Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

by Mark E. Smith

  You can’t walk down the street without being subjected to some soft-core porn image selling something; or you go to the newsagents and you’re bombarded with those awful men’s magazines with these shiny women on the cover. Let’s be honest here – it’s all a bit second-rate. They’re not that far removed from those porn mags I used to lift and flog on as a kid; only difference being that those contained some decent articles. Not like the muck that’s plastered between the pages of these other things. I know the type of people who work on them. They’re a new breed of English frat-boy who gets off on shit updates of Porky’s; they’re like the thick younger brothers of the Loaded writers in the 90s, and that’s saying something! The only way they can get women is to do a stint on these trashy rags. The worst part is the shit humour they’re underpinned with. At least the Daily Sport can be quite amusing sometimes. But not the randy college boys; they’re the enemies of humour.

  Every woman I’ve been out with has been different. But when we’ve broken up it’s always been for the best. More often than not, they’ve left me. It’s never bothered me, though. Most blokes go suicidal, but not me. Sitting in the pub all day, moping … I don’t think they should be allowed in pubs – a landlord once said that to me. ‘Get these male divorcees out of my pub! They’re making everybody miserable.’ Sat with one pint all night …

  ‘Cheer up, mate.’

  ‘But she’s left me.’

  ‘Good, you should be happy.’

  It’s quite weird, the feedback I get off people in broken relationships or in prison or on their deathbed. They find The Fall’s music more stimulating than that usual crap. I find that pretty satisfying. I think it’s because it makes them think a bit; it takes their mind off things. A lot of people have said that to me.

  I mean, if you’re dying and somebody plays you a track by The Police it’s not going to stimulate you or console you, is it? One bloke who’d done ten years for manslaughter told me that The Fall had kept him going, kept him together throughout his stay while everybody else would be watching Top of the Pops. That was the highlight of the week – all the lifers gathering round to watch Top of the Pops. That’s punishment in itself. He also told me he’d been wrongly accused as well. Poor chap.

  It’s been said that I tend to write from an asexual perspective. There’s a few love songs in there, but mostly I’d rather leave that to everybody else. It’s all been said before. I don’t see it as being asexual as such. It’s more akin to putting yourself in other people’s shoes.

  I’ve got a good talent for that.

  I don’t want to be like the other lot – Mick Jagger and fucking Rod Stewart. My sex life actually went down when I formed The Fall. It wasn’t the reason why I did it, of course. But a lot of people do form groups for money and sex. It’s still true today, no matter how avant-garde they claim to be. I was earning more money on the docks, and I had more women. In fact, there have been occasions when I’ve been getting on with a woman very well and as soon as she found out I was in The Fall she went right off me. I’ve even tried to cover it up sometimes.

  There was this one occasion where I was chatting a girl up in a pub near me and doing really well. But she kept saying, ‘I know you from somewhere.’ I thought she might have seen me on telly or something. But I didn’t want to mention The Fall. I’m asking her if she wants to come back to my place or should we go back to hers, and then she started talking about one of my sisters, saying she used to knock about with her. It turns out I’m related to her. I should have realized. She had the same nose as me; the Smith nose.

  Elena’s the best thing to have happened to me in some time.

  I met her in the Volks Bar in Berlin; this old circular bar. It’s a great place. She was promoting one of our shows. She used to put on a lot of hip-hop stuff too. Her musical tastes are a lot different from mine – Cool Keith and the real hip-hop before it went stupid, when it was much more adventurous, and less mainstream, like The Sugarhill Gang.

  I think she was a fan of The Fall as well, though.

  This would have been in 1996 – which was quite a rocky time for me – because I knew her for about three or four years before we’d started going out.

  We hit it off from the start, but she was in Berlin and all that. I saw her again three or four years later. She used to ring me up occasionally. Then one day I just got on a plane to Berlin and thought, she’s the one for me, and proposed to her in 2000. She just looked at me – who’s this weird guy? What are you doing here?

  There came a point when I had to work out what I was doing – not that I had a load of choices. It was instinctive. I was on my own and didn’t have a lot of dough; scrimping to pay the band and bills. And when it came down to it, I knew she was the best for me.

  She’s got a good sense of humour, that’s very important. And she shares my love of literature. I think she’s very underrated as a musician. She’s not over-educated on the keyboards. She knows the basics. Coming from a dance and hip-hop background helps a lot – there’s a real drive to those incessant rhythms. Ask a fellow to play a bass riff over and over again, they get bored and start embellishing it because they think it should have another twelve notes in it. Women can do it and make it exciting.

  She deals with things well. I’ve had other women in the group and they’ve been completely doolally. After a couple of gigs they’re on the verge of an emotional collapse.

