“The great thing about rock and roll is, any idiot can play it. The bad thing about rock and roll is, any idiot can play it.” Many personal recollections of Mark E Smith bubbled up on social media when the death of this singular figure – tyrannical owner-operator and sole permanent component of The Fall, most curmudgeonly man in pop, and possibly the last member of the punk generation still engaged in intellectual jihad against sonic acceptability – was announced on January 24. But these lines, half-remembered by ex-WYNU DJ Hugh Foley from his interview with Smith in the 1980s, said it best, I thought. Though The Fall grew out of punk’s DIY anti-elitism they repudiated its anti-intellectualism with venom. The group (never “band”, Smith always insisted) could sound simple, basic, dumb even, but they emphatically weren’t. They – Smith – contained multitudes.
A working class autodidact from Prestwich in Bury with a mind wired differently both by nature and a prodigious consumption of alcohol and speed, Smith would employ the lumpen brutality of pre-Beatles rock and roll plus Krautrock’s mind-dissolving repetition to deliver a dense cross-cultural payload. In this endeavour, the group made successive generations of supposedly alternative rock appear craven and illiterate. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, European football and Doris Stokes, CB radio, Jabberwocky, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, DC comics and of course Albert Camus: it was all there if you could find it, accompanied by ever-shifting musicians who might sound like Link Wray one year or a malfunctioning ZX Spectrum the next.
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