The awkward moment Mark E Smith compared The Fall to “a Nazi organisation”
Trying to pin down the exact, de facto history of a band like The Fall is an impossibility, not only because around 50 different members passed through its ranks over the decades, or because they produced over 30 studio albums, but also because its glorious leader and only continuous member, Mark E Smith, had a penchant for messing with interviewers.
Pouring over old interviews of Smith and The Fall, it is incredibly difficult to separate genuine facts from the songwriter’s sardonic persona. Take, for instance, when he once claimed that he had “never heard of” Suede, despite having, not long before that, had Brett Anderson’s outfit perform as their support act. During that tour, by the account of Mat Osman, Smith was “great” to the band and, contrary to his persona, very supportive of their efforts.
It seems that Smith simply hated interviewers – or, rather, interviewers – and viewed each one as an opportunity to espouse his sense of humour and, in many cases, cast scorn upon virtually every band that wasn’t The Fall. Particularly towards the end of his time on Earth, in fact, the Prestwich songwriter took multiple opportunities to set the record straight on the history of The Fall and, in doing so, muddied the waters even further.
During one of his final interviews with Uncut back in 2017, only a few months before his ultimate passing, Smith pulled no punches when discussing his former bandmates. He, for instance, discredited the memoir of Brix Smith, who, as well as having two very successful stints in the band, was also married to Mark E Smith for a time. Seemingly, he took issue with his former partner’s suggestion that his flat in Prestwich had primitive bathing facilities: “Who in Manchester, in any fucking flat of a 23-year-old person in the ’80s, had a shower?”
Brix Smith is not the only one of the band’s many former members to have put their musical memories into print, either. Longtime bassist Paul Hanley published his memoir, The Big Midweek, back in 2014, and Smith didn’t feel any warmer towards that offering, describing it as “like the fucking memoirs of a psychopath” – a quote which miraculously didn’t make it to the book’s cover.
One of Smith’s biggest issues with that book, as he went on to describe, was the fact that it was co-written by Olivia Piekarski, whom the bassist had met at a Fleet Foxes gig. As he continued in his rant, Smith revealed how he knows so much about his former comrades and their activities, declaring, “The Fall is like a Nazi organisation, I’ve got my working-class people, they tell me everything. So I know it all.”
In typical fashion, Smith went on to poke holes in Hanley’s book, focusing specifically on a fabled incident in which the frontman abandoned the band on a journey to Calais when their van ran out of petrol. Nevertheless, it is difficult to get over the songwriter equating his band to the architects of the Third Reich.
While it certainly isn’t difficult to envision a network of post-punk spies feeding back information to their scornful dictator in a ‘the walls have ears’ style, and he did once reveal that if he made Prime Minister, he would declare war on France, it is also rather awkward to equate one of the greatest British songwriters of the 20th century with Adolf Hitler.
Then again, it certainly fits in with the kind of bizarre chaos that a typical Mark E Smith interview usually ended up in, even during his later days.
