Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

by Mark E. Smith

  I’d go for walks as well, take in a few sights. Edinburgh has a lot of great buildings – truly spectacular monuments. And the place itself has a good feel to it. I couldn’t have picked a better environment.

  At night I’d go out and have a drink with my new pals. But the more I think about it, the more I remember it as a heavy scene; not too dissimilar to Trainspotting. I still have a few mates there. But they do tend to live very fast in Leith. People my age are virtually retired with six kids now; grandfathers at forty. I’m talking about men who were spiking it up in their twenties when I was with them – doing everything.

  I know a lot of people who were unhappy with Trainspotting. They didn’t like the way that whole scene was depicted. It’s true that Welsh was very much a fringe player. He didn’t go as far as a lot of others, and so of course they think he’s a bit of a stool pigeon. I liked it, though. I was one of the first people to read it. I recommended it to a lot of my mates. The simple fact is you don’t have to be a complete fuck-up to write about being a fuck-up. I think they’ve got it wrong there. You’d have to be quite stupid to think otherwise; and there’s not that much difference between jacking up for three months and jacking up for a year or however long. It’s not as if he wrote about it in a Guardian way. He didn’t slum it for a few months and then chivvy on back to Notting Hill. I think he nailed it well. He’s a good writer, just a shame he didn’t put us on the soundtrack to Trainspotting – I needed a few quid at the time!

  Wintertime was good there as well. They don’t celebrate Christmas like they do in England. I remember being alone in my flat and just wandering to the pub every day and the atmosphere was nothing like it is in England – none of that straining for a good time. It seemed less commercial there as well. It was great. But the big thing in Scotland is hogmanay – that’s a free for all. And it lasts for days. Fantastic – free drinks, whisky.

  Christmas is a weird time to be in England, especially where I live. People get more emotional as the years go by; people I haven’t heard from in months ring me up all sad and wistful. It’s like a confession, like they’re conferring a darkness upon themselves and I’m their sounding board. There was none of that in Edinburgh. It was more like the last days of Rome – strangers coming up to you with a half a bottle of whisky in a pint glass.

  ‘Here you go, sonny!’

  I think that’s where the problems started. I got a real taste for it. There’s nothing quite like being drunk on whisky. Things can get mental on that stuff; and things did get mental years later; but while in Edinburgh I handled it well. I was happy to be out of Manchester. I couldn’t have stuck around and witnessed all that Madchester bollocks. I thought it was all very childish really; cynical and childish and empty. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been around then.

  Part of me wishes I’d stayed in Leith. The flat I had was fantastic; this beautiful Victorian house with a big luxurious couch and all this classic art on the walls. Cobble stone; before all that sort of thing became trendy. I see that area quite a lot on property programmes. It’d cost you about half a million quid now. Typical me; I gave it up. I could have just signed the lease – it was only a year and a half lease and I was paying twenty-five quid a week all in – electric, gas, etc.

  I came back for a number of reasons, one of which was that it was too nice there. This is another thing with me. Sometimes things can be too good. I am like that. People call it self-destructive. You can become too comfortable; and I do care about my writing. It’s alright getting up when you want and making a few phone calls when you want, going to a few museums, a few clubs; but all the time you’re finding excuses not to write.

  My dad died in 1989 as well. It was a bad period. All the males in the family started dropping off, too. I’d have to come back every month or so: go back to Edinburgh after six weeks and Uncle Jimmy’s dead; a month later my grandad’s dead; a month after that Uncle Ernie’s dead. They all just dropped off the perch. Quite weird, really. In the space of about six to nine months I was going through a divorce and most of the male members of my family had died. After nearly a year in Edinburgh I was the only male in the family. I went from being Mark the daft fellow who never goes on Top of the Pops to being something entirely different. They were all bastions of the family. They left a big hole.

  All that remained was me, Uncle Norman and about twenty women. It’s quite common, that. Salford has one of the worst death rates for middle-aged males; higher than parts of the Third World.

