifer in the Hotel', with Jade Mannion in between, and Fergal Kinney and Annabel Fraser on the decks until the end.

Girls in Synthesis played in front of the roller shutter, their guitarist in a boiler suit, bent double, his head almost against the metal, a floodlight on the floor throwing his shadow across the stage. It was the perfect warm up for what came next.

Damo

Earlier in the day, the band were running through some things on stage when Damo walked into the room. He heard them playing, went straight up, took the vocal mic and started singing, with no introductions and no plan. That was the only rehearsal there was, and it was not really a rehearsal at all.

Then, at 21:15, the green light. Damo's method never changed: no songs, no setlist, only local musicians and whatever the room gave back that night. Imperial Wax gave him something heavy and relentless, close to the drive of the last Fall records, with Simon Archer, another former member of The Fall, adding electronic noise on top.

Damo stood almost still in the dry ice, both hands around the microphone, eyes closed, growling, chanting and babbling in a language that belonged to nobody. From where I stood, behind a wall of heads, he was mostly a silhouette, the light going from green to blue and back to green again. He was still recovering from cancer treatment at the time. A little over an hour later he thanked the band and walked off smiling.

After

In June, Imperial Wax went into a studio in Colne with Sam Curran of Black Pudding on vocals. 'Gastwerk Saboteurs' came out in May 2019 and 'Tranquilliser' in February 2024, and it was never The Fall, which was exactly the point. Damo kept carrying his sound from city to city for almost six more years.

In 2017 I saw The Fall in Manchester for the last time, at Transformer festival, with Mark still at the front. In 2018 I saw what came after, in a warehouse next to a prison, with one of his heroes at the mic. I am glad I was there for both.

All these blurry photos are my own, taken that night, along with my flyer, the Imperial Wax single and my copies of 'Tago Mago' and the Omnibus Edition of 'This Nation's Saving Grace'.

Mark E. Smith (1957–2018)
Damo Suzuki (1950–2024)