Mark E Smith has died

[kushiro]

Damn. Went to bed last night listening to The Fall. Woke up this morning and he's dead.

 

So many memories. Here's a few:

 

Little Hill Estate, Wigston,September 1985.  I've just moved into a flat near the Viking's Tun with my mate Andy, and the track of the moment is 'My New House' from the Fall's new album. But two days after moving in I say- 'I'll be gone for a while. I'm going to follow the Fall round the country on their tour'. You see, I had a plan. I had no money, had recently dropped out of uni and was signing on. But I thought that if I took a mini cassette recorder to the gigs, taped the concerts, and sold tapes of the concert to fans at the next night's gig, and repeated the process continually, I might make enough money to follow the tour.

 

So the first gig was in Newcastle, at the Riverside. I made it out to Leicester Forest East services and hitch-hiked up the M1, getting there in good time for the gig. As the place is filling up, I'm talking to a guy at the bar about my plan. Whoops. Turns out he's one of the people who runs the place. He says 'I'll just have to check with the band'. Five minutes later he comes back. 'Mark says you're just another bootlegger'.

 

F***. Part of the disappointment of that moment was having to acknowledge that, yes, that's exactly what I was. My plan was in tatters. But the guy was so friendly and took pity on me and said he'd put me up for the night. And the best thing was - The Fall were blindingly good that night. Next day's gig was in Glasgow. I just about had enough cash to go. Hitch-hiking again, I got stuck somewhere near Carlisle in the pouring rain and was feeling utterly miserable. But I made it, and some other good samaritan gave me a bed for the night. But I had given up the plan of taping concerts, so the money was running out. Next gig was Aberdeen. That was a step too far, so I trudged out to the M74 and hitched back south with my tail between my legs - destination Wigston. Fortunately for my bedraggled self, I was picked up near the Scottish border by a guy heading to - 'The Wigston Stage Motel'. Whoopee!

 

So I arrive back and tell people that my masterplan had ended pretty feebly. I saw just three other gigs on that tour. Leicester (poly?), Nottingham and Norwich UEA.

 

Isn't the internet wonderful? Just googled and found this clipping with the details of the whole tour: So the Leicester gig was the Uni, not the Poly.

 

 

Here's one of the great music videos, filmed at Turf Moor:

 

Edited 25 January 2018 by kushiro

[kushiro]

This is good:

 

Call yourself a football fan? – Mark E Smith

Time for a chat with Mark E Smith of The Fall, whose football experiences include encounters with a goalkeeping plumber and a controversial match against the Icicle Works

You grew up in Salford, which is more United than City. Is there a reason why you’re a City fan?
Not really, just to be contrary I suppose. Also you want to support the opposite team to your dad and my dad had been a United fan. Back in the 1950s he’d to go to away games on his bike – he’d cycle to places like Leicester. But I converted him to City. I had another United connection, though. I applied for a clerical job at the Edwards family’s meat factory after I left school. It was £9 a week. It might even have been Martin Edwards who did the interview. He said “Well the meat wagons come in, just sit there, fill in these forms and file them.” I said, “When would the job start?” and he said “You’ve started” and he left me in the office.

 

How long did you keep the job?
An hour. I was there all by myself. He’d locked the door. When he came back, I left.

 

Did you watch United winning the Champions League?
I was walking to my local pub just when they scored and this huge roar went up. There was a free bus into Manchester laid on half an hour after the game and they said “Come on, even though you’re a Blue, you’re getting on this bus” and I have to say it was a great night – all the clubs you could never normally get in had their doors open, free drinks and everything. And in a funny way it didn’t feel like it had happened to United, it was like they were a cricket team or something.

Did you used to see City regularly?
I used to stand on the Kippax but one of the reasons I stopped going was because of the moaning. Now, when you have to sit down, you can’t escape them. In the Peter Reid days, they’d be winning 2-0 and they’d be saying, “Oh, it’ll be 3-2...”  The thing about the moaners is you know they’re always going to come back. I remember talking to these young City fans before Joe Royle came and they were practically suicidal and I said, “Look, it’s always been like that.” When I started supporting them in 1965, they were bottom of the Second Division. But these kids think City’s history began with Colin Bell. Just about the only good thing Oasis ever did was to threaten to take over the club. That galvanised people into action and they got this new guy, Bernstein, in like a shot. Now Sky are involved and it could be the downfall of them. Does Murdoch know what he’s taking on – 30,000 miserable gets? “Live from Maine Road, it’s Man City v Hartlepool.” Try selling that in America.

