Mark E. Smith
Irascible frontman of the Fall
March 5, 1957–January 24, 2018
“If it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s a Fall gig.”
A young Mark E. Smith started the Fall in the Manchester suburb of Prestwich after that infamous 1976 Sex Pistols show in Manchester that inspired the majority of attendees to start bands the next day. It was the only time in his life that Smith would (unwittingly) succumb to rock cliché. He spent the next 40 years trying his best to dismantle rock and roll, and the music industry, from the inside.
Though he looked like an ill-tempered postal clerk or substitute teacher, Smith was punk and disorderly to the very core. With the Fall, he built a sound antithetical to the idea of musical proficiency, and ended up with something every bit as inspirational as Gang of Four or Wire.
The unforgettable songs and anthems piled up like discarded ex-band members (a cohort over 60 strong, all told) — “Totally Wired,” “Mr. Pharmacist,” “The Classical,” “Hip Priest,” “Glam Racket,” “Ghost in My House,” “Big New Prinz.” If the albums aren’t enough to slake your thirst, the Fall recorded 20-plus live sessions with equally legendary British DJ John Peel over the BBC’s public radio airwaves between 1978 and 2004.
Despite this fearsome productivity, Smith kept the Fall proudly “unprofessional.” If during a concert Smith would drink himself into oblivion, unplug an amp, mess up keyboard settings, change up the setlist, or recruit a new drummer 15 minutes before showtime, what of it? As Smith himself barked, it’s just “creative management, cock!”
Smith anecdotes are almost as legion as Fall anthems, suffused with a sui generis cranky mystique. There’s the apocryphal story of him catching some of his bandmates dancing to “Rock the Casbah” at an after-party in the ’80s and summarily delivering slaps to every offender, or when he almost singlehandedly bottled Mumford & Sons off the stage in the early ’00s; the time he fired a sound engineer for eating a salad; or when he fired a drummer on the unlucky percussionist’s wedding day.
His neverending embrace of chaos and tension had an ugly side to it; he could be vile and abusive to those closest to him. And yet, most remained loyal, believing in their flawed leader’s vision, like the long-suffering Hanley brothers and, of course, Smith’s most famous creative foil, guitarist and ex-wife Brix Smith. A glammed-up American punk, she contributed unforgettable serrated riffs to pivotal albums like The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall and The Frenz Experiment. Their breakup was equally as seismic, though she rejoined the band for a brief time in the 1990s.
Smith died at 60 after a long battle with cancer, but was still doing shows, in a wheelchair, in the year before he passed, and never ceased writing and releasing music regularly. There will likely never be a pop star quite like him again. —Matthew Moyer
This article appears in Dec 27, 2018 – Jan 3, 2019.