The Fall: Fighting talk

The Fall's famously chippy leader, Mark E Smith, is still ready to take on the world, Tim Cumming discovers

"If you take a right from here, there's a mosaic of me on the corner. But nobody knows who it is, because it's got all these people from Coronation Street in it. I've walked past it loads of times and never noticed it was me. Like, who's that, you know what I mean?"

"If you take a right from here, there's a mosaic of me on the corner. But nobody knows who it is, because it's got all these people from Coronation Street in it. I've walked past it loads of times and never noticed it was me. Like, who's that, you know what I mean?"

The Fall's Mark E Smith is talking in a hotel bar near Manchester's train station, crutches balanced against the wall beside him. "I'm gonna throw these as far as I can," he declares as he settles himself down. After fracturing his hip on an icy pavement in Newcastle in February, Smith was wheelchair-bound through a string of British gigs and for most of a lengthy American tour, which ended abruptly in Texas. "We were going to have to cross the desert and we didn't want to do that," he offers by way of explanation.

With concerts on the West Coast summarily abandoned, some US fans vented their spleen on Fallnet, the band's esteemed website. "I never read it," Smith says, "though I know it's the envy of a lot of groups. When I was in America I had a look at it. Most of it's all right, but this culture where you have to explain everything all the time, what you're doing, puts a clamp on you. It's a bit of a trap."

Mark E Smith has been avoiding the traps and explanations for 27 years. He formed The Fall in 1977 with Martin Bramah and Tony Friel. Some 49 members, 78 albums and 41 singles later, he and his group remain a unique, abrasive and indispensable force in modern music. As John Peel said: "They are always different, they are always the same."

Their gloriously rousing new single, "Sparta FC #2", is a good example of the band's creative dynamic. "The group made this song that was sort of like 'Born to Be Wild', with a great feel to it. Elena [Smith's wife] came up with some great words, and I added some words that I thought were like a Greek football fan's attitude. Sort of cobbled it all together, put a Greek motif on the guitar and that was it. "I do know quite a few Greek football fans," he adds, "and their attitude to soccer is completely different to Britain's. It's not about winning. It's just about being within the club. They find British fans very funny. They find them hilarious - you know, when they cry."

When we discuss early influences, the name of William Burroughs crops up. "Have you heard [Burroughs'] Nothing but the Recordings? It's really good. It's something that [the industrial music pioneer] Genesis P Orridge put out. A bit of an influence, I must say."

Burroughsian touches are all over Smith's cutting of lo-fi elements into the mix, from distorted electronica and indecipherable lyrics to recordings of the wind from a hotel window. Yet, however abstract the flavours, the essence of The Fall simmers down to the purity of guitar, drums and bass. The high modernism of Burroughs or Stockhausen is tempered by the basic rock pulse of The Stooges or Can, and a good ear for the ephemeral, the trashy.

Talk turns from the Eurovision Song Contest - Smith is a big fan - to those Top of the Pops albums from the Seventies. "I used to buy loads of them," he says. "One of my favourites has 'Hits of T-Rex, Slade and The Sweet' on it. I bought it when I was about 15. And inside it's got," - he breaks into laughter - "'As performed by Unicorn.' They're better than the originals. This bloke; his voice cracks, it goes in the middle of the song. And in 'Blockbuster', the police siren really gets out of control. It's fantastic."

Teetering on the edge of chaos, The Fall's sound embodies the tensions played out in the band. "I can't do what they do," he says, "and they can't do what I do. I haven't got a musician's ear, me, at all. I know less now than I did when I started. Chord progressions and things. Where I'm coming from has always been atonal and quite savage."

This tension keeps The Fall going. As erstwhile member Marc Riley says: "The day you get an easy, cosy Fall, it's probably over." After Smith sacked most of his band at the end of a US tour in 1998, the current line-up is reasonably stable, but relations still get strained. "Even today, I lose me rag with them. You can say, well, 10 years ago you were having hard times, you were drinking a lot of whisky, which I used to do, but it's still the same, sober or not. But I think it works." The only time he felt lost, he says, "was around [1996's] Light User Syndrome, sort of plodding on in the studio, not getting anywhere. I was really stuck sometimes, to be honest."

Though last year's Country on the Click was heralded as a first-class return to form, its release was delayed by months of record company interference. "If you make things look a bit too easy," Smith surmises, "people think they can just fiddle around with [your work]. Something like 'Sparta' was knocked up in two days. It sounded really great. Then we got it back and it sounded like Posh Spice, you know. So that got me off, of course." After going to EMI and Mute, Smith returned to Action Records and more or less took the album back to how it first sounded. "I couldn't believe that after all this time people had started thinking they could take away tracks of mine and mess about with them. It's forbidden."

The album's release was followed in January by the first of a definitive re-issue programme from Sanctuary Records. The Fall's first four albums - Live at the Witch Trials, Dragnet, Grotesque and Totale's Turns - appeared in deluxe expanded editions, remastered where possible from the original tapes. The project will extend into next year, with a boxed set of the complete Peel sessions due in the summer, alongside one of the crowning achievements of early Falldom, 1982's Hex Enduction Hour.

