True to his northern soul

WHEN the call comes in from Mark E Smith, redirecting me from recording studio to pub, the taxi driver is sceptical. "Don’t think it’s open, cock," he says. "We’ve had a lot of pubs shut down because of fighting. Gangs in Salford and Broughton have got theirs closed - now they’re doing the ones in Prestwich."

But Prestwich is Smith’s Manchester; he lives nearby and his local knowledge is the more sound. The Friendship is open, just not yet, so we stand around the car park like alcoholics until Smith gets bored - this takes all of five seconds. Then he summons Ben, his guitarist in the 548th incarnation of The Fall, and orders him to drive us to the next watering-hole. Bingo, the Woodthorpe is fully functioning, and so begins my long liquid lunch with one of the most important figures in popular music over the past 30 years.

The Fall were inspired by punk, named after an existentialist novel by Albert Camus and eulogised by the late John Peel as the band against whom all others must be judged. The ex-docker who formed them has been compared to Philip Larkin, among others, but never admits where his sneering, sarcastic world view comes from.

I’d been told Smith, 48, was a difficult bugger. I’d heard about the time he pulled a knife on an interviewer. But by the second pint, he’s saying he thinks he’s "getting softer, nicer". By the third he’s confessing his favourite TV programme is Neighbours. And by the time he tells me to "Get them in, Aidan - and a whisky," he’s casually mentioning how he turned down the chance to become Doctor Who.

I’d just asked him if he’d seen Christopher Eccleston’s reincarnation of the Time Lord and in particular the first episode where he utters a line worthy of Smith himself: "All planets have a north."

"Nah, I’ve heard he’s good, like, but 10 years ago there was talk of me being the Doctor. I was down at the BBC, doing a session for Peel, and this bloke - he must have been a Fall fan - said a place on the short-list was mine if I wanted it. ‘Nah, I don’t do acting,’ I said. Well, could you see me fighting t’Daleks?"

On today’s evidence, no. The man behind ‘Hit The North’, ‘The North Will Rise Again’ and ‘Rowche Rumble’ cuts a shilpit figure, hunched over his lager and fags. He constantly rubs his legs, a legacy of the hip fracture he sustained last year slipping on an icy pavement, which is about an unrock ’n’ roll as Keith Richards injuring himself in his library. He fits in with the Woodthorpe’s gallery of sad, worn-out faces, and quickly feels the need to apologise for his scruffy appearance.

"My water’s gone off so it took me a fookin’ hour and a half to shave this morning. The funny thing is, my father was a plumber, his father before him, and every school holiday I had to work with my dad. I didn’t take anything in. And look at plumbers now: they earn a fookin’ fortune. Four or five years ago, when I was completely broke, I thought: ‘Why didn’t I learn the trade?’"

Could have been a plumber, could have been Doctor Who. Instead he’s stayed Mark E Smith, and we should all be grateful for that. Of course, many more people acknowledge Smith’s importance than actually buy his records; no one knows this better than him.

He’s also aware that all new bands must credit The Fall as an influence; it’s obligatory. "I sometimes wish I had a lawyer. I’d tell him: ‘Hey, get them groups to stop mentioning my fookin’ name’." For instance, LCD Soundsystem - almost as achingly, omnipresently hip as Franz Ferdinand were this time last year - garner almost as many Fall comparisons. "I don’t see it myself, about any of them," says Smith.

We should stop here or at least slow down, take on some water, and correct any impression given that Smith is Mr Grumble-Guts. Not today, he’s not.

HE DOESN’T ENVY Franz Ferdinand their sales or their cheekbones. He doesn’t regret those wilfully perverse moments when he fell out with record companies, refused to follow up the Top 30 hit ‘There’s A Ghost In My House’ with another easy cover and, rather than embrace celebrity, penned ‘How I Wrote Elastic Man’ about the fleeting nature of fame. "No, no, I couldn’t have done it. I’ve never wanted a fookin’ big house, fools running after me. I’m quite private."

And he’s still relentlessly pursuing his singular, sardonic vision. A new album has been recorded in New York and Smith is thrilled with it. "There’s a theme running through the songs - assumption." But don’t assume the album is coming out here. Without a British contract, The Fall have been picked up by a American label, Narnack, and the US may get the album first, "just to be spiteful". This is a faintly sacrilegious state of affairs for a great British institution such as Smith, who has also been likened to James Joyce. Of his influences, he says: "I’m not saying they’re not there, but if I wanted to be someone else, I wouldn’t have formed a band in the first place."

Emboldened by the drink, I press him for a musical inspiration. "I’ll give you two: the Prestwich Evening News and the Salford Advertiser. Local papers are great for material and I love the adverts and junk mail an’ that. Don’t read what everyone else reads, that’s my tip."

Smith has been a voracious reader since childhood. "My dad wouldn’t allow any books in the house apart from plumbing manuals and the Encyclopedia Britannica so I went down t’library. It’s closed now."

The old man’s gone, too, and Smith says the older he gets, the more he misses him. "It’s funny, my mum and sisters were always like ‘Our Mark’s in the papers again’ but my dad would say: ‘Why don’t you write love songs? People are stupid, they don’t want songs about history an’ that. Get yourself a van.’

"I didn’t think he rated me until, after I died, I met up with his mates down his local, the George. That’s gone too - more fookin’ flats. Anyway, I sat on his old bench and these fellas were like: ‘Jack was so proud of you, you know.’ I didn’t know! But I kind of like that about him. There was never any fuss."

This sets Smith off on a rant about New Dads and their biographers, Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons. He remembers being summoned to the NME by Parsons and Julie Burchill and promised a front page. "They were like: ‘The Clash have sold out - The Fall are the great new communist band.’

"They asked about my influences and I told them I loved Johnny Cash. ‘You’ve just blown your cover,’ they said. ‘Too bad,’ I said, ‘he means a lot to people where I come from.’ Then the other day I’m reading how much Parsons misses the same Johnny Cash. Fookin’ revisionist!"

I tell Smith it doesn’t sound like he’s mellowing but he insists he’s no longer a fearsome taskmaster with the band. "They get away with things I’d have shot them for before." The current line-up includes second wife Elena Poulou (his first, Brix Smith, led the group perilously close to the mainstream).

"It was important to my dad, and my grandad, to have four or five blokes working with them. They were always being told to go out on their own, that they’d make more money that way. My dad drove a Lada and the rest of our street laughed behind his back about that. I’ve never thought of this before, but maybe that’s my attitude towards The Fall."

It’s time for Smith to round up the greatest plumbing crew in rock. But it’s also time for one more drink... "I’ve told you about my dad and my grandad; I haven’t mentioned my great-grandad," he says. "He was a printer for the Manchester Evening News and he’d work through the night until 7am, come home, lie down for 10 minutes, eat a cheese sandwich, then go off to the pub. When he died, doctors wanted his body for scientific research, to find out how a man with that lifestyle could live to ninety-fookin’-nine."

Smith’s literary heroes - whoever they are - are long dead and his biggest fan died last year. But it sounds as if the man himself might be around for a good while yet.

The Fall play Glasgow’s Renfrew Ferry (April 28), Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree (29th) and Edinburgh’s Liquid Room (30th) as part of Triptych. Voiceprint, the second batch of ‘Live From The Vaults’ archive live recordings - Los Angeles 1979, Glasgow 1981 & Hof [Germany] 1981 and a six-CD box set of The Fall’s 24 Peel sessions are released on Sanctuary, April 28