RIP Mark E. Smith

“If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.”

somehow never ran across this quote

his music brought me so much pure FUN and joy.

and a break from cold crappy reality

this feels sad and unreal. glad i got to see the fall back in 2005 or so. i wasn't sure what to expect but they sounded as great as they'd ever sounded to me on any of their records. easily one of the 10 best shows i've ever seen. still vividly remember buying my first album in my late teens -- wonderful & frightening -- and just not knowing what to make of it. many, many listens later, i still don't, really. MES's lyrics feel as deep and rich and worthy of study as any pop lyrics i can think of. he was way ahead of us all. rip.

From the beginning up to Bend Sinister is where the real gold is for me, and the two albums after aren't too bad. There's been some very good stuff from 2000-present, but the '90s were pretty weak for 'em - particularly 1995-1998.

rong :)

I can hear MES's voice in some of today's newspaper front page headlines:

- Furore Over Groping Scandal
- Trump Hails New Churchill
- Cop Probe Urged
- Cloned Macaques Make History
- Eat Curry To Beat Dementia

that last one accompanied by a derisory chuckle

I once served MES when I was working at the Music and Video Exchange bookshop in Notting Hill. He bought a copy of Rudolph Grey's oral biography of Ed Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy. He was incredibly polite.

Ah man, hero -- that's one of my favorite books.

I was a big Nick Cave and Pogues fan when this Cave/McGowan/MES interview came out, but I was in possession of Bend Sinister and still trying to figure out what to make of it.

http://thequietus.com/articles/09277-mark-e-smith-nick-cave-shane-macgowan-nme-interview

And this little sub-rant crystallized his work for me -

NC: And your songs are very deceptive Mark, in the way they're sung. They may appear at times like streams of consciousness but that's deceptive.

MES: One thing that really annoys me is that stream of consciousness thing. I wouldn't let on to it normally, but it annoys the shit out of me. I put a lot of hard sweat into them, I think about them. They have an inner logic to me so I don't really care who understands them or not. I see writing and singing as two very different things. My attitude is if you can't deliver it like a garage band, fuck it. That's one thing that's never been explored, delivering complex things in a very straightforward rock 'n' roll way. My old excuse is if I'd wanted to be a poet, I'd have been a poet.

"if you can't deliver it like a garage band, fuck it" is one of those slogans that's repeated in my head ever since. Made me respect the possibilities for what could be communicated with a song, beyond the classic themes.

I love that interview, arguing w/McGowan abt Nietzsche lol

I can hear MES's voice in some of today's newspaper front page headlines:

- Furore Over Groping Scandal
- Trump Hails New Churchill
- Cop Probe Urged
- Cloned Macaques Make History
- Eat Curry To Beat Dementia

Dragnet For Gun Blast Man.

man those headlines are really good
i have been enjoying reading the tidbits and interviews that show how singular MES was, lyrics too

i never really got into the fall when i was young because i found their catalogue impenetrable without help and no one to ask in the dark ages. i got 458489 B Sides at some point and enjoyed it but then kinda drifted from rock music and never went back to find more about their catalogue until recently. i have been sent playlists that i know are probably excellent (thanks jon!) and dipped my toe in but i am not a regular spotify user and therefore i still feel stymied about where to begin! is this the essential nature of the fall and MES? seems like it :) RIP

i think the greatest hits are a fine place to start. that two-disc the fall rough trade compilation (the one with the red cover) is the one that got me into them. the 50,000 fall fans can't be wrong compilation (also two discs) is also good and maybe easier to find.

note: i am not asking for help now because i think everyone has their own experience with a band like this
mine is a very long journey apparently

i always figured there would be fall CDs out there for me to buy since so many people loved them so much and liked different parts of their catalogue

50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong was my gateway after years of not quite getting it

That was a sort of good gateway era, you had the Totally Wired comp and also around that time a really great new album (Real New Fall LP)

The Fall is like a Magic Eye poster, you stare at it forever and it looks like a big mess then suddenly some form pops out at you and you become obsessed

Derisive YouTube comment that accidentally encapsulates everything I love about the Fall:

"The Fall aren't so much a band, more a well-intentioned 1970's Manchester Council unemployment initiative that has snowballed out of control."

— Tobi Haslett (@TobiHaslett) January 24, 2018

this radio tribute right now is going well

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/77083

The Fall is like a Magic Eye poster, you stare at it forever and it looks like a big mess then suddenly some form pops out at you and you become obsessed

*wild applause*

I don't want to get too sentimental about him, and I don't want to forget how cruel he could be (that part of Prince has already been written out of history)

but I think the reason that so many people like myself who have been big fans and dabbled in making underground music react so strongly to him is the sheer guts he had.
i've been in a few bands, i've written professionally as an entertainment journalist and always meant to try something more personal and substantial

but the fact is that i never had the guts, the real nerve it takes to fully devote myself to something the way Mark E Smith did, to forgo a stable life, stable relationships, having a child, my health, sanity or whatever else he sacrificed in pursuit of his vision of The Fall (the band as an idea, a principle to him)....Can you imagine what it took in these last years? To the point where he was doing shows in a wheelchair? How much of his life he ruined because of The Fall?

