When did Peter O’Toole last test his climbing competence? The Sixties seemed a never-ending urban rope climb inching up iron drainpipes and daring foot scrapes across solid-wood window ledges. A tap on the glass, the look of shock on the inhabitant’s face and you were in. “Now, do you have whisky, ice and two glasses, my dear?” Possibly the last occasion was three years earlier when he’d lost the keys to his flat in the early hours having been out to dinner with… was it Richard Harris at the Dorchester? If it was, it was a quiet night by their standards. Nothing stronger than tonic water had passed their lips but their evening’s recollections covered many nights of strong liquor, most of which had passed into legend. Drunk on drinking memories. O’Toole had asked to take in the bouquet of another restaurant-goer’s flowery white wine. He’d sniffed, closed his eyes, announced, “Mmm, wonderful,” and passed the glass back. And then the inside-outs of pockets on the doorstep and hands on hips wondering if the keys were in the back of the cab that had fleetingly departed towards the West End with a wink of an indicator. Always keep a top window of your property ajar. It let’s the air circulate; 20 minutes later O’Toole was indoors.
Looking into the spattering rain, O’Toole knew he was in for a tough task ahead, yet hunger, thirst and weariness proved improbable allies. I must go, he thought. A foot off the ground and the trial was underway but O’Toole hurriedly understood that the day’s torrential conditions would only add to his vulnerability. He considered the white and green stone and whispered, “Play your part Mr Cliff and don’t arse things up for me, there’s a good chap. Six lives might depend on my successful scaling of your pockmarked pallor.” He edged upwards.
“You see it’s all in the mind!” O’Toole shouted to the spectators below, as he slapped his hands from small ledge to divot to crevice. With the concentration required, the rattle of relentless rain had all but been tuned out. O’Toole plotted his course, planning seconds ahead, face additionally catching moisture now from the dripping limestone. He shifted sidewards, shaking his head to remove his flopping fringe from his eyes, jockeying for simpler routes and potential locations in which he could rest.
“The trick is not to concentrate on the ascent as a whole,” O’Toole called out. “It would be overwhelming. Take it stretch by stretch, rather like reading a book. It’s a collection of chapters and you’re never quite sure how it’s going to end until you reach the last page. Apart from Mark E Smith, of course! That bugger’d instinctively know the conclusion from reading the first paragraph! May I catch this Fall of yours at some point?”
“Guest list!” Smith spoke with cupped hands. “I’ll dedicate ‘Perverted By Language’ to you!”
“That would be marvellous!” O’Toole grinned.
From below, eyes scanned O’Toole’s every move, mapping out an itinerary for the actor in their own minds. The next section was a doddle, like climbing a stepladder, but a bulge 20 feet up, which ran the length of the more-navigable cliff, required care and attention. Gravity has a strong effect on the backside when there is nothing between it and the hard ground below. A scrape of O’Toole’s shoe as it fought for purchase on the rock surface brought gasps from the onlookers, but a tightrope-walker’s foot along the narrowest of seams while tightly hugging the rock gave precious time to devise the next action. O’Toole felt with delicate fingertips and pushed with precision from his knees, and then he was above the natural protrusion and able to rest and regain his composure.
The difficult section behind him, O’Toole was aware that complacency could yet prove his undoing. Cracks and crevices were few and far between and for a moment, 60 feet high, O’Toole wondered if he’d happened upon a dead end. He clawed at a clump of moss and it fell away from the wall, giving him an extra pocket to utilise. Sweat gathered on his forehead, which he wiped using the rock as a cool sponge. Then, suddenly, O’Toole could view his job ahead via a series of pits and depressions that were so beautifully laid out that he thought for a moment that he was taking a stage-one mountain-climbing certificate on an artificial wall.
Moving to his right before the final push to the top, O’Toole ridiculously mistimed a simple foot manoeuvre and found himself clinging for dear life by his resolute hand grip.
“What on earth is he doing?” Tony Wilson spoke and looked away.
“He’s tiring, that’s what,” Brian Clough said. “There’s nowt we can do. We can’t catch him if he drops. He’s on his own. If he was in my first team I’d be getting Kenny Swain warmed up on the touchline.”
