A mate of mine called Hubert told me a funny story about him. He came to Prestwich once, in the early days of Oasis, pulled up in a car with one of his sycophants and asked Hubert where James’s recording studio was – James the band, ‘Sit Down’ and all that shite. Hubert hadn’t a clue who he was. He wouldn’t have been bothered anyway. But he said Noel was very impolite, asking for this studio. So Hubert asked him if he was a Fall fan. Noel said he wasn’t. Hubert’s like, ‘You go down here and then you take a left; and then another left; and then you go down there …’ Not a clue where he’s fucking sending him. Serves him right.
That whole pre-Grotesque period was a phenomenal learning curve. It’s horrible how much people try to shape what you do. At the time I was very sensitive about this; I still am, but I don’t beat myself up about it as much. I had a lot more untapped anger back then. And hearing other people’s silly verdicts on what I did just made me worse.
I wrote about what was around me; that was the whole point – to get down the experiences, scenes, people, etc. But some people are so daft they don’t understand that writing about Prestwich is just as valid as Dante writing about his inferno.
There’s nothing stranger than the things you know but don’t quite realize. Pointing it out is the difficult thing. But you can bet that once they get it the world has changed in a weird little way; it’s an altered state. But it works the other way as well. And it happens in a flash. It empties you a lot more than you think. I’ve been lucky in that respect. But I’ve known people who’ve returned from London after a week or two, or even just a night, and their entire creative mind-state has altered beyond recognition. All at once they’re rootless. The London body-swap has skinned them. I see it also with people who have gone and ‘travelled’. They lose so much of who they are they can’t retrieve it, they just float around talking about travelling all the time. No stories or anecdotes, just talk of more travel, of more time in Cambodia or somewhere else equally as fucking impoverished and war-torn. It’s a similar mindset to that of ghoulish celebrities who quietly travel out to Congo with a school of cameramen and journalists. And once they get there they can’t wait to start picking up young kids with half an arm. I find that very odd: celebrity healers.
Imagine being a young lad or girl from outside London and then you’re thrust into the London record industry. Imagine the peer pressure that goes with all the partying. Most record companies, most major record companies that is, hire enough staff to cover hangovers and the rest – the emotional breakdowns and whathavya. It’s the new wilderness: the moneyed wilderness. These big companies have all this covered. As soon as you start partying too much, start turning up for work with webbed eyes and a mouth like gravel, like the fast-money kids did in New York in the late 80s, you’re out of the door, and the day after another one enters. Then where do you go? I’ve seen it loads of times. A good friend of mine used to write for a men’s magazine, one of those crap lifestyle magazines. Every month he’d have to review a car or a cricket bat or something. But after a few years of it he didn’t have it in him any more – the bullshit had got to him. But instead of kidding himself and hanging in for the wage packet and the nights out, he wrote a letter to the magazine, exposing it for the sham that it was. And then fucked off.
He’s never worked since.
He had just returned from interviewing Hunter S. Thompson, though. Maybe the fact that Hunter had taken him out for a drive around Woody Creek at six in the morning on acid might have had something to do with it. Things might have seemed a bit skew-whiff after that!
People underestimate what places can do to you. If you’re not a space cadet you’re alright, but if you walk into these things blinkered then beware the vampires. I’ve been avoiding them all my life. The fuckers are everywhere.
I left home young; not like lads nowadays, who live at home until they’re thirty and spend all their money on cars and hair products and bad ecstasy. I never had big dreams about travelling. I know a lot of kids who did; who got homesick for places they’d never seen. Even when I did romanticize in my music, it was always about Manchester, because that’s what I knew best.
It’s similar to when the Victorian writers would romanticize about places like the Orient. They’d never seen it. It was just one of those places that fixes itself in people’s heads, like Australia now. And when they eventually made it there, after slaving enough kids into the ground, they discovered it was awful.