Who were your favourite players?
Harry Dowd, the goalkeeper in the championship team in 1968, was the best. He still worked as a plumber part-time and my dad was a plumber too. We used to go behind the goal and Harry would wander over and talk about washers and copper joints. I remember being at a cup tie once and Harry was saying “Do you know if this goes to extra time today, only I’ve got a job on at half five?” then suddenly people are shouting “Harry Harry!” and the team we were playing are charging down the pitch and Harry rushes out, dives at someone’s feet, throws the ball up the pitch then comes back and starts again, “So, is this extra time today...?”  The local paper had a “where are they now?” feature recently on City’s team from the Rodney Marsh time in the early 1970s. There were a couple who just seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. One was quoted as saying “If I wasn’t a footballer I’d be a tramp” and I think he’s done it.

Did you collect things like football stickers?
Yes, I had the 1970 Mexico World Cup set. The Romanians had been photographed in black and white then coloured in. You’d open a packet and it would be one of the east Europeans and you’d scream. And then when the World Cup came around, half of them weren’t even in the squad. The pictures were all from about 1962.

Did you go to see other teams in the area?
Quite a few. Prestwich Heys were the local non-League team and I went to see them in an Amateur Cup tie against Sutton United. I was on the pitch celebrating a goal and got arrested by my neighbour, who was a part-time policeman. At Bury you could get in for free if you went though the cemetery behind one end and jumped over the fence. They were always losing though, because they had the best pitch, this great lush grass that all the other teams liked to play on. We used to go to see Oldham when they had Ray Wilson from the 1966 World Cup team and he could hardly walk. You could see why he became an undertaker, because he was halfway there. They were bottom of the Fourth but they suddenly started winning every game and in three seasons they were up near the top of the Second.

Who was the first player you met?
Funnily enough, I met George Best a few times – first was in some drinking club in London in the early 1980s. He heard I was from Manchester and went into this big rant about how he’d used to get all this stick from the crowd at United when they thought he wasn’t doing enough. It was true he did used to stand around doing nothing for 80 minutes but I thought that was all right, given that he’d still win them the game. But he’d still get stick when he was going off from Bobby Charlton and the other players. He was the type who’d just walk into his local boozer and there will always be people wanting to have a go, if you’re like that.

The Fall did a song about football, Kicker Conspiracy, back in the early 1980s. What sort of reaction did it get at the time?
You couldn’t mention football in the rock world then. We were on Rough Trade and I told them “This is about football violence” and it was all “You don’t go to football, do you?” I remember Melody Maker saying, “Mark Smith’s obviously got writer’s block having to write about football.” About five years later, the same guy reviewed something else saying it was a load of rubbish and “nowhere near the heights of Kicker Conspiracy”. And now, of course, all the old music hacks are sat in the directors’ box with Oasis.

Have you ever watched a game from the directors’ box?
My worst experience at City, actually, was when the agent we were with at the time got us into the directors’ box for a David Bowie show at Maine Road. And it was a disgrace. They had pennants on the wall, like the European Cup-Winners Cup, all creased up in plastic. They hadn’t changed the photos since 1968, they still had black and white blow-ups from the Manchester Evening News and the trophy cabinet hadn’t been cleaned. The bar itself was like a kiosk – it was worse than anything on the Kippax. Alex Higgins was there too and he sort of collapsed into it.  I’ve been to United’s, and of course that was like something on Concorde. 

What is your favourite football book?
The best one I’ve read is Colours of My Life by Malcolm Allison, which covers how he turned City around. When he came back in the late 1970s he was totally broke. He’d go into all the best clubs in Manchester like it was still 1968 and take a load of mates, like an Oliver Reed scene. He’d be asked to pay at the end and he’d just say, “Pay? What do you mean, I’m Malcolm Allison.” But sometimes it didn’t work and they’d have to have a whip round, he’d go around collecting fivers and loose change in his hat. As far as football writing now, the newspaper coverage here is terrible. I was looking at one paper during Man Utd’s games in Brazil and I thought, “Am I reading the financial pages?” It was all about Man Utd haven’t got a press guy and what a disaster it was they were the only club who didn’t have one. And I’m reading it, thinking “Yeah, but what was the score?”

