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Textbook Messing Up The Paintwork The Wit Wisdom of Mark E Smith Mark E Smith Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Messing Up The Paintwork The Wit Wisdom of Mark E Smith Mark E Smith Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Editor’s Note
Epigraph
ON TOUR
‘And a tow, row, row, row. In memory of the Captain …’ by Michael
Nath
The Fall Peel Sessions
THE FALLEN
The Fall // A User’s Guide
‘Is the Shipping Clerk Out There?’ by George E. Harris
‘Late Fall, Early Winter’ by Tom Clayton
Extracts from the Fallen by Dave Simpson
‘To the Fallen’ by Mark Coverdale
‘The Fall at the Zodiac’ by Art Lagun
Extracts from the Fallen by Dave Simpson
MANCHESTER
‘Twice’ by Karren Ablaze!
‘Visitor’ by Dan Cohen
Material from When Saturday Comes by Andy Lyons
FOOTBALL
Classified football results
MISCELLANEOUS JUKEBOX
‘Snakes in my Boots’ by Roddy McDevitt
‘Legend of the Fall’ by Dave Simpson
‘Attitude’ by Pauline Sewards
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
Studio albums
Live/Studio Albums
Live Albums
EPs
Mark E. Smith Spoken Word Albums
Text Credits
Copyright
About the Book
Renegade
MES
Stuart Maconie
“Where d’you get that? I want one of those. I went into a little Asian
electrical shop in Prestwich to buy a tape recorder like that;
something to get my ideas down and the bloke said “You need this,
sir, a little mini cassette recorder dictation device” and I said no,
mate, I want one that takes ordinary C60 cassettes. I could be in
Oslo, I could be in Naples or Chicago and I don’t want to be faffing
about trying to get hold of those little tiny cassettes …
‘And he says “Oh sir, you are living in the past. These are what
everyone uses now. And everywhere sells the tapes, everywhere
…” So I said, go on then, give us one of those recorders … and
you’d better give us ten of those little tapes.’
Stories abound, and those stories are mostly terrific. Like most people
who knew him even a little, I have scores of vignettes like the above.
But just as journalists are encouraged never ‘to let the truth get in the
way of a good story’, we shouldn’t let the stories, good as they are, get
in the way of the truth. Mark E. Smith was irascible, aloof, funny,
belligerent, wayward, slippery, complicated and smart. But he was
more than just a character. He was also a very real creative talent
responsible for a unique strand of modern British art: the music of The
Fall.
In their baffled and faintly sniffy obituary of Mark, The New Yorker said
that his main contribution was ‘to liberate the rock lyric from the need to
make sense’. This was bunkum. If you grew up in Manchester in the
benighted 70s and 80s, songs like ‘Kicker Conspiracy’, ‘The NWRA’,
‘Totally Wired’ and more made perfect sense. Stewart Lee opined in a
valedictory piece that The Fall in their late muscular hard rock phase
reminded us of music’s power ‘to bypass sense’. Paolo Hewitt, a
metropolitan soul boy tasked with reviewing them for NME, once
bemoaned their ‘brutal and nonsensical music’. From friend and foe
alike, there’s been an eagerness to stress the absurdity and surrealism
of Smith’s writing. But that’s not what I hear most. I hear Wyndham
Lewis and Kafka, a bitter, diamond-hard Modernism, or Vonnegut and
Phillip K. Dick, the amphetamine clarity of a hyperactive, restless mind.
The crucial division in British society today, the cleave that affects how
you vote, how you view the world and your place in it, what you think
about Brexit and politics is not race, class or gender; it’s whether you
went to university or not. John Lydon didn’t. Morrissey didn’t. Nor did
Curtis, Weller, Rowlands, nor MES, though he was surely smart
enough. In fact, none of that rebarbative, objectionable, voluble
generation of autodidacts that built the post-punk musical world did.
This is perhaps the most significant fact in their shared histories. None
of them inculcated the mild liberal consensus that has become
ubiquitous on the artistic left. On a visit to the NME once, hearing and
seeing a record by The Verve and gazing at vocalists Richard Ashcroft’s
lank hair and vacant expression, MES remarked famously ‘God help us
if there’s a war’. The derogatory term snowflake as now used to
describe sensitive young liberals is felt by many to be unfair, dismissive
and offensive. Perhaps. But it is certainly a term I can hear MES using,
three pints and a few Jamesons into a long afternoon on licensed
premises.
A unique mind and voice who was also the purest product of his class
and region at very particular time in its social and cultural history, it’s
hard to imagine we will see his like again.