  Looking back, I do remember having a feeling that I had to return to Manchester. It wasn’t as if I’d been hiding or that I was frightened. Manchester had been my home for a long time; an unhealthy amount of time almost.

  To be honest, I’m trying to get back to my Edinburgh regime today – eating three square meals a day of good food. And good fresh air helps a lot as well. Rather than moping around Prestwich, where you’re lucky to get a packet of bacon.

  The one thing I do regret is not buying that flat. It killed me financially. I’m hopeless with things like that. Before I went, I had all these pension plans. But I let it all go to pot. Just thought – fuck it!

  Me and Brix were shelling out two hundred quid a month for health insurance and Bupa and a pension plan. Things were quite straight in that respect. But the longer I spent in Edinburgh the more broke I became.

  I suppose I ought to be glad I didn’t continue with all that shit anyway. A lot of people around the ages of fifty and fifty-five who invested in things like that can’t get their money back now. Not long after I couldn’t afford to invest any more, Robert Maxwell died and all that pension corruption business became public news. I knew people in the music business who were paying out £600 a month for pension plans and all those companies have collapsed. I do remember feeling guilty about not keeping up the payments, though.

  You’ve got to make your mind up – pay the group a decent wage, pay your divorce or your pension plan; looked at like that it’s not that important. But in those days financial advisers would come round to your house wanting to know why you’d fallen behind; they even tried to come up to Edinburgh.

  A lot of people went solo because of that pension business. People were telling me to do likewise, saying, ‘Why shell your money out on the band when you can put it in a pension plan? You’re like a footballer, you’ll be fucked up when you’re thirty-five – save your money.’

  But I thought it was more important to pay the group – not that they appreciated it. I always paid handsome wages, which backfired. I was very socialistic. Everybody got paid the same. It’s not a bad job at all. But I was working with lower-middle-class people who think you’re a bit stupid. They all think you’re an idiot. Maybe it’s because I’m not a musician – they don’t think I understand their ‘creative angst’.

  They say things like, ‘Why aren’t we like U2? Why aren’t we at the top of the album charts?’

  After I’ve just paid them more than what those bands were receiving! But my attitude was, it’s better to do that in order to remain independent.

  They couldn’t understand why they weren’t playing stadiums, failing to realize the fact that they’re doing something they want to do and earning the same money as fucking Bono. I had the same thing with Ben and Steve. I’d have to keep saying to them, ‘You’re getting the same money as Franz Ferdinand but you don’t have to make a fool of yourself every five minutes on TV. You can record what you want. It doesn’t have to be a hit. Stop whining!’

  I think they get to a stage where they think they’re carrying me – that I’m holding them back just for the stubborn hell of it.

  A lot of people think I’m an idiot because I keep paying these people. But I don’t see it like that. Where would I be now if I didn’t continue to do that? In a nice big house in Cheshire on my tod! Not doing anything. Looking forward to the gardener coming around. Popping down to the nice local pub. What would I do? I would have been dead at forty-five, that’s what. />
  Despite not getting a lot of writing done in Edinburgh, the time I spent there resulted in Extricate (1990), which is still a well-liked album. A lot of good writing originates from periods like that, when you don’t force it too much. Even the critics liked it. But I think they read too much into it. Every question they asked me would be like, ‘This single here – this is about Brix, isn’t it?’

  It’s never that clear-cut. Even ‘Bill is Dead’ – which everybody assumed was about my dad and his mate Bill – began as a piss-take of The Smiths. Only later did it become something a little more personal.

  There’s not a bad track on it, if you ask me. I’m very proud of that LP. Stuff like ‘Popcorn Double Feature’, that’s a cover of a Searchers track. I’ve always been a big fan of The Searchers. Everybody goes on about The Beatles, but The Searchers were the main Merseybeat band for me. They were brilliant song-writers, very underrated. That whole scene’s very underrated. Music buffs harp on about the Nuggets groups and 60s American garage music – which is all very good – but there was also a lot of great music originating from Liverpool at the time. I think that’s why The La’s were the only group I liked around ’89. The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses were alright, but they were never as good as The La’s. Lee Mavers was brilliant; they were very similar to The Searchers in a soulful way.

