Peter,
        I was surprised at your eulogy for Mr. Smith but then
I've always been a bit puzzled by such praises.  I was
finally persuaded to go see him in Sheffield a few years back
by various members of Forced Entertainment who think 
The Fall is the bees knees.
        I felt insulted that I had to pay to watch such a debacle of
a performance and by the end of the night I had developed an 
intense dislike of The Fall in general and Mr. Smith in particular.
Afterwards I expected various members of Forced Ents. to
apologise to me for dragging me along to what I presumed
was The Fall Gone Off but no...that was them in full flourish...
they loved him...my puzzlement deepened.
        Maybe one day I will see the light but until that day you have
at least reassured me that having no desire to shake Mr.Smith's
hand I am saved the fate of becoming an irritating pod-person!
Best G.  
         


-----Original Message-----
From: peter.manson <[log in to unmask]>
To: british-poets <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, October 14, 2000 08:51
Subject: Re: Mark E. Smith


>John:
>
>I was at the St. Andrews gig.  MES did a fairly short set, with Julia
>Nagle on Keyboard and tapes.  Excellent, low-key performance -- very odd
>to be able to see a live audience cottoning on to just how _funny_ the
>stuff is, even odder to hear Smith having to break his timing to allow
>the laughter to subside.  Can't report many further details due to the
>amnesia of sheer gibbering fandom -- I was sitting at the back with Bill
>Herbert and my mate Oscar when Smith and Nagle arrived and sat at our
>table.  Seemed a lovely guy, very nervous about reading and incredibly
>patient with all the pod-people who "just wanted to shake his hand"
>(Bill, Oscar and I, by contrast, remained frozen in mid-heartbeat till
>Julia Nagle broke the ice and we ended up chatting about The Fall).
>
>Nice moment at the end, when MES came back to the table and asked Bill
>if he wanted to do a duel (Julia Nagle: "do you mean a duet?") -- the
>folder of papers appeared and he handed Bill the handwritten lyrics to
>the song "Life Just Bounces".  They did it as an encore, so I've now
>heard WN Herbert and Mark E Smith reading the lines "On TV last night
>somebody claimed their dog had been molested by a textile chemist".
>
>Malcolm Phillips was there too, and may have been far enough from the
>event horizon to remember more -- Malcolm ?
>
>As to whether it's poetry, well, some of the songs do stand up rather
>well when spoken: he did "Idiot Joy Showland" from 1991:
>
>"Microcosms come and go
>and it's amazing what they show
>your sportsmen's tears are laudanum
>in Idiot Joy Showland" --
>
>but the thing that's always struck me about Smith's lyrics is the way
>they seem to be all available in his head at the same time -- he'll be
>performing a recent song at a Fall concert, and suddenly he'll drop in a
>lyric from 20 years back.  When the band are on a roll, you'll rarely
>hear the same version of a song twice.  Follow them as long as we
>obsessives must, and you trace a network of cross-referencing and
>refunctioning to rival anything in Beckett or Burroughs.
>
>I actually like "The Post-Nearly Man" (Smith's solo spoken-word CD from
>1998 [Artful CD14]) more than anything The Fall have done in the past
>half-decade, though be warned that it's a difficult listen: fragmented
>bits of dictaphone monologue and multi-voice pieces derived from
>sketches for a  SciFi/occult screenplay (the opening quote's from HP
>Lovecraft).  At one point the dialogue goes on inaudibly while a plane
>goes overhead.  Some excellent one-liners and at least one song.  At
>it's best it's close to some of Burroughs' early tapes -- something like
>"The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah", which resembles a pirate radio
>broadcast from Hell.
>
>Peter
>------
>
>From "Visitation of an American Poet" [ amended from the transcript at
>http://www.freedonia.com/%7Ejeff/fall/pnm.html ]
>
>Act 2
>
>I now had a bubbling black large seafood plate
>SF type load of problems at my gate
>Purple squid less of pink and what's that thing on the left wriggling
>Small irritant
>Behind right upper motel balcony was a poet teacher and dressed
>accordingly
>Remember there'd be four/five viewpoints
>Would even step out of the house
>Frisco I was in Frisco
>Chain gang
>Thompson type held a visit number two
>Second visitation seizure in hotel
>Excitement on face gut wrench hospital
>Cat odour lysergic acid smell
>(Corn bubbly) it's the smell of hallucinating delusional
>When mixed with a prescrip stuff of dear family doctor
>New alias monthly
>Spreadeagled in driveway
>Come up soon for the third visit
>That was in the future
>The visit of an American poet
>Gothic green goblin gnome
>Cast her adrift my first mistake
>Let her into the motel in Frisco.
>
>http://www.manson88.freeserve.co.uk/
>



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%