Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

by Mark E. Smith

  You’re not progressing if it’s just about sounding exactly like where you’re from. There’s got to be more to it than that. I get sent a lot of CDs that suffer from this. They think because I’m proud of where I’m from and don’t hide my accent that that’s all it’s about. I must admit I don’t listen to new CDs as much as I used to, for this reason. I know what I’m in for. Most of the time it’ll be some bloke with a broad accent telling me about his night out or what it’s like to be skint, with some interesting guitar or electronic noise behind him. It’s not bad. I’m not one to have a go at people for doing it. I just think it’s limited.

  The main problem with it is its lack of humour. I’ve always found The Fall humorous. I’m surprised when people don’t get that side of us. It’s glaringly obvious to me. I’m not one for wallowing in grimness like a lot of other groups are. There’s money to be made out of doing that. You only have to listen to the likes of Coldplay. They only have one tone or mood. They can’t step it up. But that’s not been The Fall’s way.

  A lot of what we did in the 90s has been overlooked because of the Mad Mark side of things. I went from being a provocative drunk to being public enemy number one. I was drinking a lot of whisky at the time – too much, probably. But I still think the work stands for itself. Even The Light User Syndrome (1996), which is often dismissed as a whisky-rash of an album, has its moments. I still hear people talking about ‘Cheetham Hill’; and the likes of Primal Scream just robbed the whole sound of that album in the 90s.

  The ironic thing was that you had the accepted rebels like Bobby Gillespie and Shaun Ryder and Liam Gallagher – who were all fawned upon in one way or another; and then you had me!

  I’ve never played the game like they have. The Happy Mondays and Oasis would do anything. The NME would say, ‘We’re having a party for the staff in London,’ and there’d be about 150 people and their mates, public not allowed. The Happy Mondays would come down and play. I’d never do that. I’m talking about playing private parties for record executives at Creation Records, which Oasis did. What’s more, Creation used to ring me up and say, ‘We know you haven’t got a label, and we really want to sign you if you do this: if you come down and play this informal party for the Creation staff and Alan McGee.’

  And I’m like, ‘If you’re a Fall fan, as you say you are, why do I have to play a party?’

  ‘Oh, it’d be in your interests, Mark.’

  The Mondays did loads of that shit, and New Order did as well. You’ve got to do it. That’s what I’ve had to deal with for years. Sorry, I’m not singing for some fat nobody – fuck that!

  And then all of a sudden I got a very bad reputation for only playing for half an hour, for just shouting and then walking off. I don’t see why you can’t do it. But in the mid 90s we couldn’t get shows because of it. It was alright for The Jesus and Mary Chain – it was hip when they did that. But when I did it we got the opposite reaction. And then we had a reputation for not turning up on time and me being abusive – which was a pack of rumours. That’s why we now pride ourselves on being on time and playing for the exact limit. Just to see their faces.

  It was any excuse for them not to pay you. Countless times we didn’t get paid in the 90s; couldn’t even get booked. It was all over the place. What can you do?

  Looking back, I should never have got Trevor Long in to manage us. He brought about my bankruptcy. I met him just after we’d done Kurious, Oranj (1988). He’d worked with Dexys Midnight Runners, and he seemed like he knew what he was up to, seemed competent.

  He was a pro alright.

  At the time, I couldn’t really put my finger on it. It was so strange the way our money kept going up and down. The problem stemmed from the fact I’ve always insisted on paying people equal wages. I wanted to take control of most things. I never wanted musicians to worry about money. If you’re going to do it, then centre it.

  I took him to court in the end in 1994.

  My argument to the prosecution was that his job was to go and garner some money. But he had this really good barrister who said, ‘Mr Smith, who’s a pop singer, says he was supposed to garner – whatever that means.’ Everybody knows what that means. The judge just laughed. It was like The Prisoner: everybody just laughing in my face And then they threw out the evidence because I quoted a figure of £1,200 when the actual figure was £1,215.

  It couldn’t have worked out any worse.

  There was a microphone in front of me that I thought I was talking into, but it wasn’t even plugged in. I must have looked like a right idiot – I didn’t notice it until the third day.

