{"id":413044,"date":"2026-02-07T14:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T14:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/413044\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T14:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T14:28:08","slug":"the-fall-song-that-parodied-the-smiths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/413044\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall song that parodied The Smiths"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mark<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Secret Records)<\/p>\n

Sat 7 February 2026 10:00, UK <\/p>\n

Throughout their illustrious career and extensive discography, Mark E Smith and The Fall<\/a> seemed to take far more pleasure in lamenting the prevailing sounds of the \u2018Manchester scene\u2019 than they ever did in embracing that movement. In fact, one of their most beloved efforts started out life as a lampooning of The Smiths.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From their very beginning<\/a>, The Fall were never overly keen to be lumped in with the music scene of Manchester. Their roots in classic literature, and their home base of Prestwich, set them apart from the perpetually drizzly city during its punk revolution, even if Smith and Co ended up sharing a lot of billings with Manchester\u2019s punk progenitors. Even after the wave of gobbing northern punks had died down, though, The Fall were still an island of their own, ever so slightly outside the realm of Manchester music.<\/p>\n

In contrast, The Smiths were the archetypal Manchester band<\/a> back in the 1980s, having risen to the dizzying heights of mainstream popularity off the back of a defiantly independent sound, influenced both by the punk explosion of years prior and Morrissey\u2019s own interest in classic literature and 1960s pop. Despite sharing a few common interests with Mark E Smith, though, The Fall frontman couldn\u2019t be much further away from Moz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, Morrissey\u2019s rather outspoken pretensions \u2013 being of a different sort than Smith\u2019s own pretensions \u2013 inevitably caught the ire of The Fall before too long, probably spurred on by The Smiths achieving the kind of mainstream acclaim that their Prestwich counterparts never particularly courted. <\/p>\n

So, in late 1989, once The Smiths had imploded with the aid of a Cilla Black cover, Smith chose to begin work on a kind of parody of the band\u2019s songwriting, forming the basis of the Extricate track \u2018Bill Is Dead\u2019. An out-of-character effort from The Fall, the song offers a kind of vulnerability and, for want of a better word, romance which is not often found in the songwriting arsenal of their endearingly miserable frontman. <\/p>\n

It might have ended up sounding completely different, though, if Smith\u2019s original plan came to fruition. In the end, the songwriter decided that Craig Scanlon\u2019s musical masterpiece would have been wasted on a mere Smiths parody, so he opted for some lyricism with a little more merit. <\/p>\n

That change-up in plan seemed to work out, too, as \u2018Bill Is Dead\u2019 ended up becoming a Fall favourite, with John Peel being a particular devotee. Peel was, of course, always open about his adoration of The Fall, and is often cited as the DJ who first \u2018launched\u2019 the band during their early days. Nevertheless, \u2018Bill Is Dead\u2019 is the only Fall track to have ever topped Peel\u2019s Festive Fifty.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the song\u2019s sense of romanticism was still rooted in the Morrissey-centric writing of The Smiths\u2019 heyday, but the likelihood is that few people upon listening to the song would ever make the link to Manchester\u2019s premier indie outfit. <\/p>\n

It speaks both to Mark E Smith\u2019s songwriting mastery and his penchant for criticising virtually every band under the sun that he could transform a song from being a piss-taking pastiche to a crowning jewel of The Fall\u2019s extensive and all-encompassing discography.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Secret Records) Sat 7 February 2026 10:00, UK Throughout their illustrious career and extensive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,153024,128314,128,128315,44786,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-413044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-john-peel","tag-mark-e-smith","tag-music","tag-the-fall","tag-the-smiths","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}