Mark E Smith: wonderful and frightening

With 27 studio albums and 40-plus band members in 32 years, few have been able to keep pace with the Fall's volatile frontman. As he publishes his memoirs, the notoriously unpredictable Mark E Smith talks to Nicholas Blincoe

Mark E Smith has one of life's more distinctive faces. He moves and clicks his jaw before he speaks, as though he is literally chewing over his words. His eyes are lively and he breaks easily into laughter, but the eyes can just as quickly become hooded as the smile turns to a wary challenge. This is the look Smith wears on stage. His band, the Fall, release their 27th studio album this month. Smith is the frontman - in every sense. He is the singer and the lyricist, he pays the wages and he decides who to hire and who to fire. Especially fire. Smith once sacked a guitarist on the man's wedding day, and fired a studio engineer for eating a salad.

Perhaps Smith's face is so distinctive, because it is always pulling in two directions; you can never be sure if it is half-open or half-closed. But sitting beside him in a hotel bar in Manchester, as he drinks Malaysian beer and takes dark-brown snuff to beat the smoking ban, I am struck by a new thought. In the barrel-chest that he holds up high; in the gaunt, boxy head with its wide mouth and narrow lips; and most of all in the nose, which is pugnacious yet honest; Smith looks rather like Johnny Cash.

'That's what people have started telling me, but only since he died.'

Cash is one of the few people Smith admits to admiring in his new autobiography, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith. In the best tradition of celebrity memoirists, Smith has not yet read his book, so when I say that he cites Cash as an influence, he groans and looks towards the exit, through which his ghost-writer has just disappeared. 'Oh no, he hasn't put that in, has he?' Smith says of the Mancunian journalist Austin Collings, who compiled the memoirs from hours of taped conversations, mostly in the pubs of Smith's home town of Prestwich, Greater Manchester. The result would make a useful pub-crawl guide, from the Church, to the Forresters and on to the Woodthorpe.

But as biography, it is singularly uninformative. 'That was the general idea,' Smith admits. It is more saloon-bar wisdom than standard memoir; vicious, funny and always contrarian. Indeed 'contrarian' would have been a better title than 'renegade', which sounds too much like the rock'n'roll biographies that Smith loathes. 'All that sex on the road, groupies and debauchery,' he says. 'This was supposed to be a riposte to those books, and a way to set the record straight after other writers have attempted to perpetrate their own story of the Fall.'

Smith's idea of 'setting the record straight' is to undermine stories circulated by ex-band members (more than 40 people at the last count), questioning their reliability or sanity, while offering few new stories of his own. Smith had wanted the book to read like the autobiography of a football manager: 'like Malcolm Allison's'. A key part of his job, as he sees it, is to take apprentices and mould them into Fall musicians, firing them as they become complacent or take on airs.

He approves of Alex Ferguson's timing, daring to sack David Beckham from Manchester United when he appeared to be at the height of his powers. The memoirs were delayed for a year, which Collings blames on punctilious libel lawyers. This sounds plausible. Yet the book is not as uninformative as Smith would have liked. He took the manuscript on his recent UK tour but became upset at the number of revelations and failed to finish it.

Mark Edward Smith was born in 1957. The family moved from Salford to nearby Prestwich when he was six months old. 'The house was supplied by my grandfather, Fred, who ran a plumbing firm.' Smith identifies with his grandfather, speculating that inherited traits skip a generation. Fred Smith hired apprentices by standing outside Strangeways Prison, seizing young men as they were released. Smith's own father worked for the family firm and, the house aside, seems to have been kept on short rations by Fred.

The family were not well-off when Smith was born, the oldest of four and the only son among three sisters. In a 1986 interview, he spoke of the strained relationship with his father. 'I wanted to go to college when I was 16, so I did for a short while, but he gave me no money. My ribs would be sticking out. I'd hate the bastard.' Smith was expected to earn his keep by working for the family firm. His response was to leave home. At 16 he moved in with his girlfriend, Una Baines, who had also dropped out of college.

