Music for the Salford hard men: reading Mark E Smith's Renegade
Anyway, true story: the other day someone I like on Twitter mentioned they were reading Renegade while sitting in their car listening to Hex Enduction Hour in a Tesco car park, another pleasingly Mark E Smith-like bit of mundane-weird. So yep, I was inspired to take it off my sagging music books shelves and actually read the bloody thing. Main impressions? These: Smith is the pub bore you want to avoid in an old man's boozer, despite him occasionally differentiating himself from such people; his opinionatedness is both wearying and amusing (it's funnier at the beginning than it is after 235 pages); he's as well-read as you expect him to be (a few key books/authors are mentioned), but also seems to have watched some good films (Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital, Mike Leigh's Meantime, and Welles' Citizen Kane, A Touch Of Evil and Macbeth are all name-checked); and - perhaps most of all - his notorious cantankerousness/reactionariness isn't, in the end, a clever music world-baiting pose. He really was like that. Mostly. How to disentangle all this? (Is it even worth disentangling?). In a blog on Simon Ford's Hip Priest book a few years ago I was moaning about Smith's "obnoxious ego". It's impossible not to. Unsurprisingly, Renegade takes you on a beer and whisky-fuelled journey into the super-sized Smith ego - a wonderful and frightening (but in fact quite familiar) place. It's main components are all well-known: Smith's scathing disregard for virtually all musicians (especially those in the Fall); an almost pathological need to put down anyone for being middle class (or "semi-middle class"); acidic disdain for intellectualising (except his own rough-and-ready brand); disgust with modernity (computers, iPods, modern footballers, modern music, modern anything); a brand of "hard man" one-up-manship that involves denouncing those who can't "handle" heavy drinking or a ramshackle life-on-the-road lifestyle that he seems to enjoy, not least because it involves endless opportunities for getting drunk. Slightly more surprising to me is Smith's veneration of his family (his plumber father especially, but also mother, grandfather, and sisters). He also praises his "real mates", apparently old acquaintances from Prestwich or Salford ("good lads"), or people in the Manchester Irish community ("Irish gangs"), or more generally afternoon pub drinker types, especially those who don't appear to know anything about the Fall. These are regularly contrasted with inauthentic people: "media graduates", record company executives, journalists etc. Yeah, you'd better believe it: Mark knows who's real and he knows who isn't. Given Smith's famously all-encompassing disdain (everyone from David Beckham to Nick Cave and John Lennon, everything from Rough Trade to hippies, Factory Records and the BBC), it becomes quite interesting to see who escapes the wrath of MES's bombast. Aside from the Mcr locals, these are a only select few: the drinkers he befriends in pubs in Leith during his Edinburgh period (late 80s), one or two touchstone musical influences (Link Wray, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Iggy Pop, early Johnny Cash). There's also John Peel (grudgingly), Leigh Bowery and Michael Clark, a select clutch of maverick/semi-maverick sporting figures (George Best, Malcolm Allison, Alex Higgins, Harry Dowd, Alex Ferguson), a few studio producers (especially if they're from "straight" studios, not "hip" ones working with indie bands), and .. that's about it. This level of near-universal put-downery quickly becomes predictable and slightly boring, but it does - I must admit - bring with it some flashes of genuine comedy. For example:
-"Bramah was the singer because he had the looks, Friel was the bass player, Una had to save up for a keyboard and I played guitar. And we got this drummer in from Stockport. This little bald man: Dave. He died actually" (first incarnation of the band).
-"All the groups who'd be playing would have sticky-up hair, and their mams and dads would be waiting for them outside" (Electric Circus punk scene)
-"But Marc had to be got rid of. I sacked him on his wedding day! I didn't know he'd just got secretly wed. I said to Kay, 'We've got to ring him, we've got to get rid of him,' because he was getting out of hand: wanting to do Totally Wired twice a night, playing Container Drivers with his cowboy hat on ..." (Marc Riley's sacking)
-"It's just me with a felt tip" (cover for Hex Enduction Hour) -
-"The older I get, the more I remember things he used to say to me, things like, 'If you're feeling too sexy have a glass of water and run around the backyard'. That's brilliant" (his father)
-"Germany has probably the greatest education system I've ever come across ... Even the daftest Germans read books all day. They've read everything. Even the roadies ... This English teacher I had was supposed to be one of the best in Manchester. Not a fuddy-duddy: a young girl. It was all mixed ages in this class, and she's asking me what I've read, and I'm going - Norman Mailer, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler. She hadn't heard of any of them. Norman Mailer! She hadn't heard of him because he's American; and she's supposed to be one of the best English teachers in Manchester. Never heard of William Burroughs. It's all Jane Austen and Dickens, Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy - which is all good. But it's a poor show when a so-called English expert hasn't any knowledge of Norman Mailer. Even a German dog would know who he is"
There are a fair few jokes like this (a dog with a squint gets a mention elsewhere). It's all part of Smith's well-practised patter that I reckon he probably absorbed from 70s Manchester pubs and clubs. Uber-old school comic Bernard Manning even gets a couple of mentions in the book and I presume his brand of unreconstructed working men's club humour infiltrated Smith's consciousness, even if - as he maintains - he didn't actually enjoy Manning's manically crude routines.