Have you kept in touch with football when you’ve been abroad?
Going to Germany in the early 1980s got me back into football when I was going off it a bit. In places like Hamburg there was an avant garde rock scene among fans at some clubs, something that wasn’t there in Britain. And you get big pints of beer at German matches for, like, 25p, and a nice clean sausage. I saw Germany v Bulgaria at the 1994 World Cup. What a day out that was. The German players were limbering up like an hour before the game, doing leap-frogging and gymnastics. Then they showed an interview with someone from the Bulgarian staff on these massive screens around the ground and he said, “I’m just glad we’ve all turned up. We only had nine men half an hour ago.” In the stadium they were trying to be nice to everyone and they brought in these guys with red caps all dressed like Michael Jackson as extra security. We were in the German end and in the middle of the game this South American film crew come and sit in front of us, and I’m asking them to move. This red cap comes up and asks me what’s wrong, then a policeman comes over and he brings over this guy from the US soccer federation who looks like Ronald Reagan with white hair and he’s saying things like “Is your seat not comfortable sir?” And I’m saying no, it’s fine, it’s just this film crew. Then he says “Ah. You’re not German are you sir?” I think they had this idea that football was like some germ from Europe that might infect them.

Do you play yourself?
I’ve started playing again. I’m a central defender. I like tackling, but when I play I walk.

Like Franz Beckenbauer...
Similar. I trip people, tap them on the shin. But I don’t like the niggling little fouls they do now, all that shirt pulling. The annoying thing about that Beckham foul in the World Cup, when he got sent off, was he hardly even kicked him. If you’re going to kick them, kick them. The Fall used to have a team, we’d play university teams before gigs. We played the Icicle Works when we were both in this hotel in London. There were eight or nine in our team, the group and  couple of roadies. This guy called Big Dave from Lincolnshire, who was like the fattest lad you’ve ever seen, went in goal. And they turned up in replica Liverpool kits with “The Icicle Works” on the front and they’ve got this mock European Cup with them. It was 20 minutes each way and we went 5-4 in front in injury time and their tour manager’s the referee, so it went on and on until they won 6-5. It’d gone dark by the time we finished and in the bar they’re telling all the music journos they’ve won and passing the European Cup around...

Have you had any encounters with football hooligans?
It seems to me that the fascination with rough lads we’ve got now is a very middle class thing. They’re from small places, but not impoverished places either – stockbrokers who can forget about being new dads for a day and have a fight. It’s a sado-masochism thing, wanting to be hit. It’s like the kid at school who was always hitting people, you just knew he was a closet case. I used to get it on trains coming down to London. They get on at Milton Keynes and they’re staring you out and all this.I remember Man City had this group called The Main Line Service Crew. We were on a train on a Saturday afternoon going down for a gig and they were asking us if we were City or United and all that. And I said, “Hold on, it’s three o’clock, City are at home today. What are you doing here?” And they were going to Spurs or somewhere to try and cause trouble at half time, then they’d be back up on the train to get to Maine Road when the away fans are coming out. That’s the sort of mentality they've got.

[Stadt]

I'm not really familiar with him or The Fall but you have a fantastic way with words Kushiro

[separator]

 

[Bellend Sebastian]

The saddest of losses, but I'm amazed he's lasted as long as he has.

 

For someone who always looks unwell, he's looked REALLY unwell for the past few months.

 

I keep seeing clips of the old stuff in the tributes but to be honest I prefer the albums over the last 15 years or so.

 

 

 

[TheLittleBigMan]

Bought tickets for the gig at the Koko club. Just missed out.

[SpacedX]

 

[rico]

 

[rico]

 

Edited 25 January 2018 by rico

[Percy Thrower]

Gutted. Music is an infinitely more bland & meaningless space this morning that's for sure. 

[mancunianfox]

Really saddened by this, saw them loads and know quite a few former members of the band who all have fascinating stories. Wouldn't be unusual to see him sometimes in and around the boozers of the Northern Quarter either. They would either be the best gig ever or completely shambolic, you never knew what you were going to get.

 

Also, was there a band better at covers than The Fall? So many great ones.

[fleshdaddy]

I saw The Fall at Bestival on the Isle of Wight maybe 11 or 12 years ago now, and they were (and still are) the best band I've ever seen live.

RIP Mark E!

