“For The Fall fan who thinks they’ve read everything,” writes Edwin Pouncey in The Wire 449, “this tale of a creative friendship between two very different writers will come as a revelation.”

In 2015, The Fall’s Mark E Smith and screenwriter Graham Duff wrote the script for a horror film, The Otherwise, in which The Fall are recording in an isolated studio, while the surrounding countryside is at the mercy of time-travelling Jacobite soldiers.

The newly-published script is accompanied by an essay by Smith's widow Elena Poulou plus transcripts of Smith and Duff in conversation on a range of topics: creativity, dreams, musical loves and favourite films. Here they share their appreciation of the German band Can and British film director Lindsay Anderson.

MARK: I did this thing a while back, for the bleedin’ James Joyce Society.

GRAHAM: Did you set them straight?

[Laughter]

MARK: Yeah, I think I did, yeah.

GRAHAM: I know this is heresy, but I’ve never really been able to get into Joyce.

MARK: No, I think he is very good actually. Some of it, y’know. But this thing, it was weird. I was ready to leave and they fuckin’… They locked the door and showed this film. It was… it was not right, y’know what I’m saying?

GRAHAM: What?

MARK: Some art thing: worse thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Y’know in O Lucky Man! where everywhere he goes he ends up being shown films. It was like that. Soon as it started I knew why they’d locked the fuckin’ door. Nobody would want to sit through that!

GRAHAM: I watched O Lucky Man! again the week before last. Reckon that’d be about my 20th viewing.

MARK: Oh it is fantastic. Yeah, I must’ve seen it at least five times meself. Lindsay Anderson was… he was fuckin’ acidic! The best. If you want to know what Britain was like in 1973, watch O Lucky Man!

GRAHAM: Exactly! It’s all there: every layer of society.

MARK: The more you think about it… It’s superb. Actually I watched Britannia Hospital again a while back. It was a blow out watching it again. It is fuckin’ fantastic.

GRAHAM: In terms of the storytelling in that, David Sherwin’s writing is so strong. Things like… How he kills off the hero half way through the film, then brings him back as a ‘monster’. It’s amazing.

MARK: It’s everything that films try to be now. And O Lucky Man! the more you watch it, the more there is in there. It’s like Shakespeare or summat. The only thing is, I used to hate all that Alan Price music.

GRAHAM: Yeah well, to be honest, I’ve watched the film so many times now that I just love the music. It’s so completely bound up in the film for me.

MARK: Yeah, yeah… That stuff with Alan Price and the band in the van and all that is quite interesting. And there’s those great sections in it, where it has ‘4: The North of England’. In a way it’s odd. But I sort of grew up with it. So If…. when If…. came out I was in the second year at grammar school. So I identified with it.

But then I’d never seen O Lucky Man! for years. But it was the same sort of thing. Like when it had ‘6: Yorkshire’. And at that time I was a shipping clerk, and every time I used to have to go to Yorkshire. And every time it was like a totally different world. And it shows that. He has to go into a strip club, to talk to the mayor about getting a deal in Wakefield or summat. And that’s what Yorkshire used to be like.

I used to go over on me motorbike from Salford docks, to talk to the guy, and you end up in a porn party. When I was about 17. In fuckin’ Yorkshire, where I’d never been in me bleedin’ life, on a motorbike, to get the guy to sign these import and export forms and I had to go in this club. And they had these strippers on, and the Mayor was in there, and I’m tryin’ to get the guy to sign these forms.

And then in Lancashire at one point, a similar thing, I had to go to this bloke’s house, and there’s all these birds, and the fuckin’ Mayor! Another Mayor! He didn’t have any underpants on and he had a big fuckin’ joint in his fuckin’ hand!

[Laughter]

Thanks for the CD by the way. That was great actually, because my copy of Tago Mago is fuckin’… It is scratched to fuck. But I couldn’t go buy it myself, y’know.

GRAHAM: Why?

MARK: Well, y’know… I couldn’t. Y’know what I’m saying?

GRAHAM: What, you couldn’t be seen going into a record shop and buying a Can album?

MARK: No… it’s not that…

GRAHAM: It’s not like in the 70s, when the police treated it as a misdemeanour. It wouldn’t end up on your permanent record.

[Laughter]

MARK: No, it’s just y’know, it’s hip to buy Can records nowadays. It is. See it all the time in Manchester.

GRAHAM: Tago Mago was the first Can album I ever heard.

MARK: Yeah me too. That was the first one I bought. Mail order. You couldn’t fuckin’ get it otherwise. I was into The Velvet Underground. But then Can! I tell you, when I was working on the docks, Can saved my life. That’s what people don’t understand now. Now it’s hip to be into Can, you know what I’m sayin’? But y’see a lot of people want to say they like Can. But most of ‘em, they don’t really get what it is that’s going on.

GRAHAM: It’s still my favourite Can album. “Mushroom” and “Bring Me Coffee Or Tea”. It’s like… You can just hear they’re all bringing the best out of each other. The band is so tight.

MARK: Well that’s what you fuckin’ want isn’t it. Yeah it’s very… I was mad into Can. I learnt a lot from Tago Mago. I tell you the other one I played the most: Soundtracks. Have you heard that?

GRAHAM: Yeah. Brilliant. “Tango Whiskyman”!

MARK: These films, you’ve never seen ‘em in your bleedin’ life. But the music! What’s that er… “Don’t Turn The Light On”? Jaki’s fuckin’ drumming on that!

GRAHAM: A mate of mine is a sound engineer. And about 20 years ago he worked with Holger Czukay. And he came into the studio one morning and apparently Holger had come in over night and dug out a huge hole in one of the studio walls so he could thread some piano wire through and twang it!

MARK: See a lot of people, they think Can is just fuckin’ Holger. But it’s fuckin’ not. Even now, the Germans couldn’t care less about Can.

The Otherwise: The Screenplay For A Horror Film That Never Was by Mark E Smith and Graham Duff is available now from Strange Attractor Press. Read Edwin Pouncey's review of the book inside The Wire 449. Subscribers can also access the review via our online archive.