It’s even worse nowadays. Kids start saving up to go to Australia when they’re about seven, harbouring notions of the Neighbours life before they can even chew their food properly. It’s time to eradicate this idea that by getting away you’ll find yourself or walk into a glorious new existence. People who think like that just want rid of themselves. Where you’re living is in your head.
I know the address he wants it delivered to. I’ve seen the lights on at night in those long, long windows; seen the cars outside, the teenage bones scattered liberally along the gravel path.
But for the stories I’d sleep; but there’s something in the stories. I can’t escape the stories …
No more lithe lads with shorn skulls peddling small bags of low-grade bugle. No more girls with tikka masala tans totalled on White Lightning and the giddy rush of new love. No more young; their history ripped. Gone …
8. The Year of the Rats
1980 was a bad year …
New decades tend to make people fragile and more unsure than they’ve ever been, but 1980 seemed to be particularly barmy.
The problem started soon after Totale’s Turns, when I began thinking of albums more in the way of documents; elongated newspapers, so to speak. ‘Fiery Jack’ was a turning point; I guess in hindsight you could look at it as the beginning of Grotesque.
I’ve always written from different perspectives, but that one seemed to have more weight to it. I still see ‘Fiery Jack’ types like that. They’re quite heartening in a way. Manchester has always had men like that, hard livers with hard livers; faces like unmade beds.
Even though they’re clearly doing themselves damage, there’s a zest for life there. And that’s a rarity. They’re not as oblivious as you might think. They’re not all boring cunts. Drinkers have a good sense of the absurd. I like that.
What pissed people off with the stuff from that period – Slates and Grotesque – was the position it was coming from. But I knew what I was talking about. I wasn’t just dropping in for a couple of afternoons to observe the beer-minded proles. I was more than just a can of Holsten. And, what made it even worse, I was on to Step Forward. It had swiftly turned into a bum deal, and you weren’t supposed to speak out about stuff like that, especially being a northerner. You were seen as a whistleblower. Basically, their idea of distribution wasn’t the same as ours. I’d go to record shops in Manchester, looking for a copy of Witch Trials or Dragnet, and find nothing. There’s no point recording if it’s not in the shops. It’s not enough that you’re just on a label. You might as well do it all yourself if that’s the case.
In retrospect it’s alright Mojo magazine voting Grotesque the best Rough Trade album. But at the time it was bloody murder. You think to yourself you’ve got it bad now … But instead of the two-year gap it’s the twenty-year gap.
I was never certain about Rough Trade. They reminded me of kids at school who suddenly get into things. I remember being into Bowie’s Man Who Sold the World when I was a kid; all the other lads at school were listening to fucking Pink Floyd. Bowie was off the radar for half of them. Six months later they’ve all got fox-coloured hair and they’re all acting fey and spacey. Rough Trade were like that, but in a business way. It was as if they’d returned home from school, yapping about this new thing – indie music – and their mam had given them a few quid to go and immerse themselves in it – to shut them up. But they’re nowhere near as radical as they think. That’s why we buggered off from them as well, after Slates – that was the final straw. They didn’t want to bri
ng it out because it was a 10-inch; neither an album nor a single. I wanted to release something that could be bought by the working man. Too much stuff released around that period seemed to overlook this particular corner of life. The likes of Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and his ilk; they were only arsed about entertaining their mates round the corner.
And sure enough, they didn’t like the sentiments behind some of the records. People forget: ‘Slates, Slags etc.’, the actual song, was totally un-PC for Rough Trade. They didn’t like the phrase ‘male slags’. A lot of so-called hipsters are very conservative like that. There are more taboos in their world than there are in that of the fucking Tories they purport to despise.
On top of that, they’d always have people interfering, people who were supposed to be working on the cover. I’ve got no problem with quality input, with genuine ideas; what I can’t abide is those who just stick their hooters in for the hell of it, because they’re at odds with their jobs. They wanted lyrics to all the songs and stuff like that – it was like living in Russia. I was living my own Cold War.