[Alf Bentley]

1 hour ago, mancunianfox said:

Really saddened by this, saw them loads and know quite a few former members of the band who all have fascinating stories. Wouldn't be unusual to see him sometimes in and around the boozers of the Northern Quarter either. They would either be the best gig ever or completely shambolic, you never knew what you were going to get.

 

Also, was there a band better at covers than The Fall? So many great ones.

 

If you get a chance, I'd recommend seeing Brix and the Extricated. As well as Brix (ex-wife/80s band member, as I'm sure you know), they include the Hanley brothers on bass and drums. Steve Hanley was the bassist from about 1979 to 1997, Paul the drummer (or one of them) for part of the 1980s. They were excellent when I saw them last year - did a mixture of Fall songs (only those co-written by either Brix or the Hanleys) and their own new material.  I'll be interested to see whether the death of MES changes their set.

 

I think that I saw The Fall about 7-8 times: first time in Norwich 1982-83, about 4-5 times in London 1985-88 and twice in Leicester about 10-15 years ago (brilliant at The Charlotte, less so at Summer Sundae) - last-minute cancellation another time.

 

I'm looking forward to going back to discover some of the albums that I don't know. Shame not to be able to see them again, but Youtube footage is a substitute of sorts...

Edited 25 January 2018 by Alf Bentley

[kushiro]

This is so good. Mark being the loveable oik in a 1982 interview with Australian TV. Part of the reason why he looks like that is Marc Riley had punched him in the face the day before, and huge amounts of make up had been applied to his face to try an conceal the black eye:

 

[MrsJohnMurphy]

6 hours ago, rico said:

 

Loved this track when it came out 

[Alf Bentley]

3 hours ago, kushiro said:

This is so good. Mark being the loveable oik in a 1982 interview with Australian TV. Part of the reason why he looks like that is Marc Riley had punched him in the face the day before, and huge amounts of make up had been applied to his face to try an conceal the black eye:

 

 

Yes, I read about that in Steve Hanley's book. Apparently various Fall members took to the dance floor in a club after a poorish gig in Australia, dancing to "Rock the Casbah". Smith deemed this inappropriate and came over, slapping each of them in turn. Riley, being a big lad, wasn't having this and laid him out! Soon after, MES sacked him from the band just after he'd got married.

 

Riley then formed The Creepers and wrote this song in response, including the line "Dare to dance on an Aussie floor, bloody nose, bloody poor" 

Shame The Creepers didn't continue. Saw them a couple of times in the 80s and they were very good, though not as good as The Fall. The "Warts 'n' all" live album is particularly good. Apparently Riley was playing lots of Fall tracks on R6 yesterday and he's always been very complimentary about MES' musical contribution, if not his personality!

 

 

Incidentally (1): Strongly recommend Hanley's book ("The Big Midweek") to anyone interested in The Fall. I also read the books by Smith himself ("Renegade") and by Dave Simpson ("The Fallen"), both entertaining but not a patch on Hanley's.

Simpson's is a bit of a novelty as he tries to locate all the dozens of people Smith sacked from The Fall down the years. Smith did'nt like to reveal too much about his songwriting, I think, so his book is prone to a certain amount of bullshit and self-aggrandisement.

Incidentally (2): Hilarious accounts are also available, in Hanley's book or online, of the on-stage handbags in New York in 1998, when Smith ended up fighting Karl Burns (drummer) and several other Fall members on-stage, before being carted off by the cops later for fighting another band member when he got back to the hotel.  

Edited 25 January 2018 by Alf Bentley

[TheLittleBigMan]

Bought their new album a few weeks back. Shit hot.

[Bellend Sebastian]

Agree with you about Dave Simpson's book, Alf. He does come across as a bit of a knob - claimed his wife left him because of his obsession with getting the book written. 

 

Two lovely Mark E guest appearances:

 

 

And I never tire of this...

 

 

[Blue ROI]

Remember this as the first thing I ever heard from the fall. What a way to start!......

 

 

 

 

[kushiro]

14 hours ago, mancunianfox said:

 

 

was there a band better at covers than The Fall? So many great ones.

Here's two great originals that Fall covers made me seek out:

 

 

Oh Brother was kind of based on this:

I'm sure you have other suggestions...

[Daggers]

I was a Fall completist, I scoured record shops for hours to hunt out juicy morsels and Porky primecuts. Went right off the man as he fell into decrepitude and bigotry in his piss pants - but there’ll never be any escaping that he was a staggering musical genius who took a format and carved out a unique niche.

