Citizen Smith

“Double Jameson please, cock,” requests Mark E. Smith. At about one o’clock in the afternoon. With a beer to wash it down. He’s in great form, too, grinning benevolently, laughing a lot, mischievous glint in the eye, limping slightly. It would be stretching a point to say the man looks well, but his spirits seem sky-high. He’s even intermittently coherent. Perhaps not a walking advertisement for the benefits of abstinence, early nights, cold showers and organic food, but there’s life in the old dog yet.

I’ve read a hundred-odd Smith interviews down the years, and am well aware that irrespective of how lucid or stupid the interviewer’s line of questioning, a huge amount depends on what side of bed Mark E. has gotten out of on that particular morning. But we seem to have got him on a good day. Sigh of relief. The Fall consumed my life at the age of about 15 and I’ve never really recovered. I don’t idolise him, nor do I think that everything The Fall touches turns to gold. But for the guts of three decades now, 90% of it has. Sure, the last dozen or so albums haven’t quite been as mesmerisingly hypnotic as the first dozen were. But... ‘Winter’? ‘Spectre Vs Rector’? ‘Elastic Man’? ‘Fiery Jack’? ‘Jawbone & The Air-Rifle’? ‘Rose’? Some of this stuff would put Shakespeare or Dylan to shame.
We get down to business. The Fall have just about outwitted a cloud of volcanic ash and made it to Dublin (“Reminds you what a fuckin’ amazing invention air travel is. Punters take it for granted.”) He’s written a World Cup song, but is less than excited about the whole affair: “I’m sick of the World Cup really, and it hasn’t started. It was bollocks the way they changed the rules, they were terrified that the Krauts and the Russians weren’t going to make it. Fuckin’ sponsors put the foot down. Same with France. You’re right to be upset. Actually, if you hear the song, it’s quite anti-England. I’ve never really given a fuck about the England team.”
He then launches into an icy tirade enumerating all the things that have gone wrong with the Beautiful Game: specifically, the evaporation of hatred and the attendant whiff of violence. Though a lifelong Manchester City fan, one senses Mark feels a bit distanced from the club now that they’re a genuine zillionaire global franchise with a swish new shiny all-seater stadium who win more often than they lose, rather than a byword for post-industrial urban decay who get humped on a regular basis by the likes of Bury and Stockport.
“Yeah. It’s bollocks. I watched the last Manchester derby, or maybe it was the one before, and there weren’t any Mancunians playing. You had Tevez, who plays for City, who played for United last year. What’s the point? I think that was a great rule when you were only allowed two foreign players on each team. The players fuckin’ shakin’ hands – what’s that about? It’s a derby, man, it should be fucking hatred.
“The hatred’s all gone,” he reflects with a sad shake of the head, before wistfully reminiscing: “When I was on the Kippax as a kid, it was madness. You were there for the ructions. The CCTV and the all-seater thing changed it all. There’s still some grounds where you get that, but they’re all outside the Premiership. I’m not bothered nowadays. I’ve been to Eastlands once and that was a social thing. Sitting down at football, it’s very uncomfortable.”
Mark glances at the telly, where Sky News (with some relish) are replaying then-British PM Gordon Brown’s fateful encounter with the Rochdale auld dear he described as “a bigoted woman”. Smithy springs to her defence. “I thought it was dead funny. But like...she’s got a point. Have you been to Rochdale?”
Eh, no. Not really on my list of Places I Must Visit Before I Die.
“Right. Ah, it’s seen better days. They’ve got mosques all over the place. Like, seven people out of seven are Asians. No, honestly, if you live in Rochdale you’re not a fucking racist. She was just having a moan. You can’t really say anything, though. All these old mill towns, Oldham and Burnley – you should see them. But them political journalists don’t seem to notice anything. They’re ignorant.”
What do you think of the BNP?
“I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. I’m surprised they’re not more popular than they are. Especially in hard times. I mean, they’re a bunch of fucking idiots, obviously. But so are all the others. Did you see that episode of Question Time with Nick Griffin?”
Yep. I thought almost all the panel, Bonnie Greer excepted, made themselves look like the fascists by shouting Griffin down, interrupting his every word and generally interfering with the free and open exchange of ideas and opinions.
