The Otherwise

by Mark E Smith

  As is often the case with Mark's texts, it's the sudden magnification of detail that takes you by surprise. Here, it's the moment we suddenly zero in on a Russian maid, working in New York as an illegal immigrant, who, due to her overtime, is unable to watch Gossip Girl – a US romantic TV drama aimed at teens.

  It should also be mentioned that Gossip Girl features a character called Nate Archibald, played by the handsome Chace Crawford. So the song's title could refer to the character of Nate being written out of the TV drama. Either way, the narrative's perspective appears to slide between Nate as actor and Nate as character. It's also possible that he is the same Archibald referred to in ‘O.F.Y.C. Showcase’.

  key line: ‘I perchance do decide to replicate.’

  ‘Loadstones’

  The narrator informs us ‘And after dark sunset, my brother and I, we walked the path, far from the tower.’ Once again we are in the realm of gothic horror. We know Mark isn't speaking from his own perspective here, as in reality he has three sisters but no brothers.

  This is another fragmented tale, told through sharp snapshot images. The entire text is veiled in an atmosphere of uncertainty and unease, wherein the author pares down the information to its most essential elements.

  As ever, there are several specific details that catch the attention. The image of ‘shoes for the dead’ for instance. Or the use of ‘Island of Wight’, as opposed to the usual Isle of Wight. Whilst the phrase ‘the pill police’ feels like a visitation from another kind of story altogether.

  A lodestone is a naturally magnetised piece of mineral, with the ability to attract iron. Perhaps it is this very power which asserts such a strong effect on the characters’ blood. Lodestones were also used as the very first magnetic compasses – the Old English word ‘lode’ meaning ‘journey, or way’.

  Yet Mark chooses to spell it loadstones. This may be an affectation, but it's quite possibly intended to imply the loadstones are a burden to be borne. Perhaps the loadstones are an oppressive and negative influence on ‘the parish’ – like the standing stones in the 1977 children's supernatural TV drama Children of the Stones.

  key line: ‘A light sea breeze ruffles blood, skin is bleeding.’

  ‘First One Today’

  Mark described the lyric as “social commentary”, and its subject matter would seem to be familiar enough. The protagonist is caught up in the process of endlessly documenting the boring minutiae of his life, by taking photographs with his smart phone.

  He's also engaged in other activities that mark him out as a bland, modern man, such as entering a bar and ordering a ‘New Coke Latte.’ There is fortunately no such drink. However, like Philip K. Dick, Mark was fond of inventing fictional products, services and organisations that sound as if they belong in the real world.

  Further examples include Fibre Book, The Birmingham School of Business School, The Broken Brother Pentacle Church, Hotel Amnesia, The Vitamin B Glandular Show, and a new programme called The Kettisons.

  There are other details in the text of ‘First One Today’ that imply the situation is far more off-kilter than its subject matter would initially suggest. The repeated references to shootings hint that the taking of a photo is a potentially aggressive act. Indeed, an alternate reading of the narrative is that the ‘shootings’ are actual murders. If so, then the killer seems to be extremely indiscriminate and dispassionate, shooting a waitress even as he pays for his coffee.

  If Mark's earlier work often bore the influence of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery, then ‘First One Today’ seems to surf the same zeitgeist as Charlie Brooker's dark anthology series Black Mirror.

  key line: ‘There stands the door, within, a man.’

  ‘Couples vs Jobless Mid 30s’

  Written for the final Fall album New Facts Emerge, ‘Couples vs Jobless Mid 30s’ is a lengthy composition, representing Mark at his most fervently Burroughsian.

  A series of short cryptic phrases and words accumulate to create a mosaic of desperation. In contrast, the title appears to mock catchpenny film titles such as Cowboys vs. Aliens (2011) and Cockneys vs. Zombies (2012). But, within this specific scenario, the conflict is largely between a young man still living at home, and the mother who repeatedly shouts at him to ‘get a job!’

  Or perhaps the title refers back to 1979's ‘Spectre vs. Rector’. For there are several intimations of the gothic here too, with references to ‘gargoyles’ and an ‘elf grin’, not to mention the line ‘His blonde mother spouse tortures him in his big house.’

  Meanwhile, the use of the phrase ‘No, nevermore’ inevitably summons up thoughts of Edgar Allan Poe – just as it did when Mark deployed it in the 1984 text for ‘Elves’. Another lyrical quote buried in mix is the chorus from Jacques Brel's 1962 song ‘Les Bourgeois’, including the line ‘les bourgeois c’est comme les cochons’, which translates as ‘the bourgeois are like pigs.’

  Despite being one of Mark's very last compositions, ‘Couples vs Jobless Mid 30s’ still displays his desire to experiment and blend seemingly disparate sources, and it contains turns of phrase that can rank amongst his best work, including the sinister ‘awkwardly descend to great terror’ and the unforgettable reference to ‘clotted breath.’

  key line:‘He implodes on shelf, with someone else.’