MES and I are in the bar of the Ramada Hotel Manchester. We are
waiting to be joined by Peter Hooton of The Farm and Paul Heaton
of The Beautiful South to discuss and review the singles of the year
for the NME’s Xmas issue. In the few minutes before they arrive,
Mark disposes of four pints of strong lager. (At the end of the day,
the bar bill will nudge £1000 and The Farm will have to cancel a
show that night because of Hooton’s ‘indisposition’.) The first
record we listen to is ‘You Can’t Touch This’ by MC Hammer, who is
essentially a novelty rap act, a six foot plus black American man in
baggy harem pants. Mark E. Smith looks at his portrait and then at
me, and then sips his pint thoughtfully.
The Fall’s channelling and occultising of the North was ingrained and
unmistakable. But crucially, it also refused to be definitive. What I loved
about Smith wasn’t that he was a clichéd, flat-capped, flat-vowelled
Northerner but actually, that he was none of those things. He was many
other things instead, none of which I’d imagined were compatible with
each other. He was a beer-drinking, Rothmans-smoking aesthete. He
was the embodiment of a particular cultural identity even as he refused
to be imprisoned by it. He’d read books and he’d worked on the docks.
He was simultaneously instantly recognisable and deeply exotic – his
lyrics and the music he somehow coaxed and cajoled out of his
revolving pool of musicians rendered northern England, the place I
somehow felt I belonged, bleakly mystical and sullenly magical.
Smith was everything and nothing like I’d expected. He was already on
the lager at around midday. He helped himself to my cigarettes, swore
spectacularly, resisted flattery. He carried a tangible air of
unpredictability; not menace exactly, but a sort of blunt, unsparing
rigour. There was an un-mistakable edge, certainly – Smith was the
most unbiddable of men, never feeling the need to sell The Fall or
himself to anyone. It’s hard to imagine that his company was ever
relaxing – he was too intense for that and occasionally, he’d refuse to fill
an uncomfortable conversational space; leave you hanging.
I honestly can’t remember much of what we talked about and I’ve long
since lost my copy of the interview. But I don’t really care – plenty of
Mark E. Smith interviews exist, almost all of them better than mine.
Really, the commission was a means to an end: I just wanted to shake
his hand and have a beer or two. I’m absolutely certain I was just
another London media twat to him but even so, he was kind enough not
to show it. He was, in fact, of all the strange things he could have been,
thoroughly likeable. Confounding to the last, then – even after the
interview, the enigma lived on. I imagine it always will.
Simon Reynolds,
Rip It Up and Start Again
‘What surprises me in life is how little
people have to say.’
The Fall had been the first and best part of a double bill with the overly
proficient Magic Band at the Royal Festival Hall, and I had reviewed
that for the Independent (‘MES saunters on to the voluminous stage of
the Royal Festival Hall, drops his jacket by the drums and sets about
dismantling his mic-stand, and over the next hour he sets about
recreating the off-hand menace of a Fall gig by cuffing his bass-player,
twiddling with the amps, poking mics into the drumkit and delivering a
three-note keyboard solo with his hand behind his back, his body
corkscrewed, like some malevolent modern-dress Richard III’).
Although I had in my head all these foggy second hand tales of MES
stubbing out fags in journalists’ eyes, that wasn’t the man or the artist I
met. He was friendly and funny, a fascinating gentleman, soft spoken,
much given to laughter, uninterested in addressing prosaic questions,
always on the ball when it came to more freeform talk about art and
music and the body politic. I think that with MES, what you got from him
was what you brought to the table. It helped to know your stuff, and not
to trust the internet. We drank and talked until his then-wife, Elena,
came to join us. Soon, they went off in a cab, I skulked around the
station a bit. The days of transcribing from those lo-fi little tapes was a
nightmare, but meeting Mark was a dream, really.
The next time I met him, in a weirdly straight bar at the top of Piccadilly,
he said, ‘I didn’t realise it would be you.’ The last time we met, we
finished off in a big dark, empty late afternoon pub, of the older, heavier
kind, drinking tequila. He had a weird smile hanging off his face, his
back to the window, in silhouette. It was like looking at someone
laughing in outer space. There was no sound. I remember him at one
point reassuring me that ‘I’d not end up in prison’. Thanks for that,
Mark.
NME, 1995
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dictated by the artistic requirements of the subject, and not by the
necessities or allurements of what I may call for brevity, competitive
painting. It was never a question with him of the preparation within
twelve months of an annual poster, which was to occupy so much
linespace, and send the betting on him up or down as the case might
be.
