Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

by Mark E. Smith

  Mark E. Smith

  with Austin Collings

  RENEGADE

  The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

  photographs by Tom Sheehan

  Contents

  Intro Phoenix 2006: Desert Storm!

  1. The Power of my Childhood Days

  2. Grandad versus King Kong

  3. Prelude to Revolution

  4. The Phantom Nazis

  Voices 1

  5. The Group/s and their Useless Lives

  Interlude The Two-Year Gap

  6. The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World and Eric the Ferret

  Voices 2

  7. They Who Dare!

  8. The Year of the Rats

  9. Silence of the Riley

  10. Operation Cavemen!

  Voices 3

  11. The Wife

  12. The Devil’s Compass

  13. Death of the Landlords

  14. A Man Alone

  15. Hard as Nails

  ‘Guide to Manchester’

  ‘I’m the History of the World’

  ‘Sufficiently Strenuous 2 deter flirts’

  ‘My Top’

  ‘Words found on a Cassette of 23/01/06’

  16. I’m on the Hard Road Again

  17. The March of the Gormless Bastards

  18. Crisp Man

  19. To Hell and Back

  Voices 4

  Outro The White Angel

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  RENEGADE

  Mark E. Smith was born in north Manchester in 1957. He has been the leader and lead vocalist of The Fall for thirty years. In 2001 he married Eleni Poulou. When not touring, they live in Manchester.

  Austin Collings was born in north Manchester in 1980. He has written for the Guardian, Frieze and Flux, among other publications, and currently lives in Manchester.

  … both everything and nothing in a person’s past and background may be significant.

  B. S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry

  Somebody’s murdered Manchester and not told me. Somebody’s taken it to the dogs – ripped from it a history.

  All is as all shouldn’t be.

  And here’s another one of those signs – ‘Thank G.B. for “The Nocturnes” ’ – weeping with damp …

  Inside The Lion, posters boast the cheapest drinks this side of a dropped half-empty in the gutter; boast hot pies also. But I won’t be having one of them. Leave the solids for others, I’m a liquid man today …

  Intro

  PHOENIX 2006: DESERT STORM!

  I sensed it long before it happened.

  They reminded me of the recent England team: the Beckham generation; that lot that fucked up so spectacularly in 2006 because they couldn’t do what they were paid to do; because they couldn’t spend time away from their birds; that lot who couldn’t stop crying.

  Lads with no guts, I can’t stand them …

  You’re out there in America playing music, free drink, women, scenery; and you bail out in the middle of the night after the third gig.

  They’d only been there for a week.

  I know fellows – so-called scally types – who’d have given their right arm to be in their position. Imagine what other people think of you when they’re sat at home on the dole or sat in the pub and in walks this daft guitarist who didn’t have the mettle to hang in there and see the rest of America.

  I thought it was hilarious when Ben Pritchard did that interview with Anthony Meirion for the unofficial Fall website, blabbing his heart out. It reminded me of one of those memoirs that politicians love writing: Ben Pritchard: The Fall Years, 2001–2006 …

  I think he’s going through this phase at the moment where his tolerance for alcohol has just dropped … He’s getting drunk really quickly … He was falling asleep in the dressing room five minutes before we were due onstage … when you’re drunk and in a deep sleep you’re not gonna get up for anyone, y’know … he’s threatened to stab people before for waking him up, y’know.

  Interview with Ben Pritchard 12 June 2006

  http://www.visi.com/fall/news/pritchardint2006.html

  I knew it was coming. I knew they didn’t have the nerve.

  Three days in and they’ve got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.

  We wanted to do it and we were prepared to do it and we were looking forward to it but we knew that it was gonna be … it was five weeks and that’s longer than we’ve ever done on tour with this line-up. There was already rifts and things happening when we did the last UK tour.

  It’s a brutal let-down for a lot of people. They go on tour and it isn’t what they expected. All at once their lives don’t work any more. They’re adrift in more ways than they can handle. It’s not for everyone; twelve-hour drives starting first thing in the morning, different food, different culture and all that shit, but it’s not as if we’re living in the 40s; most kids should be used to all that nowadays.

  I seriously think there’s something wrong with Ben. I’ve always suspected it. He has a stunning ability for getting the wrong end of the stick all the time about everything. I think it has something to do with him being boiled alive as a kid. There was a kettle boiling on a stove when he was four or five, and it fell on him. He had to go to hospital. I don’t think his nerves have recovered. That’s my theory, anyway.

  We were using the Winnebago as a dressing room when we played in Tucson at the Congress Hotel and we’d been sat waiting for him and we were getting all edgy … you wonder what kinda mood is he gonna turn up in. Who’s he gonna go for tonight? Whose turn is it? For the first two nights I was golden bollocks. It was Steve and Spen. ‘You’re shit, you’re shit, him and me are the professionals …’

  And at this gig in Tucson, he walked into the dressing room just in a really fucking stinking black mood. He took a bottle of wine out the dressing room, ‘What the fuck you looking at? What are you fucking looking at?!’ … And he just lifted his hand up and he’s got a corkscrew in his hand. And Spence had to grab him … we all kinda got out of the van and we left him in there to stew. I think somebody had told him that we’d all had a meeting about him and about his behaviour, y’know, you couldn’t go for a piss without somebody telling Mark and everything we did angered him. And we just wanted to get on with our jobs and we weren’t being allowed to do that.

