mark e smith – Plain Or Pan

Bury, Chuck

April 6, 2025April 6, 2025 Craig McAllister

Comin’ outta the traps at 100mph, I Want You was the rich fruit of the unlikely pairing of Mark E Smith and Inspiral Carpets.

I Want You – Inspiral Carpets feat. Mark E Smith

It’s a brilliant racket, Mark’s gub full o’ gum filtered through a megaphone vocals the snarly yin to Tom Hingley’s look ma, I made the school choir bellowy yang. It’s very Fall-like, a clattering slab of snarky garage punk that might’ve peeled itself from the caustic grooves of Extricate or Shift Work, with Mark coming in, as is his wont, half-way through the second bar, the group behing him revving up slabs of power chords, propelled breathlessly by a rifling snare drum that sounds as if Craig Gill himself toppled backwards from the top of the mountain marked ‘indie-dance’, broke his drum kit but somehow kept it together enough for the length of the track. Essentially, the song is a three minute snare solo with shouting.

The Inspiral Carpets provide the pop edge, both Tim Hingley and Clint Boon wrapping their Oldham vocal chords around the melody to provide some good old-fashioned call and response backing vocals like some lost in space ’60s beat combo. Hingley takes the second verse. Mark spits his replies. The hefty chunk of basic barre chords and concrete slab bass maintain the urgency. And still the snare drum rattles. There’s some sort of warped duet by the third verse, Hingley’s baritone allowing Smith to freeform and riff around the melody. There’s nary a hint of Boon’s trademark wheezy Farfisa nor the hippity skippity shuffling beat that made early Inspirals so goddam infectious, garagey and danceable. Indeed, ol’ Mark E goes out of his way to blast any silly notions like that clean outta the Lancashire air. He drawls, he shouts, he coughs, he yelps…and he’s totally, totally into it. Driven on by their master, the Inspirals find new sounds in this brave new world of theirs. The record is billed as ‘Inspiral Carpets featuring Mark E Smith’, yet if it was billed as ‘Mark E Smith featuring Inspiral Carpets’, no one could question it.

I think you should remember whose side you are-ah on-ah, as he states on I Want You. “I love the Inspirals,” he said at the time. “Pure pop, innit?”

Released in 1994, just as the UK was waking up to the hot new sounds created by a former Inspiral Carpets roadie and the promise of a new musical movement just around the corner, it’s a real pity that neither Smith or the Inspirals thought to eke out an album’s worth of tunes. Perhaps the Inspirals had desires on recreating their late ’80s/early ’90s success with an audience tuned in to all things ’60s, or perhaps they realised the game was up. Their record compnay certainly did – Mute dropped them four months later. The Fall would turn up as support act on the last Inspirals’ tour. Mark would continue to kick against the pricks, releasing a pair of patchy mid ’90s Fall albums – Middle Class Revolt and Cerebral Caustic – that never veered far from the Fall blueprint, whether the public at large liked ’em or not. And he kept rollin’ on regardless.

The charting of the single meant going on Top Of The Pops, something that Mark E Smith hadn’t experienced at this point. He was – expectedly – awkward and contrarian and managed to offend 2 Unlimited, Eastenders’ Gillian Taylforth, the sainted Elvis Costello and most of the TOTP team. By the time the band was due to film, it had been put to the Inspirals’ manangement that they might be better going on without him…but no one was brave enough to confront the guest vocalist.

Here’s the brilliant Mark-enhanced Top Of The Pops appearance that found its way into living rooms up and down the country, the Inspirals bowl-cutted and rockin’ out (and Martyn perma-fiddling with the tuning pegs of his bass guitar – how very Fall), Mark with one hand in the pocket of his leather blouson, occassionally freeing it to read the song’s lyrics from a scribbled piece of paper. It’s a darkly-lit studio, there’s a lightning war of strobes to accompany the Stooges thunder on the stage and the front couple of rows in the audience are shakin’ loose and gettin’ down to it. A properly great piece of pop telly.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

In The Buff

March 5, 2024March 5, 2024 Craig McAllister

My old pal Derek was mad on coffee, in both senses of the phrase. He drank it the way a fish might presumably drink water, or the way Shane MacGowan evaporated his pints of gin, y’know; one regularly after the other, repeated non stop until bedtime. One too many and he’d be a gibbering, gum rattling freak, speeding away quite happily on a perfectly legal drug. In this state he could carpenter an intricate dado rail around your hall in the time it took the kettle to boil. A solid wood floor could routinely be laid in under an hour. The 60 Minute Make-Over? Our Derek was doing that while Claire Sweeney was still Lindsey Corkhill, mate.

