Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

by Mark E. Smith

  I’ve got that type of face that people want advice off – I get it all the time. It must be the nose or the way I drink.

  Voices 2

  Talk about long days … Sleepless for days … Stare at the Mail. Borrowed town. Eat shortbread. Radio 2. Regress. Open can … I stand in the full light of play. I feel now. I hear them rewrite the past. They need a version of truth. Need to forget. Like kids caught … Points a gun. Drunk … I’m in a car and it isn’t England … Long drives. Talk about long days … ‘Could you vacate the car please, sir.’ And minutes before I was talking about Yogi Bear … I get back. Light enters the odd room from dingy angles … He stands so much in the shadow of play … Their music is cutting edge … the … cutting … Spent drinking with men again … Sharp as a cue ball. Past exhumed … Blank and autistic. Some late city. Hotel mornings. Nescafé sachets. A hill of pillows. Retired shower … You can hear your hair grow out here … I’m having it he had it planned all along … Mark without the M … I hear the city breathe. And blood sneezes … A mass of phlegm that’s been balling the wall of his mouth. Dropped on ash. In The Red at 7. I’ll meet you in The Red at 7 … Fancy a nip? … R.E.M. wail. From station café … My train is now pulling in. It’s a comeback album … There’s a thread that runs throughout. They never knew what the fuck they were doing … Fingers like cigs; as thin as … Homeless tan. And the black bull misery … Angst afternoons. They can’t even make it to Birmingham on time … V for Vendetta … Worm. Guilt … The absence of scruples. The crime of aggressive war … My house is smaller now I’m older … Marks and Spencer’s doesn’t want the likes of us in there … What’s wrong with you? They’re our people … Telling me he’s from Edinburgh. Drinking like a rock star … Why don’t you go home and type it up instead of acting like a rock star? … Sloppy cunt. Why you sitting like me? … That’s the word he kept using … Sloppy … American radio … Cowswitchz … I knew it was the wrong idea to get the plane. I should have stayed. Reckon you can get me back on tour? They spew shite. Walking unreal pantomime … Snakes in San Francisco. The lung association. Keep tabs on tabs. Too busy feeding fucking snakes … German snuff … Some sort of music dripped from the speakers … Brix smoothed out the edges; brought in a snappier look … Did she fuck … The McGyver effect. Breaking. Things. Down … Pop. 1280 … How to influence people and talk dirty … That’s what they want to hear. Influences … Nothing in their own heads. They all want to be me. Guardian vendetta. They eat loneliness. All willing to bare their insides to fill a night. Full of piss and wind. Clever negativity … Town flesh … Hotel bedroom. Ants below window. Smart as whips. Sunshine unkind … Ignorance in action frights … For turning up here’s a Holsten. I’m more than a can of Holsten … Ill omens of the permanent underclass. Twenty-five now and all your ideas gone. Fucked … He looked nervous in the interview. She’s a slag. Lazy journalism. They’re all the same … Empty logic becomes you after time. I’ve not seen Karl since … the Hanley brothers … The Fall army. I should have a word with The Fall army … The perfect hour. Brought low … Rigsby pilled up. No. 6 … You would have loved it. Loads of birds for you to look at. Nice rider for you to drink from. Sun … I release them from the pains of the normal working environment … He meets the world … Impotent Labour. And Elvis … Head music with energy. The Manchester Music Collective … Arndale CCTV … Bury market. Saturday. Busy … About the present and always will be … At the ICA, The Mall … How years turn and dip. Without equal. More or less equal. No pictures of me … I’ve got traps on my door. Nobody in there … Scary fuckers don’t scare me … The community feel of American radio … The music sounds jagged. Franz Ferdinand fans will not know what’s hit … Whistle and I’ll come to you … Drink; that blessed curse. Feels like a slow kill … ‘Worst film I’ve ever seen. Nothing fucking happens. What was it called? Lost in Translation? I wish it was …’ Ground control to Gene Hunt. Decades unkillable … Hellfire. Let’s have it like Man in Black … Thin like cigs … We’ll have one in The Old Monkey. Celebrate … Not enough smokers on TV. Not like Russell Harty … Have you been locked away somewhere? Distance dictates this thing … Mind if I shoot … Just like flies. Don’t write too many good lines. They pilfer. Them … Black rooms in the Roosevelt. Bowie walls … Crystal methskin … ‘Yeah, did you not know? It’s made from cleaning products.’ Pure gunk … The downhill struggle of … Bono. Branson. Frankie Machine. I can’t write in the present. Out of the woodwork. Out of the dust. They’ll be back soon. And they’ll think it’s going to my head. Changed … I am writing this at 23.46 so all may not be as it should be … They never used to let you in without a gun. Let it be said. I am not one to shirk mirth … The applauseless life … More kids at the gigs now … I am in constant repeat. He always sounds the same. Drings like a srunk …