  He’s like an old-fashioned gentleman fraud: semi-middle class. Cooks for his parents every Tuesday – chilli; goes to church once a month. Keeping up appearances. He makes me out to be some Dennis Wheatley horror character. Telling stories of how I’d wait for them on their days off in the hotel lobby, skulking. Then I’d jump out and ask if they’ve had anything to eat. That’s so Ben, that. I’d be having a drink in the lobby and they’d walk in and I’d ask them if they’d eaten, if they fancied a drink, if they were alright. Not in a motherly way – a simple question, basically. Nothing serious.

  We were driving down from Tucson to Phoenix, driving through the desert at 70 miles an hour, we’re in a Winnebago, or that kind of thing, nobody’s got a seatbelt on in the back … And Mark was pissed … and he just came wandering over, walking to the front of the bus and I was sat next to the driver with a map, giving this guy directions. You know, for some reason, Mark had made th
is guy the enemy. Before this guy has a chance to do his job, Mark was like, ‘You’re fuckin’ shit! I’m getting rid of him!’ But he doesn’t just sack him, he winds him up … Mark had a bottle of beer and I think he just poured a bit on this guy’s head … some people having a beer over their head could’ve gone off the road, just panicked, y’know, and with people walking around in the back, he could have killed everybody … And he walked up to the back of me with a lit cigarette in his hand and I could smell something burning and I’m sure he was at it with a cigarette at the back of my head, just cos I was helping this guy with directions.

  Tell him anything and he construes it in a paranoid way. I feel sorry for him.

  I did spill some beer over the driver. I did flick a bit of paper at him; because he was asleep. Why say things like that? Why’s he talking behind my back about me taking speed? It’s not as if I’m jacking up every day.

  He’s not the first. They enter a completely different world when they join The Fall. When they’re first in the group they’re just used to having a few pints on the weekend, then they see me with the double whiskys. Next minute they’re on the double whiskys, pint and a line of coke.

  I remember Ben leaving his passport at home when we were trying to get visas sorted out. A good friend of mine had to drive back from London to Bury because Ben hadn’t the spine to admit he didn’t fancy the journey. He must have thought I was daft.

  He talks like he was my counsellor – implies that I needed him to be my friend, but he didn’t want to be burdened by me. It wasn’t the case at all. I’d just talk to him because he was there. When he said I told him I’d been followed by the MI5, I told him that in jest, like a kid. Just to keep him chatting.

  He thinks he knows me better than I know myself. I needed him? The only thing I needed him for aside from playing the guitar was to chauffeur Elena to Tesco’s every now and again. That’s why I’m gutted, because I don’t have anybody to call on to do that any more.

  I confide more in the Post Office than Ben. That’s where he gets his name from, the Bible – Benjamin, the judge.

  The other daft cunt, Steve Trafford (bass), was one of Ben’s mates. He appeared out of nowhere. Wouldn’t tell you anything about anything; the sort who wanted to know everything about you, though, like some bored suburban housewife.

  I don’t think he ever wanted to be in the band anyway. I kept hearing stories about how he preferred to save his best tunes for his own band. He was never a Fall member; not in the true Fall sense.

  He started losing it when it he met that actress out of Shameless, Maxine Peake. He didn’t realize she was only hanging around with him because he was in The Fall. I found it quite amusing when she buggered off after Phoenix.

  Same thing happened to Ben as well. He had this bird he couldn’t stop gabbing on about, how she was this and that, and they were going to move in together, blardy-blah. Day after he’s got home, he finds out she doesn’t want to see him any more. That’s the Curse of The Fall for you.

  What annoyed me most about Steve, though, was he was always very quick to sulk. I don’t like lads who are so ready to fold. And he was one of those pseudo-intellectuals as well; thinking he’s bright reading Crime and Punishment on the tour bus, not realizing that everybody reads it at the age of fifteen. The funniest thing was, he must have been influenced by it, because he said he was going to give me a good hiding in the dressing room, just before they did their midnight flit. Imagine! I can remember him telling a story about how he stood and watched his mates get a good kicking off a bunch of kids and did fuck all about it.

  The thing about the final stooge, Spencer Birtwhistle, is he’s a Hacienda casualty; and not only that, he’s a drummer as well. That’s his background. I know for a fact he knew he’d made a mistake following Ben and Trafford out of America. He’s easily led, you see. Necked too many Es. He’s not as sharp as he should be.

  There’s a whole bunch of those people in Manchester: the living dead. Some essential trigger ceased functioning back when The Happy Mondays had another night out around 1992. I feel sorry for them. They get so caught up in a version of themselves, it becomes an unmanageable reality. The annoying thing is I helped him out by having him back in the group and he stabbed me in the back.