What, on the other hand, were the essential ideas of Bastien-
Lepage’s work? To begin with, he was a painter of exhibition
pictures, of what are called in Paris machins. He was an inveterate
salonnier, with the ideals and the limitations of the typical uncultured
Paris art-student, the fort of his atelier. Faire vrai is the sum and aim
of his intention. Realists he and his like have been jauntily labelled
by the hasty journalist. But the truth in their work is truth of
unessentials, and their elaborate and unlovely realities serve only to
cover themes that are profoundly unreal.
To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive of
truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take a
large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture in
hourly tête-à-tête with nature. This practice at once restricts the limits
of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too quickly. You
find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never working in
any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is found to be
almost impossible. You find that you had better confine your
compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the
photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better be
in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of a
model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of a
north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of a
Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own
natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what
is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks
it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise
again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the
sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful
rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a
real peasant. What are the truths you have gained, a handful of
tiresome little facts, compared to the truths you have lost? To life and
spirit, light and air?
The tacit assumption on which the theory and practice of the so-
called realist rests, is that if photography, instead of yielding little
proofs on paper in black and white, could yield large proofs on
canvas in oils, the occupation of the painter would be gone. What a
radical misconception of the nature and function of art this is,
becomes evident when we paraphrase the same idea and apply it in
the region of letters. Few would be found to defend the proposition
that a stenographic report of events and words as they occurred
would constitute the highest literary treatment of a given scene in
life. A page of description is distinguished as literature from reporting
when the resources of language are employed with cunning and
mastery to convey, not a catalogue of facts, but the result of the
observation of these facts on an individual temperament. Its value
depends on the degree of mastery with which the language is used,
and on the delicacy and range of the writer’s personality, and in no
wise on the accuracy of the facts recorded.
Richter says somewhere that no artist can replace another, and
not even the same artist himself, at different periods of his life. One
characteristic of the work of the modern photo-realist in painting is
that almost any one of them could have painted a portion of the work
of any other without making any appreciable discord of execution
apparent. They are all equipped from the first at the studios with a
technique which serves them equally, once for all. It is known as la
bonne peinture. It differs from style in being a thing you can acquire,
and I believe it is even maintained, not only to be perfectible, but to
have been, on several occasions, perfected.
Nothing is more frequently brought home to the student of modern
painting than the truth that the work of the salonnier, the picture, that
is, that is born of the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears its air of
novelty and interest strictly for the season. If he meet it again in a
house, or in the holocaust of a retrospective exhibition, its date is
stamped upon it with the accuracy of a page of Le follet or Le
moniteur de la mode. And whether a picture be asserted at the date
of its exhibition as advanced, or the contrary, as daring or dull, if it is
born of the exhibition, it dies with the exhibition, and the brood to
which it gives birth hold their life on the same tenure.
It was impossible, on seeing Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc at the
Paris Exhibition of 1890, after a lapse of some years since its first
appearance, to resist the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the
heading of “machin.” In the composition, or in what modern critics
prefer to call the placing, there is neither grace nor strangeness. The
drawing is without profundity or novelty of observation. The colour is
uninteresting, and the execution is the usual mechanically obtrusive
square-brush-work of the Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the
leading figure is not impressive or even lucid; and the helpless
introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the rapt maid
completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a
painter with the limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and
sanctified legend with commonplace illustration. A faithful copy of so
strange and interesting a subject as Mme. Sarah Bernhardt cannot
fail to be a valuable document, but Lepage’s portrait has surely
missed altogether the delicacy of the exquisitely spiritual profile. The
format of the little panel portrait of the Prince of Wales evoked in the
press the obviously invited reference to Clouet. The ready writer
cannot have looked at so much as a single pearl in the necklace of
one of Clouet’s princesses.
To judge fairly of an artist, however, we must follow him on to his
own ground. In his portrait of his grandfather, at the same exhibition,
it was quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a workmanlike and
photographic copyist of a figure in repose. It was at the same time
possible to turn from this picture straight to Manet’s fifre, and to his
bon bock, and thus to measure the gulf that separates a meritorious
workman from an inspired executant of the first rank. No useful end
can be gained by obscuring this fact, and if, in league with the
modern gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak of Bastien-
Lepage as a master, what terms are left us for Keene and Millet, for
Whistler and Degas?
WALTER SICKERT.
Chelsea, 1891.
A STUDY OF MARIE
BASHKIRTSEFF.
In Possession of her Mother.] [Engraved by C. State.
Marie Bashkirtseff.
(From a Portrait by Herself.)
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.