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  SEE

  ALSO

  Mark E. Smith – The Post Nearly Man (1998)

  A spoken word album unlike any other you'll hear, and definitely not one for the faint of heart. A mix of studio recordings and lo-fi dictaphone fragments, this is a deeply experimental collection featuring plenty of rough edged tape collage. The closest analogue is probably William S. Burroughs's tape cut-ups album Nothing Here Now But the Recordings (1981).

  As ever, Mark is keen to confound expectations, so not only does his spoken word album include music, it also features readings from other voices besides his own. Despite having the space to create more expansive narratives – such as the ten minutes plus of the menacing multi-voiced thriller ‘Visit of an American Poet’ – he chooses to keep his texts as abstracted and splintered as ever.

  Also, as befits all the best Fall LPs, there's even a cover version; the album opens with Mark and others reading/performing an adaptation of ‘The Horror in Clay’, the opening chapter of Lovecraft's classic short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.

  No Place Like It (1999)

  This is a short story written by Mark, and published in Penguin's City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories. Three disgruntled men meet and decide to form a political party, although it's unclear what their aims are.

  It opens with a hefty, paragraph-long sentence that snares the attention with phrases like ‘the gross arrogance, blatant incompetence and thievery of the white trash.’ The two and a quarter page story also rather cheekily includes a reference to a pub called Finnegan's Wake.

  Pander! Panda! Panzer! (2002)

  A spoken word album unlike any other you'll hear. Unless you've already heard The Post Nearly Man. This second collection of stories, ‘poems’ and incantations sees Mark experimenting further with text and sound collage. The album is edited together as one continuous piece, and whilst there's a slightly more cohesive feel to the whole enterprise, it simultaneously sounds even more intangible.

  Highlights include the murky, hypnotic ‘Who Are We And How Did We Get There?’ and a section where Mark and his wife Elena Poulou read excerpts from one of Mark's film synopses.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  FURTHER

  RESOURCES

  If you have the inclination, but more importantly the time, I can recommend no finer resources than the following.

  The Annotated Fall

  http://annotatedfall.doomby.com/

  For those with a special interest in Mark's words, this is the site for you. Every Fall lyric, with annotations harvested from a variety of sources. It's full of well-researched references and background detail, alongside learned observations, hea
lthy speculation and wild theories. Plus a lively, informative comments section that constantly adds to the vast resource of information therein.

  The Fall Online

  https://thefall.org/

  This is the largest resource of Fall related information on the web; more than enough to entertain both new fans and old. Including detailed discography, gigography, bibliography, lyrics and a photographic archive. There are also multiple first hand reports of hundreds of gigs, plus set lists and more.

  Fall Tracks A-Z

  https://sites.google.com/site/reformationposttpm/fall-tracks

  For those fascinated by recording and performance dates etc. herein you will encounter a mind-bending amount of factual information. Includes details on the various versions of any given song and its appearances on albums, singles, bootlegs, radio sessions and so on, as well as dates of the song's first and final performances.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  MY FAVOURITE WHILE

  Conversations with M.E.S.

  On various occasions over the years, when Mark and I were brainstorming on either the anthology series ideas or working on plots for the film script, we would record these sessions on my iPhone. Inevitably however, our discussions would often veer onto other subjects.

  Mark was a witty and vivid conversationalist, and for forty years, his interviews in the music press were unfailingly entertaining. So much so, they would be avidly read by many who would never dream of listening to The Fall's music. Mark could be insightful, perverse, contradictory and deliberately controversial. Like Spike Milligan, he was a deeply unpredictable interviewee who could never ever be considered a safe bet.

  Despite this, it's worth noting that, his reputation as an authentic working class autodidact notwithstanding, Mark was also an astute showman. Therefore part of what he was doing in interviews was putting on a show: marking out his territory: projecting an image: defining the parameters of his persona. By way of contrast, the following exchanges are not interviews; rather they are conversations. That's part of what I think makes them interesting. There's a thoughtfulness and honesty here.

  Naturally enough, our conversations regularly drifted onto our favourite films, favourite music and so on. After all, although Mark was a widely recognised artist, he would always remain a fan, and a shared love of the music of Can, and the films of Lindsay Anderson shine out of these exchanges.

  Mark was also a very engaging storyteller, with a wonderful sense of the macabre. Witness the tale of his late night arrival at Sigmund Freud's house whilst speeding, or the description of an afternoon train journey from Manchester to Clitheroe, which he manages to imbue with the morbid, clammy dread of an M.R. James story.

  Of course some of the time we're just riffing and trying to make each other laugh. Mark's sense of humour was as refined as it was daft and he would often reduce friends to fits of giggles with his rants and one-liners. Over my career as a writer I have been fortunate to work with some of the funniest men and women in the comedy business. But no one has made me laugh as much as Mark.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  1

  JAMES JOYCE, LINDSAY ANDERSON & PRESTWICH MENTAL HOSPITAL

  MARK: I did this thing a while back, for the bleedin’ James Joyce Society.

  GRAHAM: Did you set them straight?

  (Laughter)

  MARK: Yeah, I think I did, yeah.

  GRAHAM: I know this is heresy, but I've never really been able to get into Joyce.