Way back around 1997 Derek bought a satisfyingly chunky Italian percolator and would enjoy the ritual of preparing an espresso for you. Then another. And another. And one more before leaving. We’d be playing guitars and with each passing espresso the strumming got that little bit more ragged and loose-threaded at the ends until we were murdering the classics with Java and Illy and Lavazza running rampant through our systems. I remember rattling like a Scotrail diesel train on the walks back from his house, jerking from heel to toe at a hundred miles an hour, shaky and ill and continually needing to pee, then unable to sleep way past the midnight hour. Have you ever watched an Alex Higgins 100+ break? That. Can you miss the feeling of being totally wired? When your pals are no longer here to share it with you, of course you can.

We were at Songs Ya Bass in Glasgow’s Buff Club at the weekend. An idea that grew out of music nights in Rik and Nell’s house, for 11 strong years SYB has filled a quarterly slot in one of the city’s mankiest upstairs clubs. The premise is simple. Message Rik and Nell with 3 songs you’d want to dance/jump around to and they’ll create a playlist from everyone’s requests then play them at a decent volume until 11pm, when the Buff Club proper opens its doors and the oldies and goldies and grey hairs and nae hairs retreat down the sticky carpeted stairs and make their way to Glasgow Central for the last train home.

It was midway through Dog Eat Dog, or maybe Voodoo Ray on Saturday night, when I realised the Red Stripe was taking me well on my way to pished. The video screen slideshow that never repeats itself all night – a labour of love for Rik – had rotated from Joe Strummer to Run DMC to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest‘s Nurse Ratched and the upstairs balcony and mobbed dancefloor were both a blurry haze of arms aloft folk not giving two hoots about what any onlooker might’ve thought of their dancing styles. Faces loomed in, grinning. The legs loosened to elastic. The sprung wooden floor (sacrilegiously laid on top of a Jim Lambie work of art, they say) became bouncy castle like. The slideshow faded from Lee Perry to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to Muhammed Ali to The Cramps to Pele to Wilko Johnson to all the other greats. The music jarred unexpectedly from Gerald’s ‘hey oh, a-ha, a, uh-oh-ah‘ to Wham’s Young Guns to The Clash to New Order to…! Hey!…

thump-thump-thumpa-thump… ‘I’m Totally Wired! I’m Totally Wired!…I drank a jar of coffee and then I took some of these…. and I’m TOTALLY WIRED!‘ Magic!

The Fall – Totally Wired

The guitars, cheesegrater thin, cut through like tinfoil to a filling. Clang…scree…tcchhhskkkk…; relentless, repetitive and rickety, but really, really great! Steve Hanley, Mark E Smith’s long-time lieutenant plays looping, thumping bass. It worms its way into yr skull and stays there, uninvited but very welcome, the empathetic drums pounding away in the background and hammering you into submission. On top of it all, Mark Smith yelps and barks and screeches like the nails down the blackboard of popular music that he was, abrasive ADHD in the form of verse and chorus.

This – Totally Wired – is the exact jittery, nerve-shredding, anxiety-inducing sound of too much coffee (and other things, if that’s yr bag). It’s also, as it happens, the unofficial soundtrack to those frantic and fidgety walks home from Derek’s, senses jangling into the wee small hours. T-T-T-Totally Wired!!!

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Kraut-y

S’all Gone A Bit Pete Tong

June 1, 2021 Craig McAllister

Dr Bucks’ Letter is late-ish era Fall at their best. Taken from The Unutterable, it’s an incessant, kerb-crawling jackbooted stomp of a track; claustrophobic, indulgent and relentless, the sound of The Fall doing half-speed dub techno. The disciplined beat and fuzzed-up riff underpin a crackle of electro static and a cackle of spoken word, random keyboard outbursts that sound like guard dogs in heat and a clanging Holger Czukay bassline that fights for ear space in-between a returning signature riff. It’s not quite a kitchen sink production, but it’s getting there.

The Fall – Dr Bucks’ Letter

The cherry on the top is Mark E Smith’s spoken word vocal, the lyric referencing an unfortunate fall-out with a friend – ‘of my own making, I walk a dark corridor of my heart, hoping one day a door will be ajar at least so we can recompense our hard-won friendship.’

He may have been viewed as a grizzly, alcohol-soaked hard-heart, but Smith could write flowing sentimentality like no other, even if, perhaps to keep his image somewhat intact, he delivers it in a voice that borders on menacing. There’s the complexity of MES right there.

