Popular culture today is just millions of peeping-Toms keeping up with the Kardashians, pulling-down-to-refresh their social media feeds, jeering as earnest-looking singers get lambasted by gurning, preening, judges. Their so called superiors. Popular culture today is just “heightened prying”.
How did it come to this? When did we turn ourselves into the soap-opera stars that used to live only on Coronation Street. Well, if you’re looking to collar someone for this cheapening of culture, for crimes against dignity, then Mark E Smith has your culprits.
David Frost and Lloyd Grossman.
Yes, David Frost and Lloyd Grossman.
He lays the blame firmly at the feet of the storied interviewer and his sidekick, the trans-Atlantic pasta sauce-man, for the rise in people’s lazy interest only in other people. It’s their show, Through the Keyhole, that started it all off, that lead to Big Brother and all that followed. Who knew that a midweek tea-time show your nan liked would be such an insidious influence?
That’s how Smith lays it out in his book, Renegade, first published in 2008 (possibly now being hastily reprinted in light of his death in January of this year), and is typical of the angle he takes on things. It’s certainly not the usual.
Renegade is a weird title (I have no idea if it was Smith’s idea, or the publisher’s), since, if anything, Smith is known as curmudgeon, which he plays up to in the pages here. Renegade seems too dynamic. More charitably you might describe him as a contrarian, or a musical auteur. Whilst Renegade is ghost written by Austin Collings, the book is unmistakably MES in tone and voice. As well as the well-worn image of a grumpy drinker he also reveals himself to be nuanced, hard to pin down. Just like his 40-year musical project, The Fall.
Smith apparently once said of the band, “If it’s me, and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall”. This reference to the constantly changing line-up of the band, of which Smith was the only constant member, is also dealt with in the book. As Smith turns judge on some of the former members, he uses football terminology: “Craig Scanlon, signed 1978/sold in 1995”. Scanlon, evidently, was a key member of The Fall, playing guitar on and co-writing some of their most notable releases. But all he gets here is three short paragraphs, maybe 100 words, including “…[guitarists] don’t want to fill in the tax forms. But when the going gets good, they start acting like Keith Richards. It’s a syndrome. But it’s not very fall. I’ve found it with a lot of guitarists”. When your band has had more than 40 members, maybe that’s as much as you can expect. There are many former members not mentioned here. In that context, these few harsh words begin to look like a tribute.
In Renegade it’s not just ex-band members that get given short shrift; it’s everyone. The world as laid out to you and I just doesn’t sit right with MES. Your record label asks you for the lyrics to put on the record sleeve? What’s it got to do with them? “It’s like living in the Russian Cold War”. Someone from your band wants to dance to Deep Purple in a night club? Tell them to get back to their hotel room, then get in a fight with them. Do you know what’s wrong the Beatles? Paul McCartney is. “A bloody goody two shoes” who didn’t know how to graft.
If you knew anything about The Fall, or of Mark E Smith, before reading Renegade, you won’t be surprised that this is how he comes across. Who knows if all the stories are true? It doesn’t matter. Smith’s version of events are almost certainly the oddest, most vicious, and funniest. If Frost/Grossman is to blame for that heightened prying, maybe Smith is to blame for that other most modern phenomena, the troll. How to else to explain his desire to “Stay away from it all: attack them from the comfort of my abode, a nice cup of tea and the Chuckle Brothers on the box”. If you miss him already, then Renegade is a great way to join him in some sniping some from the side-lines.
J R Vincent 
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