Well, so much for Mr Smith and his hard-as-nails world of tough blokes defiantly drinking themselves to death in Salford boozers where they don't like outsiders. But it's all partly a pose. Or at least an exaggeration of his genuine beliefs. I think some of this is contrived Smithian grotesquery (grotesque after the glam: after his brushes with semi-celebrity, Brix, Top Of The Pops, being interviewed by Loaded magazine or invited to a record industry bash in some appalling place called London). He pretends he's essentially the same as his no-nonsense self-employed father, who took on plumbers outside Strangeways prison. The Fall's much-abused musicians are his "workers", and he prides himself on being fair with his pay (he says this about a dozen times in the book, repetition indeed). But the other side of Smith is evident as well. The literary type who values "good books" and has a strong desire to read and write every day. Renegade is interspersed with passages and smaller fragments of unidentified prose, which I take to be stuff from Smith's notebooks. It's nearly all very good. For example:
"No more lithe lads with shorn skulls peddling small bags of low grade bugle. No more girls with tikka masala tans totalled on White Lightning with the giddy rush of new love. No more young; their history ripped. Gone ..."
A phrase Smith repeatedly uses to semi-comic/semi-serous effect is that he "was more than just a can of Holsten". More than a pisshead, a speed freak contrarian. More than mouthy Mark with his tuneless dirge and his up-yours more-Manc-than-thou aggression. And he's obviously right. When he slightly too forcefully distances himself from punk (I've never aligned myself with the whole punk thing") he does it with a tellingly literary phrase, dismissing the Sex Pistols and the Clash (both of whom he clearly rated in certain very specific ways) as sloganeers, while he claims the Fall were producing complex songs on a par with "short stories". And Renegade also shows how Smith cultivated his reputation, deliberately switching on his "difficult" side when it suited him:
"To a certain extent you've got to be a bit poetic, or a bit aggressive. They have their image of you - and I play up to it. But it's a protection, a screen. I can pull it out when I need it, because with some people you do need it."
To what degree this self-aware side would regularly blur and merge into an everyday drunken surliness as the years wore on, I don't know, but he's surely right when he says that compared to "straight-weird" people (Ian Brown, Russell Brand) his uncompromising approach (the complexity, the resistance to revisiting older material) was always going to see him marginalised within the music industry. And that, dear Fall heads, is that. That's my reading of Renegade, most of which I sped through under the influence of a large glass of red wine while flying at 35,000 feet casting unfriendly glances to fellow passengers left, right and centre, just as MES would have wished. Two final thoughts. I remember a few years ago seeing Smith interviewed on Channel 4 News by Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Smith, glass of lager in hand, sat in a pub spouting absolute nonsense about refugees and how "these young blokes" should have stayed in Syria "to fight". It was utterly embarrassing. Even a simple-minded Farage supporter wouldn't have been as bad, never mind a supposedly intelligent person. Meanwhile, I think Smith's brand of liberal-baiting throwbackery has its limits. Renegade was published in 2008, not 1978, so casually referring to women as "birds" or "girls" is just plain dumb, not a sign of "authenticity". Ditto with his account of the famous time he read out the football scores on Grandstand, when he recalls saying to the BBC staffer ("girl") assisting him, wouldn't she rather be out shopping? (No Mr Smith, I'd rather be here with you, doing my job, despite your idiotic sexism). Did Mark E Smith have a heart, or was he post-punk's ultimate tin man, a (fragile?) bundle of egocentricity and defensive bile? Hard to tell! One passage in Renegade is faintly revealing. Recalling how Buzzcocks had helped out the early Fall with lots of support gigs, Smith finds it in himself to be relatively generous to a band he would surely otherwise have dismissed as rank inferiors. Rather than the Sex Pistols with their punked-up heavy metal, Buzzcocks "went the opposite way", says Smith. "Dead pop, which was a good idea as well. Girly pop". Yeah Mark, pop music for girls. Alright in its way, but not Smith-penned masterpieces for the Salford hard men.
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