Mark E. Smith is the founding member, lead singer and constituting ingredient of The Fall—“if it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s a Fall gig”, he once said. For an improbable thirty years now, The Fall have been an obdurate presence on the music scene, resisting categorization, fashion and chart success, and building a fan base best described as fanatically loyal and intelligently sceptical, as well as long-suffering. They will be the prime audience for Renegade: The lives and tales of Mark E. Smith, an engaging quasi-memoir, ghostwritten by Austin Collings in what appears to be a smart marshalling of numerous rambling pub conversations.
The late Radio One disc jockey John Peel, who did much to introduce The Fall to a couple of generations of listeners, and who adored the group, remarked that they were “always different, always the same”. Despite the constant renovations and reinventions of the group—around forty musicians have come and gone from the line-up, many telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty—a Fall song is unmistakable, primarily because of Smith’s lyrics and delivery: slurred, sarcastic, whooping, whispering and droning; literary, full of bizarre stories and characters and crazed slant-ways assessments of contemporary life, always with a sardonic eye on human foolishness and fashionable idiocy. The Fall represent a successful collision of rock-and-roll and avant-garde sensibilities.
The music is another matter. Smith doesn’t play an instrument, though he has had the odd and ill-advised stab at it nonetheless; his ever-changing band have, under his sometimes difficult leadership, provided the stylistically diverse backdrops for his peculiar visions. This has led, in the past, to fierce arguments over Smith’s allegedly whimsical distribution of songwriting credits and royalties. Sometimes other arguments have spilled onstage, as in Phoenix, in 2006, when Smith sacked the entire band (apart from the keyboard player, his third wife, Elena Poulou); or in 1998, when the entire band (apart from the keyboard player, his girlfriend, Julia Nagle) resigned, and Smith was arrested after a fight back at their hotel. For a period, audiences could not be sure if the band would appear at all at gigs, let alone when or for how long. With Smith’s bullying habits, such as interfering with his band’s equipment on stage, not always for discernible reasons, violence was perhaps inevitable from time to time.
Many of these incidents have already been detailed in Simon Ford’s unofficial but affectionate Fall biography Hip Priest (2002), solidly based on interviews with band members and contemporary reports on fansites. Later this year, Dave Simpson’s The Fallen: Searching for the missing members of The Fall will be published, giving the former musicians another chance to have their say. In Renegade, Smith seems to be getting his retaliation in first. For all his ostensible desire not to talk about these people and events—“The Fall is about more than just disgruntled ex-members”—he lays about him with vigour and at length. His playing down of the role drink played in the increasingly fractious, and musically uneven, period of the 1990s is unconvincing: “To a certain extent I understand where they’re coming from. I did happen to lose it a bit when I was drinking too much whisky in the mid 90s, but I checked myself”. This is as far as he goes; the rest is all self-exculpation, heavily at odds with nearly every other account.
But, it should be said, the idea of Smith producing a conventional rock memoir is unconvincing too. Smith has always hated nostalgia and several passages in Renegade repeat the point; “I always find the present more real than any other period of my life … I prefer to look at LPs more as contemporary chronicles”. Happily, much of Renegade therefore becomes less an autobiography and more a wide-ranging, eccentric set of fugitive opinions. Smith’s views are an odd and sometimes contradictory mixture of conservative working-class values, libertarianism, paranoia, chippiness, avant-garde enthusiasms, surrealism and egotism. There are countless deadpan one-liners and left-field observations:
“We should have more ashtrays on morning TV and presenters wheezing”;
“Read any of [the Brat Pack’s] books and it’s as if they’ve photocopied the first two pages 230 times, done a line and bunged it to their publishers”;
“It’s disappointing when programmes about moving cushions and painting kitchens are watched by more than nine people”;
“I can’t abide all that forced liberalism … I hope this book turns out like Mein Kampf for the Hollyoaks generation”;
“Programmes like [I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here] remind me of wartime Russia where they’d make so-called subversive artists dig holes and plough fields”;
“People are infected by all this guff. You can tell them anything. They’ll eat anything that claims to stop them burping or ‘may’ prolong their lives for a few seconds. Red meat and liquids—that’s all you need”.
These barbs are punctuated with jottings from notebooks which read like ur-texts for unwritten songs, and “voices” (some verbatim) from critics, fans, former members and the like; “vipers”, “vultures” and “vampires” as Smith would have it. He suffers almost no one gladly. The short and peculiar list of heroes in this book includes George Best, Lee Mavers (of The La’s), Rigsby (from Rising Damp), Dr Carl (from Neighbours) and, most startlingly, Pete Waterman. The book also includes several striking photographs, which chart Smith’s facial evolution from bolshie teen to sardonic hobgoblin.
He gives little away about his artistic methods, bar his desire for “primitive music with intelligent lyrics”. “If you’re going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly”; “I never sing in time. Last thing you want is regular time”—Smith is a perfectionist when it comes to getting it wrong in the right way. His control-freak approach to the band, and his refusal to play anyone else’s game, runs through every page of this book, which comes to represent not so much an authorized history as a snapshot of an ethos and an attitude.