Lyrics

No need to be downhearted
There must be ten ways to leave your man

Don't be broken-hearted
There are many ways to leave your man
Leave your man
Leave your man
Leave your man

You gotta be cheerful-hearted
There's at least fifteen ways to leave your man

Get a flat and a magazine
Get your body ahead and out of that scene 

Don't be disconcerted
There must be fifteen ways to leave your man

Soon you will discover you are no longer undercover

Break! Now! Fly direct! Post Office box! 

You'll get a dallying notion 
But you will soon recover
No longer undercover
Branch out into complete disorder

You gotta be cheerful-hearted
There's at least fifteen ways to leave your man
Get a flat and a magazine
Get your body ahead and out of that scene.

But don't be disconcerted
There are eight ways to keep your man
Don't be downhearted
There are fifteen ways to leave your man

Don't be too disconcerted
You use all fifteen ways to leave your man
Leave your man
Sixteen ways to leave your man
Leave your man
Leave your man

No need to be downhearted
There must be ten ways to leave your man

Don't be broken-hearted
There are many ways to leave your man
Leave your man
Leave your man
Leave your man

You gotta be cheerful-hearted
There's at least fifteen ways to leave your man

Get a flat and a magazine
Get your body ahead and out of that scene

Don't be disconcerted
There must be fifteen ways to leave your man

Soon you will discover you are no longer undercover

Break! Now! Fly direct! Post Office box!

You'll get a dallying notion
But you will soon recover
No longer undercover
Branch out into complete disorder

You gotta be cheerful-hearted
There's at least fifteen ways to leave your man
Get a flat and a magazine
Get your body ahead and out of that scene.

But don't be disconcerted 
There are eight ways to keep your man
Don't be downhearted
There are fifteen ways to leave your man
Sixteen ways to leave your man
Leave your man
Leave your man

Commentary

Described by Steve Pringle in You Must Get Them All (p.272) as “a straightforward mid-tempo indie-jangle-strum with a conventional verse-chorus structure”, “15 Ways” is indeed played fairly straight. It hasn’t tended to be regarded very highly: Paul Mathur in the Melody Maker called the single “a record that I will never play again unless a sizeable bet depends on it”, and Johnny Cigarettes in the New Musical Express dismissed it as, “almost easy-listening wallpaper by Fall standards, Mark ruminating philosophically over a simpering keyboard and a slacking guitar jangle to effortlessly original if reasonably forgettable effect.” An almost entirely negative review in the fanzine The Biggest Library Yet by Andy Campbell described “15 Ways” as “a weary, almost formulaic song… down there with High Tension Line and Ed’s Babe as their weakest A side. There’s little of the wit, wisdom, and fury, with which we normally associate Fall records.” (Campbell, 1994, pp.19-20). Dave Thompson’s retrospective assessment (2003, p.136) was that it was “neither the Fall’s finest single, nor the best possible induction into the forthcoming Middle Class Revolt.” On the other hand, Tommy Mackay thought the “subtle” keyboards “absolutely brilliant” (2018, p.139).

The single (released 18 April 1994, reaching a peak of #65 in the UK singles chart) and album (released 3 May 1994) versions are different mixes or edits, and so there is a very slight variation in the lyric, but both are documented above. Both versions are credited to Smith/Scanlon/Hanley, S.

The song was also recorded for a BBC Radio 1 Mark Goodier session on 1 May 1993 (broadcast 17 May 1993); this somewhat scrambled version includes the line “You’ll get an older lover” – a call-back quotation from “An Older Lover, Etc.”.

Mark Goodier Session version

No need to be downhearted
There must be ten ways to leave your man
Don't be broken-hearted
There's all kinds of ways to [ ]
Leave your man
Leave your man
Be cosmopolitan 
There is fifty points to leave your man
Get a flat and a magazine
Get your body ahead out of all that scene
Be broken-hearted, there must be fifteen ways to leave your man
And you have the notion, maybe it wasn't as good about 
Discover, now you're on your own, life
Undercover
There must be fifteen ways to leave your man
And you will discover your Euro man is an idiot thing
You'll miss or discover
You'll get an older lover
There must be fifteen ways that you can leave your man
Don't be broken-hearted
There must be ten ways to leave your man
No you don't be downhearted
There are all kinds of ways you can leave your man
There are all ways to leave your man
Don't be broken-hearted
There are sixteen ways to leave your man

The song title and lyrics appear to owe something to Paul Simon’s 1975 song, “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover”. But where the narrator of Paul Simon’s text is receiving advice and/or encouragement, MES’s intent appears to have been disapproval of a social phenomenon.

