SOME BELATED COMMENT ON THE RECENT NEUTRALISATION OF MARK E. SMITH
Marc Riley: What’s this song about?
Mark E Smith: Er,
nothing.
I slouch here not to bury MES but
to praise. He was an imperfect human being, a curmudgeon, a
bully, an inflicter of harm, particularly to himself and those closest to
him. But what talent, almost uncanny in its uniqueness! An autodidact; no
instruction booklet, no map to the path he staggered along for forty years
without ever losing his direction; a hunched man walking in a howling wind,
like an arctic explorer or shit mime in beret.
As a sallow, grey yellow youth he
was obsessed with Lovecraft and Machen – inhaled weird, cosmic horror and unsettling
ghost stories like B & H – sucking in on and off planet eeriness. He wore out the visceral pulp
of Sven Hassel and James Herbert, read classics, ate culture, regurgitated it
all as clamour, as clatter, as art. As a kid, I first encountered Wyndham Lewis
through MES-emulation. But where the hell did he hear of him, let alone be
influenced by him to the extent that the syntax of The Fall was the text of Blast! projected fifty years hence?
Fags and beer and Prestwich
aside, where did Smith get that that voice-ah? Eldritch in tone and timbre. Timber!
And that squeak/squeal/scratch/scream, banshee shot at with airgun; Howling
Wolf given helium. And that VOICE? Those words, wrenched from what strange plain?
MES said he had second sight, but read no tea leaves, was this a case of possession? By
ghosts, spirits, strange Gods and odd alternating energies, alien manifestations
and psychic parasites that cranked his chemistry and ran his non-stop, can’t
stop, won’t stop mouth: enthousiasmos in excelsis.
The Fall were not a one man band
(seven thousand members and counting), but instead an ever moveable feast, a pick n mix
of personnel martinet run like a small business, hammering at their instruments
like trolls in Vulcan’s workshop, like Morlocks. When I raise my pint glass,
play, when I turn off your amp, stop and get your stuff, you’re sacked.
The mess and method and the nerve
and noise of The Fall make me think of Paxmans Factory in Colchester (great
social club and workers taking turns to nap) where they made Intercity 125
engines and always had one going, full bore, high volume, powering nothing but
its own demise. It worked until it stopped working, broke, blew up, and then
they poked around in it to find out what went wrong, then start up another one. MES
and The Fall ran until they broke, blew up, Now it’s stopped, the engineer’s post
mortem can begin. But it’s a pointless exercise, as this engine didn’t run in
any kind of standard way or on any type of conventional fuel. In fact, it had no right working at all.