As the track reaches it’s conclusion, Smith bizarrely – yet thrillingly – reads aloud an abridged version of a magazine interview with superstar DJ Pete Tong, cackling to himself/at Tong’s superficial lifestyle and the vacuousness of it all.

There aren’t many folk who’d have the nerve to lift text from such disparate places – a Virgin Rail customer magazine, as it goes, but there y’go – proof, if any were needed, that Mark E Smith wasn’t yer average writer.

Dr Bucks’ Letter is a Fall track that works for all sorts of reasons. The references in the magazine article to Palm Pilots and CDs and cassettes (no vinyl, Pete?) has the track firmly dated as 2000, a portent of a new millennium with another new Fall line-up in the making and at least a further 83 albums before the fall of The Fall with MES’s untimely death in 2018.

It’s worn far better than some of its lyrical influences, has Dr Bucks’ Letter. Indeed, it never sounds anything other than ‘now’, a decent snapshot of a band who’d perhaps lost their way a wee bit at the time.

Gone but not forgotten, Kraut-y, Peel Sessions

Kurious-ah and Kurious-ah

May 29, 2019May 29, 2019 Craig McAllister

Dead Beat Descendant by The Fall was the first track of theirs that really piqued my interest. Until then, I’d pegged Mark E Smith’s rattling racket as irritating and annoying, the atonal sound of Regal-stained fingers slowly scraping their way down a blackboard. When it popped up in the middle of an episode of Snub TV, Dead Beat Descendant had me hooked.

It wasn’t just the stinging garage band guitar riff, played on a Rickenbacker by a sulky, peroxide shock-wigged Brix that pulled me in, or the gnarly, relentless and repetitive Stray Cats meets Stooges bass, or the occasional daft parp of a one-fingered keyboard, or the metronomic tribal tub thumping that held the whole thing in place that got me – it was the group’s leader that grabbed me by the short ‘n curlies and demanded my attention. That, and the ballet dancer. I’d heard The Fall, but I’d never seen The Fall. And that was apparently important.

Smith is hunched over his microphone and ready to spring, the German army-issued leather greatcoat he’s wearing letting all present know who’s in charge. “Come back here!” he demands with barely under the surface menace. The omnipresent smouldering fag, more ash than cigarette, is lodged at a downwards 30 degree angle between his fingers as he delivers the vocal, a lip-curled sneer the equal of a Mancunian Gene Vincent. Between lines he delivers terrific little off-beat Supreme handclaps and chews on an invisible glob of gum whilst staring his musicians down, lest they consider veering from his well-chosen path. Maybe that’s where the “Come back here!” line comes from. The band, as slick as the gears in a Victorian workhouse, are in tune with their leader and dutifully do what’s demanded of them.

Well, stone me! It turns out there was no German army greatcoat after all. Or a shock-wigged Brix. Or long-burning Regal King-Sized ‘tween the digits. It’s funny how your 30 year-old version of events turns fiction into reality. And it’s funny how, as it turns out, it’s the music that endures rather than the vision. Those hand claps, though… And the told-you-so smug grin on Mark’s face at the end. They were real.

It’s a great clip mind you. The ballet dancer (the awkward piece of the Mark/Brix split jigsaw, if you believe what you read online) pirouettes obliviously around the studio in the middle of the racket, in practise for her stint on stage with The Fall as they prepare to provide the musical backdrop to Michael Clark’s I Am Curious, Orange ballet at the Edinburgh Festival.

A weird pairing, it’s certainly something that’d have been worth seeing, with Brix sitting cross-legged atop a giant hamburger while Mark prowls betwixt and between the ballet dancers, spitting venom about King Billy and barking out Cab It Up and Wrong Place, Right Time amongst others. I Am Kurious Oranj isn’t the top of the list of critics’ favourite Fall albums, but it’s right up there alongside Extricate on mine.

Here’s 2 contemporary Peel Sessions versions of future Kurious Oranj tracks.

The Fall – Dead Beat Descendant (Peel Session, 31.10.88)

The Fall – Kurious Oranj (Peel Session 31.10.88)

Hard-to-find

Telephone Thing

January 25, 2018January 25, 2018 Craig McAllister

Did he really sack a sound engineer for ordering a salad? Did he really read out the football results live on the telly? Did he really leave a hapless member of the band in the middle of Sweden? Or, on the way to spending an unplanned night in the cells, have a full-on fisticuffs punch-up on stage in New York with one of his more loyal and long-standing Fall members?

