In my book, the more you want to make of your life, then the more you fucking do. I wonder sometimes when I look at bands what their brains must be like. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish writer, said, ‘Produce, produce – it’s the only thing you’re there for.’ This is what I’m talking about.
I didn’t mind being on the dole. I had a lot of time on my hands as a result. Other people went to university and I read books, smoked cigs and looked around most days. It’s good to have a period like that in your life, when you’re not being forced to think like others. Don’t get me wrong, I had my fair share of dull days and my diet wasn’t the most healthy …
The main thing was, I read a lot of good books and wrote a lot; most of which found itself on our first LP. I didn’t think of it like that when I was writing. I just felt an urge to write. I’m still like that, with reading as well. I need to read a certain amount of words a day – it doesn’t matter what it is; it can be a newspaper or a book. All I know is that I get very annoyed if I’ve not written or read anything on a particular day.
If you’re a cod-psychologist I guess you could trace most of The Fall’s output back to this period, to the wilderness years; the dole days; back to young Mark laying the hard foundations for the rough and brilliant years that he hasn’t yet seen!
It’s amazing how many books you’ll read when they’re not being forced on to you by some indifferent teacher. I remember reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins and thinking, this is what writing’s all about. I ripped through that fucker in the space of days. If only they fed you books like that at school.
I never felt better than anybody though, never felt superior, in that sort of arrogantly artistic way. That’s why I never really liked John Lennon. He seemed very arrogant. It was all about being an artist with him – the living part was secondary to his stance. I’ve never wanted to be like that. I think it’s more important to be a man than it is to be an artist.
To certain people you’ve got to be a bit poetic, or a bit aggressive. They have their image of you – and I play up to it. But it’s a protection, a screen. I can pull it out when I need it, because with some people you do need it.
It’s hard enough to draw breath some days, never mind with some daft scourge wanting to infect me with his shit. And invariably it’s a bloke. It’s funny, because with people like that, who feel the need to really press themselves on you, you can see the lad they were twenty or thirty years ago in their faces. They’re disappointed with the way they’ve handled those years. Fuck all to do with me. I don’t get it a lot but when I have I’ve just pulled out my other side; the malevolent Mark side – that’s always been enough to see them off.
Hear the clatter of late afternoon karaoke sung by the straw-boned, soon-to-be new barmaid, and it sounds like a cat holocaust.
I wish she’d just stop; just for a minute or so …
4. The Phantom Nazis
I started going out with Una Baines after meeting her in Heaton Park. I moved in with her soon after. And I knew Martin Bramah through Tony Friel. I used to see him around Prestwich.
It was hell for me. It was like a semi-commune, that flat in Kingswood Road; Bramah meditating, somebody giving a lecture on vegetarianism, and Baines, my supposed girlfriend, in bed with some hippy. I wasn’t in love with her though.
But you’re stuck when you’re on the dole, nowhere to go.
We lived at the back of the mental hospital. Una worked there. Psychiatric nurses lived in every two or three houses. Biggest mental hospital in Europe; serious mental patients. I’d invite patients in for a cup of tea. Sit them down, play them some rock and roll, a bit of telly. Sometimes I think I did more good than all the nurses put together. They’d go out all cheerful.
It was bad in those days, but I think it’s just as bad now, worse. That’s what the song ‘Repetition’ is about. They used to give them Largactyl and Mandrax for depression, heavy downers; but when you went out into the sun all your face would flare up into blisters. I took them for kicks just to see what they were like. Always been like that, experimenting. You’d be lucky if you had two pints in your local and you could make it home with half a Mandrax in you. Out of your box. Your skin feels itchy. And that was sanctioned by the National Health!
