“I was too soft”: How Mark E Smith fired 66 bandmates from The Fall
There’s an element of truth to the idea that to be a successful frontperson in a band, you’ve got to be a little bit insane, but they don’t come much more loopy than The Fall’s Mark E Smith.
For 42 years until his death, Smith ran the entire band like a dictatorship, and it wasn’t the benevolent kind that one might secretly hope for. The madcap Mancunian was unwavering in his commitment to the project that he formed in Prestwich in 1976, and wouldn’t let anything potentially jeopardise the future of it, which led to an almost constant sense of unrest emanating from the group.
The Fall cycled through a grand total of 66 members over the course of four decades as a band, which was either as a result of his brutal hiring and firing policy, or due to the fact that people couldn’t hack being in a band with such an egomaniac, and choosing to call time on their tenure for the fear that any more time spent in Smith’s company would drive them to insanity.
At the end of the day, this didn’t affect them all too much, and their music remained of a pretty high standard across the span of their career. Over 31 studio albums, they managed to become something of a cult act at the time, and with retrospect, they now stand as one of the most influential post-punk bands of all time, who continue to inspire future generations within the genre.
Because Smith had such a strong idea in his head of where things ought to be going at any given time, he needed to be ruthless in this respect, and anyone who didn’t see eye to eye with him simply had to be disposed of, no matter how tyrannical it made him seem to any onlookers.
Not only did the personnel change an unprecedented number of times, but the band changed labels frequently as well due to Smith’s incessant demands as the leader. While a lot of people thought he was difficult to work with and proclaimed that the idea of being in The Fall seemed like signing a contract to work in hell, the way he saw things was that he was actually far too kind.
During an interview with Mojo in 2016, two years before his death, he reflected on his tumultuous career, even joking about how they’d managed to stay with one label, Phonogram, for three consecutive years, as though he had a certain degree of self-awareness about his belligerent ways. “Fuck me, they were quite tolerant, really, weren’t they?” Smith quipped, before immediately changing tune.
“I should have got rid of the group. We’ve left Phonogram and we’ve fucking got in the Top 10, and it’s not like, ‘We fucking showed ’em.’ All they can think about is, ‘How will it affect my mortgage?’ I’m paying them New Order wages, the same as me.”
While he seemed to think that his egalitarian distribution of the band’s earnings may have been enough for people to see that he wasn’t the one in the wrong, he then went a step further to argue that it was certainly the fault of other members that they weren’t able to stay in the band. “People say I was too soft with them,” he added. “I spoiled them to death. Everybody told me. [Steve] Hanley, [Craig] Scanlon, they were just in a dream world.”
As if his ego hadn’t been inflated enough already, he then went on to proclaim that he was still blown away by the fruits of his labour around this period in the early 1990s. “I listened to The Infotainment Scan, and it’s fucking brilliant and fucking hard,” he claimed. “It’s way ahead of its time, all our work is.”
There’s simply nobody like Mark E Smith, and it may well be for the best that there will never be anyone like him again in the future.