  As I say, I’m very proud of Extricate. Like with Hex before it and The Real New Fall LP after, I think I proved something there. It does bring the best out of me when I’m forced into a corner. I don’t wilt like other people. I’m used to being up against it. Being brought up the way I was helps.

  If I wasn’t who I am, I wouldn’t stand a fucking chance nowadays. I’m trouble. They’d rather have somebody straight-weird like Ian Brown or Russell Brand; a fellow who can be reined in, given enough coercing. They don’t want anybody like me. They don’t want the honest stuff – somebody saying I don’t want that, I don’t want anything to do with that. But I’m incapable of toeing the line. If something is clearly wrong or third-rate I’m not willing to let it go. I get that from my dad. He had a good head for correcting mistakes while remaining a decent bloke.

  Just before he died he asked me if he’d ever done me wrong. He never gave me any problems. He was great. The older I get, the more I remember things he used to say to me, things like, ‘If you’re feeling too sexy have a glass of water and a run round the backyard.’ That’s brilliant. I’ll always appreciate what he did for me and my sisters and my mam.

  15. Hard as Nails

  I am one of the 3 per cent who was made to take speed. It helps me sleep. It’s not a big problem for me, but I can always tell when people are writing on drugs. On speed it’s all nonsense.

  I remember Nick Cave when he used to write on heroin, he’d show me his lyrics. I’d be like, ‘Nick, what you doing?’ From The Birthday Party to this – lyrics like, ‘Ohh, I went to the canal, fell in the lake.’ That’s what heroin’s like, you think you’re really good. I did it once at a party in Manchester in the mid 80s, just to be sociable. I started writing, thinking this is the greatest thing ever written. Then I fell asleep. I woke up some time the day after, thinking I’d written the masterpiece of all masterpieces. I was convinced I’d written a short story, a novel, and an LP all in one. I felt like shit, told myself I’m not taking that again, but at least I’d got this work of genius.

  And then I started reading it, or trying to read it; this four-page epic. It was a mess. I’d fallen asleep on the fifth page. I didn’t even know what it was, whether it was a song or a story.

  It fools you, proper heroin. It’s quite scary. You can see it with the likes of Pete Doherty. He thinks he’s created something that isn’t there. It plays the worst of all tricks on you. Never again; the first and last time – I hated the stuff. Why bother? You’ll be like that anyway when you’re ninety and dying.

  I get classed with the Beat writers sometimes, in that people think I’m under the influence when I write; which isn’t always the case.

  There’s a rumour with William Burroughs, though, that he didn’t take as much as he cracked on he did; that a lot of it was an image thing: the experimenter. He was a clever man in that respect.

  Contrary to what a lot of critics think, I’ve never been influenced by him. I’m not such a big fan of his work. In fact, I don’t particularly like Naked Lunch. It’s almost unreadable, if you ask me. Cities of the Red Night is much better. But most of his stuff is boring, almost as if he’s doing it for the money in order to go and get some more little boys in Tangiers or wherever. I think Ginsberg was the more interesting writer. He was the one who took all the drugs as well. His lines are clearer, less dense. He doesn’t hide as much as Burroughs.

  But it’s not really about the drink and drugs, is it? To some people it is; to some people that’s it – if you take drugs or you have a pint or two, then they’re not going to go any further with you. But to me they’re missing the point; which is, if you are going to take shit, then it’s essential that it doesn’t get in the way of what you’re doing, that you handle it as best you can. I get the feeling with Doherty and a lot of young lads nowadays that they’re acting the rock star without delivering the goods. It’s empty success, in other words. It’s fine when they’re shooting up or they’re arm in arm with supermodels, but sit them down and ask them to record an album and they’re fucking straight off to rehab. They get sloppy too quickly.