  MARK: No, I think he is very good actually. Some of it, y’know. But this thing, it was weird. I was ready to leave and they fuckin’… They locked the door and showed this film. It was… it was not right, y’know what I'm saying?

  GRAHAM: What?

  MARK: Some art thing: worse thing you've ever seen in your life. It was like in fuckin’… y’know in O Lucky Man! where everywhere he goes he ends up being shown films. It was like that.

  GRAHAM: What because…?

  MARK: Soon as it started I knew why they'd locked the fuckin’ door. Nobody would want to sit through that!

  (Laughter)

  GRAHAM: I watched O Lucky Man! again the week before last. Reckon that'd be about my 20th viewing.

  MARK: Seriously?

  GRAHAM: Thereabouts. I tell you though, even now I'm still seeing new things in it.

  MARK: Oh it is fantastic. Yeah, I must've seen it at least five times meself. Lindsay Anderson was… he was fuckin’ acidic! The best. If you want to know what Britain was like in 1973, watch O Lucky Man!

  GRAHAM: Exactly! It's all there: every layer of society.

  MARK: The more you think about it… It's superb. Actually I watched Britannia Hospital again a while back. It was a blow out watching it again. It is fuckin’ fantastic.

  GRAHAM: In terms of the storytelling in that, David Sherwin's writing is so strong. Things like… How he kills off the hero half way through the film, then brings him back as a ‘monster’. It's amazing.

  MARK: It's everything that films try to be now. And O Lucky Man! the more you watch it, you're right, the more there is in there. It's like Shakespeare or summat. The only thing is, I used to hate all that Alan Price music.

  GRAHAM: Yeah well, to be honest, I've watched the film so many times now that I just love the music. It's so completely bound up in the film for me.

  MARK: Yeah, yeah… That stuff with Alan Price and the band in the van and all that is quite interesting. And there's those great sections in it, where it has ‘4: The North of England’. And actually it is… when I was… funnily enough, in a way it's odd. But I was sort of… I grew up with it. So If…. when If…. came out I was in the second year at grammar school. So I identified with it.

  But then I'd never seen O Lucky Man! for years. But it was the same sort of thing. Like when it had ‘6: Yorkshire’. And at that time I was a shipping clerk, and every time I used to have to go to Yorkshire. And every time it was like a totally different world. And it shows that. He has to go into a strip club, to talk to the Mayor about getting a deal in Wakefield or summat. And that's what Yorkshire used to be like.

  I used to go over on me motorbike from Salford docks, to talk to the guy, and you end up in a porn party. When I was about 17. In fuckin’ Yorkshire, where I'd never been in me bleedin’ life, on a motorbike, to get the guy to sign these import and export forms and I had to go in this club. And they had these strippers on, and the Mayor was in there, and I'm tryin’ to get the guy to sign these forms.

  And then in Lancashire at one point, a similar thing, I had to go to this bloke's house, and there's all these birds, and the fuckin’ Mayor! Another Mayor! He didn't have any underpants on and he had a big fuckin’ joint in his fuckin’ hand!

  (Laughter)

  MARK: Ask Lynden! In the 70s! So the stories I tell people from the fuckin’ 70s, nobody believes them. But they were things that happened to Malcolm McDowell, and they happened to me. I never noticed that to start. But it shook me up a bit watching it.

  GRAHAM: I've watched it such a lot over the years. And it's always felt very contemporary really. But then, a couple of years ago, I was watching it at a screening in London, and all of a sudden it looked like the past y’know. The images of the North suddenly looked like how it looked when I was a kid.

  MARK: Me too, yeah.

  GRAHAM: And the bit at the scientific installation where there's the explosion. And the fire engines arrived, and they suddenly looked like vintage cars! They've got the big wheels at the base of the ladder y’know.

  MARK: It's a bit disturbing for a person of my age. It's like a video diary of the things you couldn't film in them days. So you've got to give him that. That's why they should preserve it. I mean that fuckin’ Britannia Hospital, it's fuckin’ amazing. I remember when Prestwich Hospital was like that.

  When I left home, I lived in a flat opposite Prestwich Hospital with two mental nurses. But y’know, if I see one of them to work, which was once in a blue fuckin
’ moon, to the hospital. The start of Britannia Hospital – it's a regular scene there y’know: pickets, nurses, all about summat like the soup was off or summat, in the mental home! And the mental patients'd mix with them. (Laughs) And y’know, a lot of people seemed to think the mental patients were saner than the staff. I used to have them round me flat now and again y’know.

  But you sort of forget about all that, it's just day-to-day life. But seeing Britannia Hospital brought it all back y’know. I mean it must look ridiculous now. But that was not an exaggeration of how things were.

  These nurses, they'd have a bag, the psychologists and the mental nurses. All the nurses, and whatever the thing they were in Prestwich, they used to have these little Biba bags. Y’know, a Biba bag, like a woman's bag. All the nurses, they all had these bags. Even the guy who stoked coal in the basement, who I used to get my pot off, he had one, a Biba bag. And I said “Why have you all got Biba bags: these zippy bags?” And it was coz they'd all bring a sign to work.