The Fall were formed in 1977 after Smith, Baines and two other friends saw the Sex Pistols play Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall. The event has passed into legend because so many members of the tiny audience went on to form bands, including the Fall, the Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Thirty-two years later, the Fall are the only group associated with the punk explosion that continues to make music as original as their earliest work, producing an album almost every year. Yet Smith shrugs off the 'punk' tag; those bands had no longevity, he says, there were too many empty slogans.

The Fall were also DJ John Peel's favourite band (he described them as 'the band against which all others are judged'), but Smith hated the idea of being regarded as 'the Peel house band'. His discomfort was evident when he appeared on Newsnight following Peel's death in 2004. After saying that he appreciated the early support, he appeared to suffer a near-fatal attack of cottonmouth. The subsequent bout of gurning prevented him from fully answering any more of the presenter Gavin Esler's questions.

In his memoirs, Smith claims this interview led to an attack on his life. He accepted a drink from a stranger in a bar who could talk about nothing but John Peel. Smith later fell ill, convinced he had been poisoned. 'The television was racing at me and the room had lost its shape and feel. I went to bed to sweat it out. It was never-ending. I have a very high tolerance level… but this stuff would have killed the next man.'

The Fall have rarely appeared in the hit parade, surviving by keeping working. 'You've got to accept that you're never going to be on Top of the Pops every week if you're in the Fall,' he says in the book. 'That's not what the Fall's about.' Their regular concerts draw a youthful rock crowd, yet also swaths of middle-aged fans who would not dream of seeing another pop group. Loyal followers include novelists and poets, such as Tibor Fischer, Michel Faber, Niall Griffiths, Simon Armitage and Matt Thorne. The playwright and comedian Stewart Lee attends almost every concert.

The hundreds of songs from the Fall catalogue are always quotable, though rarely transparent. The tune that opens the BBC's football results programme, Final Score, demonstrates the ambiguous appeal. Theme from Sparta FC, sung in comic broken English, criticises football hooliganism, yet does so by skewering their pretensions to be warriors: 'You mug old women in your bobble hat.' The Smith voice is so unlike any other that his long-term collaborator and producer, the splendidly named Grant Showbiz, struggles for comparisons. 'No one sounds like him,' Showbiz says. 'You have to look to figures like Captain Beefheart or Tom Waits for anyone comparable.'

After 30-odd years, there are signs that the music is beginning to insinuate itself into the cultural landscape. The Hip Priest was an unlikely entry on the soundtrack to the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs; now, tunes such as Touch Sensitive and Cruiser's Creek enliven car advertisements and mainstream television shows.

Smith's 50th birthday was celebrated with a mini-documentary on the BBC's Culture Show to add to the full-length documentary of 2005, The Fall: The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E Smith. He has appeared as Christ in the Johnny Vegas sitcom Ideal, and even read the live football results on television. You're becoming a national treasure, I tell him.

'And what good would it do me?'

You could be like Van Morrison, simultaneously loved but feared.

He shakes his head. 'I think I may be losing it. I used to be able to clear a bar in 10 minutes, but I'm not sure I can do it any more. While we were on tour, I thought some people in Hull were getting a bit insolent. You don't want to encourage that sort of behaviour. I asked one of the lads in the band, "Do you think I've lost the touch?" He said, "I definitely don't think so, Mark."'

This story ends with a grimace, a laugh and a peck of snuff. Showbiz says, 'People have this image of Mark E Smith striding through Manchester, snapping at old ladies. But when I've spent time with him, my strongest memory is always the laughter. You work with him and you spend all your time laughing out loud.'

Does he use his public persona as a shield? 'It's a useful protection,' Smith says. 'I was talking about this with John Cooper Clarke [the poet, and one of Smith's oldest friends] and he said, "That's why I always wear dark glasses."'