  And the door opens and the cold enters before him, whispers his name. And he sits down and slips me the package wrapped in an Asda bag: another mobile, the fourth in four days.

  I put it on the floor, near to my feet, within eyeshot, and ask:

  ‘Pint?’

  But he’s out the door. Gone …

  7. They Who Dare!

  I’ve never really got on with record companies. Knowing how they operate or mis-operate, it amazes me how most of them manage to keep afloat. To be fair to them, Step Forward were good to us in the beginning. They seemed to be into the same thing. Miles Copeland was financing it – the record industry didn’t like him because he was a millionaire’s son, but he gave us a chance, because he heard something different in it, like he gave The Police a chance. The fact that he was Stuart’s brother is by the by. The Police were laughed at as well, because they were doing pop reggae.

  You had the freedom there. We were treated very well. There was never any pressure. When we did Dragnet in 1979, it was a new group, totally different music. Step Forward heard it, thought it was good, thought it was rock and roll, thought it fucked up the mainstream. You have to remember that Miles had a background in Wishbone Ash and Curved Air – he was sick of it, really. He’d done all that Spin¨al Tap-type shit before. We were out of this world for him. Dragnet was so opposite to Witch Trials – which I think is still a powerful LP. But Dragnet is the other side: the horror of the normal. I like that sort of stuff; with writers like M. R. James and Arthur Machen the stories are right there on your doorstep. I used to be in the Machen Society. I started reading him when I was about sixteen. He’s one of the best horror writers ever. M. R. James is good, but Machen’s fucking brilliant. He wrote a great drug story, The Novel of the White Powder. This is way before Crowley and all the other commercial occultists. His stuff’s quite terrifying. You can see where the likes of Robert Bloch and Stephen King got their ideas from, using the mundane everyday as a backdrop for great terror.

  The Machen Society was brilliant, you’d get these fantastic excerpts from his unpublished diaries – a good film could be made out of them. He lives in this alternative world: the real occult’s not in Egypt, but in the pubs of the East End and the stinking boats of the Thames – on your doorstep, basically. I know what he means.

  I always imagine his stories being read aloud in a fruity academic accent in a study in an Oxford or Cambridge college in winter, with the mist rising from the river, the only light coming from candles, and the only heat from a large fire and the bodies of the small audience. He was a great writer.

  I’m a dreamy sort of person and I get on with this sort of writing much more than I do with realists. I never wanted to be bracketed with the realists – Dragnet has nothing to do with the reality of the times.

  We recorded it in three days. Most of it is purposefully out of tune. But later we found out that Cargo Studios in Rochdale didn’t want to let it out. It was a heavy metal studio and they were nervous about releasing it because of its sound. They thought it’d reflect badly on them. But Step Forward were great. Miles and journalist Danny Baker, who was a rare fan of ours at the time, were saying, ‘Just bring it out – i
t’s The Fall!’

  They were different times then. Even though it was the arse-end of punk, it wasn’t the done thing for a studio to release something that sounded so wilfully alien to everything else. In their minds this meant sabotaging future projects with the likes of fucking Marillion.

