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"I feel trapped by mutual affection, and I don't know how to use freedom. I spend hours looking sideways to the time when I was sixteen" - Frightened, The Fall.
I'm a Fall fan of many years standing, I even ran down my favourite 100 Fall songs a few years back, and that fandom began with, I think, John Peel presenting them on The Tube, playing 2x4 and Smile, back in 1983 and, slowly but surely, they replaced The Smiths in my affections. Mark E. Smith said, and did, some pretty awful things in his life by all accounts, but, unlike Morrissey's racist and far right ranting, never went completely beyond the pale. With Mark Smith, we simply blamed the booze.
Published in 2008, a decade before Smith died of lung and kidney cancer, Renegade is helmed by Guardian writer Austin Collings but the words are very much those of the man who was once described as "a strange kind of antimatter national treasure" (Chris Maume for The Independent). The man who once boasted of being able to "clear a pub" when he wanted to. The man who took pride in "spoiling all the paintwork".
Smith's choice of those words is, of course, both exquisite and idiosyncratic. Unhappy band members have "faces like vexed tomatoes", men who've been out in the sun all day have "big red faces that you could fry an egg on", journalists for the monthlies are "office men with roadie hairstyles who play along to Pink Floyd on their guitars after work", and an American policeman talks like he's in Top Cat.
The story takes us from Smith's childhood, a world of pigeons, Irish war widows, and Teddy Boys, to his first job as a shipping clerk in Salford docks where he'd spend his lunchtimes writing and go for a pint with passing Nigerians, Ghanaians, and Americans after work, and on to forming the band with girlfriend Una Baines and friends Tony Friel and Martin Bramah. Baines would leave the band by the time the debut album, Live at the Witch Trials, came out in March '79.
By the time the second album, Dragnet, was released, just seven months later, Friel and Bramah would also be gone. Setting in motion a tradition in which the line up was changed regularly - and often quite aggressively. Over forty years there were over sixty six band members. Smith only speaks kindly about a small number of them but he does, along the way, boast of setting a long jump record while at school (even claims he thinks it still stands) and being related to Henry Hook, the winner of a Victoria Cross for his actions in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.
When he's not boasting he is, of course, slagging people off. Or even things. J.R.R. Tolkien's writing is dismissed as "shit", U2 as "cheapskates" for asking for free wine at an awards ceremony, both Elvis Costello and Spandau Ballet are "bland bastards", and Gang of Four seem to get it in the neck a fair bit too.
Even places get it. Brighton particularly, which is even "worse than London". The likes of Julie Burchill led there by "the devil's compass". A "modern cultural prison", or "the Guardian's version of The Prisoner", where journalists and scene makers cosy up to "Fatboy Slim and Chris Eubank over a Sunday roast". At least in Blackpool they have proper sand and some "smashing chip shops". Smith's final shot at Brighton is a harsh one. He'd "rather have (Marc) Riley back in the band than live there".
He does find time to say some nice words about some things. Black Sabbath, The Kinks, The Move, Northern Soul, The Ramones, The Searchers, Iggy Pop, Link Wray, Peter Noone (!), and Gary Glitter (!!) intrigued him as a kid, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge was an inspiration on the writing of the young Smith (as was, of course, Arthur Machen), and, unlike his Grandad - who hated King Kong, he enjoyed films like Dead of Night and Charlie Bubbles. As well as, quite bizarrely, the Australian soap Neighbours.
Leonard Rossiter's Rising Damp landlord, Rigsby, comes in for some qualified praise as "a lost sort, looking for company" who finds himself "at the centre of a sly sham" which Smith, of course, relates to. He cities Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital and Mike Leigh's Meantime as films made that got it right and, I didn't expect this, he confesses admiration for Damien Hirst's brash businesslike manner of operating within the art world.
Though never critical of the man, Smith's always keen to downplay John Peel's role in the Fall's success and, to a degree, that's fair enough. I imagine Peel would have been quite happy about that. Smith recalls arguing with Marc Riley about the importance of recording Peel sessions. He felt you could get known as a 'Peel group' and that was limiting. He reminded Riley they didn't work for the BBC.
As surely as he returns to Peel and Riley, he also finds himself returning, time and again, to his vices. Often directed there during lazy interviews. Smith took up smoking at sixteen, a year after he dropped his first tab of acid, but it's the booze he was most renowned for. He remembers appearing on a chat show with George Best where Bestie was supposed to be talking about beating his alcoholism. A life lesson slightly ruined by the fact that MES and Best were knocking back champagne at the time (much to the disdain of the show's host, Suggs of Madness).
He makes some fairly standard pisshead excuses (the only drink problem he has is where to find it after eleven o'clock) but when he talks about the "good offers" you can get in Bargain Booze a truer picture emerges. He claims the "problems started" when he was living in Edinburgh, to get away from "all that Madchester bollocks", and drinking too much whisky.
In a book that is, above all else, conversational, Smith talks of missing his Irish mates who if somebody asked them if they'd been drinking they'd reply "yes, I fucking have , and I want some more - what's it got to do with you"? Ruefully, and with what sounds like bitter personal experience, Smith intones, "you can't say that any more - you'd get thrown off a plane for a start". He admits red wine makes him violent and that the whisky habit got a bit out of hand in the nineties but decides it'd be worse for him to give up than to carry on.
