Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
When Steve Hanley joined Manchester post-punk band the Fall, he expected to play guitar, not pop on a London stage.
“I was the new pope,” recalls the singer. “I put on a suit full of papa with about seven different skirts, and I would go out and rock them.” The arrival of the Hanley popes marked the final moments of a kaleidoscopic and surreal production featuring mafia gangsters, exiled Nazi officials, and an artist. Leigh Bowery playing cardinal. “It was amazing,” Hanley says.
In December 1986, Hey! Luciani: The Life and Codex of John Paul I ran for two weeks at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios. To his secretary Mark E SmithFall’s iconoclastic singer and lyricist who died in 2018, was “a cross between Shakespeare and The Prisoner”. However, for the critics it was unfortunate. “Smith’s total failure must be considered his own,” sneered the Guardian. Even Melody Wong, who has held a Fall-supporting ceremony, called for a “swift and bloody end to Arts Council funding”.
But 40 years later, Smith’s play is back from the dead. This week, at Manchester’s Band on the Wall venue, comedian Graham Duff – a one-time collaborator with Smith – will reboot Hey! Luciani. The recital, complete with costumes and music from Fall’s classic band The Look Back Bores, is part of the 50th anniversary Fall celebration. “This is a poisoned chalice,” likes Duff to play evil. “It’s really unusual.”
In 1986, The Fall was at the peak of their commercial power: that year’s album peaked at 36 in the UK charts. “I remember him telling me years ago that he was thinking of writing a play,” said Hanley, who was the second longest-serving member of the group after Smith. When Riverside called Smith’s bluff, the singer spent a US tour languishing in hotel rooms and bars. The script was well known Pope John Paul I, (born Albino Luciani) who died suddenly in 1978 from a heart attack. he came 33 days after the meeting that elected him. They are said to have been written on beer mats and delivered to Riverside in a shoebox.
“Mark was very passionate about the script,” Hanley explains of the rehearsals. “He only gives you a little bit, so it was hard to figure it out.” The play appears to be based on In God’s Name, a bestseller in 1984 by David Yallop in which Luciani was killed as a result of a corruption scandal in the Vatican. But it didn’t help that the performers were often not professional, which Smith prefers to DIY for untrained musicians. “Nightclubs used to pay Leigh Bowery just to come in,” recalls Australian fashion designer Hanley. “So after the play he just goes to his real job.”
When Duff was asked to revive the play, she began asking those who had worked on it or seen the first play. “Jackie O’Malley,” explains Duff of one of the actors in 1986, “was an 18-year-old acting student who got to know Mark at the Haçienda.” He just said, ‘Do you want to be in the play I’m doing?'”
Duff’s lightbulb moment came when a secret VHS tape recording of the show — long rumored, disappeared — happened. “I thought: this is not a distraction,” Duff says confidently about filming. “Everybody’s hitting what they want, the band is tight, the lighting is great. It might be a bit obscure, or hard to figure out, but it works.”
The problem, Duff thinks, is that critics expect rock music. “But Mark is a modern storyteller,” explains the director. “You get a disturbing narrative, an erasure of the distinction between high and low art, a reference to a fictional world.”
Its secret nature can be a point. “Part of what he’s doing is showing you that the Vatican is so entrenched in government, banking, business,” says Duff, “that the actual act of worship is very low. Big events happen, people are killed, power shifts. To make the themes sound better than in 1986, Duff has hired actors: former Britain’s Got Talent contestant turned Coronation Street star Jack Carroll. Mark E Smith who was the narrator in the original script, while the protagonist Jonathan Mayor becomes Leigh Bowery’s cardinal.
If June’s performance is successful, Duff hopes her brand can be picked up by one of Manchester’s biggest art brands. “I’ve seen things with a lot of money and good people,” said the director, “that aren’t nearly as ambitious or fun as Hey! Luciani.”
Although he won’t be on stage this time, Hanley’s expectations for the evening are very low. “I’ve been arrested twice in my life,” says the singer cheerfully. “Once, on the way home after playing, and once at Band on the Wall. If I can get through the night without getting arrested then I’ll be happy.”