Paul Simon’s lyric, which disappointingly lists only five ways to leave a lover, is about how to leave a woman, not a man. “15 Ways”, on the other hand, is vague about what the “ways” are and doesn’t tell a story. MES’ tendency to avoid repeating numbers in his lyrics is very obvious here – the number of ways to leave your man switches randomly between ten, fifteen (the most common), eight, and sixteen.

Mark E. Smith listed “women’s magazines” as one of his villains in a 1993 NME feature by Ted Kessler:

WOMEN’S MAGAZINES

I hate them all because of their wrongful encouragement. There’s no big hang-up here, I’ve just seen some perfectly normal people go around the twist reading them. Heh heh heh! You must know the sort of stuff I’m on about, those articles that go on about how to tell if your old man’s having an affair and how to subsequently screw him up. Heh heh heh! Can’t say any more than that, I really can’t. Sorry.

Kessler, Ted (1993). “Mark E. Smith: Heroes & Villains”. New Musical Express, 11 December. p.11. [Text from the The Fall Online Bibliography] / [Archived]

But although Tommy Mackay is not alone in thinking of “15 Ways” as “a snide swipe at those snippets of advice screaming from the front covers of women’s mags” (40 Odd Years of The Fall, pp.138-139. See also Simon Ford’s Hip Priest, p.230), there is nothing in the lyric which conveys any sort of clear critique of the kind hinted at above. It’s not a “I hate magazines which…” sort of song. It seems reasonable to speculate that it may be based on MES’ experiences in his marriage to his second wife Saffron Prior. But it comes across as impressionistic and not specific in its concerns or targets.

15 Ways To Leave Your Man was the title of a Receiver compilation of live tracks, released in 1997.

Video

There was a video for “15 Ways”. It features, among other things, MES singing in Heaton Park with the BT Tower in the background, scenes filmed underneath and around Castlefield Viaduct, band members playing guitars and dragging amps up steps and over bridges, and playing keyboards in the middle of a street, and an unidentified woman whistling (who may possibly be Lori Kramer, with whom MES was apparently romantically involved for a time).

Footnotes

1. There are those (e.g. user @harleyr in a comment on the original Annotated Fall site, #7 09/03/2017) who argue that this line should be “body and head” rather than “body ahead”. ↩︎
2. This line reads like an airline or holiday/short break advert. A Post Office Box (abbreviated to PO Box) is a service provided by the Royal Mail in the UK. As an alternative to using a residential address, a business can instead advertise a Box Number to customers. They can then collect their mail from a Post Office location or have the mail forwarded on. Similar services exist in the United States and no doubt other countries. ↩︎
3. “Dallying” in the sense of “flirting” or engaging in unserious romantic or sexual affairs. ↩︎
4. [Mark Goodier Session version] Perhaps referring to Cosmopolitan, as in the long-running and best-selling magazine for women (see: Wikipedia: Cosmopolitan (magazine) ↩︎

Sources / Links

• “15 Ways”, Live at the Phoenix Festival 15 July 1994. Posted to YouTube by @ScottishTeeVee. [YouTube]
• 15 Ways To Leave Your Man (Receiver, 1997). [Discogs]
• The Annotated Fall: “15 Ways” [Archived]
• Campbell, Andy (1994). “15 Ways: First Impression”. The Biggest Library Yet, #1, May 1994. pp.19-20.
• Cigarettes, Johnny (1994). “B-Side of the Week”. New Musical Express, 23 April, p.43.
• Discogs: The Fall, “15 Ways”
• The Fall Online – Discography, singles/EPs: “15 Ways”
• Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet. pp.230-231.
• Kessler, Ted (1993). “Mark E. Smith: Heroes & Villains”. New Musical Express, 11 December. p.11. [Text from the The Fall Online Bibliography] / [Archived]
• Official Charts: The Fall, “15 Ways”
• Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
• Mathur, Paul (1994). “The Fall, ’15 Ways’”. Melody Maker, 23 April, p.27.
• Pringle, Steve (2022). You Must Get Them All: The Fall on Record. [paperback edition]. Pontefract: Route Publishing Ltd. [Online store]
• Simon, Paul (1975). “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover”. [Wikipedia] [Discogs] [Lyrics, from paulsimon.com]
• Thompson, Dave (2003). A User’s Guide to the Fall. London: Helter-Skelter Publishing.
• The Track Record: “15 Ways”