  It was quite strange listening to it. Even the band were unsure about it; but I loved it. It’s funny, because it was the first album that Grant Showbiz produced. I’d met him at the Deeply Vale Festival in Rochdale the year before. He was there with a load of hippies, living in a bus with no clothes on, no joke. He’s forgotten all that now. Then I got him mixing for us and mixing for The Smiths and now he’s like, ‘Oh, you know what Mark’s like after too much whisky!’ and ‘Oh, I’ve got to go and work with Billy [Bragg] and I’ve got to go and work with Mozzer.’ I remember when you were in a camper van in Deeply Vale mud, Grant! He didn’t know what year it was!

  Grant’s very London. Everywhere to him is London. He’s done some good work with us over the years, so I shouldn’t have a go at him. But once certain people start supping with artists they tend to forget the origins of this new existence; and in truth, he didn’t know what he was doing on Dragnet. It panned out okay, though, and looking back it wasn’t such a bad thing using an inexperienced producer. We were much more willing to take risks. We worked it out as we went along – but not in a half-arsed way. It helps, sometimes, not to be too precious about these things; on occasion it’ll throw up an idea that was never there in the first place.

  I don’t know why people found the album so objectionable. With the journalists, I think it was a simple case of them expecting one thing, having written the copy for that one thing, and then getting something else and thinking, ‘Fuck! I’ve now got to think about this.’ It’s hard for a lot of journalists to get to grips with a band that keeps moving. They try to pretend otherwise – that all bands should experiment more and not play ball with the industry so much. You hear it all the time. But whenever this happens, their writing falters, they can’t seem to erase that notion they had of the band. It requires too much effort. Whenever we get a good review, it reads like a good review from 1986 or whenever – ‘And Mark Smith is back with another LP of rockabilly and penetrative lyrics blardy-blah …’ I’ve read it all before – they’ve read it all before, they’re copying themselves. It’s as if we’re too far ahead for them to truly understand what The Fall are about. Good bands need a good audience too. If you don’t come across as readily as, say, U2, who are defined by the amount of records they sell, then journalists struggle to write anything perceptive about you. They don’t allow themselves the time. If you’re not a comfort blanket or a doom-monger then what are you in the eyes of journalists, who only seem to have two or three angles to write from? They don’t read enough, if you ask me. Writers should read, and I know for a fact that all too many of them don’t – they get their qualifications, fuck off travelling for a bit, return to London, get a job in the media and don’t bother to put any more ideas inside their heads other than the two or three they picked up at university. I’m not talking about striving to be an intellectual – they don’t even have any historical perspective on anything. It’s one long Friday night to them. Or if not that, then you sit down with journalists or so-called far-out types in London and they’ll be saying, ‘Oh yes, you won’t believe the way the wife breastfeeds!’ and I’m thinking, ‘Alright – good for you!’ They have fuck-all interesting to say for themselves.

  The worst thing is, they get employed very easily. It’s no wonder the media lacks depth – one idiot is enough but twenty-odd of them are bound to fuck things up. I find it strange that these sorts of people have a go at Fall fans. Writing about how they’re all the same – ageing blokes wearing wind-cheaters and all that, supping pints of bitter: moaners, basically. What’s the difference between the fan and the journalist? Both have their viewpoints on the way things should be. I don’t get it; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the opinionated fan who does a job in the week and then for one night has a few beers and goes to watch a band – what’s wrong with that? Why not write about that angle? You’re bound to have a group of nostalgia-men in the house; even Oasis have fans like that. It’s more about the journalist, about their life, than the subject they’re writing about.

