Legend of the Fall: Mark E. Smith and me

He was one of the most unlikely pop stars this country has ever produced: extraordinarily badly dressed and famously contrarian, with a voice that sounded more like an angry man shouting than anything recognisable as singing.

But Mark E. Smith, front man of the Fall, became one of the most recognisable and eventually revered figures on the music scene. And five years on from his death at 60, his stock is higher than ever – his influence heard in the sound of newer bands such as Sleaford Mods and Idles, his name regularly evoked on the likes of BBC Radio 6 Music, and a giant tribute mural an unlikely tourist attraction in his hometown of Prestwich.

I hadn’t thought about him much for years and rarely react to celebrity deaths, but his death – five years ago today, on 24 January 2018 – seemed to strike me inexplicably hard, and for months afterwards sent my thoughts back repeatedly to half a lifetime ago.

It was the spring of 1982. I was 15. It was traditional in those days to claim ‘I heard it on John Peel’ when buying a record by an act new to you, and I probably claimed as much, but in this case I really hadn’t. I had just heard of the Fall, and was curious when I picked out the single ‘Lie Dream of a Casino Soul’ from a record shop rack. I was immediately taken by its sleeve, a cartoon depiction of Smith as a grotesque, a kind of monochrome Egon Schiele. So I took a punt and bought it. 

At that moment, early in the decade, the music scene was in transition between prickly post-punk and the new look and sound of the full-blown 1980s proper. Everything was growing more luscious ­– and often more pompous – at every turn. The sounds were becoming less stark and more synthetic as what had hitherto been the avant-garde of electronica merged with mainstream pop. Suddenly music was becoming denser, lusher and, to my ear, over-produced. Hair was getting bigger; shoulders were being padded.  

The Fall stood apart. Smith didn’t sound like he wanted to drive round the Mojave Desert in a convertible or sail a superyacht around Antigua while miming for a video for MTV to launch a transatlantic no. 1 smash. Duran Duran or Tears for Fears this wasn’t. Instead it was bellowing about ‘outside bogs’ and venting obscure gripes about phoney Manc posers lying about having been regulars at the Wigan Casino club in the nascent Northern Soul scene. This group was never going to cut one of those high period 1980s albums, a Lexicon of Love or a Steve McQueen. Where others were adding synthesised strings or horns – or both – to everything, the Fall would add a kazoo solo. 

And then there was the look. Smith dressed like he was wearing clothes cast aside by his own grandad: patterned V-neck acrylic jumpers and flapping-collared shirts that a charity shop would reject. 

Unlike my other pet bands of the time – the Cure, Magazine, Bauhaus, the Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunnymen – no one else I knew followed them, which made them seem all the more personal – something which seemed to matter a lot at that age, intensifying the sense of connection. Because, at 15, you’re in the market for things to latch on to. 

At that age you feel socially uncertain: this crowd of people isn’t right for you but you don’t know how to extricate yourself; this crowd appeals to you but you don’t know how to ingratiate yourself. And your only currency, you think, is your identity – but what, you ask yourself, exactly is that? So you painfully, self-consciously, try to construct one, like a teenage Frankenstein, bolting bits of other people together to try to build a self. And choices like the clothes you wear and the music you listen to seem disproportionately significant in this process – or at least they did to me in 1982. 

At the time I bought that first Fall single I was dressing like a Stars in Their Eyes tribute act: ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Robert Smith!’ Mark E. Smith made me realise I didn’t need to do this. He helped liberate me from all that insecure teenager stuff, to realise that I could find my own taste and not follow other people’s. He was – or at least seemed to me – so unapologetically himself that he made me realise it was preposterous to care what other people thought so much.

In my Fall years I worked out it was better to stop trying to be cool – coolness being the most overrated virtue for me, to this day – and to just be yourself; not to do things you don’t feel are right; all that stuff which seems so obvious now as a fully fledged adult, but which wasn’t then. 

Smith was a skinny working-class adult who had seen the Sex Pistols at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall and started his own band – and I was a middle-class outsized schoolboy from Tunbridge Wells who hadn’t. I could like him but I didn’t need to be like him. Or anyone else. And that was liberating. 

So for a couple of years I devoured everything that came from the Fall – ‘A New Face In Hell’, ‘How I Wrote “Elastic Man”’, Live at the Witch Trials, ‘Look, Know’. And then I gradually moved on. I was always afterwards fond of them: I saw them play a couple of times, I looked out for them, laughed at their later dalliance with the charts. But I never was really a fan again.

And it wasn’t until many years later, after Smith had died in fact, that I began to consider that what I thought I’d seen in him in 1982 as total authenticity perhaps wasn’t entirely that – that in fact his contrariness was probably at least partially contrived, certainly initially. It was pretty plain that he was a bit of a mess towards the end. He had drunk and smoked too much for decades and was singing from a wheelchair, with both lung and kidney cancer; he looked like Samuel Beckett.

But although he may have seemed the antithesis of the school of inspirational quotes and uplifting content, Mark E. Smith, I finally realised decades later, had been my biggest help in navigating my tricky teens. He was my unlikely hero.