O’Toole gambled and grasped at a scrappy bush whose roots thankfully were firmly entrenched in a pocket of deep soil. Using its woody base he was able to swing his legs until he was practically horizontal and from there, with a burst of arm strength, he could re-assemble in an upright position and make a scramble for a sizeable ledge that allowed him to summon further resolve.
“Almost there,” he muttered. He allowed himself a brief view of the dark woodland below, the ant-like figures from music, sport and TV so many feet beneath, and the remains of the Vauxhall VX seized by the pine tree’s spindly branches. Hidden in a natural shroud, there was no sign of the tower and castellations of the secretive Hangingbrow Hall. A crow, in search of a pester-free mealtime alternative to Mark E Smith’s deceased driver, landed on an outcrop close to the summit and eyed O’Toole to ascertain whether he was worth the effort. O’Toole in return glanced at the shimmering feathers and blood-stained beak and stated, “You come within an inch of me, crasher, and your flying days will be over.” The crow seemed to understand this unfriendly sentiment and thumped and flapped into the sky with the heavy ascension of a fully laden bomber aircraft.
O’Toole was elated to feel scrub grass in his grasping hands and with elbows over the precipice, he was able to pull his shaking legs upwards and over for a Fosbury flop to sweet freedom. He rolled onto his back with eyes closed, rain spilling from a wild, dark sky, the most difficult climb in his life now completed. Was there still time to become a polar explorer?
“That was almost a piece of performance art,” Wilson pointed upwards. “Grace, technique, jeopardy, it had the lot, and it was a pleasure to behold. I’m almost speechless that he made it.”
“That’d be a first,” Smith declared.
“I’ve seen some crazy things in my time but this takes biscuit,” Geoff Boycott shook his head. “Madness, utter madness. Bravest thing I’ve seen since Aussie Kim Hughes worked West Indies pace attack of Holding, Roberts, Garner and Croft a few year back and come art wi’ a century.”
O’Toole waved enthusiastically from the summit as if he were a passenger on a steam ship that was about to embark on a transatlantic voyage. His delight was easy to recognise from the foot of the cliff and each of the five stricken characters below could almost sense O’Toole’s piercing Columbia blue eyes bidding them all a fond farewell. Then he was gone.
With O’Toole’s audacious departure, a sullenness descended on the remaining rain-sodden wretches as they set their minds to following what they perceived to be the route of the road that skirted the crag edge. However, Cumbria’s flora had other ideas. O’Toole had already seen that thick vegetation barred their way around the limestone perimeter, and, added to the quandary, the foot of the incline had been strewn with rubbish. Amid the bramble mass were builders’ rubble, half toilets and unwanted furniture, which had all been dumped from altitude for years – another job ticked on a local contractor’s to-do list.
Realising there was no effective passage through thorny wilds, the five delirious travellers then noted with repugnance a 15-feet-high concrete-panel fence emerge from the near-blackness topped with over-officious amounts of twisting rusted barbed wire. Once again they were captives of the landscape. A foray by Boycott and Clough quickly revealed that the barrier and its razor-sharp peak adornment had been meticulously attached to the cliff and even raised 30 feet up its sheer face to prevent trespass or escape. Defeated, the five followed the easier path through the woodland, a journey that gave as few hindrances as possible.
Wilson passed time by explaining to whoever would listen about his utter dislike of London and how both NMEjournalist and ZTT Records co-founder Paul Morley had, in effect, discredited the entire North-west by relocating to the capital. “ZTT have got that fucking awful Scouse troupe Frankie Goes To Hollywood bothering the charts with ‘Relax’,” he lamented. “I’ve nothing against people from Liverpool, you understand. The city is, after all, our little brother further along the M62, although, perhaps, they should develop their sense of humour. But ‘Relax’? Man, I hate the record. Absolutely loathe it. On Wednesday, that mid-Atlantic twat Mike Read at Radio 1 banned it due to its obscene lyrics, but as we have seen with the Sex Pistols, once prohibition is in place, people want it all the more. Luckily at Factory it isn’t about selling records.”
