Mark E. Smith: cranky old man of post-punk

Mark E. Smith, the lead singer-songwriter of the English post-punk rock band the Fall, would prowl the stage like a (sometimes drugged) caged lion. He looked part Malcolm McDowell, when he played Alex in “A Clockwork Orange,” and part Anthony Andrews, when he played the alcoholic junkie Sebastian Flyte in the 1981 TV series, “Brideshead Revisited.” With his back often hunched and turned away from the crowd (a la Miles Davis), Smith would be looking downward, his hand riffling in a pants pocket for no apparent reason, projecting mostly indifference.

Yet, what he expressed in the music – his voice pitched somewhere between singing, ranting and declaiming – ranged from tongue-in-cheek misanthropy to boredom to gleeful exuberance. Sometimes, this happened in the course of the same song, as when the Fall covered Sister Sledge's disco anthem “Lost in Music," where Smith exclaimed, “Lost in music/Feel so alive!” Yeah, well, sort of …

In the Fall's swirling, revved-up version, Smith sounded dispirited and sardonic at the onset, but actually seemed to succumb to the music's giddy charm by the end. Or was there yet another layer of a joke? “I've done a lot with it,” Smith told me back in 1993. “I like songs that are triple-edged, almost.”

It all came to a screeching halt on Wednesday when Smith died at 60 in Manchester, England. In the end, Mark E. Smith’s death was likely caused from complications of being Mark E. Smith.

The Fall did a brief U.K. tour last year with Smith in a wheelchair, but scrapped a U.S. tour, after he was hospitalized for what was referred to in a post by Pamela Vander (aka Pam Van Damned), the group’s manager and Smith’s girlfriend, as “bizarre and rare medical issues connected to his throat, mouth/dental & respiratory system.” Officially, there’s no cause of death yet. Vander said a more detailed statement would follow “in the next few days.”

Smith didn’t exactly hide his penchant for liquor and drugs and once approached me backstage before a Fall show at a Boston club, mistaking me for his Boston drug connection, perhaps, asking if I had anything “to make me go fast, you know, coke? Speed?” Alas, I could not help him. Someone else did, though, I’m pretty certain.

The Fall was dazzlingly prolific – 32 studio albums from 1979 to 2017 – with 66 different musicians playing parts at various points. The Fall really was Mark E. Smith, a tempestuous, irascible band leader who fired musicians like James Brown did. Those ex-members have told many a gnarly tale.

The Fall, a shambolic, heavily percussive band that loved chaos and repetition in equal parts, was the favorite of John Peel, the esteemed late English DJ. Peel famously, and truthfully, said of the Fall’s records: “They are always different; they are always the same.”

Some songs were topical, serious and scabrous, others more mundane and whimsical; many times, the Fall shuffled the cards. Smith often addressed the crumbling of his own country. Part of what made the Fall's music sound ever-current was that Smith sounded like an articulate, if cranky, old man back in 1980, and he sounded the same in 2017 on the Fall’s final album, “New Facts Emerge.”

“Yeah, a lot of people have said that to me,” Smith said, when I asked him about that back in 1993. “I sounded about 50 when I started out, didn't I? I was world-weary at 18. It's an advantage when you think about it.”

While Smith was in love with words and word-play – he said he edited out 90 percent of what he wrote to fit the song – he had mixed feelings about how important lyrics should be, what role they should play in the music.

“A lot of the times, in the past, I've deliberately obscured the lyrics, mainly ’cause I don't like to put too much of a point on it,” he said. “What I don't like about a lot of rock music is it's like you can just look at the title of some songs and you know what it's about: Why even play it? I never liked to put it all on one plate. I really do want to stimulate."

The music itself existed in a strange sphere – disconnected both from usual melodic notions of pop music and from the more accessible side of post-punk rock. Nothing was too sweet, or too gloomy, but all of it was cut with tense textures. The Fall’s music often had a casual intensity – moderate tempi, a mix of long and short songs, clean, disciplined rhythms and guitar playing that ranged from a subtle, country-ish twang to a dissonant, gritty clang. Riffs surged and then dropped back, stinging and soothing as rhythms surged forward.

Both in person and in the music, Smith could be intimidating. He kept his Mancunian accent when singing, sometimes slurring, often adding an added grunt – “ah” – at the end of a line. He was funny, too, but you had to get beyond the confrontational, sometimes combative, exterior. Taking the mickey was Smith's stock in trade – the English music paper NME once dubbed him "the most feared man in Britain's pop-rock" scene – and the Fall (in most any incarnation) was the crankiest, most caustic band in the UK.

Smith was also a memoirist – and a certifiably unreliable narrator – who in 2010 penned “Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith,” a vicious, hilarious spit-take of a book. The Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan opined it “may be the funniest music book ever written … (with Smith being) the ultimate indie-rock misanthrope, who slipped free of his moorings and let rip at everyone and anything that had ever annoyed him.”

At the 15-year/22-album break, I asked Smith about the group’s trip: "It's sort of cyclic, really. We are very much like we were when we started out. We still write really abrasive music, and we try to get more intelligent lyrics over it."

Cynical, acerbic, relentless, witty, obsessive: That was Mark E. Smith. Here’s a sample of a Smith rant from a Boston stage, 1986, as the song “Bombast” began: “All those whose mind entitles themselves,

and whose main entitle is themselves, shall feel the wrath of my bombast!” And from a song called “It's a Curse," Smith intoned, “I do not like your tone/It has ephemeral, whinging aspects – it's a curse. ... Their sandwiches stashed under their side seats/Their froglike chins ready to burst/I tell you, it's a curse, it's a burden. Trying to get over ... bargain vampires." (Whinging is British slang for moaning.)

“I never want to be seen as doing a Dylan type of thing,” Smith told me. “That's what I'm always trying to avoid. If I wanted to be a poet, I'd write poetry books. I just look at me writing and edit me-self; that's the excitement I get out of it.

“A lot of the lyrics, of course, mean a lot to me,” he continued, “but also, I'm conscious of being in a rock group.” That is, Smith loved sound, noting “a sound can kick off as much as a lyric.” As a lyricist, Smith favored repetition and slang; moreover, he was willing to submerge the words in the pummeling pulse of the music – his jagged bits and pieces would fly out, much like sparks from a grindstone.

Smith credited the smarts he brought to the music to his education he got and to a fierce reading habit, “not a lot of newspapers, but books. Philip K. Dick, a lot of history books, Saul Bellow.”

And, of course, Albert Camus, the French existentialist who wrote the dense novel that gave the band its moniker.

“Camus, yeah, sure," Smith said. "But, you know, I went back to read it a year ago and I couldn't get past Page 1! When I was 18 it seemed great."

Still, the provocative, wordy and noisy Fall seemed to share Camus' belief that the world is absurd. “Freedom comes from the recognition of that fact,” Camus wrote, “and such freedom in turn allows humans to live lives of dignity and integrity.”

Put in the Fall's rock ’n’ roll terms: Life's absurd, let's have a good, nasty rave-up while we consider all the conflict.