This Nations Saving Grace

Commonplace Newsletter #26

A few of you may get the reference in the title, for those that don’t I’ll explain. This Nation’s Saving Grace was a record by post-punk band The Fall whose leader Mark E. Smith died three years ago today. He was 60 years old. Not that his relatively early passing was a surprise- Smith unrepentantly swigged enough lager and hoovered up enough amphetamine sulphate to finish off most mortals well before they could reach the half century mark, even.

The tragedy of it, though, is that the world no longer gets to experience his music and his acerbic, poetic, sometimes baffling lyrics and unfiltered, contrarian worldview.

Given that, the least we can do is to spend our time together today reflecting on the man and his art.

A mural of Smith painted on the side of a chip shop in Prestwich, Greater Manchester. Scowling, prematurely wrinkled, perennial cig in gob, an accompanying cantankerous quotation: the muralist clearly understood his subject well.

‘I’m A Fifty Year Old Man/ And I Like It’

‘What really went on there? We only have this brief excerpt.’

~ The Fall, Cruisers Creek

There’s a line that the laureate of Deep South grotesquery Harry Crews used to say, he would say ‘survival is triumph enough’. Perhaps one of the truest utterance I have yet come across.

And our subject Mr Smith was a survivor if nothing else. A mardy sod maybe, but an enduring (and perhaps occasionally endearing) one. His one and only band The Fall started when he was a teenager and ended the day he died. The Fall went through 60ish member (‘If it’s me and your gran on bongos, it’s The Fall’) and released 32 studio albums in 37 years. They never had a hit. They never stopped. Survivor statistics, those.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Smith himself would survive forever seeing as he had that streak of spite that has a way of making centennials out of people. You could foresee a post-apocalypse England populated exclusively by coachroaches and the soot-stained remains of Smith and Keith Richard rummaging through rubble for a chance pack of Richmond Superkings.

But it wasn’t to be. Given that Smith looked like a state pension aged Wetherspoons regular at the age of 49 (video evidence), I suppose it comes as no great surprise really. Sixty is probably the theoretical biological limit of the human body if you go all out on the working-man-made-good cigs and booze lifestyle. See also George Best and Alex Higgins.

So here we are, three years after the final whistle with a vast back catalogue and an artistic legacy to assess. Were I a journalist I would out of kneejerk and duty-bound instinct rehash a few of the vast number of anecdotes of Smith being an arsey, belligerent, wilfully ignorant and offensive interview subject and an exacting and tyrannical bandleader.

As the mentor character in the Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail said ‘everything ends badly otherwise it wouldn’t end’. This was certainly true for being a musician in The Fall. There were more acrimonious splits in that band than you could find in a decades worth of National Enquirer back-issues.

But I feel no need to defend or paper-over our mans personal life and his actions- he truly seemed like a piece of work- I simply have no interest in going down that salacious and gossipy avenue. Such incidents have relatively little bearing on the music and the lyricism, and that is what I want to talk to you about.

‘Life Should Be Full Of Strangeness’

I am eternally grateful

To my past influences

~ The Fall, How I Wrote Elastic Man

Like the majority of Fall fans, I got into the band via the sadly missed radio DJ John Peel. I think it was the ‘04 session where the band played a blinding version of, um, Blindness, but I could be misremembering. Your memory is never to be trusted entirely. Peel sadly died a few months later and the world became a little poorer as a result.

Thinking about it I might be of the very last cohort of those who hold teenage memories of listening to late night Peel sessions on BBC radio and then going to the (still existent, relevant, solvent) record shop on the weekend to spend my paper round money on the record in question. That makes me sound unfeasibly old but the world changed all of a sudden with the coming of the Great Recession and the ubiquity of the devils distraction devices that now perpetually rest in our back pockets.

(To quote another Fall Lyric: I hear you telephone thing listening in/ How dare you assume I want to parlez vows with you!)

But the point is this- in the days prior to the predominance of people-who-like-this-also-like-that algorithms you had to rely on trusted elders, whether they be siblings, High Fidelity type guys who worked in record shops, cult radio DJs, or indeed frontmen who would make cryptic allusions to writers and musicians in their lyrics and music press interviews (another institution melted to click-bait and Adsense irrelevancy by tech-driven shifts in the cultural landscape)

Mark E Smith was one of, perhaps the, supreme example of someone who would leave breadcrumb trails through his art and utterances that lead you, in your adolescent obliviousness towards the Good Stuff. Off the top of my head I can think of: Camus, Blake, Captain Beefheart, Can, The Vorticist art movement and the film Charlie Bubbles being discoveries drawn directly from Smiths endorsement.

You need people like that in your life, now more than ever. People who share their idiosyncratic taste as a means of helping you develop your own idiosyncratic taste, or at least give you permission to do so by shamelessly sharing their high brow meets low brow aesthetic. I’ve noticed a disturbing online trend whereby people reply to posts asking for ‘best book’ recommendations by citing the same small cadre of in-group approved canonical greats. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Hemingway and the like.

All well and good, but where’s the eclecticism? Where’s the defending of some so-called genre work on stylistic grounds (Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, Ursula Le Guin, whoever). Where’s the random discovery championing, the vanguard mavens, the gatekeeping, the contrarianism? Where, in short is the Mark E Smith mindset of being shamelessly autodidactic, individualistic, unconventional, grounded in the courage of your convictions?

Over! Over!

I think it’s over now, I think it’s ending
I think it’s over now, I think it’s beginning

The Fall, Over! Over!

This is the bind that I am in- I’m trying to hold myself back from rhapsodizing in flowery language about a man who was, above all, the epitome of no-nonsense, straightforward artistic expression.

What would Smith himself think were he able to read of the things I am longing to say- , about how a whole world seemingly died with him and how a part of me misses it? That world of swirling paisley-wallpapered pre-refurbishment pubs, of the aforementioned cheapo second hand record shops and book shops, of ashtrays and pints and carrier bags, a world that was pre-internet, pre-gentrification, pre-health consciousness, a world that was grimy and awful but at least you could actually touch it.

That shitty England of my faded youth in other words, now two decades old and gone forever as we all retreat into a collectively sanctioned virtual reality.

(All post-mortem tributes are more about the living eulogiser than the departed recipient, all biography is disguised autobiography)

Smith would probably flash a quick smirk of Luddite ascent before swigging from a draft and saying something uncharitable about Pep Guardiola.

So Smith might’ve been a bit of a prick but at least he was an honest and forthright one, both virtues in dwindling supply.

He didn’t try to cajole or convince or coax, he just wrote bizarre and oblique northern scorn/ magic realism lyrics and delivered them in a drunken Karaoke uncle mumble with the obligatory added ah at the end of every line-ah.

Upon discovery you either find this regretfully amateurish or you develop a cultish devotion to it. Many from the former column discover they slowly drift to the latter- often against their own better nature- with enough exposure.

And that is how art should be- singular, wilful, unpandering, belligerent in pursuance of its vision. That’s the lesson from Smith’s body of work, assuming the extraction of a lesson were even necessary or desired. Relentless and endless distribution of works that reflect your own deeply felt worldview, success or recognition (‘he is not appreciated’) be damned.

Until next time,

Live Well,

Tom.

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