Clough and Boycott exchanged expressions of tedium.
Healy, who was only half-listening, asked, “What does ZTT stand for, like?”
“Zang Tuum Tumb,” Wilson seethed. “Are you familiar with initialism? No? Then you should read more. It’s derived from the sound poem “Zang Tumb Tumb” by an Italian guy called Marinetti, founder of futurism and who, as it transpires, was also the author of the Italian fascist manifesto. The title refers to the sound of a machine gun from some conflict or other that Italy had become embroiled in around 1912. Probably got their arses kicked. Interestingly, Marinetti hated pasta. He thought it was part of the reason why his fellow countrymen were prone to apathy and ennui. He may have a point. I want to nap after a spaghetti alla carbonara.”
“Zang zang… what?” Healy spat. “To be honest, it sounds like a right load of bollocks, man.”
“Again, that’s an opinion,” Wilson concluded.
Boycott gritted his teeth as his holdall strap bit into his shoulder, not assisted one iota by the confusing conversation he was being subjected to. He switched his bag to the opposite shoulder and began another countdown to pain. At the very least, Boycott believed, the bag could be used as a pillow should they have to rough it. He was beginning to feel fragile and that he should quietly lie on the ground, leaving his destiny in the hands of others. And yet, he couldn’t let the side down.
“If I were a tennis champ,” started Boycott with renewed vigour, “I might call my country mansion Fifteen Hall.”
“Eh, Geoff Boycott’s just cracked a joke, man,” Healy perkily responded. “Mike Yarwood and Jim Davidson must be quaking in their boots!”
This brought a hint of a smile from Clough, perhaps the last smile he had the energy to pull that day. “Eh, if you’d hit hard times, you could call it Sod Hall,” he quipped. “I wish Sod Hall was nearby. Or Bugger Hall! I could do with a kip. I must have lost a stone in weight today, but gained a stone in wet clothes.”
“It’ll read well in your autobiography,” Smith said.
“I wonder what Hangingbrow Hall is named after?” Wilson wondered. “You don’t think…?”
Mark E Smith shook his head. “What, you think it were a place where they strung folk up in Middle Ages? Wouldn’t ’ave thought so, cocker. Imagine you’re building the chimney on the place, y’know, job’s almost done, and one of the workers says, ‘You know that tree over there, that’s where they used to execute local sheep thieves. You should name your new house after that.’ Not very ’omely is it? I should think it’s more likely that a tree nearby had a low branch on it. Not that any of this has any consequence on us literally walking ourselves to an early grave. It’s funny, Hangingbrow’s spooks now seem almost welcoming, although Wilson’s scotched that one with his endless man-on-TV prying. Stirring up a hornet’s nest of the dead with his accomplice O’Toole. Anyway, too late now. We’d never find the gaff.”
“I’ll tell you what, we can’t walk indefinitely, lads,” Tim Healy admitted. “We’re making a habit out of this. Here we are, middle of a forest once again, miles from anywhere, no food, no water, it’s dark and we’ve got foot rot from the trench-like conditions and forced marches.”
“Funny that Hitler fancied shackin’ up this way,” Boycott spoke. “It makes you think ’e were wantin’ to use power of all these ghouls at Hangingbrow for ’is own dastardly plans. But question is, ’ow? Perhaps ’e were intent on creatin’ a ghost bomb that, when detonated, would frighten people to death. He were obviously a total nutcase so that sort of thing would’ve appealed to ’is twisted logic. Pity Pete’s not ’ere. He’d ’ave ’ad a fully thought-out prognosis of stinkin’ plot.”
“Although it stands to reason what the Germans did was wrong, you have to remember that a lot of people nowadays have an obsession with Nazi imagery,” said Smith. “Isn’t that right, Tony? It’s Factory through and through.”
“Well, of course you’re talking complete nonsense, Mark, and you know it,” Wilson defended, stepping over a fallen tree trunk. “Not so very long ago – and this is on record – you used to walk about Manchester with a swastika on your sleeve or has that been conveniently forgotten?”
