Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

by Mark E. Smith

  The detractors might say there’s never really been a Fall – that there’s been too many members, that I’ve just pulled the wool over people’s eyes by running it like an unhappy guest-house. I’m immune to all that. You can see how thin their lives must be when they start talking like that. There’s no point getting worked up about it, largely because these people haven’t got a clue about music. Show me the rule book on how ‘things should be’ and I’ll concede defeat; until then …

  I say to everybody who enquires about this side of The Fall – do you still work with the same people you worked with ten years ago? That’s how I look at it. That’s the way I am. People are shocked by it.

  To me these ex-Fall people are just anybody in the street now. I’m not really into asking them how they are and what they’re up to now. It’s not bitterness or anything. I’m like that with ex-girlfriends. I find it weird that couples hang around with each other’s exes; how they’re all still mates and they all go out together. They can’t cut it off. I’d never ring my ex-girlfriends up. There’s no point in it. You see it with a lot of musicians – they still hang around with each other even though they split up years ago and can’t stand each other. Split up acrimoniously even. You can see they don’t like each other. They’re still bitching about each other.

  I only get ex-members back if it’s a real emergency. But it always backfires. It’s useful for a bit, and then whatever parted you in the first place surfaces again. It always does.

  Interlude

  THE TWO-YEAR GAP

  It’s always in my head, with everything in my life. For instance, I’m working with a musician but we’re going nowhere – I think he’s good, he thinks I’m good, but it’s not happening. So he has a fit, or I have a fit. And we split up. This is what the ex-members thing is all about. I’m not interested in them. But the two-year gap is really a truce. Two years later they’ll come to me and say, you were right all along and I didn’t realize it at the time. But you can’t keep waiting for these people. That sounds condescending – but it is a two-year gap. I get people coming up to me asking where Brix is – I don’t fucking know! I don’t care. That’s what keeps me going. They’ve got their priorities all wrong. People don’t like being told the truth, though. In 1997 I said they were dicks for voting Labour – but nobody was having it at the time. Three years later people are saying – ‘Oh, you were right there, Mark.’ It’s a waste of time, really, but I still do it. Nobody likes the bringer of bad news. What makes me laugh, the older I get the more people repeat things that I told them ten years ago. But whereas five years ago I would have had a rant at them – ‘I fucking told you that in 1997!’ – now I just go, ‘Oh really, that’s interesting.’

  Some people aren’t as fast as other people. Some people have different talents. I can’t use a computer. I still use a pen and paper to write.

  6. The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World and Eric the Ferret

  You don’t know what you’re in for with The Fall.

  I mean, you couldn’t have a Mark Smith school of writing lyrics; hopefully not, anyway. There are times I’ve wished I could knock out hits. But I can’t. There’s a skill to it, and it’s not in me. It’s no use trying, really.

  I always try to write a Eurovision every two years, but there’s no way it’s going to happen. Most records I bring out, I just think this is what it should be, so it’s irrelevant what other people think.

  And I don’t worry about writer’s block. I’ve never had any real problems – a couple of weeks, maybe, without anything, but nothing serious. Something will always fall out of a bag for me. I’ll be waiting for a line and it’ll come out of the bottom of a bag with a receipt – I’m a very lucky man in that way.

  I usually find that the more you try, the less it works. It’s best not to force it. When people do force it you can always hear it. It’s just not how it should be. What gets me is the lack of lyrical effort shown by bands nowadays. I’m not saying that everything should be literary and Dylan-like: thirty verses of fifteen-syllable words that even the band get bored of playing. Me and Elena use that thing on the telly with the subtitles to read some of the lyrics. Jesus Christ! ‘I’m going up the hill, you’re going to leave me, I’m going to leave you, why did you leave me?’ It’s pathetic: all meek and self-absorbed. I’m just not interested in hearing about some lad’s break-up with some college girl he thought was the love of his life and now he’s had a few too many and can’t remember who the fuck he is.