  It used to be the case that models attached themselves to real rock stars – Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull with The Stones in the 60s, for instance; but that’s not the case nowadays. That says it all for me. Any berk with a scruffy hair-do and a couple of songs can find an outlet and hero-worship like that nowadays.

  What gets me is when I get daft promoters like Alan Wise saying, ‘Don’t give Mark the whisky before he goes on.’ It’s written into the contract – ‘Do not give Mark whisky before he goes on stage.’ I’d rather have it upfront. Most of the people saying things like that are obviously zipped out of their brains themselves.

  I’ve known about drugs since I was fourteen, and I can tell when somebody’s not all there, when their eyes are telling me they’ve done too much chokey. If I was a copper I’d lock them up straight away. But I’m too well mannered to say that. What’s more, I can see if they’ve had eight cups of coffee as well, which is not good for you. I miss all those fellows, all my old Irish mates, in that respect. If somebody said to them, ‘Have you been drinking, sir?’ they’d be like ‘Yes, I fucking have, and I want some more – what’s it got to do with you?’ But you can’t say that any more – you’d get thrown off a plane for a start.

  To a certain extent I understand where they’re coming from. I did happen to lose it a bit when I was drinking too much whisky in the mid 90s, but I checked myself. I knew I had to curb it. And I did. I stand by Whyte and Mackay though, it’s a lovely drink.

  The worst thing I could do now is completely stop. You look at the amount of people who have died because they’ve just stopped drinking or doing whatever. The list is endless. The thing with me is, I don’t get hangovers. I’ve never been bothered by them. Red wine gets to me; it makes me very violent. I think it’s bad for you. Women who are into red wine are always manic-depressives.

  The only hangovers I’ve ever had were off ecstasy. It’s not nice. It’s like going to hospital and being drugged up when you’ve had an accident. Very much like when I broke my leg. You’re drying your brain up with that stuff, it’s like a sponge. You feel sort of high, you go home, but in the morning it’s as if you’ve eaten a lot of dust.

  I remember in the Hacienda days when you couldn’t get any drink or speed – they’d all be dancing around and touching you. What the fuck is all this about? I don’t need to feel like this. I can feel like this in hospital. It’s like a gross antidepressant mixed with speed. They all want to love everybody.

  All of a sudden you’ve turned into a sex maniac. Mates of mine from Salford
who used to take the piss out of me for being in The Fall suddenly start gushing, ‘I’ve always liked you, Mark.’ It’s terrible, they start getting eloquent about plastering or roofing. I preferred it when they used to threaten me. But I don’t trust any artificial drugs. A friend of a friend once told me how they made it. It was very fishy the way it was invented. The aim was to get American middle-class kids off the street. So some scientist came up with this mixture of coke, speed, pot and acid; the chemical equivalent. Perfect. Work all week, do what you want, and take it at the weekend. State control: Brave New World.

  I’m not a big fan of pot, either. It cuts people off from their feelings, like Prozac. You’ve got to come out some time.

  At least you know where you are with booze. You drink two bottles of whisky and wake up in the morning, you know you’ve done something wrong, you know you won’t be doing that again. But experience tells you it’ll lift soon. And with liquor, if you drink any more you’ll be dead. You can’t move. But with E you start seeing chickens on the road – I know I was.

  It’s always been the same with my drinking. It annoys me when fellows go on about it, sitting there with a pint telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. It’s more about them than it is about me. They usually drink as much as I do, if not more. The difference is they work at a completely different job. I don’t have to be up at a certain time every day. It’s jealousy, in a way. I find it amusing when they bang on about how much they eat, how healthy they are – ‘I eat four meals a day, me.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, and look where it’s got you.’ They fail to realize that 99.9 per cent of people with a healthy diet will eventually die.