Press and Interviews

When Marc Riley left The Fall, he started his own group, his own record-label and his own line in vituperative rock 'n' roll satire.

Jonathan Romney hears the one about the wiseguy whose heroes are Lenny Bruce and Bernard Manning.

This bloke goes up to Manchester on a cheap day return to interview Marc Riley for the NME. He meets Riley and In Tape label supreme Jim Khambatta at Piccadily Station, and they head out in The Creepers' van to go to the In Tape HQ.

But today is the Mayor's parade and every street in the town centre is cordoned off to allow passage to a constant flow of brass bands, horses and battalions of kids in Woody Woodpecker costumes.

Surrounded! So they're stuck on the pavement, watching the parade go by, when a wagon hung with lurid pink bunting rolls past, carrying a load of inanely grinning pre-pubescent majorettes.

'Ey, look at that', remarks Marc, Wrily, 'there goes the Paedophile Information Exchange float'.

Riley's a sensible, charming man, articulate and acid-tongued, with a scabrous turn of wit and questionable taste in shirts. He has his head screwed on, as does the Creepers's sound. A healthy band. So they sometimes wade in a miasma of Velvets-derived intensity, and they can be stodgy at times, but at best the acidity merges with flair and vituperative attack, to make for an invigorating noise. The live set foes from strength to strength, and now includes a reading of Eno's 'Baby's on Fire' and a rollicking new piece, 'Black Dwarf', which should emerge as the new single come September.

It's been a heady climb since Marc's departure from The Fall in '82, following a fracas with Mark Smith in an Australian disco - the story documented in 'Jumper Clown' in the hitherto-mysterious line 'Dare to dance on an Aussie floor' - but the ensuing acrimonious feuding has been smoothed over thanks largely to the truce making efforts of the indomitable Brix.

The In Tape label set up by Marc and Jim now houses such upwardly mobile folk heroes as Terry and Gerry and Yeah Yeah No, while The Creepers' set-up is a hive of activity - Pete Keough and Paul Fletcher (bass and guitar respectively) moonlight with ex-Fall drummer Paul Hanley in a band called Shout Bamalam (formerly Kiss The Blade), while drummer Eddie Fenn, who once slogged with Tools You Can Trust and Crawling Chaos, also plays his guitar and production skills with Implies Consent and the Waterfoot Dandy.

Riley's tastes encompass the traditional alternative founding fathers, the Velvets, Stooges, Beefheart, T. Rex, plus Foetus - 'I reckon he's the only one who's doing something totally original. The stuff he did on The Tube was like Swingle II, the Kings Singers or something. Incredible stuff.

But his real heroes are comics like Lenny Bruce ('He was like a tutor to me. I'd say he was the only influence on my way of thinking') and Bernard Manning - Marc and Jim happily don evening dress at every opportunity to see him in action at his club.

'He's so offensive. People call him racist and sexist but they haven't got a clue. Nothing's sacred to him, which is perfect to me'.

Although there's a million miles difference between the types of comic gross-out embodied by these two, you can see how they've rubbed off on Marc. In a recent interview, Mark Smith was complaining about the 'English disease' of humour, which people insist on reading into The Fall. This is maybe to under-rate the phenomenon. In Riley's case, certainly, humour isn't just a catch-all escape route, although the uses the word liberally in conversation, but this best comic cuts are barbed satire that hit their target dead on.

His best trick is the first-person rant, adopting such crass personae as the 'smooth -talking fucker' of Gross' or the protagonist of 'Cure by Choice': I take mascara, lipstick and rouge/ Baddy trousers patent leather shoes/ Carmen rollers and a whining voice/ I listen to The Cure by choice'. Unfortunately, the subtlety sometimes goes unappreciated: 'people come up to me and say (incredulous tone): 'Do you really listen to The Cure?'

Another notable Riley daft head is the star of 'Shirt Scene' - 'gonna write a classic, drop another tab of acid, drop a few names like Arthur Lee'. Now, Marc surely you're not saying you don't like the brace new herb-head from the West, the paisley Underground and that?

'I have absolutely no patience with it. All those bands like Green On Red and The Long Ryders, if you stick a pompous organ on that, it'll sound like Genesis - I think they've set music back years, Duran Duran, I can handle that, but when I hear those bands ... it gets one worked up'.