  The money I could have got from the whole case would have settled all the tax problems.

  Then something weird happened. The Curse of The Fall: it doesn’t happen in ones, it comes in twos and threes. My accountant, who’d been brilliant for years, joined forces with an Asian company that turned out to be corrupt, although of course he didn’t know that. They initiated the bankruptcy. The minute he hooked up with them they started charging me a ridiculous amount of money for consultations. And it was at a time when that sort of money just wasn’t coming in. And so after three or four months he had to petition me for bankruptcy. I’d only been working with them theoretically for three or four months. Everything had been okay before they came on the scene.

  I had some very low days. I was drinking a lot, a real lot. Going to meet accountants and having band meetings pissed out of my head wasn’t the best idea. But what was I supposed to do? I was down. Bad reviews kept piling in about how drunk I was. It all came at once. In a way, I let it happen.

  You have to remember, sometimes, people aren’t like you. I’m not saying I’m special; only that a lot of people aren’t built like me. And you can see why.

  It taught me a lesson. You find out who your friends are virtually within a couple of weeks. Video directors who once phoned up for a chat – no more. Even the group got a bit funny. Now it wasn’t, ‘How are you, Mark?’, more, ‘How’s the group going to survive? What about us?’

  If you’re in a group, suddenly these happy mams and dads are at your throat. They’ve just thrown a big party for the birth of their new kid – they’ve bought all the presents. Three months later they haven’t been paid for a few weeks, and they’re at you. What a fucking shame! I was on the dole for years – I didn’t get that amount of money. So my attitude was – if you don’t like it, get lost.

  I wasn’t going to sign on the dole again.

  The only people who stood by me were my mam – it even got to a stage where I was going round to her house to borrow tins of soup – and my sisters and a few old mates. It goes back to being in gangs as a kid. You stick together. I remember one instance when I was broke. I was sat in a pub in Prestwich village with an old mate of mine, Sean; sat nursing a pint, as you do when you’re skint. And I just came out and told him, said, ‘I’m broke, Sean. I can’t buy you a pint back.’

  ‘I thought you were doing alright?’

  ‘Well, I’m not.’

  That’s another thing: you’re still in the papers but you’ve got nothing.

  And he just went, ‘Sit there, Mark,’ and fucked off. I thought – here’s another one. And then he came back: ‘Here, brother – twenty quid.’

  JR was another one who stood by me. He’s a mate of mine from Prestwich. He was great. He used to come round and knock on my door and say, ‘I know you’re living on toast. Come on – curry!’ And he’d take me for a drink and a curry. He saw the funny side to it all. I appreciate that.

  It’s hard to write through those periods. It’s so much easier to not write. It’s alright when you start out and you have no money, that’s just part of the game. But it got really bad. Just before I went bankrupt I started hallucinating figures. People would be ringing me up about shows and I wouldn’t even be listening. I was hallucinating figures. I remember walking around and all the nice trees had numbers on them. It was worse than LSD. It’s amazing I wrote anything i
n that period. Not eating, and seeing things like that …

  Then all the bills started coming in. The rehearsal rooms you haven’t paid for … suddenly they’re on at you for eight hundred quid.

  It’s true what they say about poverty-stricken people in this country. You end up paying more money out than you would do if you were just getting by. For everything; electric, gas, the lot.

  I can laugh now, but the minute I went bankrupt I got a bill off the people who were supposed to be defending me. It doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. The legal firm in Manchester who were supposed to be defending me charged me £1,110. They kept ringing up. And I’m like, ‘I hate to state the obvious, but I’ve just gone bankrupt.’

  ‘Oh well, it’s none of our business, Mr Smith.’ Their tone of voice had changed somewhat.

  It’s the only place in the world where you lose the case and have to pay the costs.

  And then I’d go to the bank. You’re trying to explain your situation to them. I can understand it with the tax people, they’re not as cutthroat in that respect. They will assess your situation. But not the banks.

