Books & Poetry

Even those whose musical awareness extends no further than Coldplay and Kylie will have heard of Mark E Smith. The notoriously acid-tongued, flat-voiced Manchester native with a face like a crumpled crisp packet is frontman of The Fall – not so much a band as a British institution, having clocked up a staggering 47 members over 32 eventful years.

The Fall have always stood out from whichever crowd-pleasing pack, not only because of their music – a strikingly linear style of post-punk whose thrilling disregard for ‘natural’ rhythm is massively influential still – but also because of Smith’s doggedly independent spirit and, crucially, his extraordinary lyrics. To call the ‘Carry Bag Man’ a poet is not excessive, even if his sneering, deadpan tone and fondness for both the opaque and the prosaic may make it hard to fathom what the hell he’s on about. There are no such difficulties with this autobiography, written with Manchester journalist Austin Collings. As the Marquis himself claims, ‘Reams of stuff has been written about me in the past, but never in my own words. This is the proper one.’ Indeed it is.

‘Renegade’ is remarkable not only in its freewheeling candour, but also in its (apparent) lack of editorial interpretation. Who knows whether Collings simply got the drinks in and let the tapes roll, or if he’s a master of invisible editing, but either way, this monologue is a comic and provocative joy. Book-ended by tales from two troubled American tours, Smith’s piquant rant gushes in between like a furious fountain of razor-sharp invective over his childhood and the early days of The Fall, relationships/marriage, the record industry/musicians and his views on everything from football to mobile phones (‘they’re a disease; people ringing each other up all the time, talking about tomato sauce and what’s happening in their car’), from drinking and drugs to driving, from books to bankruptcy, from Paul Morley (a ‘daft cunt’) to pubs (the refurbished kind are ‘concentration camps with taps’). Smith’s turns of phrase are frequently brilliant (sunburned Brits have ‘faces like vexed tomatoes’), but his language – ‘dolly birds’, ‘dosh’, ‘doolally’ – often betrays his roots in an earlier time, free from the frivolity, fecklessness and fatuity he reckons characterise our age. Whether this book has turned out ‘like “Mein Kampf” for the “Hollyoaks” generation’, as Smith hoped, is debateable, but as eccentric character studies go, ‘Renegade’ is unbeatable.