  Lads today are a bit too open like this anyway: going to the doctor’s every five minutes telling them how depressed and distanced they feel. And they’re not really depressed, not clinically – it’s not even disillusionment. It’s something else, something that they’ve conferred upon themselves. I think it’s because they’ve got too much time and space to think about themselves. You don’t get lads like that in Russia. It’s not part of the culture there. It’s a uniform, if you ask me: an identity. You can hear the whingeing in their music. It’s stale. They should stop hiding away in their bedrooms with their computers and get out a bit. That’ll sort out the lyrics.

  All my songs have got lives of their own. Otherwise they’re not worth doing. I’ve thrown lots of stuff away, though. I’ve always got a book of writing on the go, and I get it out of the bag when I’m doing an LP. Mostly it’s just shit which I thought was good at the time – stuff like ‘Jeremy Paxman is a monster’ – well, maybe not that bad, but phrases I’ve put down when I’ve been up at night.

  You’ve got to edit yourself. I’ll go through a few pages and find a line that’s lovely. That’s a really good feeling.

  The number of times I’ve lost lyrics is amazing. Sometimes I’ve left them in a pub in an Aldi bag … A funny thing happened when I was in America with Tim, Rob and Orpheo. We were driving through a desert, carrying around a bag of lyrics for the new album, Reformation Post-TLC, and we stopped off at a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. I opened the door to get out, to stretch my legs, and this wind just blew the bag of lyrics out of the door. There were sheets blowing everywhere. So I’m trying to chase after the fucking things. Then this little lad appears from nowhere and picks them all up. And I’m like, ‘Cheers, cocker.’ Things would have been much different but for him, the little man in the desert.

  I find it good if I’m under a bit of pressure. If the bass player’s moaning about his taxi money, and asking what we’re doing next, and you just hand him a sheet and say – that’s what we’re doing, on the spot like that, more often than not it’ll work. ‘Insult Song’ on Reformation was done in one take. I was just fucking around – the tune was there and I just started ranting, making things up. But it worked, and in a way it’s the story of that period when the band fucked off and left us in the desert. And the new band loved it as well – I was just using it as an exercise, but they wanted me to keep it on there.

  What surprises me most is how much of my stuff doesn’t date. I often think when I’m recording it that a particular song will, but it doesn’t date as much as you think. ‘Sparta F.C.’, for instance, is a weird one. I remember thinking, that’ll go over their heads, or under their heads. But it didn’t. And ‘Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!’, our first EP – it was very weird at the time to write something out of tune like that. But it still resonates.

  In those days everyone went on about how I couldn’t sing. It’s a very British attitude. I can actually sing if I want to, and I could then. But the thing is, if people are saying you can’t sing, you end up shouting the lyrics out as hard as possible: when in doubt, shout. I still do it now. That’s what soul singers do. Otis Redding – he’s not Pop Idol, is he? He just belted it out.

  Songs like ‘Industrial Estate’ – that was the second or third song that I w
rote the music for, but the lyrics came first – it’s a sort of poem; a hard poem. You can tell it was written at work. It’s about working on the docks, on a container base. So of course I presented it to the group and they want to know what it’s all about. They would prefer me to write about velvet shiny leather, the moon and all that kind of thing, like Television or The Velvets. As a compromise I wrote the chorus – ‘Yeah, yeah, industrial estate’ – to make it a bit more American rocky. And I wrote this sub-Stooges music to go with it, Stooges without the third chord. At the time, people thought it was terrible because it wasn’t the way it should be, it wasn’t ‘in tune’. But I never wanted The Fall to be like one of those groups. I didn’t care what people thought.