“Whaaat?” Boycott howled.
Clough tutted. “I’d have thought better of you, Smithy.”
“All true,” Wilson smiled.
“Not true at all,” Smith responded, “and this is something I need to be careful about, cos that is massive disinformation. When we formed The Fall, it was Bramah, Baines and Friel used to wear the Nazi Youth armbands. I don’t know what they were thinkin’ of. My dad would have kicked the living shit out of me if he’d spotted me wearing owt like that. We used to drink in these biker pubs where you could buy acid, and my daft musicians automatically assumed bikers were Nazis. Maybe in America, but not ’ere. Friel was half-Jewish. We’d go in a bikers’ boozer and the band would usually end up cowering under a table being shoed by leather-clad fellas! Sex Pistols were not shy of slipping an armband on either. Tony, here, has had a band give themselves not one, but two Nazi-inspired names in Joy Division and New Order, while the band he personally manages dresses in Hitler Youth uniform. It’s indefensible.”
“I no longer manage Ratio, but you’re right in that I’ve had the Jewish Telegraph on my hands,” Wilson admitted. “‘Granada man owns Nazi nightclub’, or words to that effect, was the front-cover headline.”
“But that was about you using Claude Bessy’s German propaganda videos in the Haçienda,” Smith reminded. “Just tactless.”
“Provocative,” Wilson said, holding up a finger to further make his point. “The name New Order was Gretton’s idea and comes from the Khmer Rouge rather than Nazi Germany. Who would have guessed that Gretton’s a secret Pol Pot fan? The Khmer Rouge had just changed its name to the New Order of the Kampuchean Liberation. But with Joy Division and punk, and to a lesser extent post-punk, you’ve got to look at the situationist and postmodern perspectives, Mark.”
Smith shook his head. “University crap. What you lot do is borderline dangerous.”
“Bowie moves to Germany,” Wilson explained. “Comes back to visit London and gives a Nazi salute at Victoria station. You’ve got Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren using Nazi symbolism as a shock aesthetic in their bondage-inspired fashionwear. It’s about the destabilisation of art but it means nothing. It’s an absence of values. Then comes our own Warsaw – named after the Bowie record ‘Warszawa’– soon to be re-titled Joy Division, and here you’ve got to bring in the semiotics of the punk movement: signs and symbols and their interpretation. There’s the shock value to the older generation.”
“Why get them involved in the first place?” Smith countered, wiping the rain from his eyes. “My mam’s got enough on her plate keeping her house tidy and puttin’ money away for Christmas and birthdays!”
“Mark, darling,” Wilson said in a high-handed manner, “the situationist’s epater le bourgeois was a subculture strategy.”
“It was sloppy,” Smith replied. “Get involved with movements and you’ll date. The Fall never attached themselves to anything. We were not punks.”
“Which you sidestepped to your credit,” Wilson decided. “You were looking long-term.”
“The band wanted to be punks, but not me,” said Smith. “They’re thanking me for that now. But all your Nazi shit, Barney bawlin’ out Rudolf Hess’s prisoner-of-war number and ‘An Ideal For Living’ EP with that Hitler Youth chap on the sleeve bangin’ his drums. You deserve all the flack you get, Wilson.”
“You understand that Ian, Barney and Stephen had a wider interest in German culture,” Wilson further commented. “Kraftwerk, Can and Krautrock are the bedrock of Joy Division/New Order. I’ve no idea what makes Hooky tick apart from speedway, although I will say he’s the only one who gets off his fucking arse to help out with running the Haçienda and the endless shit that that entails. Gillian, God bless her, just goes along with whatever’s happening.”
“I hope you two are well-paid for knowing all this twaddle,” Clough grunted. “Cos I’ll tell you something, that was just noise to me.”
“They’re intellectuals, pair of ’em,” Boycott stated, and meant it as disapproval. “Pol Pot they’re in thrall to would’ve clipped their wings and more. You’d get very little done in sportin’ world if your ’ead’s full of useless info like that. Sounds to me like these punks wanted Germany to win War.”