  It was inevitable. There was something in the air there. I knew it was coming. They’d been acting like irked union members for weeks. Ben talks about how they recorded all these great tracks in Lincolnshire, just before the tour. They recorded shit – a few lame incarnations of what they thought The Fall should sound like. It was like a Sunday-before-work, been-drinking-all-weekend karaoke-take on Fall Heads Roll. It had no zip to it. I’m amazed he has the audacity to even mention it. It all ties in with his dust-ridden view of the music industry – being a Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd fan. ‘The great lost album’ – what a load of shit!

  They were losing it. And, what’s more, they knew it and couldn’t handle it. It’s not as if they’ve gone on to form a supergroup; same with the other ex-members. Give them a couple of years and then it’ll really set in. Mistakes like that fester.

  The irony of that whole period is that Elena, the wife, was more of a man than any of them. That’s always been the case. She didn’t cave in. She took a lot on after they fucked off with the money, the van and the driver.

  The more I look back on that whole debacle, the more I get the feeling it was meant to be. Sometimes that’s all there is to it.

  But the support band didn’t help, The Talk. They were like the Yank equivalent of Ben and co., soft lads with rock and roll exteriors. I think they found their soulmates in each other. And after the incident with the banana, when one of The Talk invaded the stage and whacked me on the side of the head with a banana, inside I reckon they were wishing that that had been one of them. They were all in it together. I’m something they could never be and they didn’t like it.

  I’m surprised they don’t have any respect for their own history. Imagine looking back in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time and remembering what happened over there – it’s pathetic. I’d like to see them at war. It’s a generational thing – something’s amiss with too many lads these days around the ages of thirty-five and under. Empty of wonder. I think they’ve been told too much by their parents, they’re not in this life to discover things for themselves.

  They should go back and start their lives anew.

  I feel very privileged to have been part of that group … most people don’t last two or three years … for the first year you’re golden bollocks. For the second year you’re a piece of shit. By the third year you’re accepted. You’re in. And then he kind of eases up on you … The Fall has been my only job for a good four years now, so when we walked away from that tour it wasn’t just something we did just like that, we sat and thought about it and it was the only thing we could have done. That tour, in hindsight, was a good one and it wouldn’t have been if we’d have stayed … we just sat down and it was like, ‘How much more can we put up with?’

  Aftermath

  I didn’t really know what I was going to do. But I wasn’t going home. I was determined to stick this one out. It’s always the same with British bands in America: the whole work-and-play ethic turns them upside down; and then they crumble. The Yanks love it; they’re sick of all that Oasis shit – do you think the Gallaghers could get a job in an American group? They couldn’t even make it past New York! Have you noticed that about Oasis, they’re always trying to conquer America, but never make it past New Jersey! Not only that but the Brits think they invented rock and roll. This is what pisses Americans off as well: the idea that nothing came before The Stones and Led Zeppelin; forgetting that it originated in America with Bo Diddley and Elvis.

  In retrospect, it couldn’t have worked out any better. The Lord provided … Narnack, the record company we’re signed to in America, sorted us out with a new band. They got in touch with this fellow from LA, this drummer called Orpheo McCord. He, in turn, con
tacted his mate Rob Barbato, a bass player; and he got in touch with his band-mate and guitarist Tim Presley.

  They’re a solid bunch of lads. There’s no ego-glorification there, none of that smelling each other’s armpits and adoring each other.

  Orpheo’s good because he’s a complete professional. Simple. He’s the polar opposite to that clichéd drummer type. He put a lot of hours into the Reformation Post-TLC album, and didn’t complain.

  Rob’s the same. He can play quite a few instruments as well, so he’s handy to have around. He knows how to balance that drink-and-work thing too – which is rare in music.

  I found it quite amusing that Ben felt compelled to mention Rob’s beard and how, in his time, I used to make everybody have a shave. I used to make them have a shave because they couldn’t even grow proper stubble; they looked like a bunch of school kids trying to buy beer with bum fluff for ID. I wasn’t having that.

  You don’t meet many guitarists like Tim, who don’t sulk and think they’re the centre of the universe. I never have, anyway. So clichéd. I’ve never met a guitarist I like really. He’s alright though – he’s just got an old case and an old guitar and he’s not fussed about his equipment. It’s not ‘me, me, me’ all the time with him. I think he’s more of an artist. I’ve never heard anybody play like him, I must say that. In truth, I’m amazed how it panned out. They’re the best we’ve had in quite a while. What’s good about them is you can say, ‘Can’ – the old German group – and they say, ‘Yeah, we like that.’ Their heads aren’t fogged like a lot of British groups, obsessing about U2 or The Stone Roses. They’re open. You can put ideas to them and they’ll say, ‘Well, we’ve never thought of that, but we’ll try it.’ It’s good to have a group like that. I can throw up ideas I’ve been thinking about for ages and not have to worry about them being interpreted in a cack-handed fashion. It frees me up.

  You can hear it on Reformation. There’s a lot more going on than you think. It was intended as a parody of Manchester groups, but turned, remarkably, into a piece of solid music. The weird bits were deliberate – maybe they got out of hand a little. The lyrics mostly I’d been keeping back from the old line-up.