It's one thing to be Phish or the Dead, living in 4 star hotels and planes and buses, but for the Fall (or Pere Ubu) it's still shuffling into vans, loading into shitty clubs all over the world, getting enough scratch to make it through the next six months....

(not to mention i wouldn't have been capable of anything that great, but that's another issue)

D Wolk wrote sumthin

https://pitchfork.com/features/afterword/the-glorious-savagery-of-the-falls-mark-e-smith/

i am a proud Brix-era Fall fan. that's my Fall. Perverted to Oranj/Frenz. i fell so hard for Cruisers Creek. it was everything i ever wanted in a song. it felt like a gift. since it came out i have played that song a thousand times. it's funny cuz i bought that Speed Trials comp in 1984 to hear Swans/Sonic Youth/Live Skull and the thing that sounded the weirdest to me out of all those New York scuzz bands was the Fall doing "Tempo House". and obviously that was worlds away from what i would hear in "Cruisers Creek" a year later. but that five year run of records and singles...that's the best band for me. the 12-inch version of "No Bulbs" is some sort of rock pinnacle for me. it really and truly does not get any better than that. and its a friggin' high standard which is why i don't get excited by a lot of stuff i hear now and get cranky like MES and just end up wanting to listen to Can and Eddie Cochran records.

will love MES forever for saying this in that quietus interview:

I respect Dylan. The only good thing I've heard of his is that LP he did with George Harrison and Roy Orbison.

pic.twitter.com/fVMznDerWq

— Brix Smith Start (@Brixsmithstart) January 25, 2018

xxp scott if you ever feel like it you should check out Cerebral Caustic and Light User Syndrome, the two albums they made when Brix returned briefly to the fold

scott that was gen my period as well

Oh! The Fall... I only have this excerpt:
Have you ever fallen in love, slowly, measure by measure, without realizing it until you were over the moon? And, surprisingly, the object of your love was once hated and dismissed? That's my relationship with The Fall.

I was 17 when I first heard a Fall song, and I absolutely couldn't stand it. "What is this racket?", I thought, and didn't think twice. Staring at the cover of "The Wonderful And Frightening World" at Al Bum's in Amherst, MA, I just wasn't ready to process what I was hearing. I was just starting to become the man whose head and music tastes expanded, but I was far from being in a place where I could appreciate what Mark was doing. And so I retreated to my safe world of college rock. Along the way, I ran into many references to The Fall, such as the Jazz Butchers' "Southern Mark Smith" and Barbara Mannings' "Mark E Smith & Brix", and comments in interviews, reviews and books. The Fall was a hovering presence in my world, just out of my vision but always in the back of my mind.

Fast forward a decade and my dear friend, a rabid Fall fan, was determined to sway me. She made me a tape of the "458489 A Side" compilation and I played it in my car, as I commuted to work and ran errands. It wasn't nearly as strange as I remembered. Ever so slowly, the tape crept into my regular listening pattern and my thinking began to change. "I like these singles", and off I went to acquire the CD. It was a bit like the first drink of an alcoholic. "I don't need more than this", and yet within a few months I found myself picking up the Beggars Banquet catalog. So many gems beyond the singles - album cuts! b-sides! So many strange sounds but all packaged in a veil of familiar tropes. "But the early stuff is really challenging", thought I, and my dear friend gave me a tape of "Palace Of Swords Reversed". Again, at first I found a few things I enjoyed, but there was the nagging persistence to play it again and again, until I had to find a copy for myself. "I don't need more than this, well, except maybe another compilation from the same era ("Hip Priests And Kamerads"), and maybe a live album ("The Legendary Chaos Tape")". That last one introduced me to the brilliance that is "Spectre Vs Rector", and then I found that the first two albums were tough to find on CD at the time. Which made them more appealing to my collector-scum side. So I tracked them down, and then slowly filled in the rest of the back catalog.

I stopped at "Extricate" because I had found the 90s albums inconsistent. But over the next few years I found more I liked, such as "The Chiselers" single, and I started to trade for tapes of the Peel sessions containing songs that blew my mind like "Glam Racket Star", and my heart grew three sizes that day. And then I saw them perform at the Middle East in Cambridge, the night before it all blew up in New York City. I picked up the 90s compilations "A Past Gone Mad" and "A World Bewitched" and realized just how wrong I had been about that decade's work. That was the final blow, I was just mad for them to the point where they eclipsed everything else. Days passed where I just listened to The Fall. When I met people who appreciated the Fall, I instantly liked them a whole lot more.