  I put about a quarter of a million quid through Natwest in about eight or nine years. Then it all went down. They wouldn’t even give me an overdraft. It’s not like now; the boom period where you can walk in and get a hundred grand for your house. They just said to me, ‘You’re twenty-eight and you’ve got no money. You did have money but you gave it all away to your employees.’ That was their attitude. ‘You can’t handle your own finances – why should we give you an overdraft?’ They were totally ignoring the fact I’d put a load of dosh in their bank over the previous eight years; dosh that they’d invested. That was all forgotten about.

  You can imagine the worry that people with kids and a house have when they have to experience that shit.

  I could easily have jacked it all in at that stage. But there’s a part of me that’s very defiant. I wouldn’t have been able to look myself in the mirror if I’d quit. The Fall has always been there for me like that; in a mad way that was all I had.

  And then …

  I’m just glad of the graft. It’s not as if I’m actually taking them off the street myself; not as if it’s me doing the things they say they do; and you’ve got to admit, they’ve been asking for it. I can remember a time when they thought they owned the night …

  17. The March of the Gormless Bastards

  It was doomed from the start.

  First American tour in four years, 1998, and it’s the same old story: we fly from Manchester to New York and there are two seats empty. Out of five people we’re two short. It was the usual palaver, the plane had to wait for an hour or so, and there’s just me, Steve Hanley, the bass player, and Julia Nagle, the keyboardist.

  I should have known then, it goes back to chokey and amphetamines. They – Karl Burns, the drummer, and Tommy Crooks, the guitarist – hadn’t the bottle to get on a plane, because they’d run out of drugs.

  So I said to Hanley, ‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll just go without them, do it as a trio.’ That’s how bad things were.

  We got to America, and then I had a heated argument with Julia about sharing a room and we knocked each other about. Hotel security came in with this medic, this Vietnam vet, and they’re all going, ‘Prosecute her, prosecute her.’ Then JR, a mate of mine, turned up at the hotel from out of nowhere – like Jesus. He was on his way to meet some mates in Florida.

  But I refused to prosecute. What I think it is, with people who travel like that, those that have never been over the Atlantic, so to speak – they all go a bit funny. We were thrown out of the hotel, JR got us another one and the two idiots – Burns and Crooks – arrive, meaning I play the first three gigs with a black eye.

  It turns out they had it all planned for this group of theirs – The Ark – Mark without the M. They’d already booked some studio time in Rochdale that happened to coincide with the tour.

  It’s strange what this business does to people. Because what they’re seeing in New York is people are all over me and they’re not over them, so they think well, if he can do it we can do it too.

  I remember watching them in a sandwich shop, the three of them, all kissing and hugging each other. I’ve got a black eye, my only friend is JR and I’m stood with a Chinese fellow and they think you’re so daft. I thought, there’s something up here, like why are they staying in their hotel rooms all the time? It came out two weeks later. They’re on 53rd and 3rd in New York and you’ve got an American tour coming up and you spend three days in your hotel room, and I’m saying to them, ‘Why don’t you go out into New York?’

  ‘Well, we’re trying to get tight for the gigs,’ they say; when, in fact, they weren’t, they were working on material for The Ark. People have said I spoil members too much. Split everything to a reasonable point. It’s a cack-handed old commie attitude. But the result of that, when everybody gets the same, is that they all think they’ve got the same power. Fifty per cent of musicians are deceitful, that’s what I’ve found. This is why people go solo. To me they’re straights, but not in the right way. They crack on they’re artists yet live in a semi-world between the working life and the artistic life – and can’t work out which one is real. A lot of circuit groups seem like that. They just want to go home. They want everything comfy: a two-hour sex/craft thing then back in front of the mirror in their bedroom, or in front of a nice roaring fire.

  Funnily enough, the morning of the show at Brownie’s, I felt I had to meet the group. This is an instance where being psychic isn’t all it’s cut out to be; you feel it and know it but it’s not actually much help. As an old woman said to me once, ‘What good is knowing the bus will be a half-hour late?’

  Anyway, Das Gruppe, as they appeared to me with their Time-Life books on the Third Reich all over the bus, didn’t say a thing about The Ark.