‘Well, Morrissey gives us a lyric sheet.’ And of course he’s into all these causes – women’s lib and gay lib; not to knock him – ‘And “Slates, slags etc.” doesn’t quite fit in with our label,’ and all this tosh – ‘And what exactly is a Prole Art Threat?’ It was a very arty-farty time – all Aztec Camera, Scritti Politti and The Smiths. They were supposed to be against the Duran Duran types, but they were just the same in my book: poseurs with acoustic guitars instead. You get bands like that nowadays, nothing changes. I’d had enough by this stage. The strangest thing about it was that it’d come out after Grotesque. It wasn’t as if we’d hit them with that straight away. You could sort of understand it if that was the case. But they knew who the fuck we were.
The initial beauty of Rough Trade was in the contract – fifty to them, fifty to the group, which was very innovative at the time. But I just ripped it up in front of them. I never actually signed the contract. Nobody owned our output. They wanted a more commercial, ‘Totally Wired’ style record and I handed them Grotesque … Everybody was giving me shit, journalists saying people don’t want to hear songs with a story, where are the messages and why aren’t you addressing the political climate, etc., etc. Stuff like ‘Container Drivers’ and ‘Pay Your Rates’ was very unusual in those days. Groups didn’t record rockabilly country and western songs about these subjects. I even had problems with the group as well, they didn’t like it, couldn’t get their heads around it. They wanted to be The Jam. But in my eyes Grotesque was the first record that worked as a whole. And like always, it was me fronting it. I refused to bend.
I loathed all that Gang of Four sixth-form political stuff. Still do. I always thought we were a lot more mature. Even when I was younger I was never into decadence and teenage angst – The Gang of Four were a form of that, if you ask me. I wanted to appeal to intelligent listeners. This is why we kept politics at arm’s length. We’d done all that Rock Against Racism shit in the 70s.
It all got a bit ludicrous. For some reason a song like ‘Container Drivers’ wasn’t on. I guess because it wasn’t a ham-fisted attack on the state of the nation. There’s a very interesting book that sums up the pebble-dash thinking behind berks like that – No Retreat it’s called, by these two ex-soccer hooligans, Dave Hann and Steve Tilzey, who went from being hooligans to going out and wapping the National Front. They’d hunt them down and bottle the cunts: the correct way to deal with them. They used to steward for the Rock Against Racism lot, but after a bit they got rid of them, said they were no better than the violent NF. Booted out by the people they were fighting for! It’s a very English mentality.
We were dealing with a generation of guilty people, who had taken all the drugs in the 60s, had a few kids in the 70s and realized that they were exactly like their parents after all. It’s a very middle-class thing, rebelling against your parents. Most of the people I know who are working class like their parents because they know what they’ve done for them. But then of course these people aren’t in positions of authority, not in the main, anyway. But it seemed to me that a select few people were hiding behind this idea of false concern in a really half-arsed and sentimental way.
We’d done a load of free gigs for RAR, and then The Clash and Tom Robinson came on the scene, and all these other pop groups, and all at once they didn’t want to know The Fall any more. The minute Polystyrene, or whatever her name was, and The Clash said they’d start doing them – which they didn’t used to do in the 70s – things changed irrevocably. It became a Bob Geldof type of scene – they wanted the most famous people to get the message across. It didn’t bother me. I’ve never needed to attach myself to anything, and I’m deeply suspicious of people who do. Geldof’s a brilliant chancer. He’s built a whole career on Live Aid and do-gooding; a whole career that wasn’t there before. I mean, who listens to The Boomtown Rats and who buys his albums? At least Bono, for all his faults, has a career outside of all that hand-shaking.
Joe Strummer was no different. It was terrible the way he died, but it needs saying that he wasn’t the savviest cultural commentator. His politics were all over the place; bluster over substance, that’s what he represented. We supported The Clash in New York in 1981. Belting out naive generalizations in front of this backdrop that went from the Yorkshire Ripper to pictures of kids being coshed; all very clichéd. It was like watching the news in your living room with The Clash playing in the corner. Everybody knows it’s wrong. But coming at it from that angle is pointless, thoughtless even.