Strong albums in the 00's followed, along with an excellent reissue series full of fascinating previously unreleased material. "Room To Live" got the expanded release it deserved! "Fall In A Hole" out on CD without the pops and clicks! I saw The Fall again in 2003, when Mark was at the height of his powers. "Blindness" came out, every bit as great, driving and relevant as the early singles. I learned more about Mark's influences - 50s rockabilly, 60s garage rock and, in recent years, krautrock. Hearing the source material in no way diminished my view of the unique amalgam of sounds that The Fall create. The only artist I can compare with Mark is James Brown - both were able to mold any backing band into their vision, both treated voice-as-instrument, both unyielding in their views.

I'm listening to the Red Box compilation, the only one that does justice to the breadth and depth of Mark's work. I still find things I missed in all my previous listening, and expect to do so the rest of my life.

will love MES forever for saying this in that quietus interview:

I respect Dylan. The only good thing I've heard of his is that LP he did with George Harrison and Roy Orbison.

The Fall is like a Magic Eye poster, you stare at it forever and it looks like a big mess then suddenly some form pops out at you and you become obsessed

50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong is probably my favorite compilation title ever

Adding myself to the list of people who never fully got the Fall. I'd honestly been kicking around the idea of diving back in recently. Guess this will have to be that time. It's been good to read everybody's memories on this thread.

50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong is probably my favorite compilation title ever

but what about the elvis one

that's what makes the Fall one so good

"bill is dead" as incidental music on The One Show just now

frogbs gets it

i wonder what normal people are making of this, how a singer with a band with 3 top 40 singles is getting so much coverage.

(two are obvious, i had to look up the third - Telephone Thing snuck in at number 40)

((also, probably more people know the car advert music and the final score music without knowing who it is))

normal people :)

Was waiting for Geeta's piece

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/01/25/580606173/mark-e-smith-was-an-uncompromising-and-essential-voice-from-musics-fringe

i always thought it was funny "blindess" was car commercial since one of the first lyrics is i was walking down the street

I don't want to get too sentimental about him, and I don't want to forget how cruel he could be (that part of Prince has already been written out of history)

but I think the reason that so many people like myself who have been big fans and dabbled in making underground music react so strongly to him is the sheer guts he had.
i've been in a few bands, i've written professionally as an entertainment journalist and always meant to try something more personal and substantial

but the fact is that i never had the guts, the real nerve it takes to fully devote myself to something the way Mark E Smith did, to forgo a stable life, stable relationships, having a child, my health, sanity or whatever else he sacrificed in pursuit of his vision of The Fall (the band as an idea, a principle to him)....Can you imagine what it took in these last years? To the point where he was doing shows in a wheelchair? How much of his life he ruined because of The Fall?

It's one thing to be Phish or the Dead, living in 4 star hotels and planes and buses, but for the Fall (or Pere Ubu) it's still shuffling into vans, loading into shitty clubs all over the world, getting enough scratch to make it through the next six months....

(not to mention i wouldn't have been capable of anything that great, but that's another issue)

too tired (and sad) to flesh this out right now but "put energy above form" isn't quite right i don't think: he had a ferocious (if highly idiosyncratic and self-evolved) sense of form

(two are obvious, i had to look up the third - Telephone Thing snuck in at number 40)

it was free range that hit 40, not telephone thing.

Was gonna say..

"he had a ferocious (if highly idiosyncratic and self-evolved) sense of form"

just reading the lyrics on a page without the music and you definitely see that right away.

i rly like the balance of geeta’s piece - it contains the cruelty, which was important and good. he was an extraordinarily funny and often very kind and polite man, generous too. but yes. things broke down and “difficulty” could also be “damage”.

on another note, i disagree that there were any absolute failures (obv i do), a thought process that led to this:


i remember a friend and i pissing ourselves to the sketchiest live performance of funnel of love you can imagine. mind you constant laughter through a track is common. not just the lyrics, but the *manner*.

too tired (and sad) to flesh this out right now but "put energy above form" isn't quite right i don't think: he had a ferocious (if highly idiosyncratic and self-evolved) sense of form

speaking for myself, i'd rather listen to the fall than read beckett or stein...

Please keep posting good links, I am on the road for a couple of days and will be glad to have them to follow up later

UMS your last post made me tear up a little ;_;

My stepsister’s got a horrible growth

Byron Coley
‏ @ByronColey1
9h9 hours ago

just last saturday was talking to steve berlin about a fall/flesheaters/blurt show at myron's ballroom in '81. remembering how much mark e smith wanted to go see compton; also, how he and richard meltzer kept praising the work of cw mccall. so long, man.