“I threw a bottle at them”: Five acts Mark E Smith hated the most
When you mention The Fall in certain circles, you’ll usually be met with praise for their status as one of post-punk’s most treasured and uncompromising acts. Their mix of experimental guitars and Mark E Smith’s biting worldview made them a truly singular force. But while you’ll find no shortage of people happy to unpack what made The Fall so vital, just don’t try doing it in front of Smith himself.
Smith was known for despising many things, and it rarely took an invitation in interviews for him to express his disdain. But if there was anything that disgusted him most, it was the idolatry and reverence with which he was held up as a figure of subversive artistic genius. After his passing in 2018, there was a huge outpouring of tributes to his brilliance — and you can bet he’d have hated that with every fibre of his being.
Still, while he was never content with being referred to as a legend, he was seemingly happy to dismiss other esteemed acts if he didn’t think their works were up to scratch. Considering how razor-sharp his wit could be on the record, you might think that his takedowns of others would be just as verbose, but due to his dedication to necking pints, many of the criticisms he levelled at others ended up being slurred strings of expletives that were more comical that insightful.
As much of an icon as he is an iconoclast, here are five examples of Smith’s potty-mouthed slander towards other acts who either idolised him, came too close to ripping him off, or simply had the misfortune of existing at the same time as the Mancunian misanthrope.
Five acts Mark E Smith took issue with:
Mumford & Sons
Hating Mumford & Sons isn’t an unusual position to take and certainly wouldn’t be off-brand for Smith. Their position as a much-reviled act is hugely justified by their insufferability as both human beings and as progenitors of the insipid ‘stomp and holler’ brand of folk music that ruled the airwaves in the early 2010s, and unsurprisingly, Smith was not a fan of the latter.
They would appear at the same festival in Ireland in 2010, perhaps one of the most unusual co-bookings of all time, and Smith took particular umbrage at having to listen to the chart-topping act as they geared up for their performance. “There was this other group, like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible,” Smith said in an interview. “I said, ‘Shut them cunts up!’ And they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them.”
If only they’d taken heed, then the world might be a slightly better place.
Pavement
In a far more egregious slagging off that Smith dished out, he revealed that he wasn’t a fan of the California slacker rock legends Pavement. Of course, the main issue that he had with the Stephen Malkmus-fronted group was the fact that they took a huge amount of inspiration from The Fall and proudly wore said influence on their sleeve in their early work.
No matter how lovingly they paid tribute to his work, it was never going to go down well in Smith’s eyes, and he’d voice his criticisms of their output in 1993 while they were still riding high from the slow-burning success of Slanted and Enchanted. “It’s just the Fall in 1985, isn’t it?” Smith protested. “They haven’t got an original idea in their heads.”
Sonic Youth
Whether your music is good or not, you don’t need permission to make records. While it might be a wise idea to impose more restrictions on some artists who frankly don’t deserve to have a platform, Mark E Smith was all in favour of vetoing the work of seminal noise rockers Sonic Youth after he once suggested in an interview that they should “have their music license revoked“.
Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore would find great hilarity in this statement and directly responded to it many years later in an interview with NME. “I was never influenced by them, and never understood why Mark had such a hair up his ass about Sonic Youth,” Moore told the magazine. “But he was very envious of anybody who was getting attention contemporaneously to his own work.”
While the two reportedly met on a few occasions, which Moore says was a pleasant experience where Smith was “a very congenial gent”, he clearly didn’t save up an ounce of politeness when speaking about their music.
Bob Geldof
Despite all of the humanitarian work he’s committed himself to throughout his life, Bob Geldof’s self-righteousness is usually the main obstacle that gets in the way of people liking him. Once again, Mr Smith unequivocally declared his hatred for the former Boomtown Rats singer and taken many opportunities to gleefully call him a “twat”.
You don’t even need to be speaking to Smith about Geldof for him to want to bring up his hatred for the Irishman. In a 2011 interview with The Independent, the conversation was steered towards Smith’s thoughts on the then Conservative government, and somehow, he found a way to tangentially work in his ire for Sir Bob. “A friend told me he met [David] Cameron, who said he was at Live Aid,” Smith recounted. “We have fucking Glastoheads running the country. People like Geldof, who is a dickhead. They’re not even as intelligent as him.”
U2
Geldof wasn’t the only Irish rock legend that felt the burn of Smith’s acrid insults, and once again, while it’s not uncommon for people to dislike U2, Smith made sure his remarks on the band weren’t seasoned with a shred of ambiguity.
He’s condemned their existence in interviews on many occasions, but the most scathing put-down he ever levelled at the band came from a lyric in The Fall’s 1993 track, ‘A Past Gone Mad’. After taking swipes at Peter Gabriel and actor Ian McShane earlier in the song, Smith comes out with the immortal line: “If I ever end up like U2 / slit my throat with a garden vegetable.”
God knows how he was ever concerned that there was the faintest possibility that this could happen.
