Mark E. Smith

So I went from that, you know...

I went from summer of '94 doing Glastonbury and doing Top of the Pops with Mark E. Smith out in the fall.

That was in roughly the middle of '94, and a year later, I'm signing on and having to go to the job center and, you know, pretend to be looking for work [laughs].

Is, is that, is that embarrassing in any way? Or, I mean, do you...

And that's something I want us to, ag- I wanna get into a little bit.

Obviously, this is-- we're doing this as a random record club, um, appreciation album because of a connection to Mark E. Smith a- as Captain Beefheart is a huge influence to Mark E. Smith.

And I just want us to talk about that real quick 'cause I find it fascinating.

Captain Beefheart, the band leader, the dir- musical director, and what Mark E. Smith found so fascinating about him as a musical band director and leader.

What do you think about that? You know, what was Mark seeing in him and being like, "Wow, this guy is-- This is my shit"?

Lyrically, he is...

He-- Mark is very well-read.

He was probably reading up about, uh, this band as soon as he could.

That shift pushed the city toward a post-punk horizon long before Joy Division even touched the studios.

The same year saw the first iteration of the Fall form around Mark E. Smith and his college friend Craig Scanlon, a trio that would evolve into a sprawling, confrontational cult that challenged Manchester's growing musical identity.

Their raw, abrasive output at venues like the Cuckoo's Nest pushed listeners beyond punk into the territory of avant-guitar, setting up a lineage that influenced countless underground bands for years.

Factory Records opened its doors in nineteen seventy-eight as an unassuming loft above a laundromat on Salford Road, and the team, including producer Martin Hannett, co-founder Peter Smith, and the ever-resourceful Rob Gretton, crafted a catalog that combined artistic ambition with DIY practicality.

That's fun, innit? [laughs] [laughs] And then the next one, the next song was probably my favorite you sent across that I hadn't heard before.

Um, The Rhino Head with Von Sudenfeld and Mark E. Smith.

Mate, so this is, I was like, I have to pick To The Full are, like, my favorite, favorite British band, at least, of all time.

I, I just think they're- Oh, okay ...

We had The Jazz Butcher before that.

Cool track called Southern Mark Smith, which most surely is a nod to the band The Fall and Mark E. Smith.

Southern Mark Smith, the track from their 1984 album A Scandal in Bohemia.

Aztec camera before that, also from 1984.

The way one track segues into the other is a thing of beauty.

They had a muffled vocal production adds a disquieting dislocated feel that the track would have lost if Smith had had the same high five treatment as the other instruments.

Holding back the two, exclamation mark, vases for strife, now broadens the sound at that point.

But it's interesting that if anything, apart from the faster screechy vox bit, the general direction of travel is downwards, petering out towards that final non-committal jazzy note.

The guitar's more prominent.

There's some nice noisy shit going on with the studio witchcraft.

It's what I like about it as well is you know it's really kind of like minimal and it really gives a good platform for Smith's voice that kind of like shines through quite well so really there's nothing to complain about too much but yeah I prefer the early version than the one that came out from the real new 4LP

Let's have a bit of a listen, because that's on the playlist as well, right? Yeah.

I think they produced Dots and Loops.

Tiondi Braxton, the national Matthew Herbert mode selector taught us, and the notorious legendary Mark E. Smith.

So they've...

They've had a bit of like background working with iconoclastic artists.

But yeah, I, uh, similarly, like, be nice to have at least half a day where I just wander around and don't have a plan.

I actually really like, um, I, I remember the, I think it was the first year I went, first or second year I went, Mark E. Smith, um, did a, a talk of some kind, [laughs] some kind of typical Mark E. Smithian talk that was just m- mostly just him talking about, uh, crisps.

Um, but I, I kinda love, like, some of that stuff where it's just-

Yeah

It seems like a lot of people would take this medication for their dentures and oral ul- ulcers, but would...

You know, we don't have that many more Mark E. Smith [laughs] imitations.

We should.

We should.