Yes. Yes he did. He was Mark E Smith. One of our greatest cult figures. It was his business to be as caustic and obtuse as possible, the abrasive scraping fingers down the chalkboard of contemporary music. His was real working man music, approached in the same way you or I might approach our own 40 hours a week job. It wasn’t for everyone though. He couldn’t stand poseurs or pretence, cared not a jot about chart positions. He changed the players in his group as regularly as the England team manager freshening up his options in attack.

“There’s a two/three year cycle. Sooner or later you’re going to need a new centre forward.”

I never met Mark E Smith. I never even saw The Fall live. I know….I know…. Every time I’ve ever driven over the border from England back into Scotland, though, just as we’ve passed the blue ‘Welcome To Scotland’ sign, I’ve broken into a spontaneous 5 second burst of The Fall’s Hit The North. Der-Der-Der-Der-Der-Der-Duh-Der HIT THE NORTH!! No one else in the car has any idea of what’s happening, but it’s over as quickly as it started. In the words of the man himself, he is not appreciated, in my car at least.

The Fall played in my hometown a few years ago, supported by no less than John Cooper Clarke. Did I go? Did I heck. I think it was around the time our eldest was born, so I’ve a reasonable excuse, but it’s no excuse really. I’ve form for this sort of thing, as you might know if you’re a regular on here, but missing The Fall when they roll quite unexpectedly into your hometown, even with little in the way of fanfare or basic promotion? It’s just not the done thing to do. And I done went and did it.

Over the next few days, many better words by better and more qualified writers will be written about Mark E Smith and the uniqueness of The Fall. I’m not going to try. Here’s a true story instead.

No, I’ve never met him. No, I’ve never been in the same room as him. But I’ve spoken to him. Or, to be exact, he’s spoken to me. Around 1990 we had a rehearsal room in Kilmarnock’s Shabby Road, home to the Trashcan Sinatras – The Next Big Thing – and a ragbag collection of sundry acts who thought they were already the next big thing. I class my own band in this category, of course. The Trashcans were on Go! Discs, so all manner of folk would be around the place. Half Man Half Biscuit came and recorded some stuff and played football on the waste bit of ground/(cough) ‘garden’ at the side. The Stairs borrowed a guitar string from me. Chas Smash was ‘avin’ a fag and a cuppa tea in the kitchen one time. And John Leckie, fresh from sprinkling his magic atop the Stone Roses’ debut, was in for a few days to work on some songs with the Trashcans. They’d end up on their 3rd single, Circling The Circumference, which itself was enhanced by one of Leckie’s trademark Stone Roses’ whooshes midway through. You should seek it out if you’re unfamiliar with it.

At one point, Leckie left his notebook/Filofax unattended, and this is where the real fun began.

I took a Shabby Road business card from a table and quickly copied out some telephone numbers; Steve Mack (‘Petrols‘), Phil Saxe, Happy Mondays’ contact at the time, Steve Lillywhite, Lee Mavers and at the bottom, the Hip Priest himself, Mark Smith (‘Prestwich‘). It was funny, because we were sitting just up the road from Prestwick. We’d never heard of Prestwich until then. Anyway, fast forward a couple of hours….

….back in home territory, The Crown, and fuelled by Dutch courage, we fired a few pieces of loose change into the public phone at the end of the bar and picked a number. Lee Mavers was first. We dialled. It rang. “‘Allo?” a voice answered. Unmistakably Scouse. Shit! I passed the phone to Rab. Pause. Five of us stifling sniggers, daring not to breathe. There’s a muffled voice on the other side. “Aye,” says Rab. “Aye. Is Lee in?” Pause. Shit! Rab hangs up. Cue lots of nervous laughing and “I can’t believe we did that!” mutterings.

Buoyed by youthful bravado, I gulped the dregs of my pint and dialled Mark Smith. Three rings at most and then it was answered. On the other end of the phone was the unmistakable voice of Mark E Smith. Not Mark Smith of Prestwich, contact in someone’s phone book, but Mark E Smith, the pop star who was soundtracking my life presently with the Extricate album and the Telephone Thing single. “Yeah?” he drawled, totally Mark. Pause. “Yeah?” Louder this time. “Who’s this?” I panicked. I hung up. Of course. I Iike to think he looked at the silent receiver, irritated, before dropping it into the cradle and muttering how dare you assume I want to parlez-vous with you. He definitely didn’t though.

In hindsight, I wish I’d told him how fantastic these two tracks are, but then, he knew that already.

The Fall – Spoilt Victorian Child