The sad thing about it all is he distanced himself from his middle-class background and education, appropriated this tough heart-on-the-sleeve messenger stance so convincingly, but lacked the wit to take it anywhere fresh. He was preaching to the converted, and I don’t just mean his fans, but himself as well. He daren’t offend anybody, because they’d just charge him with being a phoney, and he daren’t look at it in a sceptical way, because then he’d be employing his privileged education. That was the crux of his problem.
Anybody who came up to me in America asking about the British music scene, I’d just tell them it was dire – stick to what you know, stick to driving music. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been proud of where I’m from. I’m just not into that musical imperialism that so many bands suffer from. You need a bit of it, but when you start crusading into America with that sort of attitude you just end up looking potty. They’re not as vapid as you think, Americans. They concocted their entire history from lies, so they’re not going to buy into some limey’s glorified head-trip.
Grotesque is a very English album. It’s written from the inside, from experience; the real thing. Pub men can tell you a lot about the English way. But it’s tricky, because it wasn’t a defence either. It wasn’t some sort of kitchen-sink apology; or even one of those crap salt-of-the-earth things, where the working class are delighted with their lot, trudging around potless and pissed.
I don’t really write from a solid idea. It’s never that certain at the start. You get to what you’re saying through the writing, the process; and then you move on.
But the place for Grotesque certainly wasn’t indie music.
Even though it wasn’t respected at the time, it won us a groundswell of support. That was the great thing about it. People of a certain age, say twenty-five and upwards, said that it was their record, they related to it – not people in groups who heard it as nothing more than a naff LP recorded by a bunch of pony musicians, and certainly not the critics. But the most telling aspect of that period was the fact that I realized there’s a lot of ambitious people in this country without the talent. It’s a disease.
Factory wanted to sign us after this, but I wasn’t going for it. That’s what Tony Wilson’s gripe was with me. Rob Gretton, who was one of many partners at Factory, used to say to me that you all had to dress the same, same trousers, have the same haircut, wear the same sullen expression and you all got pai
d the same. So Joy Division got paid the same as The Stockholm Monsters and so on.
Rob was cool. Every time I met him he used to say he admired me for not signing. ‘That’s the biggest mistake you ever made,’ he’d say, in a jokey way – because Joy Division got big. ‘The amount of groups that come round here creeping, arse-licking to Tony …’ I was at arm’s length with it all – thank God. Rob used to lend us equipment and vans, but he’d always say, ‘Don’t tell anybody. I’m only doing it for you because you’re a City fan.’
The question with Factory is – where did all the money go?
It was a factory system. You had to do what you were told. It was based around the Situationists: cultural terrorism, subverting capitalism and public spaces. Good in theory, but it’s a bit different when a south Mancunian like Wilson is at the helm. In my view it wasn’t that far removed from the original factory days. Engels was a factory owner in Manchester, he had twelve-year-old girls working for him, probably in the same buildings where the Hacienda was. A middle-class socialist; same as you’ve got now. He’d observe the kids and write about how depressed they were. Who does that remind you of? – Tony Wilson! He went on about how these working-class kids like The Happy Mondays were drug addicts; interesting degenerates. I think he knew what he was doing talking like that, because when it all went tits up they heaped the blame on The Happy Mondays.
The problem they had was when they started hiring people who clearly weren’t cut out for that line of work; mates of mates and whathavya. That never works.
But those people are very powerful – those media graduates. Maybe not as much with the Factory lot, because you could keep an eye on them, they weren’t holed up in London. But they can make sure you don’t work again. Labels like Rough Trade and all that – even now. It’s an unsaid thing. Rough Trade’s revitalized now; must be in their craw that we’re back as well.
Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith Page 8