I’d say to them, ‘What you in for, Terry?’ or whoever it was, and he’d tell me this story of when he was eleven and he’d nicked like two bob out of his mam’s purse, so they had him sectioned. And there was one woman whose mam just didn’t like her. She shouted a bit too much: bunged in the mental home for fifteen years. Fellows in there from the 30s and 40s; some councillor had just decided to label them ‘Mentally Ill’. Or somebody’s father had died and their mam had married another fellow, who the kid didn’t like – this kid obviously going through puberty – and they’d be in there for fifteen years. Terrible.
I’d take them to the pub: a bit of normality. Then I’d walk back with them, and all the nurses would be sat cross-legged on the floor, saying, ‘Now, Terry, we must try some yoga.’ Playing them Pink Floyd and all that. It’s where my dislike of hippies came from, I think. I used to say to the girls, ‘Who are the patients and who are the nurses here?’ All the guys with long hair would be saying, ‘Press your toes and do some acupuncture on yourself, Terry.’
Nowadays reminds me of the late 70s. It’s feasible – all those people who are in power now were student nurses back then, or student lawyers. And they’re now running the country with that same mentality: give him a computer, give him a few drugs. I actually think in their heads they thought they were doing the patients some good by playing them a whole Pink Floyd LP, or Tangerine Dream. I honestly do …
As the world progresses they always crack on that everybody will be more independent, when in fact the opposite has happened. You see adverts for computers talking about how you can chat to somebody’s brain. It’s impossible. In the late 70s you’d have eight to ten people from all ages sat down cross-legged communicating through Pink Floyd or group tarot readings. I wouldn’t do that. They thought I was weird because I had a leather jacket on. But if you look at it now, it’s only the same thing – there’s still eight people in a room but they’re all in front of a screen. It’s a lot safer now because they can do it from their houses. But it’s the same thing. Chat rooms are the new dinner parties. People thinking they’re all on the same level – to me it’s impossible, as it was then, with the obligatory joint, everybody thinking the same, or thinking they’re thinking the same … No independent thought. At least in the 70s you had to get up off your arse and go and meet these people, go around to their house; discuss things, and come to some sort of agreement.
Prestwich was quite a going place in the 70s. You wouldn’t believe it now. I tell it to Elena and she can’t believe it. You could go in The Wilton, or The Priests Retreat as it’s called now, and you could get anything you fucking wanted – acid, dope, anything. People talk about there being a lot of coke around now … they should have seen it then.
I was seen as a bit of an oddball in there because I had short hair and wore a leather jacket, which was quite unusual.
Me and my three sisters used to play darts in The Forresters. I would have been about sixteen, seventeen then. My dad was a fantastic darts player: dead eye. I used to be like that, could see a pin in the distance. Not now, though, my eyes are fucked now. I liked it, the atmosphere of the place. I don’t think you should be allowed in a pub until you’re sixteen or seventeen. It’s a place for adults. You should be made to hold back on it – do other things. You’ll appreciate it more later on.
The Fall just came about really, the four of us holed up in that flat, doing our thing. The punk scene had just started. So when I first saw The Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in ’76, I thought, my lot are not as bad as that. We’re better. We just need a drummer. I was listening to a lot of 60s garage music, like the Nuggets LP, The Ramones, Patti Smith, German rock. I never had any ideas for it, because I was o
n the docks earning money in the early days. I was into the poetry side of things. Prose, too. I never really thought of myself as a writer, though. It was just something I did for my own amusement; still is, really.
The other three were all into Weather Report and all that: jazz fusion. I said, you’re not doing that!
Strangely enough, one of the best gigs I saw in the 70s was Gary Glitter and the Glitterband. This was just before The Fall. It was astonishing. A friend of mine put a Glitter record on in a pub recently and they turned it off because of what he is now, but it’s worth remembering what a great band they were. The sound was heavy, like a war tank, two drums blasting out at you. And when Glitter went off to change his outfit midway through, the drums just played out this incessant, deep rhythm like Can or something. I was stood at the back of the hall, but I could see all the girls at the front throwing their knickers at him … He seemed quite restrained that night in that respect. And though I’m not defending him, what a lot of people fail to realize is that the working class had a different attitude towards sex in those days, pre-Aids and pre-safe sex. There’d be hordes of girls in the park near me, and that’s all they were up for. And from what I could see on that night they were literally throwing themselves at him – offering themselves up to him. And though it stands to reason what he did was wrong, it’s worth considering the climate of the time and that whole scene. Kids would have done anything to have met Glitter; for a year or two he was something else.