“But that’s just the thing,” Wilson remarked. “It’s the evaporation of meaning; the simple act of antagonism. To punks, the swastika’s just symbolism – the SS, oppression, unspeakable evil has been removed. There was an interview with a punk girl, I forget where I read it, but she said, ‘We just want to be loathed.’ That’s the sentiments in a nutshell, and Mark might not believe this, but I like nutshells.”
“Sounds like Hitler was the original punk to me, if all what you’re saying is correct, like,” Healy put in. ‘But I expect those six million Jews he got rid off might have a different take on all ya ‘symbolism’.”
“Leave it for now, Wilson, we’re all fuckin’ done-in,” Smith uttered as he started closing one eye at a time in an attempt to get some rest, making him appear like a railway-crossing signal in slow motion.
Like an unsolicited gift, the rain halted its appreciative raucous football-ground applause and the result was a clarity of hearing that had been absent since the gang’s break for freedom almost ten hours previously. Drip, drip, drip, blop, and Cumbria breathed a sigh of relief. It was cold beyond reason, gusty too, but any ideas of camping out and starting a health-reviving bonfire with fragrant smoke and friendly colour were instantly dismissed due to the vile dampness of the countryside. Teeth chattered, clockwork jaws wound to the maximum. An overall feeling of abject failure fell screaming like an Acme anvil in a Road Runner cartoon.
Smith disgustedly flung the worthless saturated contents of his pocket into the unknown and experienced the first flush of anger and confusion as nicotine withdrawal began its party at the host’s expense. “An Averna wouldn’t go amiss right now,” he thundered.
It was Healy who first spotted the tree, leaf-devoid, but round and robust, with a single long low-slung branch reaching out into its woodland setting, keeping opposing trees at arm’s length. Healy reached up and wrapped his fingers around the black wet wood, hanging to stretch his spine and collect his thoughts.
“I suggest we get some rest by Robin Hood’s oak ’ere,” Boycott spoke. “Keep close together for warmth, try and get an hour’s sleep at least, wait for light and ’ope to find a rescue team’s Labrador lickin’ your cheeks at some point after that. At least rain is ’oldin’ off.”
“I’ll keep a distance if you don’t mind,” Smith replied. “I sleep better on my own.”
“Aye, me an’ all, bonny lad,” added Healy with a reluctant smile. “I’ll plonk mesel’ by that sapling over there.”
“I won’t need tucking in either,” Clough added and stood like the Colossus of Rhodes, taking in their predicament with hands on hips.
Wilson peered into the darkness beyond the tree’s unusual bow and as pennies began cascading in his mind in a style reminiscent of the 2p falls in a seaside amusement arcade, he danced forward, gothic coat trailing, to get a better view. “Whoooaaa,” he groaned. “Oh. My. God.” Walking slowly, face slightly raised, hands placed on cheeks, he proceeded from the cover of the woodland and found by his feet a collection of rain-filled pots, pans, bowls and other assorted kitchen items, laid out in a wide circle. Like the victim of a seriously fiendish practical joke, he marvelled at a house with a central tower, castellations and higgledy-piggledy extensions at its wings.
Healy wasn’t far behind and when he too saw the outline of the building, this pile of bricks that had so tormented the troupe, he stumbled back as if struck by a wizard wielding his wand.
“Well I never,” Clough said quietly to himself and gave a brief grin of defeat.
“Maybe there’s two ’ouses built similar,” Boycott suggested. “And we’re at other, 15 mile away, that’s got ’appy family livin’ in it.”
“No, we’ve walked in a big bloody circle,” Clough affirmed. “We’re back where we started, Geoffrey.”
In an upstairs room, curtains partially drawn, a frantic light show was in mid-performance, a no-go for any epileptic due to the rapid skipping between light and dark. A TARDIS-style whooshing and howling could be detected emanating from the forbidding flickering illumination. Then the bizarre sound of high-pitched laughter and 1930s music scratching a gramophone tore through the night.
“Looks like the snooker’s on,” Healy announced with bulging eyes.
“Yeah,” Wilson nodded. “Hurricane fucking Higgins.”