Remembering Mark E. Smith, born on this date in 1957. —Ed.
As The Fall’s constant fount of creativity, vocalist-songwriter Mark E. Smith has attained a rare position in the rock pantheon, with the man and his band exhaustively covered in print form. And so, the publication of Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall might seem an inessential item. However, the objective of editors Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley isn’t biography, but is rather to assemble between hardcovers a series of ambitious essays plus photos of front and back album covers, flyers, correspondence and much more.
Norton and Stanley’s objectives for Excavate! are admirably bold, but it still feels right that the book’s final piece is a eulogy, by Richard McKenna, that was published on January 30, 2018, six days after Smith’s death, for the website We Are the Mutants, of which McKenna is senior editor. It’s also fitting that his opening line functions a bit like tripwire for writers covering this hefty tome who might not have finished the text or indeed even bothered to begin: “Mistrust all eulogies containing the words ‘contrarian,’ ‘curmudgeon’ and ‘national treasure’: these are inevitably the work of hacks.”
It’s pretty clear the author was referring to those either choosing to or fulfilling the given task of eulogizing Smith in the period shortly after his passing, so that hopefully the next sentence in this paragraph will escape McKenna’s harsh judgement (but if not, them’s the breaks). If by now so well-established as to be considered clichés, in the admittedly short interval since his passing, “contrarian” and “curmudgeon” (we’ll set “national treasure” aside for a bit), along with an unquenchable thirst for booze, remain dominant aspects of Mark E. Smith’s persona.
Norton and Stanley’s book doesn’t refurbish his reputation but instead complicates the issue by delving into the outside forces that helped shape Smith’s perspectives and his art. That means the man isn’t always front and center, with the shift of emphasis onto influences artistic, cultural, and environmental driving home that Smith’s antagonisms weren’t kneejerk or for the sake of just being difficult (well, mostly), and that his grumbling and grousing ultimately stemmed from the same complex worldview that shaped his art.
Integral to Excavate!’s fabric is the examination of Smith’s working class background, which is of course far from a secret (e.g. “Prole Art Threat”), though here, his roots shed light on his dim view of the Rough Trade and Factory labels. It’s also covered in Paul Wilson’s piece focusing on The Fall’s numerous gigs in Britain’s Working Men’s Clubs (i.e., private social clubs that proliferated in the UK’s industrial regions beginning in the 19th century).
The Working Men’s Clubs don’t have a direct equivalent in the USA, but it might be a little like catching Mission of Burma playing at a Knights of Columbus on the outskirts of Boston in 1980. While Wilson’s essay clarifies that The Fall didn’t necessarily play a lot of shows at these venues (16 documented instances; there could be more), enough of them took place (with engagements in the ’90s and then re-emerging once more in the 2010s) to be representative of Smith’s non-glamourous, perpetually dues-paying ideal.
Wilson’s piece segues nicely into Stanley’s entry, which covers The Fall’s relationship to Amateurism and by extension to concepts/ categories like DIY, underground rock and indie. Excavate! makes plain that Smith wasn’t anti-pop, but rather maintained a hatred for musical flash. Later in the book, Siân Pattenden’s essay “‘I Want to Sell a Million’: Use Value, Exchange Value and Woolworths – Twickenham, 1983–5” offers a spot on assessment of the Brix Smith-era, often regarded as The Fall’s pop phase, though Pattenden convincingly argues that it was at the same time the band’s most subversive.
As someone who experienced this period as it unfolded, I can attest that The Fall’s progressions during this period registered as distinct from the refinements and commercialisms transpiring roughly simultaneously from assorted other post-punk affiliated outfits. Highlighting the depth of the Brix-era is the amount of attention paid in the book to The Fall’s collaboration with dancer-choreographer Michael Clark, from which sprang The Fall’s superb final LP for Beggars Banquet, 1989’s I Am Kurious Oranj (Clark contributes a forward).
But Excavate!’s most fascinating stretch comes courtesy of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who tackles “The Fall’s Pulp Modernism,” in a lengthy, three-part treatise. To elaborate a bit, the subject is Smith’s penchant for “making it new” (per old man Ezra) whilst being profoundly impacted by the horror fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen, and H. P. Lovecraft.
After this, Mark Sinker retorts in mild disagreement as he expands upon Fisher’s piece (which actually references an earlier text by Sinker). The Pulp Modernist double capper is Michael Bracewell and Jon Wilde’s “Mark E. Smith,” which delivers an inversion of Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey’s “Wyndham Lewis,” the linked pieces likening Smith to the author and founder of the Vorticist art movement.
If the above portends heavy reading, that wasn’t my experience, as additional topics include Smith’s football fandom, the importance of The Fall’s cult following in the USA, and the band’s later-period dysfunction and bad behavior. And it bears acknowledging that if Smith is deemed a “national treasure,” he’s something of a problematic one, certainly for those who demand one’s political and social views be neither contradictory nor incendiary (we’ll leave the onstage fights with band members out of it).
As the pages turn, there are mentions of William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Philip K, Dick, and William Burroughs, with the writerly comparisons more frequent than the musical ones as The Fall’s singular status gets is reinforced, though with loose connections to The Birthday Party and even The Cramps (who shared Smith’s enthusiasm for rockabilly and novelty songs).
But strange to me is the lack of a solitary mention of Pere Ubu, a comparison that seems screamingly obvious to me in terms of career longevity and trajectory (though maybe that’s why it’s elided). Funny (and not without merit) is Smith’s self-comparison to John Waters, which comes amid disdain for David Byrne. But the derisiveness isn’t all Smith’s as the essayists denigrate Pavement as rank imitators (not a surprise to anybody familiar with both Grotesque (After the Gramme) and Slanted and Enchanted) and dismiss Public Image Ltd. as a cabaret band (circa 1981!).
These putdowns, nicely complementing what I’ll call the book’s deep Britishness, bring back fond memories of reading tattered import copies of the NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds as I hoped to glean a tidbit of info or two on The Fall. Three decades later, I thoroughly enjoyed Excavate! and learned a lot. For fans of this incomparable band, I’ll say Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley’s curatorial achievement is indispensable.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