 “Well, she’s American, she’s used to it, she’ll have grown up with it. But you’re right, it was pathetic. Jack Straw was the worst. Like ‘Have you ever read Mein Kampf?’ in this accusing tone, he sounded like a school headmaster. He’s one of the most powerful men in Britain: you’d like to think he’s read Mein Kampf, or at least dipped into it, and if not, why not? And Griffin – it doesn’t need saying that he’s an idiot, but he made the best point of anyone – he looked right at Jack Straw and said, ‘Listen, I’m not the one with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and kids on my hands’. But they changed the subject: ‘Oh, but you read Mein Kampf.’ Stupid twats.”
  There’s a new Fall album out, Your Future Our Clutter. It’s good stuff, a vast variety of things going on, sharply played by a razor-tight band, and certainly doesn’t deserve to be dismissed as the latest superfluous “difficult 800th Album” from a bunch of old cranks who’ve got to be grudgingly respected on account of their former glories. ‘Bury Pts. 1 and 3’ is almost up there with anything they’ve done, especially after a smoke. It probably won’t change too many lives compared to Dragnet or Wonderful & Frightening World. But I wouldn’t dismiss their continuing relevance. I trot along to the gig that night expecting to be confronted by a bunch of fellow decomposing punk fossils: I couldn’t have been more wrong. The average age isn’t a day over 30.
Still, Mark feels (with some justification) that The Fall’s longevity and preposterously prolific output works against them: that they’d get a lot more attention if the albums came out less frequently.
 “Oh, definitely. Yeah, we’re taken for granted. If we split up for a couple of years and then started again, that’d get them talking. But it wouldn’t be honest. I hate these reunion things. Well, most of them. Though I saw The Troggs lately and they were fuckin’ great. One of the best groups I’ve seen in a long fucking time. They weren’t going through the motions, and they were sort of abusive to the audience. In fact if you notice, loads of the ‘60s garage stuff doesn’t sound half as dated as most ‘80s and ‘90s stuff does now.”
Mark recently attracted the flak of animal rights activists for claiming to shoot squirrels as a hobby, but he’d like to point out that it isn’t true.
“Ah, it was ridiculous. There was this stupid fuckin’ journalist, Bernie from Brighton or whatever. He kept going on about his dad and seagulls and stuff and he was boring the tits off me. He was one of these cunts who asks you questions and then doesn’t listen to what you have to say, so I started winding him up. ‘Yeah, I kill fuckin’ squirrels, so what?’ The next thing I know it’s on like page three of the Manchester Evening News. Bit shocked, I was. It’s supposed to be a respected paper, and they could have checked with me easily enough. It was front-page news in Sweden where we’ve hardly ever had an LP reviewed. Always amazes me how keen people are to believe hearsay. The minute it’s on the internet, it must be true. I don’t believe a thing I read on the internet, I never have. I only have a computer ‘cause you need one to get paid, they won’t pay you by cheque any more. But the Evening News, you expect a bit better. Though they once ran a poll to see who was ‘the greatest Mancunian of all time’ and I won in a landslide, I got at least 99% of the vote.”
Smithy has suffered his fair share of broken bones and general mishaps lately, and recently shattered his hip: “I was lucky, I was in Germany, and the health care is really great. I broke my hip in Cologne, and they told me I had things wrong with me I didn’t know about. I only went with the wife. It was fuckin’ weird. I’d been all over the shop, I’d been to specialists. There was summat wrong with me back, and summat wrong down here (points at his nethers) – for three fuckin’ months I’d been going to VD clinics, sat with junkies in AIDS clinics, and it turns out there was no VD, it was me back. The Germans worked it out in five minutes. All they needed was to look at me fuckin’ back. I tell you, German painkillers are great.”
Calvin Klein approached Mark a few years ago with a view to talking him into modelling underpants, an offer he declined, though the idea still makes him cackle: “Me broken hip – it would have looked great. Maybe I should have done it.”
Well, it’s a thought for the future. Maybe they’ll ask him again. Billboards of the world, you have been warned.
The Fall play the Electric Picnic in September. Your Future Our Clutter is out now on Domino.