Mark E Smith – Born March 5 1957; died January 24
2018
Mark E Smith, who has died aged 60 following a
protracted period of illness that included respiratory problems, was one of the
greatest British artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. As
vocalist and driving force of The Fall, the band he led with an iron if sometimes
eccentric fist for more than forty years, Smith cut an imperious and
uncompromising dash as he prowled the stage like Nero as played by Gene Vincent
or Merle Haggard.
Smith’s early resemblance to a grown-up version of Billy
Casper, the back-street schoolboy urchin from Ken loach’s film, Kes,
transformed with age so he looked more like a surrealist country and western
singer. Dressed usually in smart but casual black and sometimes sporting a
solitary leather glove, Smith would by turns declaim, bark and – latterly - gurgle
into the microphone over a simple but relentless garage-band chug played by an
increasingly terrified-looking band. Inbetween letting loose a stream of barbed
non-sequiturs in a trademark nasal whine that could only loosely be called
singing, Smith would frequently fiddle with the sound levels, leaning on
keyboards to make a tuneless din, or move microphone stands out of reach of
those using them.
While such manipulations became part of a routine
regarded by many as the random actions of an increasingly unhinged drunk, in
truth his control of the stage through such provocations were on a par with
those of avant-garde Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor. Either that or a
performance artist sired on the northern English cabaret club circuit. Smith
would often leave the stage a few songs in, either doing his bit unseen from
the wings or else disappear completely while the band plodded on. Whether this
was due to increasing ill health or wilful social engineering of what
constituted a gig was never clear, but it made for a thrilling event, with the
audience often wound up by shows that sometimes lasted barely half an hour.
At what has turned out to be the Fall’s final gig at
Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow last November, Smith’s arrival onstage in a
wheelchair being pushed down the disabled ramp looked both comic and triumphal,
with Smith greeting the crowd like a Shakespearian king come to reclaim his
throne.
Mark Edward Smith was born in Broughton, Salford, the
oldest of four children to Irene and Jack Smith, a plumber who had served in
the Black Watch regiment. With three sisters around him all the time, Smith would
go on to surround himself with strong women forever after, with assorted wives
and girlfriends playing in or managing the Fall at various points. Moving to
Prestwich at an early age, Smith passed his 11-plus and went to Stand grammar school.
If he had taken a typical academic route, Smith could
have gone to university, but already possessed by an individualist streak, left
school at 16 instead to work as a clerk in a shipping office, moving into a
flat with his girlfriend, Una Baines. By that time, Smith was already a
voracious reader, whose auto-didactic tendencies led him to HP Lovecraft, Philip
K Dick, Aldous Huxley and Arthur Machen. This mix of existential gothic was
tailor-made for punk, and The Fall were named after Albert Camus’ novel after
they discovered their original name, The Outsiders, taken from another Camus
novel, had already been used.
Attracted to literary outlaws such as William Burroughs,
Smith and Baines’ flat became the focal point for a gang of kindred spirits who
would form the Fall’s first line-up, with Baines playing keyboards. Fuelled by
cheap amphetamines and inspired by the Velvet Underground Can and the Stooges,
they would write and read poetry, with the music added as a backdrop. Gradually
morphing into a proper band, the Fall’s first gig was in a basement run by
Manchester Musicians Collective. In spirit, Smith remained a poet in all but
name, a Dadaist spoken-word star with a musical earthquake rumbling behind him.
The Fall released their first album, Live at the Witch
Trials, on Miles Copeland’s Step Forward label in 1979. Replete with skewed
guitars and wonky keyboards, its rough and ready arrival was a counterpoint to
the stylistic gloss of Smith and co’s contemporaries. Early tours to Scotland
saw the Fall share bills with Edinburgh bands Fire Engines and Thursdays, the follow-up
to Live at the Witch Trial, Dragnet (1979), offered further off-kilter
dispatches of pop cultural detritus cut up into songs that – with a brand new
band in tow – sounded suspiciously like trucker music.
Over the next four decades Smith’s numerous incarnations
of the Fall released some 32 original albums, augmented by a stream of live
recordings and compilations, as well as numerous radio sessions for the band’s
great champion, John Peel. More than 66 band members passed through the band’s
ranks, though apart from the departure of Smith’s keyboardist third wife (a
second Saffron Burrows, had run the Fall fan club) Elena Poulou, in 2016, had
remained solid for more than a decade.
In 1988, Smith and The Fall were unlikely participants
in the Edinburgh International Festival, when they appeared onstage at the King’s
Theatre providing a liv soundtrack to Michael Clark’s ballet, I Am Curious
Orange. Clark had used the Fall’s music to soundtrack his work since his early
piece, Hail the New Puritan, was named after one of the band’s key songs. Clark
recognised the primal rhythms in their work, with I Am Curious Orange becoming
an audacious mash-up of bare bums, giant hamburgers and outlandish costumes
sported by performance artist Leigh Bowery as the Fall played on.
Clark had appeared in Smith’s play, Hey! Luciani!, at
Riverside Studios in London two years earlier. Smith’s baffling cut-up of words
and music was based around the mysterious death of Pope John Paul 1, and, with
the band taking on speaking roles, confounded critics and fans alike.
Following I Am Curious Orange, Smith split up with his
wife, Brix, who had added glamour and a commercial gloss to the Fall when she
joined as guitarist following future BBC6Music DJ Marc Riley’s acrimonious departure.
Smith moved to Edinburgh, where he nursed his seemingly unquenchable drink
habits in Black Bo’s, the Meadow Bar and Millionaires nightclub. Much of his
experience of living in the city was channelled into Edinburgh Man, an oddly
moving and atypical song, in which Smith sang without irony of ‘walking your
bridges home.’ This didn’t stop him causing assorted mayhem during future
visits, as he did when he almost caused a lighting rig to topple during a show
on Calton Hill. Smith drafted various Scottish musicians into the Fall fold,
though the tenures of violinist Kenny Brady and, later, guitarist Tommy Crooks,
were brief.
As drink and age got the better of him, Smith grew
cantankerous and at times incomprehensible. This sometimes went too far, as it
did in the late 1990s, when an onstage altercation in New York effectively
ended a long-standing line-up of the band. After a further hotel-room fracas
with keyboardist Julia Nagle, Smith got himself a night in the cells and
instructions to take anger management classes.
In interviews Smith could be both ferocious and
hilarious, often in the same sentence as his mind moved on before his mouth
could catch up. He would rail about the vainglorious peccadilloes of musicians
like a self-made mill owner disparaging the workers, or else dismiss latter-day
groups who idolised him with withering glee. As he hired and fired a stream of
band members, he had the air of a general trying to drill his troops with cruel
psychological game-playing before leading them into battle suitably fired up.
Despite looking increasingly frail onstage, Smith’s
work ethic never let up, with four albums released by Cherry Red Records since
2011. The most recent, New Facts Emerge, appeared in 2017. It was a typically
fantastical mix of social commentary, satire and opaque Smith-speak. It gave listeners
what has turned out to be a final glimpse into the mind of an artist whose
erratic genius has left behind a huge body of work that will go on to define
the fractured age that spawned it.
The Herald, January 26th 2018
ends
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