  She has a good eye for things, too – the outsider’s viewpoint. It’s very handy. They see things as a whole and not in pieces, like those who have lived here all their life. Germany has probably the greatest educational system I’ve ever come across. I was never one for school, but the methods they use seem extremely effective. A bit like Scottish people – they’ve been taught properly. They can be objective and they can comment on things constructively. It might have something to do with the war; whereas with the British some of them still have this in-built imperialistic viewpoint that they know everything – Tony Blair, for instance. They’d rather interfere with somebody else’s life instead of addressing what’s on their own doorstep. Even the daftest Germans read books all day. They’ve read everything. Even the roadies. Not like the Brits at the Reading Festival, where Mojo is the tome of choice. The barman might be a big fucking Bavarian but when he’s not serving he’ll read a book. It’s important. If people read more, they’d come to a better understanding of other people and there’d be less people trudging off to shrinks.

  I remember going to a further education college for six weeks to do A-level English, two years after I left school. This English teacher I had was supposed to be one of the best in Manchester. Not a fuddy-duddy: a young girl. It was all mixed ages in this class, and she’s asking me what I’ve read, and I’m going – Norman Mailer, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler. She hadn’t heard of any of them. Norman Mailer! She hadn’t heard of him because he’s American; and she’s supposed to be one of the best English teachers in Manchester. Never heard of William Burroughs. It’s all Jane Austen and Dickens, Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy – which is all good. But it’s a poor show when a so-called English expert hasn’t any knowledge of Norman Mailer. Even a German dog would know who he is.

  It seems like you have to be of a certain type to get on nowadays. There’s no savvy in-between – in the media and in education, anyway. In one corner you’ve got those brainless magazine jockeys; and then there’s the embittered cynic in his mid thirties who’s been stripped of all passion and sees through everything, even himself – they like them on the Guardian. And then again there’s the festival type who floats around looking pretty and not offending until she’s worth a mint for no other reason than being pretty and inoffensive – Jo Whiley gave birth to these pointless butterflies. These are the reasons for articles about Brix’s new carpet. It’s disappointing when programmes about moving cushions and painting kitchens are watched by more than nine people. I think they should have a yearly clear out of staff. Keep it fresh, like The Fall.


  I have a clear out literally every year. I hire a big, yellow skip that sits proudly outside next to the cars, and in it I throw everything that’s surplus. This can be all sorts – clothes, records, books. I don’t like clutter. I can’t work amid clutter. I crave space. Whenever I’m coming to the end of an album I’ll spread out all the lyric sheets on the floor in an empty room and stand over them, all the time working out the correct order of play – a bit like a director when they’re looking at the storyboard of the film. I don’t know how people can work in confined spaces.

  It’s no wonder so many mistakes are made in the modern office. They’re filled with too many bodies. How can you concentrate fully and correctly when you’re sat in the middle of thirty voices and bodies all vying for attention? It’s the modern incarnation of the industrial workhouse. It’s frightening, like Pink Floyd’s worst middle-class nightmares writ large. We’re all part of a machine. I never knew this. Now I feel enlightened!

  There’s a lot to be said for de-cluttering one’s life.

  A funny thing happened to me a couple of years ago when I was cleaning out. A mate of mine had sent me all these old newspapers from World War Two. I’m filtering through them, reading the odd line here and there about the Blitz and what-havya; and then all of a sudden I felt tired and went to bed. As I’m getting in bed I heard this crashing sound; part of the doorway had caved in. I was literally minutes away from being under a load of bricks. Imagine if they’d found me beneath all this rubble among a load of newspaper clippings dating back to the Blitz; they’d have probably thought I’d been there since the 40s.

  But if you want to get your work done, if you want to be an artist, it’s a good first step to avoid clutter. I only have three chairs in the house, for instance; one for the wife, one for me, and one for a guest. No more. One guest at a time – that’s my philosophy. You don’t want your house turning into a hippy commune. You’ll never get anything done if that’s the case. It’s vital that you lay down rules like that when you’re working from home; because it can get quite difficult otherwise.

  I’ve always needed space to write, even as a kid. I couldn’t sit downstairs with the rest of my family. I’d have to be alone in my room.

  It’s like when I wrote that short story for City Life magazine. They put me in a writer’s office in the Manchester Evening News. It was fucking great: big typewriter, lock on the door. I whacked out a four-page short story in two hours. No distractions, just a cup of tea now and again. It was amazing. No telly. No phones. No books – very 60s-like. There was nothing to go out of the door for – all that lay outside the door was a mile of typists. I like to get in a flow with things. I can do it with songs. But there’s always something, like some wanker will ring up. It can send you nuts. Then you return to it and you’ve had it; you end up with a mediocre version.

  So you have to try and box yourself off.

  I do this on stage, too. I like to create space. That’s what a lot of those hand movements are for. It’s a performance, after all. And I’m at my best when I’m in control of my immediate surroundings. It was the same when I used to talk in between songs, tell funny stories. I suppose I was a bit influenced by Lenny Bruce, but it was also because other bands were really po-faced and earnest. There was no performance there. I couldn’t see the point of it. I’m not talking about end-of-the-pier shit – just a few anecdotes here and there; a bit Lenny Bruce, a bit Bernard Manning.

  That’s what I liked about early Iggy Pop. His performances were very much part of the whole thing. You could take the music out of it – not that you’d want to do that – and it’d still work in a weird way.

