Legend of the Fall: Mark E Smith kept swinging to the end

I first met Mark E Smith in 1981, as I waited on the steps of Leeds University, about to see my first ever Fall gig. Suddenly I spied the singer coming out of the building and rushed over to get an autograph. I was a painfully naive schoolboy and had no idea how to approach a pop star – or, rather, an enigmatic cult figure with a fearsome reputation for taking no prisoners. Smith wasn’t exactly the darling of the music press but he was viewed with a mixture of curiosity, awe and fear: I’d already read enough about him to know that he was someone whom one should approach as one might a savage dog.

In the event – and this was my first lesson in his unknowability and unpredictability – he could not have been nicer. He didn’t have a pen, nor did I, but the previous month I’d met Captain Sensible from the Damned on the steps of Unity Hall in Wakefield, and he’d taken a bite out of my concert ticket in lieu of an autograph. I asked Mark E Smith to do the same and I still have the perfect paper impression of his 1981 dental work, which presumably contains enough DNA traces for a clone. Not that there could ever be another Mark E Smith.

I can picture that gig as if it were yesterday. The wilfully unfashionably outfitted Smith was visibly in charge, like a demented building-site foreman, barking out lyrics like they were orders as his band cowered behind him, hammering out a pulverising, hypnotic racket.

Two bands changed my life. Joy Division introduced me to the power of music and the possibilities of sound, and demonstrated that pop songs could be far more – and come from somewhere far deeper and darker – than entertainment. But the Fall changed everything I felt about words and language. From the moment I heard Totally Wired in a friend’s cellar at an impressionable age, Smith’s lyrics had a seismic effect on me. To listen to my first Fall album, Grotesque (After the Gramme) was to enter an unknowable netherworld of “hydrochloric shaved weirds”, “new faces in hell”, hideous replicas of much-loathed dog breeders and a worldview that sneered at Englishmen, councils, rapists, northerners, southerners, students, tourists, dogs and, well, pretty much everyone and everything. This was not the language I knew from pop. It was more like musical science fiction.

I developed an obsession with the Fall that evening in Leeds that has lasted a lifetime. On a good night, with Smith at full pelt and Steve Hanley grappling with the bass like it was a wild animal, they were the best band in the world. On a bad one, they could be an irritable, irascible row. I first vowed to never go and see the Fall again as long ago as 1985, and yet like a dog returning to its vomit, I’d always be drawn back.

They were never quite my favourite band, but were always there or thereabouts, a microcosm of their relationship with the rest of pop. The Fall have had scores of charting records. Meanwhile, key incidents in my own life have been bound up in the Fall: first pint of bitter at that first Fall gig; losing my virginity to the girl who gave me my first Fall album. Later, I went out with a girl called Victoria whose name gave our coupling extra frisson because, well, the Fall were in the charts with a Kinks cover called Victoria.

I’ve seen Smith deliver a professional performance worthy of Sinatra and gigs that were an epic shambles, with the seemingly drunken singer dismantling the band’s gear on stage or “singing” (or rather, making noises) from the comfort of the dressing room. This, as he well knew, was part of the fascination: you never knew which Smith you would get.

We had two further encounters after that fleeting initial meeting. In 1997, when I nervously conducted a “pop summit” for Melody Maker with Smith, the Beautiful South’s Paul Heaton and New Order’s Peter Hook, the three luminaries ended up trudging around Manchester because it turned out that Smith had been barred from almost all the city-centre pubs. It ended up in a drinking session that went on for hours, and through the haze I vividly remember Smith devouring poor Heaton. His crime? He confessed to liking the Fall.

After the third and last encounter, in September 2005, our worlds collided in a new way. Because Smith had been interviewed countless times in the Guardian, my editor had a new angle: how about getting the singer to talk about the numerous band members he’d fired (or who had fired him) over the years, and then get a few of them to talk about Smith? That plan went awry when Smith refused to divulge the whereabouts of any ex-members. Instead, I tracked them down myself – scouring the internet, old phone books and remote Lancashire hillsides, ending up finding more than 40.

This epic quest destroyed my 17-year relationship, and my girlfriend even dumped me for a lorry driver (Container Drivers being my favourite Fall song), but by the time the Guardian article became a book, The Fallen: Life In and Out of Britain’s Most Insane Group, I’d uncovered the jealously guarded inner workings of the Fall, which were as weird as the songs.

Smith ran the group like a small industrial factory, hiring and firing on a whim. I heard from wives and ex-girlfriends, who’d all been ultimately discarded or abandoned by him (one, girlfriend/manager/kazoo soloist Kay Carroll, exited the van on a freeway in the middle of a snowstorm). I heard tales of guitarists being blindfolded on the way to gigs or dumped in Swedish forests; there were stories of “creative tension” and psychological torture. Songs had been recorded live in the back of speeding vans. A drummer who hadn’t played for years found himself press-ganged into the Fall minutes before they played to thousands at Reading, by a singer and guitarist bloodied from going at each other with knuckledusters.

However, Smith was far too complex or intelligent to be a mere ogre. He could be as hilarious as some of the songs (I love the story that the Fall’s contract to appear on Later … with Jools Holland included a clause stipulating that under no circumstances was Holland to play “boogie-woogie piano anywhere near the Fall”). Many ex-members had tales of extraordinary generosity and kindness: how he’d come to their aid when they needed it, or taken them around the world. Carroll travelled from the US to visit “the Smith” (as she calls him) and wounds were healed. Almost all said that the Fall experience had been character-building and most that they’d do it again in a shot.

Granted, this probably didn’t apply to one particularly incredulous guitarist, who revealed how an entire Fall lineup abandoned Smith and his latest wife after he poured beer over the head of their coach driver, who was doing 80mph at the time. While some former members needed acupuncture to recover from being in the mighty Fall, Smith merely dusted himself down. The great tracks kept coming (if not, admittedly, as frequently as they once did) and the singer would emerge fronting another set of musicians he’d stumbled upon in the pub.

Of course, it’s hard not to think of Smith without thinking of alcohol. He was a hardened drinker (and the rest) from his teens. Interviewing him meant matching him pint for pint (I managed to avoid the whisky chasers) and I can still picture him at that last encounter, cackling as he told me how he used to fine drummer Karl Burns £5 every time he hit the tom tom. After four hours, tape machine off, Smith suggested “going over the road for one” and I ended up so plastered that it was several hours before I felt able to get back in the car. I’ll always remember his last words to me, as he departed in a taxi, as cheery (and, weirdly, seemingly as sober) as he was in 1981: “Thanks Dave, I’ve really enjoyed it.” Then, when the book came out, he annihilated it, announcing: “I’ve just fucking burned it.”

He was ever the contrarian, but if there was one thing that was predictable about him, it was his commitment to the Fall. As long ago as 1979, he said that his aim in life was “to keep it going as long as I can”. It says everything about him that he kept performing until the very bitter end – even visibly ill in a wheelchair. Music has lost one of its most distinctive, inimitable characters.