The barmaid at Gulliver’s, on Oldham Street in Manchester, spotted Mark E Smith walking in with me and had poured out a pair of double whiskeys before we reached the bar. That still left the question of what I was going to drink.
Mark E Smith, The Fall frontman who has died today aged 60, will be remembered as one of post-punk’s great frontmen, a poet with a genuinely unique and provocative style, and an occasionally combative interviewee. Along with his music, personally I’ll remember him most as one of the most entertaining men I was ever lucky enough to go for a drink with.
He could hold court about the state of Britain, his love of amphetamine or his favourite writers, like Arthur C Clarke, Hunter Thompson, and Shakespeare - who he told me with apparent conviction was “very, very underrated.” He also had an impish sense of humour. On a later occasion, at the New Oxford in Salford, he broke a conversational lull by asking: “Do you ever suffer from hallucinations?” then promptly popped out his dentures and gurned toothlessly around the bar.
Then there was his great line in anecdotes, drawn from his seemingly endless Fall tours. Like the time in Austin in 1981 when his drummer and sound guy disappeared and Smith decided to go and rescue them. Whether or not they wanted to be rescued was a moot point. “There were all these birds in miniskirts with their tits out. They were all very attractive,” Smith told me. “I said, ‘We’ve got to get them out!’ Me and the bass player did this sort of weird attack. We broke in through the fing skylight. We got them, but they weren’t very pleased about it. They were in their underpants with hard-ons and white powder all over their faces. I said: ‘Get in the van, you fing c**ts! Say goodbye to Austin, matey. You’re going back to the misery.’”
Smith’s proclivity for hiring and firing new band members on a whim was legendary, famously once clarifying that: “If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's The Fall.” He may have been ruthless, but it also meant the band were remarkably prolific. After he first formed The Fall in 1976 he went on to release no less than 31 albums under the band’s name, not counting various live recordings, culminating in last year’s "New Facts Emerge". The sole constant that links this vast collection is the strange, visceral and unsettling world created by Smith’s poetry. The title of their sixth album, Perverted by Language, could serve as an apt description of both their oeuvre and influence.
One of the many contemporary musicians to have been heavily influenced by The Fall is LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Speaking to him for this magazine a couple of years ago, I asked Murphy whether he saw himself in Smith, but Murphy demurred. “I’m a reactive person,” he said. “Mark E Smith seems to be a generative person: ‘I’m going to make this thing. Nothing like it happened before. Nothing like it has happened since.’”
Murphy was right about that. There was nobody quite like Mark E Smith before him. There’ll be nobody quite like him again.
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