Riley gets even more worked up about Catholicism, which he addresses on 'Harry's Chin' - it's about the hang-ups and hypocrisy of the Catholic religion - 'wanting to be evil but scared of sin'. My wide told me a teacher said to her class, they were all about eight, if you commit a mortal sin, your chest'll go black. How's a kid supposed to grow up?

'I tried to be more positive on 'Fancy Meeting God'. It's so easy to get into tunnelvision with that cynical thing - I don't get great enjoyment out of writing about what I like, but I realise just slagging everything off all the time isn't going to solve anything'.

Still, slagging of is the man's forte, and the songs on 'Fancy Meeting God' swipe with verve at journalists, cocktail bar radicals (with a capital W), 'dope fiends, laid back activists and obscure artists'.

Marc, as someone with an axe or two to grind, do you feel any kinship with the campaigning spirit of the radical fringe of pop, the Johns and co?

'None at all. The Miners' benefits, a lot of them were really horrible affairs - the bands shouting after every number 'Support the miners! This one's about the scabs!' They really do believe they're changing people's opinions by saying this, but it's totally patronising to your audience. We did a miners benefit but we didn't feel motivated to shout at the audience. The Redskins'd still be in their bedroom now if it wasn't for the miners.

'With us, it's human politics. Common-sense come to the fore, or humility, or whatever. But I'll only talk from my own experience, I won't tell people what hey shouldn't be doing, my only cause is to document things I've learnt about'.

Hmm. Experience, common-sense ... Sounds like a humanist cop-out, perhaps? But what Marc's talking about is his distaste for sloganeering. The left in British rock is getting its act together by and by, but some of its polemical tactics call for responses that don't always leave room for thinking about political issues. We get to talking about the Style Council tour, with the giant projection of Thatcher and Reagan.

'Sloganeering - it's an insult to the audience to assume that if you keep shouting at them long enough, you'll get there in the end. Weller's got maybe 3,000 people at his concert that're to the Left, you get a picture of Thatcher, it's like a fucking pantomime - 'Ooh look out Paul, she's behind you'. There's no substance in it at all, it's stating the obvious all the time'.

Once thing The Creepers' records do is make you think it out for yourself - if only because the lyrics are usually inaudible. Doesn't this present some problems?

'No, it's the way I've been brought up. Some people have quoted me and they've got their own interpretation of the words, and the imagination they put into it is great. Somebody wrote a review of 'Fancy Meeting god' and they put 'everybody hates Jackie Charlton', and it's not, it's Jocky Carson. Now if I had a libel suit from Jackie Charlton I wouldn't be too happy'.

And here I was thinking it was Johnny Carson. I refer you, dear reader, to 'Wanna Cocktail Hate Tale', where you can make your own mind up about Bob Monkhouse, Melvyn Bragg and Dudley Moore. More fun than Spitting Image, I tell you.

Finally released by the Woodpecker hordes, we escape to the House of In Tape where Marc and wife Tracey share a flat with a tarantula, an Indian python called Sabu, and Timothy Malcolm Riley (a dog).

The next In Tape release is place on the turntable, a slice of scorching Delta hardcore by The Janitors, from Newcastle, entitled 'Chicken Stew' - the paint peels spontaneously off the wall and Sabu moults two layers of skin.

Mentally, I tot up the essential Creepers discography - the 'Jumper Clown' single, the 'Creeping at Maida Vale' 12" and the wonderful 'Gross Out' LP, beside which this year's 'Fancy Meeting God' pales somewhat, but is worthy of investigation nonetheless. Methinks, however, the best from this rare conglomerate of wit, intelligence and vitriol that is The Creepers is yet to come.

Golden rule, always leave 'em laughing. This one'll kill you.

'Recently we played in Durham and this lad came down, and he's a dead ringer for The Edge out of U2. So I came on and said, We've got a very special guest tonight, and all the chins in the audience dropped and they all started clapping him. I said, Come on up and we'll do 'I Will Follow', but he wouldn't get up. And I said, He's a millionaire, but he's not too proud to come to a Creepers concert. And then he got up and played drums on 'Louie Louie'.

'You get branded as being a miserable bastard - what's a boy to do?'

(Jonathan Romney, NME: 31st August 1985, p36)