Hmmm! He's either an unreliable narrator or his body (or mind) has a strange way of dealing with things. He claims he's never had a hangover from alcohol but that he gets them from ecstasy and he reckons speed sends him to sleep. He even boasts of his urine sample being, at one point, 90% pure alcohol. This was in America and the Americans were quite impressed by this "limey's piss".
Then there's Smith's love life. From "sheepishly" kissing a girl called Sharon in a barn and on to his marriage with Brix Smith ("there's nothing worse than living with a woman if you're not married", but Brix came from an LA cocaine scene full of "daft bastards") Smith claims to not be interested in looks ("it's intelligence with me") and has a loathing for Loaded style lad mags ("at least the Daily Sport can be amusing"). He admits that most of his partners have left him but doesn't seem remotely bothered by it. Even going as far as claiming that men whose wives have left them should be barred from pubs as they sit there moping, one pint all night, ruining everyone else's evening.
When the book was written, Smith was with Elena ("the best thing to have happened to me in some time") who he met in the Volks Bar in Berlin. She's not featured in a song because Smith, mostly, avoids love songs which he dismisses as "sugared denial". The music itself sometimes gets a look in though. Smith formed The Fall after seeing The Sex Pistols at Manchester's Free Trade Hall and thought him and his friends could do better (as long as they didn't indulge their love for American jazz fusion combo Weather Report). Originally called The Outsiders, after the Camus book, they changed their name to The Fall (another Camus book, a better one according to Smith) after discovering another band had already bagged The Outsiders back in the sixties.
Initially Bramah sang ("he had the looks") and Smith played guitar but that soon changed. Smith mentions how some people think he can't sing and claims he can sing, always could, and compares himself, obliquely, to Otis Redding of all people!
On lyrics, he's on stronger ground. Mark claims never to have suffered from writer's block, at least for not longer than a fortnight. So much so that he laughs about leaving lyrics in pubs in Aldi bags. He's keen to point out that he's not a realist lyricist, that he writes about the occult. But also that he doesn't need to go to Egypt to find the occult, it's on the doorstep in Prestwich. You don't need to visit Australia, or the Orient, to find yourself. "Where you're living is in your head".
Although Renegade is highly favourable to Mark E. Smith's vision and view, some of his foes are allowed to get a brief word in. Former Fall guitarist and backing vocalist Ben Pritchard describes how a drunken Smith would threaten to stab people who woke him from his stupor to play gigs, how he poured beer over the Winnebago driver's head as they drove down the I-10 from Tucson to Phoenix, and the time a support band member invaded the stage during The Fall's set and whacked Smith in the head with a banana.
Not all the stories relating to Smith are dangerous and violent. Other reminisces you can't help laughing out loud at. Like the Irish lads he hung round with at school and changed the lyrics to All the Young Dudes to "I'm going to Woolworths, I'm going to shag a cow to death", a dog with a squint eating Karl Burns' passport (and failing to spew it out) before an Australian tour, falling asleep in a portacabin when Bob Dylan was playing at Glastonbury, and meeting Alex Higgins at a Bowie concert when Higgins was so drunk he thought he was at a snooker tournament AND fell on the band Tears For Fears.
Some of the stories you've heard before (Marc Riley wanting to wear a cowboy hat when they played Container Drivers and then getting sacked, supposedly, by Smith on his wedding day) but they still evince a smile. Sometimes you think he's surely got his tongue in his cheek. Does he really rate Louise Redknapp's cover of Stuck In The Middle With You and does he really want to see "more ashtrays on morning TV and presenters wheezing"? I do believe him, however, when he claims to have liked Alvin Stardust and Shakin' Stevens!
As well as being funny, Smith is insightful when the mood takes him. Johnny Rotten being on I'm A Celebrity made him think of how in wartime Russia, supposedly subversive artists were forced to dig holes. Tony Wilson and Factory Records reminds him of Engels, a middle class socialist who owned factories in Manchester and employed young kids before observing how depressed the conditions made them and making money out of that as well.
A "classic Christian" according to Smith, is a "cunt all week and then a saint on Sunday", Stuart Pearce is "deranged", Gary Lineker is "the crisp man", Steve McLaren is "one of those blokes who starts to panic if he's not occupying his mind with a catalogue of small things; the sort you see out in the garden every sunny Sunday", the Football Association are "a randy cult souped on good wine, expensive fruit, and nice clean sausages", and John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Elton John, quite simply, "are or were cunts".
One thing that does come across nearly as strongly as his dislike for the establishment and accepted ways of thinking and behaving is Mark E. Smith's total and utter dedication and devotion to The Fall. It was his life's work and passion. It was where he processed his thoughts, ideas, and creativity. Like a mad philosopher creating his own world with himself as pivot. Everything rotated around, and was filtered through, Smith's unique purview.
You may, quite likely, have felt he was a drunk curmudgeon who could barely hold a note leading a band of tuneless brickies but, if you did, you'd have been wrong. You'd have completely misunderstood what The Fall were. You'd have, in Mark Smith's mind I think, embraced mediocrity. The Fall were not a rock'n'roll band. The Fall were The Fall and could only be judged against themselves.
Renegade, great read though it is, is not the book to make this argument. It's written by, and for, people who have already fought and won that argument. That it doesn't present an all encompassing view of everything Mark Smith and Fall related is, in fact, proper and correct. Like many of The Fall's greatest songs, Renegade is a partial view, occluded, clouded, and littered with digression, transgression, and meanderings on either the occult or Association Football. In that it seems not unlike a Fall song or, indeed, Mark E. Smith's wonderful and frightening mind. Notebooks out plagiarists.
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