Anyway, I was more influenced by that than the stuff Friel and Baines were listening to. It had more edge. Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ was another. Unlike Weather Report it doesn’t force its quality, it isn’t false; it’s very much a record that’s aware of its own strengths. I like the direct poetry of its lyrics, too, the economy. Journalists ramble on about Dylan being a poet and all that, how his words have the ability to do this and that – totally overlooking stuff like ‘Superstition’; probably because most of the journalists writing that stuff are white males who grew up trying to be Dylan and now can’t move on from that same wave of thought.
It was me and Tony who decided to call it The Fall, after the Albert Camus book. He wanted to call it The Outsiders at first after another Camus book; but I’d read The Outsider and didn’t particularly like it. I thought The Fall was a better book. But for a period of time we were The Outsiders until I found a seven-inch in Shudehill by a 60s band called The Outsiders – ‘A Question of Temperature’ it was called. Good record. So that meant we were The Fall.
The connotations of the name are quite strange. It works on different levels. Very religious middle-aged people see it as a comment on the fall of man. A lot of Americans see it as the autumn of rock music – serious people, not loonys. Russian fans see it as a sword of vengeance against communism.
Bramah was the singer because he had the looks, Friel was the bass player, Una had to save up for a keyboard and I played the guitar. And we got this drummer in from Stockport, this little bald man: Dave. He died actually.
A lot of mistruths have been reported about the early days. For instance, it was Bramah and Baines who used to wear the Nazi armbands when we were forming The Fall. Don’t know what they thought they were doing, but I would never wear a Nazi armband. My dad would have fucking murdered me for wearing something like that. Friel was half-Jewish, and even he used to wear one. But then it got popular with The Pistols too.
I remember going into a biker pub and Bramah and Baines both had leather jackets on and Hitler Youth armbands, and I’m saying, ‘Take that off!’ They thought being in a biker pub they could integrate themselves by wearing these bands. They had this middle-class idea that all bikers are Nazis – which is the worst thing you could think. Bramah and Baines caused all the fights. I’d be under a table, or dragging them out because they’d ruined my chances of getting any acid. Whatever you say about the bikers, they weren’t Nazis. Might be in America, but not here. They’re all talking about themselves when they say I wore a Nazi armband; quite interesting really.
I’d have just two pints, maybe some acid, but they lived on a different planet. Whenever I do see them now – and it’s rare – they’re always apologizing for something; don’t know what it is, must be what they say about me. My sister Barbara, she was a Hell’s Angel. She used to call them The Plastics – Bramah and Baines. You’re talking about people who get on a bus wearing a leather jacket, parking cars with a leather jacket. You only wore a leather when you got on a motorbike. It was a major sin in those days.
I felt sorry for those bikers because they were a pretty good subculture. I used to like them. They had it all worked out – half a pint of mild, half a pint of bitter, a bit of acid …
I remember in those days you used to get idiots driving around having had about twenty pints of bitter. Crashing into walls and knocking people over. But if you’re on a bike you’ve got to be very careful about stuff like that. You don’t have the protection of the car. I still don’t like car drivers. Never learned to drive. I tried to but I can’t, don’t like it. I can drive an American car, passed my test there. But not here.
