Mark E. Smith’s dark comments about the death of John Lennon
What can you say about Mark E. Smith that he hasn’t already told you himself? The most acerbic man in Manchester (which puts him pretty high in the running for the most acerbic man worldwide) was as cutthroat as a certain Sweeney’s razor, but unlike Mr Todd, he never made a song and dance about it. Someone who most certainly did was John Lennon.
If Lennon identified as a revolutionary with any more fidelity, then his image would’ve been banned from the BBC. However, this John Lenin act waned towards the end as it did for many counterculture kids who slowly gave in to the comforts of suburban conformity and Smith was not prepared to stand by and let that legacy go unaddressed.
As ever, The Fall frontman decided to tackle the issue in the least opportune fashion and threw himself straight into the debate at the troubling moment of Lennon’s untimely end. “The first thing I thought was it would have happened in Liverpool,” the shocking Manc once said. Before adding for good measure: “I don’t know, I sometimes think things like ‘Maybe he had it coming to him’, y’know. Like, life is like that.”
Going on to clarify his truly nettlesome point, he added in. his stumbling fashion: “If you sort of lead a whole generation of people on to do something like leave home, freak out, and become revolutionaries, and then you turn round and say, ‘Well, I’ve just met this woman, Yoko, who’s fuckin ‘great’– she is, like, I think that – but she broke his balls. It’s not a sexist thing to say, y’know… but it’s like everything came back on him.”
In Smith’s warped view, he believed that once you publicly extolled a message of libertine virtues, you had to stick by them forevermore, and any hint of temperance was tantamount to a u-turn that left millions stranded in an abandoned territory without an idol as spearhead. “He released an album about how great it was to be straight, and there’s hundreds of people – well, there must be millions of people whose lives he affected,” Smith commented.
“I mean, he even got through to me – I mean, like ‘Working Class Hero’…I don’t think of myself as one, but I think that from his situation, it’s so fuckin’ good that he actually gleaned that from one song. I think that’s one of the few good things he did,” Smith opined. “He actually says, like, ‘I was screwed for what I did’. That’s why he became an American citizen, I think.”
However, Smith’s somewhat wayward conclusion rather nettlesomely ties that to his murder in a callous and misguided fashion. As The Fall man stated: “But you can’t do that. Life is very cruel like that: you can’t lead people on for ten years, and just turn round and say ‘I’m a father now’.”