 

He wrote to me once. Five rambling pages of A4, covered in scribbles and blotches. It was my favourite thing ever. My wife binned it as part of some moving process spring clean. Like MES, my favourite thing is no more.

[Bellend Sebastian]

7 hours ago, Daggers said:

I was a Fall completist, I scoured record shops for hours to hunt out juicy morsels and Porky primecuts. Went right off the man as he fell into decrepitude and bigotry in his piss pants - but there’ll never be any escaping that he was a staggering musical genius who took a format and carved out a unique niche.

 

He wrote to me once. Five rambling pages of A4, covered in scribbles and blotches. It was my favourite thing ever. My wife binned it as part of some moving process spring clean. Like MES, my favourite thing is no more.

Personally (and I don't know what this says about me) I think this coincided with a creative resurgence on his part - I actually like the shouty piss man on a bus schtick of whatever you want to call it that has come to the fore on the last decade's albums.  In the late 90s when he was going off the rails and there was all the New York nonsense I was more of an observer than a fan and I thought, this bloke is going to be dead soon.  Instead, we get 2 extra decades of what, for me at least, is mainly fantastic material.  To say this is not the outcome I would've expected would be an understatement.

 

I've been thinking about this quite a lot, and the thing that I think is amazing about The Fall (and not everyone will agree, of course) is that the creative drive was there up right up to the end, and the ability and drive to prevent himself becoming a heritage act (terminology I use and I'm not sure if anybody else does).  Resting on past glories just depresses me, but that's the fault of the audience and critics as much as anything.  Morrissey released a FAB (IMO) album in 2014 to lukewarm reviews that sounded like the reviewer hadn't listened to it, and when he toured it the complaint I heard most from people that went (who for the most part were big Moz fans) was that he 'played too many new songs'. 

 

No wonder The Stone Roses are so popular

 

 

Edited 26 January 2018 by Bellend Sebastian

[Jordan]

I can't explain the whys and wherefores of how I became a Fall fan. I can't explain why anybody would, considering how idiosyncratic Mark E. Smith's lyrics, style and personality were. But I thought he was just the greatest.

 

I saw The Fall once, when they headlined the Narnack Records showcase for CMJ in NYC, at the old Hiro Ballroom in 2006 (with yet another brand-new lineup). After an unbearable 30-minute video show by the untalented Safi Sniper (I can only guess that MES started bringing him around on tour just to piss people off), The Fall took the stage and sounded great for 4.5 songs, despite MES's complaint that none of the 6 or 7 mics he had on stage worked. And then Smith just called his band off stage, where they never returned. 

 

The famous John Peel epithet was that The Fall was "Always different, always the same." I guess that's so, but MES's ability to straddle paradoxes went far deeper than that. He was consistently inconsistent. Working-class and arty. Arty and unpretentious. Cultured and boorish. Eloquent and incoherent. Well-dressed and a slob. And old man at a young age. And while he was renowned for his rudeness and belligerence, he could be charming and tell hilarious stories--when he wanted to.

 

Since I got into The Fall, I was always simultaneously impressed and let down by Mark E. Smith--and this is after he'd already been doing this to many others for over two decades. His music was that good that we would put up with it, but good luck trying to convince someone new that it was worth their while. That show in NY was just MES being MES; I spoke to fans that night that just said, "Well, the last time we saw him in NY, he got into a fistfight with his band," and shrugged.

 

I had tickets to one of the shows in what was supposed to be a 1-week residency in Brooklyn in September. It was postponed to February due to Smith's poor health. The shows were eventually cancelled last month. This is all a downer, yet I'm writing this even as I know Smith wouldn't think twice about stubbing a cigarette on someone's head for mawkishly blabbering about an artist's death. But as sad as death is, I can at least crack a wry smile when I realize Smith was able to **** with Fall fans in NY one last time before he kicked the bucket. Well played, sir.

[kushiro]

There are an extraordinary number of great tributes around, most of them collected here:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/thefall/mark-e-smith-tributes-and-obituaries-working-on-fi-t42798.html?sid=3d88dcc38d4f2bf36836ef80b24738e9

 

The best one is on page 11 of the thread, from his former partner, and once manager of the band, Kay Bateman (née Carroll)

 

[Bellend Sebastian]

I thought the tribute at the end of Match of the Day was lovely. Brought a tear to my eye, so it did