Mark E Smith, lead singer with the Fall – obituary

To refer to the Fall as a group is somewhat misleading, in that the band’s personnel functioned as a vehicle for Smith’s perverse but inspired songwriting. “If it’s me and your granny on bongos,” Smith once said, “it is still the Fall.”

As a singer he favoured a distinctive declamatory style which was more notable for its volume and tone of sardonic menace that for its adherence to the chromatic scale. The music was diverse, sometimes poppy but typically uncompromising, and underpinned (from 1979 to 1998) by the propulsive bass guitar of Stephen Hanley, who played, one critic remarked, “with the remorseless concentration of a communist factory operative”.

The band could never have been said to function as a democracy, and Smith, who played God in a 2007 episode of Johnny Vegas’s television comedy series Ideal, sacked so many group members that there is a book, The Fallen, by Dave Simpson, cataloguing the experiences of former accompanists: their total, excluding Smith, is estimated at 66. He once dismissed a sound engineer for having ordered a salad.

The most famous musician dismissed by Smith was Marc Riley (now a DJ on BBC Radio 6 Music), who, despite having been sacked on his wedding day in the wake of a punch-up, still describes Mark Smith as “a genius”.

For all his less amenable impulses, Smith was one of the true originals of popular music, and the Fall were tirelessly championed by enthusiasts such as the broadcaster John Peel. “With the Fall,” Peel said, “you can never be quite sure of what you are going to get. Sometimes it might not be what you want.”

Smith was brought up at Sedgley Park, a working-class neighbourhood of Salford. His first wife, Brix Smith, was a graduate of the august Bennington College in Vermont. Born Laura Elisse Salenger – she adopted her nom de guerre in homage to the song Guns of Brixton by the Clash – she came from a privileged background in California.

In her 2016 memoir The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise, she gives her first impressions of coming to live in Smith’s rather modest flat, equipped with neither shower nor washing machine: “I never expected Manchester to be so grim. Its glowering Victorian red-brick buildings looked like mean structures where horrible atrocities had been committed … The people seemed joyless. Nobody smiled … Mark loved this city.”

Smith, a former docks worker, wrote songs with refrains such as “Yeah Yeah, Industrial Estate” – from Industrial Estate, a track on the band’s seminal 1978 album Live at the Witch Trials. Just as the comforting opulence of California summers had infused the songs of the Beach Boys with a sunny joie de vivre, so the more challenging landscape of Manchester after dark nurtured the furious defiance in Smith’s songwriting – and attitude.

“Nobody,” said Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records who first put the Fall on television (on Granada in 1977), “exemplifies attitude more than Mark E Smith. He is attitude personified. The Fall was always more about attitude than music.”

Mark Edward Smith was born at Lower Broughton, Salford, on March 5 1957. The house in which he spent his infancy is in the shadow of the Cliff, then the training ground for Manchester United. The neighbourhood is dominated by that club’s supporters; Smith, unsurprisingly, professed a fervent allegiance to Manchester City.

His father Jack was a plumber, like his father before him; his mother Irene worked for the post office. “My dad’s attitude,” said Smith, “was either you follow me into the business, or you join the Army.” He had three younger sisters. 

Having passed his 11-plus, Smith attended Stand Grammar School, where his academic performance, especially in English, was commended as outstanding.

As a schoolboy he displayed a sensitivity that he would spend the rest of his life seeking to deny, preferring to espouse the values of his father and paternal grandfather, both no-nonsense ex-servicemen. “Manchester has always produced men like this,” Smith said. “Hard men with hard livers. Men with faces like unmade beds.”

He left school on his 16th birthday and worked on Salford docks, initially as a cargo-handler, then as a clerical worker. In the evenings, he attended a class in A-level English literature but never took the exam. An admirer of Aleister Crowley and H P Lovecraft, he named his group after the novel by Albert Camus, La Chute.

While in public he enjoyed sneering at the notion of art and literature, Smith would go on to produce two acclaimed albums of his own poetry. One of his most notable achievements, produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988, was the ballet I Am Curious, Orange, an ambitious collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark. (It became the album I Am Kurious Oranj.)

As a teenager Smith listened to Northern soul and had a fondness for mainstream pop virtuosos such as Joni Mitchell. He began writing performance poetry and experimenting with music with his first girlfriend, a psychiatric nurse called Una Baines, and a gifted young guitarist, Martin Bramah. As a youth, Una Baines recalled, Smith was an ardent socialist and committed feminist.