Once you’ve driven a bike every day, like I used to when I worked on the docks – in the rush hour, when Manchester was ten times busier than it is now, when you used to have to drive down the middle of the road – it’s hard to adapt. If I get in a van or a car I sit in the back. Still don’t trust them. I’ll sit in the front seat if it’s necessary but I don’t like it. I don’t like that idea that certain drivers have that just because you’ve got a car you can go anywhere, with the wind in your hair. It’s bollocks. As soon as you buy a car you’re on the books. You can’t go anywhere without somebody knowing about it.
I remember a lot of punk rockers going down to the Monsull estate to The Electric Circus and loads of people from the estate would be hanging around throwing things at them. We were in between. For me it was like CBGBs in New York: rich kids pretending they’re trash. And the people round there didn’t like it. That’s why people like Paul Morley didn’t like us, because we’d go up dressed like the people who’d been throwing bricks outside. Not because we were trying to be stylish, but because we were on the dole. All the groups who’d be playing would have sticky-up hair, and their mams and dads would be waiting for them outside.
The only reason we carried on through that was because of the strength of the music, that’s how we won people over. I had long greasy hair. I couldn’t afford to get it cut – what could you do? I was also very young. The Clash and Elvis Costello were a lot older than me. It was supposed to be people singing about anarchy and all that, but they didn’t actually know what they were talking about, they were all public schoolboys – that’s what I thought.
To me, punk was a safety net for a lot of people, a refuge of sorts from the reality that was 70s Britain. On one side, it was something that the kids could fall into, and out of when it all got a bit too complicated and harsh; and for the older generation, instead of concentrating their minds on the undeniable mess of the State, it provided them with an almost manageable problem.
That whole scene has been wildly misrepresented over the years; once the revisionists get their hands on something it’s hard to seek out the reality. The best thing about it was that it didn’t rely on perfection; you didn’t have to be a well-schooled musician to be a punk. But, as with many scenes, it became very conservative – with everybody dressing the same and avoiding those that didn’t. Small wonder that they soon ran out of things to say.
Even The Clash – who, I must admit, were very good when they started out, much better than The Pistols – lost it spectacularly. After that first album there’s really nothing there; and in a way, like a lot of those punk bands who wanted to be ‘Punk’ – not like us – they turned their backs on their real selves, embracing all the old rock postures and themes instead of keeping to what they did best.
That’s why I’ve never aligned myself to the whole punk thing. To me, punk is and was
a quick statement. That’s why most of the main players couldn’t handle the fall-out of it all, they were like a bunch of shell-shocked army majors stuck in time, endlessly repeating their once-successful war cries. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but I wanted something with a bit more longevity. When you’re dealing in slogans like The Clash and The Pistols it’s hard to keep that shit fresh. I sensed that at the time. It’s like when we played live it was – attack! People at the back of the room would be like – whoa, what the fuck is this? Quite confrontational in a way … But the songs were more like short stories; unlike every fucker else we didn’t just bark out wild generalizations. Simple fact: we weren’t a punk band. That wasn’t my intention.
Hardly surprising that nobody liked us. We played all sorts of places; used to get a better reception in youth clubs – kids clubs. You go to a punk club in Middlesbrough and there’d be twenty strapping guys with their hair all stuck up – weekend punks, we used to call them – spitting at you all the time. The only place that would put us on was Eric’s in Liverpool. They understood us. But we always thought on a different level from the punks. I didn’t want to be part of a scene, never have. And I knew it wasn’t going to last. Things like that are very temporary. I think it had to do with the fact that you have to work at The Fall; we’re not always an easy option.
A lot of the time I was being portrayed as a fool who still believed in punk. I wasn’t at all. Journalists like Ian Penman at the NME, they were all going into avant-garde punk, Scritti Politti and electro and all that shit. And it didn’t really concern me. A lot of that punk stuff was heavy metal to me. We’d been through the pubs and clubs by then. I liked The Sex Pistols; but except for the lyrics they were only the same as the Sabbath and Zep-like bands we were playing with. It was the same sort of music. Not bad when it’s good. Sabbath and Zeppelin, they weren’t bad.
Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith Page 4