Goodbye Mark E Smith – Thank you!!

The Fall were one of the few bands left that I would travel a long way to see! Now they’ve gone. Mark’s grandmother playing bongos on her own would just not be the Fall.

What can you say about Mark? He couldn’t sing, he couldn’t dance, he was an irascible old git, but somehow he was a genius who created an unbroken series of brilliant albums from their inception in Manchester in 1976 right through to now. They never disappointed.

As John Peel said – Always the same and Always different.

The Fall were never the same – they actually transformed themselves through 65 different musicians over that 40 years – but they were always consistently the same. Mark, who once said ‘even if it’s just me and my Grandma on bongos it’s the Fall’, had a vision for the sound. It was based on those great repetitive riffs that took it into a groove that drove the music into pulsating life. Mark, with his plastic face and ability to gurn, was the anarchic Prince of Punk. He treated the stage, the performance, the audience and the musicians with utter disdain. He seemed intent on disrupting the whole thing. He seemed intent on undermining any attempt to create a slick musical  event. He would stride around scowling, shouting the lyrics over the beat, bashing the symbols out of beat, detuning the guitar as the guitarist vainly persisted in playing, pushing his wife aside to plonk discordantly on the keyboards, pushing musicians around and generally doing his best to disturb the flow and interrupt the musicality. Yet it worked. It was theatre. It was experimental. It added to the tension. It simply worked. It was the Fall’s equivalent of John Cale’s avant garde contributions to the Velvet Underground.

You could hear shades of Captain Beefheart, Sex Pistols, Clash and New York New Wave but there was nothing quite like them. You could see why John Peel adored them. They were unique.

Then there were the words. Poetry? Lyrics? Just words? Who gave a fuck. They worked.

There were times when Mark would slouch off stage halfway through a song. At one gig in Hull he delivered half the concert from behind the speakers with his back turned to the audience and just the top of his head showing. He’d sing (used loosely) a song while holding his writing pad in front of his face and reading the words off the page. In York at the last gig I saw him at he disappeared into the dressing room and delivered the last part of the gig flopped out on a sofa invisible to most of the audience (I could just see him through the door from where I was on the balcony). He’d turn up so drunk that he slurred indecipherably and fell off the stage. Yet he propelled the audience with him. The places were always packed. They yelled the lyrics back at him. They bopped and chanted. They loved every minute. They loved Mark.

Mark was uncompromising. He never sold out to anything. He made the Fall the greatest Punk Band in the World. They rocked. They were one of the most exciting acts you could ever see. This was anarchy in action.

Somehow the chemistry that was Mark E Smith created some synergy that propelled it to other heights. It was a formula that was beyond analysis.