  That’s what grabbed me about The Stooges. You can’t imagine how hard it was to get hold of Stooges LPs in those days. I’d harass every record shop in town when I was nineteen to get The Stooges. I’d keep going in every week, take a day off work, post off for it – anything. I used to get all this shit from Virgin Records: ‘No, we haven’t got any Stooges LPs but why don’t you try this, Tubular Bells, it’s on special offer.’ But it was worth it when I got it. There was nothing like The Stooges in the 70s. They weren’t hippy-drippy. I’m not a guitarist, but I can play their songs – I like that. That’s what’s great about them. And the fact that they wrote the first album in a night is fantastic. They only knew about three chords and had to get it down. Not enough bands work like that nowadays. They’re too precious. It’s The Stone Roses syndrome: five years to record an album. Just get in there and fucking do it! That’s your job.

  You can work at things too much, do too many takes, make it too clear. Strip it of its mystery. When we recorded the first album I had a sore throat, but the studio time was booked. So the bottom line was we had to go in there and record; no fucking around.

  People misinterpreted that album. They thought it was too serious, overlooking the humour of it all. That’s the story of my life, actually. People can’t quite get it, so instead of giving it a bit of time and sticking with it, or even just not bothering with it, they’ll talk a load of crap about it. People like Paul Morley. Paul Morley never liked us, and now all of a sudden he’s written an article in the Observer proclaiming The Fall as the best thing to come out of Manchester. I think he’s earning money off me. That’s my attitude. I don’t want to live in their world. And neither do Fall fans.

  Every time I get a good review in the Observer or the Guardian I get worried. And when Paul Morley starts saying nice things about me I get more worried. Status Quo used to say that the day you’re on the front cover of the NME, that’s the time you start worrying – I agree with them.

  People forget what it was like. At the time we never had any money. When Kay Carroll got involved in the late 70s she was just a working-class housewife who’d got divorced. She had nothing else to do. She knew what she was talking about. She knew what it was like to work in an office and have the boss feeling her arse every day when she’s got two kids at home. She was well into it, managing the band.

  We were one up on a lot of other people – John Cooper Clarke, for instance, was a beat poet and The Buzzcocks were music students – but me and Kay had actually worked. It’s all right saying, ‘You’ll all be on the same wage,’ as they did at Factory Records, but that was the deal when I was on the docks. I might as well have gone back there, earning a wage. We wanted the money for a fair day’s work. We wouldn’t play for nothing. We still don’t. It’s not an extension of your art-school course, it’s work.

  Unlike a lot of bands who just wanted to play in each other’s back gardens, we were willing to go anywhere. We did a lot of working men’s clubs in the north, a comedian’s audience basically. Les Dawson wrote a very good book about that scene: A Clown Too Many it’s called. I never liked his comedy, but that book’s worth looking out for. They didn’t like us in the Midlands, though. They wanted everyone to be like Led Zeppelin, not a bunch of kids in jumpers.

  I wouldn’t go back to those days, but in a strange sort of way it was fairer. Now the promoters are all drama graduates and media graduates telling you how late you are. Whereas the owners of those places would just say, ‘Get on, play loud and do it! You’ve got a hundred people in here!’

  Most of the time, the audience weren’t bothered about what you said and did. Half of them might have hated us because they’d just come out for a pint and a plate of chicken and chips. But in a funny sort of way they tolerated you. And a lot of our core fan-base originates from that period, and from those places. People who didn’t like rock groups. People who did just go out to see comedians. They’re still there now – the Yorkshire Fall Army. God bless ’em.

  John Cooper Clarke was a big help as well. He used to live near me in Prestwich. I’ve always got time for him.

  We couldn’t get anywhere to rehearse in Manchester around 1979. You had to be on the Factory label or a lardy-dah band … it was all The Nosebleeds, The Smirks, The Buzzcocks. We couldn’t rehearse anywhere. At least Tony Wilson was honest about it in that BBC documentary – they didn’t like us in south Manchester at all. But Clarke let us rehearse at his house in Salford. It was tiny. He was great, bringing us cups of tea. The neighbours would be complaining and he’d be telling them to bugger off. All his mates would come round. He was always very encouraging. He gave us a bass player – Eric the Ferret. He was useless, but he meant well.