Smith might be mellowing but, ever the contrarian, he claims to pity young people now that it is possible to walk through Cheetham Hill, a run-down part of north Manchester, at midnight without getting beaten up. 'It's true. It's not like it used to be.' As a child, he had a street gang called the Psycho Mafia. 'Other gangs were named after a geographical area, like the Kersal Mob. We were different.' They were also unusual in being multi-faith. Prestwich is home to Manchester's Jewish community, as well as a large Irish population. Did this ever make Smith feel like an outsider? 'Not at all. Prestwich has always been mixed, and the Psycho Mafia were the same, two of each: two Proddies, two Catholics and two Jews.'

Smith insists a writer should know his subject thoroughly. He sees his subject as Manchester, but it is more specific than that: it is Prestwich. The novelist Howard Jacobson, also from Prestwich, has described how close the Holocaust felt in a town with a strong Jewish identity. Smith's songs and conversation are peppered with references to the war. The local government bill that led to Prestwich's incorporation into Bury is described as 'the Anschluss'.

When I ask about the disastrous personal period between the close of the 1980s and the 1990s, when he suffered a divorce, lost both his father and his beloved grandfather and went bankrupt, he only shrugs and says that he looked to his mother's generation, who lived through the Manchester blitz and remained stoical.

Prestwich Hospital played a key role in the Fall's origins. After dropping out of college, Smith got a job on Salford docks while his girlfriend Una Baines trained as a psychiatric nurse. The couple got a flat behind the hospital, which was then the largest in Europe. 'It's a lot smaller, now,' Smith says. 'Though it still has the high-security unit. The outpatients department was demolished and the land sold to Tesco.' Smith would amuse himself by taking Baines's patients to the pub. 'I wanted to give them something to do. I still see some wandering around Tesco out of habit and looking a bit lost. I'll say, "How are you? All right?" And they'll nod and shuffle, you know.'

It was Smith's friend and the Fall co-founder Tony Friel who named the band after the Albert Camus novel. When Smith's relationship with Baines ended, he began seeing another nurse, Kay Carroll, recently divorced and 10 years older than Smith. He asked Carroll if she would manage the Fall, which rapidly led to the band's first collapse. Both Carroll and Friel have said they believe this was Smith's intention. By 1979 he was the sole original member.

In a 1983 interview, Carroll was asked why the Fall was Smith's vehicle while the other members were so anonymous. She replied, 'You've met musicians, for God's sake? It's like, he plays his guitar really well, but Mark plays his brain really well.' Smith added, sardonically, 'It's not as if they don't try and be personalities.'

This aside is a dig at Marc Riley, a Fall guitarist from 1979 to 1983, now a BBC radio DJ. According to the memoirs, Smith felt that Riley's jolly, goofy personality projected the wrong image of the band. Riley was the man sacked on the day of his wedding but the reason, in part, may have been the fact that the younger Riley was getting the better of their regular fights. Riley is well-built and over 6ft; Smith is wiry and closer to 5ft 9in. When they appeared together on an Australian children's television show, Smith sported a black eye delivered by Riley. Riley has said he was fired after Smith punished the band for a poor performance by slapping them all across the face. Riley fought back.

The Fall breaks up regularly, often messily. Yet the line-up from 1979 to 1983, when Smith and Carroll separated, was unusually stable, anchored around the brothers Paul and Steven Hanley, and the guitarist Craig Scanlon. Carroll left the band in 1983 while they were on an American tour. Smith still admires her, grinning as he says that no one ever managed a band like her. 'She'd been a psychiatric nurse, so she was fearless. She used to bang people up against walls, screaming, "Where's our money?".' He admits he spent the early years in the band 'perfecting the moody writer' image. With Carroll gone, he had to grow up. In past interviews, he has suggested that handling finances led him to abandon his early socialism, but he now says this is wrong.