  It was supposed to be our penultimate Yank gig, but of course we had an onstage disagreement. They all started throwing punches. But I gave them a few left hooks back. They got worse than they gave me. But that’s not nice either, being hit on stage. So I got carried out of the venue by well-meaning security. The crowd are going crazy, they had to be held back. They wanted to rip the band to bits.

  Back at the hotel I’m kicking at their doors, shouting, ‘Come out, cowards, what’s going on?’ Of course they didn’t.

  What I didn’t know was that it’s an offence to do that, to start shouting, because of the fire regulations. I understand it now.

  Julia’s no fucking help. So, back in my room, I’m having a cigarette, and I just put it out on her trainer and went to sleep. Next, I’ve been reported by them and her, and handcuffed and put in jail by a copper who came into the room early in the morning. I’m knackered from all this palaver and she’s acting like Princess Diana with the police officer, telling him how much she likes his accent. And they’re asking me what happened, and I’m saying, ‘I didn’t do anything to her, I dimped out a cigarette on her trainer.’ She’s still jet-lagged and they think she’s being abused by a guy who’s half dressed, soaking in his anger.

  Daft Julia thinks she’s talking to English coppers. So when they say to her, ‘Does he shout a lot, does he drink a lot?’, being from Stockport she doesn’t realize that it’s a criminal offence in America. She’s the sort who’d have bloody advisers over when her husband didn’t collect the kids every weekend. She thinks it’s that sort of thing – the Cheshire advisory service; failing to realize that these are hard-boiled cops. And they go, ‘Is he shouting at his fellow workmates?’ And of course they’ve all said, ‘Yeah, he is,’ because they’ve all got their flights booked. She thinks I’m going to go down to the cop shop and get a fine for ten quid or something, not realizing you get rammed in the tombs with a load of murderers.

  But, as we were due to play a second night there, the copper said to me, ‘If you can prove this, I’ll let you go.’ They can do that in New York, take you to a show and bring y
ou back. Not to let the people down. But at this point the band were already on the plane. I even asked Hanley to stay, but he was acting like a dinner lady, worried about getting back to Karl and Tommy.

  The best thing about it was I got arrested the same day as George Michael. Because on MTV at 6 a.m. the headlines are ‘British indie-rock guy goes ape-shit in New York hotel’ kind of thing. But two hours later George Michael got arrested. So that was the main news. I was a footnote at that point. Thank God.

  They charged me with third-degree assault and harassment relating to Julia. Once there they put me in the tombs with all these black fellows, this Sopranos-type guy and this six foot two kid from San Francisco; his racket involved picking up rich gay New York guys, going back to their houses, hitting them over the head and nicking their credit cards. He rang his mam up as well to bring him back home.

  The cell’s the size of a small living room and there’s about twenty fellows in there, and they kept turning the lights on and off all the time. You can’t get any sleep, you’re all stood up. Then they transfer you to another cell. The Italian guy’s shouting out, ‘Police cruelty! Police cruelty!’ all the time.

  Then we had to go down and watch a film together just before we went to Rikers Island. We were sat behind school desks, and they started showing us these three films. There’s obviously a police analyst behind a screen, gauging our reaction. There’s about forty of us and this copper asks us what films we would like to watch. First one’s this Little House on the Prairie type of film, and everybody starts groaning. ‘Or you can watch this one, guys,’ says this copper. And it’s your regular police drama like Hill Street Blues or something. Everybody starts booing when the guy catches the criminal. And then it’s, ‘What about this one?’ Two fellows beating the shit out of each other, and everybody goes, ‘Weahh!’ It’s this really bad fake boxing match. Some of the black guys, hardened crims, are like, ‘What kind of prison is this – you’ve only got three channels?’ And it’s clearly not on telly like these coppers are making out, but some of the cons in there thought it was, because they’re not the type to be watching TV – too busy selling coke. It’s this fake boxing match! It seems funny now, but not then; then, my bowels were liquid with fear. This went on for about an hour and a half, but it was at least a relief that we didn’t have to sit in the cell.