Mark E Smith The Fall - OBITUARY

OBITUARY

Mark E Smith

Irascible, mischievous and contrarian front man of the Fall dubbed ‘the grumpiest man in pop’

Mark E Smith with former wife and lead guitarist of the Fall Brix Smith

Among the ranks of recalcitrant, irascible pop stars, Mark E Smith was in a contrarian class of his own.

Never a man to look on the bright side, he was dubbed “the grumpiest man in pop” and the songs he wrote for the Fall, the band he sustained for more than 40 years, were abrasive and bleak, leavened only by a cynical and sometimes vicious sense of humour as he railed bitterly at the hypocrisies of life and the injustice of the world.

He didn’t so much sing his vitriolic lyrics as rant, bark and snarl them, and off stage he was as caustic and as confrontational as his music.

Famously uncooperative, he was every interviewer’s worst nightmare, turning the simplest question into a gladiatorial battle. Inspired to form a band after seeing the Sex Pistols play in Manchester in 1976, Smith made Johnny Rotten, even at his snotty height, seem as benign as Barry Manilow.

His love of confrontation was often destructive, but at its best could be deliciously mischievous. Ever keen to bite the hand that feeds, when the NME gave him a “God-like Genius” award, he declared that it should really go to “the people who buy the NME and can manage to read it”.

Yet his acerbic and often disturbing music, which drew on musical influences as diverse as the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop and Can, was in turn hugely influential on other bands and made him a cult icon, much admired by connoisseurs of rock’s more maverick extremities.

John Peel was the band’s most ardent supporter and noted in his autobiography that the Fall were the only act to have a shelf all to themselves in his legendary record collection — although in the 2004 documentary film The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E Smith, even Peel admitted: “You can never be certain what you’re going to get and sometimes it may not be what you want.”

When Peel died that same year, Smith gave one of the all-time horror interviews when he was asked to pay tribute to his “close friend” on BBC Two’s Newsnight. Clearly out of his head, with eyes bulging and his tongue lolling out of his mouth, he was barely able to string a sentence together.

His normally suave interviewer Gavin Esler was left visibly shaken by the encounter and the producer pulled the plug. With characteristic perversity, Smith subsequently said that he had only met the Fall’s biggest fan on a handful of occasions and he and Peel had never been friends.

His most memorable songs, such as Fiery Jack, which profiled an ignorant, brawling, beer-swilling yob, Totally Wired, about the joyous rush of taking drugs, and The North Will Rise Again painted a nightmarish vision of Britain, which one critic praised for “depicting in Hogarthian detail the underbelly of poverty in English society”.

Another described him as “a strange kind of anti-matter national treasure”, while Simon Reynolds in his book The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’Roll described “a kind of Northern English magic realism that mixed industrial grime with the unearthly and uncanny, voiced through a unique, one-note delivery somewhere between amphetamine-spiked rant and alcohol-addled yarn”.

The Fall had minimal chart success, although those unfamiliar with their albums — to which Smith gave titles such as Perverted By Language, Cerebral Causticand Ersatz GB — may recognise the song Hip Priest, used in the film The Silence of the Lambs. Smith’s music also featured in several TV adverts for such unlikely products as the Vauxhall Corsa. “I needed the money. We’re not all Elton John,” he noted acidly.

His songs came at a high cost to himself and those around him, for he believed that creativity came from confrontation and chaos. Not an easy man to live with, he sought stimulation by picking arguments with girlfriends and partners and recording their fights to play back for inspiration when writing.

“I like to push people until I discover what they really think,” he said. “Push them and push them and push them.”

It was a fractious and dysfunctional approach to human relationships that led to 66 musicians passing through the ranks of the Fall over the group’s existence, while he remained the only constant member.

One third survived less than a year and he once sacked a band member because he didn’t like his taste in food (“the salad was the last straw”). The guitarist and keyboard player Marc Riley was sacked by telephone on his wedding day. Yet with an indulgent degree of forgiveness, Riley, who later became a Radio 1 disc jockey, continued to regard Smith as “a genius”.

Another line-up was lost after a violent fight on stage in New York, which continued afterwards at the group’s hotel and resulted in Smith spending a night in jail and being charged with assault and harassment.

He remained unrepentant and derided those he sacked or who walked out on him as “dickheads who couldn’t hold their beer” and went running back “to their humdrum bleeding lives”.