  Clarke doesn’t go on about it, even now. He was just into what we were doing. At that time he was doing stuff with Martin Hannett. I liked the lyrics but I thought the production was horrible.

  He was very laid back. I’d say to him, ‘Look, Clarke, I can’t afford to pay Eric the Ferret to drive us to London,’ and he’d say, ‘It’s alright, Mark, have a joint – I’ve just got a big advance off so-and-so,’ – whatever label he was on at the time. ‘You can still borrow Eric – useless as he is.’ That’s proper behaviour.

  For the first two years we weren’t bothered, we didn’t want to sign to a major. I had Richard Branson ringing me up at the end of ’77, asking me if I wanted a deal, and I just said, ‘No!’ Two years later, when you finally get your first record out, you might regret that – but I don’t really regret it. It was the right decision. Who wants to be one of the thousand Virgin groups to have been dumped over the last ten years?

  I used to earn money playing pool: me and Kay – doubles. Pool tables were a new thing in pubs at the time. Beforehand it was all snooker tables. As a result, few people had got the hang of it.

  Me and Kay would take teams of brickies on, Irish labourers – they’d look at me and look at her, and go, ‘Yeah, we’ll have a bit of this.’ About eight of them. Making these remarks to me … So we’d let them win a couple of times, then thrash them, and walk out with fifty quid each, all their wages – it paid for the rehearsal place. We needed the money to finance the group. I would never dream of ringing my dad up and asking for it.

  I used to do tarot readings as well. I went through a phase of reading books on the occult. I was fascinated by it. I still believe that things leave vibrations. America, for instance; I’ve visited all these old Civil War sites and the atmosphere is incredible. You can almost reach out and feel it.

  Bramah used to do readings as well. But after a bit, when the drugs prevailed, it got ridiculous. I got more interested in the Philip K. Dick Time out of Joint angle – the way certain pieces of writing have a power all to themselves, almost as if they can prophesize things. But I still did the readings. Kay had a lot of hippy mates, housewives with a bit of money, really, who were always seeking out people to read for them. And I had a natural talent for it. I’ve always been able to read people. My mam’s a bit like that. I never used to charge a lot, but now you can earn a fortune. When I was really skint in 2000, I thought to myself I should be doing that again. You could earn £40 an hour.

  When people did a tarot with me they’d walk away with their life changed. But you can’t fuck around wi
th those things too much. You’re dealing with a force. When it goes wrong you’re not being a vessel. You start getting into what you think the person wants to hear, what you think they should be told. But if you actually just let it go, with strangers especially, you find it’s usually exactly right. I got quite a reputation for it. It’s very draining, though. Poker and other card games are a bastardized version of tarot. If you keep losing at poker or cards, then you’re a loser, there’s no two ways of looking at it. But in a tarot you can suss things out, and put them on the right track, whereas in poker you’ve just lost a million quid there, pal. Poker plays on people’s vanity and greed, it’s a very down experience. To me, the difference between tarot and card games and poker is like the difference between reading a book and watching a film and TV. Tarot is a book, cards is like watching a film and poker’s TV – a now experience. Tarot’s a much richer experience. You get what you want out of it. Nobody really loses with tarot, unlike poker, where you can come out depressed, like watching TV.

  I did the readings for a year or two. But people started coming back too much. I had to tell them to stop. You get to the point where people can’t function without it – once a week turns into twice a week. They were driving up in their sports cars outside the flat, asking if they should go with this nice man they’d just met. A lot of fellas used to take advantage of that. Telling them they need more tarot – and that the tarot says you need sex with me.

  One of the rules of the tarot is that you shouldn’t really take a lot of money for it, like psychics. It’s not good. So I’d take presents, a nice leather jacket. You’d go round to dope dealers and they’d give you two ounces of dope per reading. All their readings would be like, ‘You need more advice,’ i.e. I’ll come back next week when I’ve run out. Especially if you’re rich.