  The only thing I do find annoying with Fall fans is their tendency to reminisce too much about the early days. I find it hard to look back at things like everybody else. They seem to have different eyes from me, fondly reminiscing about Karl Burns, about the original line-up, the purity of punk, about events like Deeply Vale. Deeply Vale was fucking heavy, I remember that. It was in its third year and by then there were about twenty-odd thousand people there; and no coppers. All these morons come to beat the hippies up, all these big Rochdale fellows with enormous heads. Some of the biggest people I’ve ever seen live in Rochdale. I don’t know what it is. The blokes are huge. I’ve recorded there a few times over the years – we finished Reformation Post-TLC there, at Lisa Stansfield’s studio. The Dudes came over from America – Tim, Rob and Orpheo. I remember sitting in a pub with Orpheo and all these lumpen Rochdale blokes are in there with dents in their bald skulls, belting down pints. He handled it well, even though they were just staring at him every time he opened his mouth. He was too un-Rochdale for them. They didn’t know him. I think he wants to move there now …

  I can’t look back like some fans can. I can’t get beyond the fact that most of it was shit – most of the people telling me otherwise are daft cunts like Paul Morley and all those other talking heads who make money out of that sort of shit. It’s blatant revisionism, if you ask me. Programmes about how great the 70s and 80s were – it’s always the same people peddling the same story – don’t they have anything else to talk about? Thing is, if they weren’t making that sort of programme then half of those idiots would have to go and write about something proper. Odd thing is, they don’t even talk about the few good things that originated from the past. You look at a programme like The Prisoner – now, do you really think the people pushing those nostalgia lies have the talent or patience to create something like that? A single episode of that or The Twilight Zone has more ideas in it than a full year of modern TV. The difference is that back then they actually cared about what they were doing – that, and the fact a lot of the writers working on those programmes had a background in literature. It was proper writing: original writing that tried to work on different levels. It makes me laugh what they get away with nowadays. They just don’t explore the medium that they’re at the centre of, they’re frightened. It’s not just TV either – music as well. When we recorded those early albums we never thought about how the record company would react; not like they do today. I wanted to write out of the song – ‘Spectre vs. Rector’, for instance. I wanted to explore, to put a twist on the normal. People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads. Instead of going with it, gambling on an idea or a feeling, they check themselves and play it safe or consult their old university buddies. That’s why it’s all so staid. They’ve only got about four ideas between them.

  The late 70 and early 80s were a strange time being in a band. I quite liked the way that everything was a little fragmented. It meant that I could get on with things and the band not moan about which other band they thought we should be sounding like. I remember when we released Totale’s Turns in 1980. Nobody wanted to release it, because nobody played the sort of venues that you hear on it – places like Doncaster and Preston. It wasn’t the done thing to promote ourselves like that. The north was out of bounds; it might as well have been another country. But I know a lot of people who rate that album; it reminds them of The Stooges live LP – Metallic K.O.

  It didn’t help that I was in my early twenties at the time. It’s not acceptable to be headstrong at that age. A lot of people are still like that in the music business. They don’t like people who
know what they want, at the best of times; but they like you even less if you’re sticking to your guns and you’re under the age of forty. The thing is, I don’t deliberate like most other people. I know when something’s done, when it’s time to work on something new. It rankles with musicians. It’s amazing how many of them just don’t know when to stop. They think it’s a marathon; a marathon of perfection.

  With Totale’s Turns we just pieced a load of tapes together. They were lying around in a studio somewhere. In the band’s eyes it was commercial suicide releasing this dirge; they couldn’t see the soul that lay behind it. That’s musicians for you.

  The interesting thing about being in a band is that a lot of people who want to get up and go on stage are quite reserved in normal circumstances; but part of them needs to be seen. So they join a band with another three or four people with the same unspoken problem. But inside there’s a lot of bile. In a way they resent the man at the front. You only have to look at Oasis. I’ve never really liked Noel Gallagher. Liam’s alright, I like him. I feel sorry for him actually – it’s always our kid this and our kid that, always his fault. I’d hate to have a brother like Noel. What’s he doing? Liam is Oasis – he’s handsome, he’s a good front man, great voice. What does Noel do except write Beatles-type tunes? I’ve met him a couple of times and you feel like saying, ‘Shut up!’ I think he’s a bit jealous of Liam – very Catholic, that. Liam’s done a lot more for them than he’s been credited for.

  I remember meeting Noel in America in the late 90s. He went to the bathroom in my hotel and I had all my shirts in there. I could see him through the mirrors looking at them, seeing what brand they were.