THE OTHERWISE by Mark E. Smith and Graham Duff
150 x 205mm, 300 pages, Black and white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2021
Read The Otherwise and shed a tear for one of cinema’s great, long-lost screenplays.” Ben Wheatley
In 2015, Mark E. Smith of legendary post-punk group The Fall and screenwriter Graham Duff co-wrote the script for a horror feature film entitled The Otherwise.
The Fall are recording an EP in an isolated recording studio on Pendle Hill. The surrounding Lancashire landscape is at the mercy of a Satanic biker gang, and haunted by Scottish clansmen who have slipped through time from the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
Every film production company they showed it to said it was “too weird” to ever be made. Yes, The Otherwise is weird. It’s also witty, shocking, and genuinely scary. Now the screenplay is published for the first time, alongside handwritten notes and previously unpublished photographs by Jim Moir and Smith’s widow and Fall keyboardist Elena Poulou.
Also within are essays by Duff and Poulou, and transcripts of conversations between Smith and Duff, in which they discuss creativity, dreams, musical loves (from Can to acid house) and favourite films (from Britannia Hospital to White Heat).
With Manchester’s visionary frontman Mark E. Smith as their one constant, The Fall were the most individual and influential group of their era. From post punk angularity to mutant rockabilly and machine-driven garage rock, via slanted Northern pop, The Fall were one of Britain’s last great singles bands.
As well as their own unmistakable songs, The Fall’s single discography also takes in a panoramic range of cover versions, including the psychedelia of The Move, the northern soul of R. Dean Taylor, the country rock of George Jones, the quintessential Englishness of The Kinks and William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.
Covering a diverse and thrilling run of over 50 releases between 1978 and 2016, Graham Duff has interviewed key members of The Fall, including Marc Riley, Elena Poulou, Simon Wolstencroft, Keiron Melling, Una Baines, Tim Presley and Paul Hanley.
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