RIP Mark E. Smith

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.

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.

: )

just on categories the way the not amazing imperial wax solvent album explicitly reintroduced character led songs again for the first time in a decade.

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

gah, i looked it up and forgot it in less than a day 8(

(by normal people i mean the people i work with, or my parents, people who listen to radio 2 rather than 6.)

Front Row podcast (the extended download-only version) includes Grayson Perry's thoughts on MES - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09nrsg1

WFMU continues to play a lot....

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/77089

and i'm catching all the sneering Mark-critic quotes, eg "I don't sing I just shout," in "Your Heart Out."

Good work from Nate here

https://www.stereogum.com/1980231/wonderful-and-frightening-remembering-andor-rediscovering-mark-e-smith-and-the-fall/franchises/sounding-board/?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral

you can call it a bubble or whatever but i kinda dig that its like a head of state dying on my facebook. this massive response. we make our own worlds.

xxp one of my favorite lines

?? nate famously hated the fall i thought "mingering shit" iirc

Read on!

i did and it was pointless

sorry that was mean, music nerd hand-wringing does seem kinda pointless tho, the fall had plenty of catchy tunes

if someone didn't know where to start i would tell them to buy i am kurious oranj. so much fun and such an awesome rock record and tons of hooks/great songs. it's like the last great post-punk record. r.i.p. 1980s.

it's weird but the fall were never a band that i ever really picked apart or analyzed or dissected. i never wondered what MES was listening to. i knew he liked krautrock and 50s rock and garage rock and i guess that's all i needed to know! the clang was there. the beat. the roughness. pretty self-explanatory. it DID take me years to realize what a good writer he was. which is strange. but i just let the words wash over me and for a long time it never dawned on me how hard it must have been to write stuff like that. i just saw him/them as a force of nature. raising a ruckus. such cool sounds.

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

somehow never ran across this quote

This was, IIRC, in response to being challenged about a Reading festival performance where they pulled up backstage, MES having drunkenly sacked the drummer halfway up the motorway, and asked if anyone knew how to play drums. The Chemical Brothers' manager had not played since he was a teenager, and didn't know any of the Fall's songs, but went on and played them to tens of thousands of people.

the chemical brothers should have played drums! they had that big beat.

xp that's amazing, never heard the backstory there

i should also say that ned has a lot of reviews of fall albums on allmusic and they are great reading again

I think that Reading festival show was one of the 2 times I saw the Fall, although I only watched a few songs before wandering off because it was pretty bad.

xpost Too kind. As always I'd probably like to rewrite them but I'd like to rewrite pretty much everything I've ever done anyway.

loll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2euHrKaRW4

Beautiful. Are those saucepans in the foreground part of the instrumentation?

J0hn D0lan:

"MES meant a lot to me. A reckless courage that was beyond my imagining, bloody-minded persistence immune to attacks of conscience, and muttered backhands that could floor a target while barely brushing them with a knuckle:

'She consigns them all to Hell,
She's the Littlest Rebel...'"

probably not - this was for Ginger Wildheart's album and probs a home studio lol

xpost

That Reading/Fall story shows up in that Guardian piece from 2006 where the writer tries to track down every single former The Fall member:

One of the strangest entrances is that of Nick Dewey, who attended the 1999 Reading festival as the manager of the Chemical Brothers and ended up on stage with the Fall. "This drunk man [guitarist Neville Wilding] came backstage asking if anyone played drums," he says. "The band had had a fight and left the drummer at motorway services." Dewey hadn't played for 10 years, but once a Chemical Brother put his name forward, Wilding refused to take no for an answer. Dewey was led to a darkened tour bus to meet Smith, "passed out with his shirt off. The guitarist had to punch him in the face to wake him up. Then they began fighting over whether or not they should teach me the songs. Mark said no!" With a blood-covered Smith offering occasional prompts, Dewey pulled it off.

I tried to ask Wilding about this incident but his neighbour said he was "in Guadalajara". The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.

I just ordered "The Fallen", looking forward to it

The neighbour is Adam Helal, who also appeared in the Fall, playing bass from 1998 to 2001.

omg haha

how many posters in this thread have played in the Fall

MES quote from the liner notes to the 2CD reissue of Shift-Work:

"I'm trying to chop off all the esoteric bits, the unnecessary bits, all the time."

been a fan of the fall for nearly 30 years and only realizing there are barely any songs about girls in the trad rock sense. and it’s hard to know the few that might be love songs. maybe none of them are love songs.

not a shocking thing generally — esp in darker genres — but for 32 albums?

when you’re driving around looking for parking, cursing non stop, there’s no more appropriate soundtrack than pretty much any fall album.

I remember working as a temp first few year and a half when I finally got out of college in the mid-90s working in the bowels of telephone, insurance and local government offices usually in big monolithic file rooms, cleaning up and filing with a discman listening often to The Fall. While now it seems some guy with a set of headphones doing some dead end job is kinda normal now, I think it was kinda strange to the stiffs at the time. The Fall seemed to really fit the circumstances, stop MITHERING.

grooving really hard on Extricate & related tracks this evening

with your daft African pop
and the wine that you call Bull's Blood
Hillary
oh oh Hil-uh-ray

Keep me away from the fest-i-val....

MES, the New Puritan after all, could have been mistakable for a second-wave feminist. No lechery whatsoever in his words, and plenty of criticism for 'male slags' and those with overactive libidos in general. I guess there is that 'An Older Lover etc' song, but isn't that sarcastic?

oh the etc is on 'Slags, Slates', whoops

Anyway, this is possibly his most tender moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VUnbPG8i3A

MES, the New Puritan after all, could have been mistakable for a second-wave feminist

well there was the hilarious time he punched and strangled julia nagle but let's not talk about that eh

yeah and then he wrote her the above song

it was a chaotic and shitty time for sure (punctuated by some amazing music) but apart from that fight i think he showed generally good credentials in that department. also iirc she fully forgave him (i know this doesn't absolve him completely)