'I was always a Labour party member. I left because of the Falklands War. This was 1983, and local members were dead set against the war. I would go in the club and be told the war was a waste of money. We should just give the islands to Argentina. I was arguing, "Hang on. We're talking about a military dictatorship, in a country that's made a career out of hiding Nazi war criminals. You want to give in to that lot?" No one agreed with me, so I left.'

The Fall began as a staunchly left-wing group. In the 1970s, the promoter of a benefit gig angered Smith by asking him to read slogans from a political banner between songs. He retorted that the Fall's message was in the music. Escaping the original members freed Smith to develop a more ambiguous political stance. In an interview in 1986, he said: 'People can't get into their head that there isn't any threat from the Left or the Right. The threat is some kind of standardised horrible society, run by a bunch of f***ing idiots.'

After Carroll's departure, Smith returned to Prestwich, but not alone: he had a young American wife, Laura Elisse Salenger, better known as Brix. She joined the Fall on guitar and another stable line-up produced a run of fine, much brighter-sounding albums and unexpected collaborations, including a ballet, I Am Curious, Orange, with the dancer Michael Clark. However, by the end of the decade, the Smiths' six-year marriage had collapsed. Following the divorce, Smith dragged himself away from Prestwich, briefly, but the deaths of first his father and then his grandfather brought him back.

The 1990s continued a downward spiral, with Smith's bankruptcy, another failed marriage to a local girl, Safron Pryor, and the sacking of Craig Scanlon, his closest collaborator. Even the effervescent Grant Showbiz talks of the mid-1990s as 'dark days'. The period reached a nadir with an on-stage fist fight in America, ostensibly over a VAT bill. The argument continued back at the hotel and Smith was arrested. He spent two nights in a detention centre in New York. The band left him and flew home.

'The prison was opposite the World Trade towers,' Smith says. 'When I was released, I found myself in front of them, talking to a cop.' The incident led to a premonition of 9/11. 'I had terrible dreams. A lot of terrible dreams.'

Smith believes in his psychic gift. In the early days of the Fall, he financed the band by giving Tarot readings to local housewives. But he regards his gift as a kind of curse. 'Suppose we get a new record deal, and everyone in the band is excited, but you know that something's wrong? You try and say, "That's great", but inside you know it's not going to work and that's that.'

Smith sees life as a series of collisions with destiny, and it makes him anxious. Yet he continues to face the future head-on, and is scathing of anyone who takes refuge in cosy nostalgia. He refuses to look back; he is reluctant to play old songs live, for instance. Yet this stance produces its own contradictions. The Fall's work is rooted both in a place and in a history: their first album was named Live at the Witch Trials in memory of the Lancashire trials that saw 12 witches executed.

The latest album, Imperial Wax Solvent, has a Victorian-sounding title and songs about latch-key kids and mill chimneys. Smith acknowledges it has similarities with the Fall's earliest work, but lays the blame elsewhere. 'That's Grant Showbiz's fault. He did the earliest production before we took the album for a final mix.'

Conflict propels the Fall forward, but throughout our interview, the one-time bar-clearing Smith is engaging and funny. Is it a sign that Smith is finally at ease with himself? He has been married for seven years to a Greek DJ, Elena Poulou, who joined the Fall in 2002 as a keyboard player. Smith anticipates their forthcoming holiday in Athens with enthusiasm, enacting a little Zorba dance.

At the end of the interview he offers me a taxi ride and drops me off with a warm hug. Smith's good humour might be rooted in either domestic bliss or mellowing years, but I suspect he feels the world is beginning to share his perspective. During our taxi ride, a black bus adorned with a logo of a witch passes us on Albert Square. 'That's the express bus from central Lancashire, through Prestwich to Manchester, and they call it the Witch Way,' he laughs. 'How do you like that?'

• 'Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith' (Penguin) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p&p (0870-428 4112; books.telegraph.co.uk). The new album, 'Imperial Wax Solvent', is out on Monday