This is probably a Manchester Evening News picture ... Alan and his Russian bride Tatyana Yakokleva at a turning point in both their lives - their wedding day in 1993, when he was 40 and she was 27. There is video somewhere.
Marriage certificate at
www.mdmarchive.co.uk/artefact/34747/A...
Earlier that year, the NME, which was famous for printing any old crap it got sent, ran a story about the Fall doing a benefit concert for a "homeless" Alan Wise.
It was actually a fund-raiser for this marriage - which turned into a culture clash to put it mildly.
The Soviet Union was breaking up and the personal ads of Loot were famous for Russian girls advertising for husbands. Alan found "Tanya" there. The story is told in James Young's second book, Moscow Mule, which gives a glimpse of the world Tanya left.
She met Alan for the first time In Mancheste and was soon pregnant with Natasha - born March 94. But the marriage was already troubled and it got worse. Tanya briefly moved into a women's refuge and got Alan kicked out of the house by a court. She moved in and he went back to lodging with Dougie James, in the flat they called the Sad Lads Club, while a long divorce wrangle went through.
Natasha was brought up shuttling between her parents and was out of the control of both by the time she was a teenager. She had her own flat for a while but eventually moved in with Alan and his last partner, Beverley, and Beverley's two children. Then after midnight on her 22nd birthday she stepped off a bridge and died on the road.
It was a devastating event for everybody. Alan died less than three months later. Tanya went back to Russia.
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