If his early influences – such as the German electronic ensemble Can, Iggy Pop and the Sex Pistols – remained detectable, there was always something about Smith that suggested he was in touch with another reality. Considered by many friends and family members to be psychic, for some years he gave tarot readings. On a childhood holiday, Smith said, he “began speaking in tongues, in Rhyl”.

The first serious incarnation of the Fall, including Smith, Una Baines and Bramah, seemed to arrive fully formed. The broadcaster Danny Baker early on recognised the unhinged ferocity of songs such as Totally Wired and the peculiarly compelling poetry of titles like Hex Enduction Hour (1982), the fourth album.

Jonathan Demme used one of the Fall’s best known anthems, Hip Priest, in his film The Silence of the Lambs. Another Fall track, Touch Sensitive, was used to advertise the Vauxhall Corsa. (“I needed the money,” Smith explained. “We are not all Elton John.”)

It was 1983 before the group appeared on national television, at John Peel’s request, on Channel Four’s The Tube. By this time the singer’s liking for alcohol and amphetamines was already public knowledge.

Although Peel adored the Fall’s work, he and Smith were not soulmates. “Never in my life,” Peel said of one encounter, “have I been in a room that so crackled with malevolence.”

Smith, though he remained a dedicated advocate of socialism, surprised many of his supporters when, in 1982, he vigorously endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s decision to engage with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

Mark E Smith married three times. He met Brix Smith at a club in Chicago in April 1983; they were married in north Manchester that November. He left her in 1989 for Saffron Prior, the daughter of a friend, who ran the Fall’s fan club; their marriage was dissolved in 1995.

He met his third wife, the Greek Elena Poulou, at a bar in Berlin in 2000. His last partner was the photographer Pamela Vander, three decades his junior, who managed the group.

He tended to recruit his wives and girlfriends as members of the band. The most significant contributor was Brix (subsequently romantically linked to the violinist Nigel Kennedy). She was the Fall’s guitarist between 1983 and 1989 and would rejoin for two years in 1994. She helped to engineer the band’s most commercially successful periods.

Brix Smith persuaded the scruffy-looking Smith and the rest of the band to dress with some concessions to style. For a time they achieved mainstream recognition with songs like their covers of R Dean Taylor’s There’s a Ghost in My House and The Kinks’ Victoria, both of which entered the Top 40, as well as Mr Pharmacist, first performed by the San Francisco hippy group The Other Half. In the late Eighties, for a while, they were almost fashionable.

“Always different, always the same,” John Peel said of the Fall. Smith released 32 studio albums with the group. Some, like the most recent, New Facts Emerge (2017), could be disappointing. Others, such as The Light User Syndrome, a 1996 album which includes one of his finest songs, Cheetham Hill, were magnificent.

Theme From Sparta FC, from the 2003 album The Real New Fall LP, was for some years used to introduce the football scores on BBC1’s Final Score.

By the late 1990s he was collaborating with his girlfriend Julia Adamson, and his altercations with male band members were increasingly frequent and public. “I have never molested a woman,” Smith observed, “or hit anybody who didn’t deserve it.”

In 2004 BBC4 made The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E Smith, a documentary in which Alan Wise, who managed both the Fall and the German chanteuse Nico, said: “Mark’s tremendous use of drugs, notably speed, clearly shows in his face. Mark is a hard drinker and a tough man. He has great talent. He has charisma. He is not ‘a nice guy.’”

Smith himself said: “I am one of the three per cent who were born to take speed. It helps me sleep.”

On another occasion, he boasted: “People are s – t scared of me. I do actually enjoy that. I do not want or require security guards. I don’t think that security guards are very good for your writing.”

In 2004, after the death of John Peel, Newsnight interviewed Smith live. “Who are you?” Smith snarled, having pointed out that he scarcely knew Peel, to a visibly perturbed Gavin Esler. “Who are you anyhow? The next DJ?”

In 2017 he cancelled a string of concerts in the United States and Britain, citing lung and dental problems. Friends said that he had developed osteoporosis, a condition sometimes associated with alcoholism.

Few were surprised when on March 5 2017, Smith’s 60th birthday, the BBC mistakenly announced his death. Defiant to the last, he gave his final performance in Glasgow on November 4 2017, from a wheelchair and with his right arm in a sling. “I think it is over,” he proclaimed. “I think it is ending.”

For many years his concerts would end with the crowd singing along to the chorus of Hip Priest: “He is not appreciated.” If those admirers had to identify a single source of regret at his disappearance, it might be that his aberrant behaviour earned the troubled artist a level of public recognition that his music would never achieve, at least in his lifetime.

Mark E Smith, born March 5 1957, died January 24 2018