Unable to separate work from pleasure, several girlfriends and two of his three wives played in the Fall at different times. He married the American guitarist Laura Salenger, better known as Brix Smith, a few months after they met in Chicago in 1983. She was 20 and, convinced that she had met her soulmate, flew to Manchester to be with him.

He collected her from the airport in a taxi and on the way back to his Prestwich home he pointed out the local attractions, such as Strangeways prison. Entering the lobby of his building, she was struck by the “strong odour of urine”. In his flat there were cats everywhere and the floor was strewn with the unwashed underwear of an ex-girlfriend. He offered her a cup of tea and reached for a pint of milk sitting on the window ledge alongside a carton of eggs and a loaf of bread.

She thought it was a “quaint” English custom and they married at Bury register office and celebrated with sausage rolls, crisps and pickled onions in the Eagle & Child pub.

She described marriage and life in the Fall as a “dictatorship”. It was a judgment with which Smith did not argue. “I mould them like a football manager. I’m a bit like Alex Ferguson,” he said.

Astonishingly, she lasted six years until she left both band and husband in 1989 for another roller-coaster romance with the violinist Nigel Kennedy.

By then Smith was already sleeping with another member of the band, but he picked at the scabs of their broken marriage in songs such as Don’t Call Me Darling and Feeling Numb and made known his feelings about Kennedy in a song titled Fiend With A Violin.

In the 1990s he married Saffron Prior, who ran the Fall’s fan club. After their divorce, in 2001 he married the Greek-born Eleni Poulou, who was a member of the Fall until 2016. They were separated and he is survived by his partner, Pam Vander, who also operated as the Fall’s manager. There were no children from any of his marriages.

Born Mark Edward Smith into a working-class Manchester family in 1957, his father, Jack, had served in the Black Watch and worked in the family plumbing business. His mother, Irene, then gave him three younger sisters, which, like most things in his life, he seemed to resent.

“I was picked on at school because I was timid. I had younger sisters; I couldn’t turn to them for help,” he complained in a rare admission of vulnerability. Nor did he get much support from his father, who told him: “If you think you’re being bullied, you try the Black Watch.”

Yet he was top of his class at primary school and won a place at Stand Grammar, where he developed a love of literature. To his chagrin, when he transferred to a local college at 16, he received no support and his father insisted that he worked simultaneously for the family firm. “He gave me no money. My ribs would be sticking out. I’d hate the bastard,” Smith recalled.

His response was to quit his course and move in with his girlfriend Una Baines, paying the rent via dead-end jobs, first as a packer in a meat factory and then as a clerk on the docks, where he wrote songs during his lunch breaks.

After failing an audition to sing with a local heavy metal group, he formed the Fall in 1976, taking the band’s name from Albert Camus’s novel, and recruiting Baines on keyboards as the first of his many paramours who played in the group.

In his teens he had belonged to the Socialist Workers Party and the Thatcherite monetarist experiment of the early 1980s that resulted in unemployment topping three million provoked an anger that produced some of his most impressively belligerent work, as the band recorded nine albums between 1979 and 1986.

In later years his politics tended to anarchy rather than socialism. Asked for his personal manifesto, he suggested he would “halve the price of cigarettes, double the tax on health food and declare war on France”.

Despite the endless churn of band members and his growing problems with alcohol, he continued to record prolifically and released more than 60 albums as the Fall.

A fall of a different kind after a heavy drinking session in 2004 left him with a broken leg and a cracked hip. Yet he insisted on going ahead with an American tour with a metal rod running from knee to hip. He sang while sitting behind a table.

Suggestions that he needed to sober up were robustly dismissed. “If anybody says I’ve got a problem with the drink, I tell them I do have a problem,” he said. “Like where to get it after 11pm.”

His judgment of his life was wildly contradictory, veering between defiance and guilt, denial and self-awareness. “I have never hit anybody who didn’t deserve it,” he once said. Yet on another occasion he confessed that if he were to apologise to everyone he had wronged, “I wouldn’t have a day left in my life”.

A student of the occult, he taught himself to read the Tarot and claimed to be clairvoyant. Typically, he wrote his own epitaph when he was only 22.

“When I’m dead and gone my vibrations will live on,” he barked on the Fall’s 1979 song Psykick Dance Hall. “In vibes on vinyl through the years people will dance to my waves.”

Mark E Smith, musician, was born on March 5, 1957. He died on January 24, 2018, aged 60