  The problem I had was that the group started playing louder than me, drowning me out. When people are starved of attention, or they think they’re playing second-fiddle, they’ll revolt in some way or another after a bit. I’ve had that a lot. You’re dealing with kids when that sort of thing occurs. They can’t see that it’s a whole; can’t see their own contribution; don’t understand that they’re not me, and I’m not them. I don’t whinge about not playing the guitar or the drums. When I fiddle around with their amps, it’s because it needs to be done. I must be hearing it different to them. But you’d be surprised by how many people tell me that it works. Not that I need telling. I know it works. They don’t realize that I’m hearing it as a whole because I’ve not got my head stuck in an instrument.

  I keep going on about it, but musicians are a unique sort. The stage is everything to them – there’s nothing outside of it. It’s as if they’re still performing in a school play and their mam’s out in the audience and they’re busting a gut to upstage every other fucker around them. I’ve got to keep an eye on this all the time.

  I’ve heard people say that I’ve got too close to some of the lads I’ve had in my group, that they start relying on me like a second dad. They said that about Ben, for instance. But I don’t think I did. I was just being me. The problems start when they start buying into all that shit and then I have a go at them because they’ve played like a toddler on vodka. And their heads drop and the annoyance grows into full-time hatred.

  It’s no wonder that I’ve never had kids myself. There’s still time. But I don’t think you should bring a kid into the world if you can’t feed it. I’ve always thought that. People look at you like you’re mad. I couldn’t have had a kid when I was twenty-one. I didn’t know whether I was going to do another LP, for one thing. The rest of the group were different, even though they were younger than me: ‘Grotesque is number 1 in the indie charts and oh, by the way, I’m a daddy.’

  And I’m thinking, ‘You’re only nineteen, man, you don’t think Grotesque is going to finance you for the next twenty-five years, do you, because it’s not?’ But you don’t say that.

  It’s what you get from coming off a big family – I’ve seen it all. There’s nothing that shocks me. I resent people thinking that I’m too frightened or impotent to have kids.

  A lot of people say I’d be a really good dad. But I’m the sort who’d forget about the child. I’d be at the pub engrossed in a conversation when I should be at home because the baby’s in front of the fire getting slowly roasted. I’m that type of fellow.

  12. The Devil’s Compass

  It was a typical Brix evening. We were in Los Angeles among writers who were all chewing cheeks on chokey and talking themselves up. It was some house party or other. Tight-fisted bastards hadn’t bought enough booze in. The so-called hell-raisers were sipping champagne. I’ve seen more hellraising on a Sunday in Prestwich. They couldn’t drink. They were still acting seventeen, feigning drunkenness.

  Most of them had been at some arts college in Vermont, and they seemed like charlatans to me. Read any of their books and it’s as if they’ve photocopied the first two pages 230 times, done a line and bunged it to the publishers. And the publishers are so happy that they’ve got one of the so-called Brat Pack in their ranks, they’ve gone and said, ‘Awesome!’ This is how careers are built.

  It’s all padding around one or two semi-good ideas.

  But because they’re there in their full glory, you’re supposed to tell him how much you like his book and tell her what a good ending her book has, and so on. And because I’m not half as belligerent as I’m made out to be, I just kept my trap shut and waited for it all to finish. But I remember thinking, what a cotton-wool world they live in. They were all variations on the same theme: totally unable to move on from flimsy stories about cocaine and other stuff. Even at the time I remember thinking that they’ll never find a different perspective. You read their stuff now, and it’s nothing more than another 1980s counselling session on the page. Who wants to read that? We’re talking about the elite here. The opportunities at their disposal were ridiculous. And most just spurned them and chose to shoot junk instead. Daft bastards. That’s the background that she comes from.

  I’ve had it with all the talk about the so-called classic era of The Fall; the Brix era, etc. I’
m not rankled by it. I just think it’s been documented so much there’s no point reclaiming it for the purpose of this book. It was over twenty years ago, remember – let’s not unearth more dull memories.

  People have got a serious problem if they’re interested in wading through it again. I don’t think it’s the best era. I don’t even like the word ‘era’ – it’s very Mojo terminology; as if I’ve come to an end.

  I’m always dissatisfied with the way things pan out. That’s what keeps me going. It’s like that film Last Days, based on Kurt Cobain, which reminds me of the Sartre quote, ‘Hell is other people.’ It’s true. It’s a good film. You can see how he was driven crackers by his mad wife and his flimsy mates. They’re all living in this mansion, and he’s hiding away in one of the ten bedrooms, holding his shotgun, or he’s traipsing around the gardens mumbling. I don’t think it had anything to do with his heroin habit. Everything had caved in on him and he had bad taste in mates. I don’t think he’d ever been in the company of good people.

  You see his lickspittle mates arrive in this isolated group, fried out of their minds. But when he’s fucked up, they all piss off in a car. And then they come back a few days later and they keep doing that until he’s blown his brains out. He can’t stand it. He’s trying to play his guitar and write his lyrics and they’re all whispering among themselves, right in front of him. And I’ve seen that with the groups that I’ve had. I just kick them in the arse, but him being him he’s too shy to say anything about it. And he’s got to deal with the rent collectors and some fundamentalist mitherer.