"That's the only one I like from the Eighties," Smith says. "It stands up, which surprised me." It was recorded live in an empty cinema and in "a cave in Reykjavik made out of lava. The studio was like a lava igloo. It's why 'Hip Priest' and the other ones sound good. It's a very strange sound." He laughs, sucking a Benson & Hedges to its root and crushing it in an ashtray. "We should've done more there, really. I think the studio fell to bits a year later. The lava cracked."

While tidying up the back catalogue, and, as Smith says, "drawing a line" under a decade of sloppy compilations, Sanctuary has also put together the band's first career-spanning retrospective. The sleeve of 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong cheekily imitates that of the Elvis album of almost the same name - minus three noughts and the lamé suit. A young Smith stands in diamond-pattern jumper, staring belligerently out. "They did put it past me," he says of his involvement, which came with his blessing, if not unbridled enthusiasm. "My eyes sort of run out half way down it," he says, looking through the track list. "Whoever did it did a good job. They've got a bit of taste." He selects tracks. "'Cropdust' is the one that forecast the twin towers. 'Powder Keg' forecasts the Irish bomb and all that. I'd listen to this. It's the one I'd recommend. I used to have nightmares about some of the other ones."

The prospect of the linear retrospective doesn't sit well with Smith, but a rare look back comes with the recent A Touch Sensitive DVD. Recorded live in Blackburn in 2002, it captures the band rattling through the likes of 1982's "The Classical", "Hey Luciani!" from Smith's 1986 play about Pope John Paul I, and 1991's "Free Range", another song of precognition, written about Yugoslavia a year before the cataclysm was unleashed.

"It's funny doing the tour with these," he says, pointing to the crutches, "because I've had to do most of it singing sat down. My voice was getting really good, and a lot of the songs sounded better live. I can ease in new material, or try to. I always have this fight, you know, with musicians." He gestures toward 50,000 Fall Fans: "They'd do this set if they could, a lot of the musicians I've worked with."

For listeners - and perhaps band members - the world of The Fall has no road map. It's instinctual music and, for Smith at least, there's not much to explain - at least not directly. His aversion to explanation forces you to make your own way through his songs, as a new tribute album from Germany, the excellently idiosyncratic Perverted By Mark E, demonstrates. Mixing weird and eclectic cover versions with song tributes from the likes of Jowe Head and The Container Drivers, it gets a thumbs-up even from its subject.

He was less enamoured of the three books that appeared about the band last year. "I liked the Users' Guide - that was just LP by LP. Facts. But I didn't like Hip Priest, where he interviewed everyone but me. The thing about browsing through these books," he adds with a note of satisfaction, "is that you don't find out anything about me at all, do you?"

As for his own work, he says: "A lot of material I keep for a few years. I have it around in my head. I find that's the best way." He still writes every day, though less voluminously now. "A lot of things that read like nonsense when you write them make a lot of sense a month later. Seems like complete rubbish as you're writing it down, but it seems to come true."

Smith rails against the state of music now. "Straighter than ever, don't you think? Rock music is so standardised these days, I can't believe it, really." Not that he's considering finishing the band. "It's more than necessary to carry on." A completely remastered US version of Country on the Click is out next month. "It's got a few different tracks on it and a sharper cut for some reason. Harder."

Despite the plug being pulled in Texas, a week after the interview the band are playing a club in Brooklyn for their US label, Narnack. They even debut a new song plucked from a tape given to Smith by the new bassist Stephen Trafford. "He's been writing for years," Smith says. "Sort of like Manc pop but a bit weird. I'm hoping to use some of his stuff."

He has set aside next month for recording, with plans for a new album by November. "I don't usually tell people these things," he says with a dry laugh. "It's good that you asked... the group will read about it in The Independent and feel more secure."

BEST OF THE FALL

Grotesque (After the Gramme) (1980) The first great Fall LP, with the immortal Robinson Speedo on "Gramme Friday", alongside the anti-pop "Pay Your Rates" and kazoo-driven "New Face in Hell". Early Fall at its best: relentless, repetitive, compulsive.

Hex Enduction Hour (1982) One of the great albums of all time. The opening lines of "The Classical" cost the band an unlikely deal with Motown; "Hip Priest" lends the film Silence of the Lambs extra menace.

This Nation's Saving Grace (1985) The garagey Goth sound of an instrumental by Brix Smith, Smith's first wife, sets the tone. The band explodes on "Bombast"; "Spoilt Victorian Child" is classic Smith elliptical sloganeering.

The Unutterable (2000) Few fans would doubt the brilliance of this album. Smith was leading a revitalised Fall into new realms: fascinating and richly detailed

Country on the Click (2003) The Fall's latest masterpiece comes in significantly altered form on US label Narnack. They're both brilliant. "Theme from Sparta FC" is pure genius.

'50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong' is out on Monday on Sanctuary; 'Sparta FC #2' is out on 21 June on Action Records; 'Perverted by Mark E' is on Zickzack Records; 'A Touch Sensitive' (DVD) is on Secret Films