I am sitting in a pub in an industrial estate in Manchester with Mark E Smith, 36 years old and founder and leader of the Fall. Whippet thin and wiry, he’s dressed in a smart black designer shirt, speaks in a cautious whisper out of the left corner of his mouth, and, over the course of a two-hour interview, drinks something approaching his own body weight in bitter. Smith, a fiercely independent autodidact, formed the Fall in 1976, as a largely free-improvising vehicle to accommodate his literate but ragged poetry, while working as a clerk in Manchester docks.

“Let’s not do too much of this old biog stuff,” he complains, starting his second pint. “It makes me feel as if I’m already dead. We haven’t been going that long, relatively speaking.” Maybe the Fall’s 20-year life span isn’t that long relative to, say, the life of a turtle or a giant redwood, but for a rock band, especially a band who have managed to remain adventurous and vital, it’s a virtual eternity.

Three things characterise nearly all of the Fall’s two dozen or so albums, apart from massive critical acclaim and little commercial success: the distinctive bass playing of Steve Hanley, who sounds as if he’s twanging overhead power cables; Smith’s fractured, fractious lyrics, all barks and mutterings; and the desire to push the limits of the band’s ability, testing and defeating every expectation. It seems as if they’ve occupied mid-afternoon billing at every British
rock festival ever, constant as the northern star, while each year’s pop fads revolve round them, from obscurity to celebrity and back again, in fragile arcs.

The early Fall releases of the late 1970s were an amphetamine-visionary take on the DIY scrappiness of punk, but Smith feels little for his bondage trousered contemporaries, of whom the Fall are the only dignified survivors. “We got offered really good money to do a punk nostalgia three-dayer in Blackpool with Wire, ATV, X-Ray Spex. But their fans were the people who used to throw bottles at us when we were starting out,” he remembers. “I didn’t relate to it then and I don’t relate to it now.”

While punk busied itself with situationism and banal sloganeering, Smith was busy constructing a workable mythology for late 1970s Britain. The Totale family, a corrupt dynasty of wealthy northern industrialists, stalked the landscape of his lyrics. “The North will rise again,” boasted Joe Totale on Grotesque (1980), “and the streets of Soho will reverberate with drunken highland men.” It seemed Smith was under the spell of the 1920s American gothic writer HP Lovecraft. “I didn’t need to take much from Lovecraft,” he counters. “North Manchester was very like an HP Lovecraft story in the late 1970s. That’s what I like about it.”

In the 1980s, Smith, now spitting Wyndham Lewis-style vorticist fragments, pushed his untutored young musicians into uncharted, experimental realms that bettered his teenage heroes, the Stockhausen-trained German band Can. Hex Enduction Hour (1982) remains one of the greatest albums of all time, combining a post-punk energy with the transcendental ambition of the avant garde. But despite the musical complexity of some of the Fall’s best work, Smith maintains a posture of musical ignorance. “I don’t count myself as a musician,” he insists, as if the term is some sort of insult. “I feel very sorry for musicians a lot of the time. They get into a pattern and I can’t get through to them what I want.”

Consequently, Smith still seems to have the kind of relationship with his band that a cowboy builder has with short-term hired painters. Drummer Karl Burns comes into the pub with an invoice for him and meekly asks: “Can I just give you this?” “I’ll sort you out Friday, okay?” says the boss. Long-term lieutenant Craig Scanlon has just been given his dismissal notice for the crime of “trying to play jazz or Sonic Youth-style stuff over good simple songs that he’d
written himself. It sounds like a bloody mess to me, your layman, people thrashing three guitars at once”. Smith seems to protest his ignorance too much, but he has an instinctive fear of looking as if he’s trying to achieve what he calls “a sort of concentrated avant-gardism”.

Smith met his demons head on in 1988 when the Fall collaborated with the Michael Clark company on a ballet called I Am Kurious Oranj, which told the story of William of Orange’s 1688 invasion of England, after a fashion. The Dutch “rode over peasants like you! They
invented birth control!” boasted the title track of the subsequent album, the Fall’s most likable recording, which included their strident version of Blake’s Jerusalem. “The bow-tie-sporting crowd were heard `arf-ing’ in many a theatre bar,” wrote Smith at the time, clearly relishing the chaos.

Kurious Oranj was in many ways Smith’s last big splash. The past seven years have seen the Fall variously refine an increasingly streamlined brand of skewwhiff pop, always anticipating new styles before they take root, from which the new album, Light User Syndrome (out now on Jet records), is a natural progression.

It’s a strange record, simultaneously sparse and dense, awash with swathes of modern techno effects, gleaned from teenage dance outfits such as DOSE, with whom Smith perversely delights in collaborating, but allied to the bombast of old. Spinetrack and Powder Keg both
throw enough classic alternative rock shapes to fill the student disco floor with the sound of the Fall once more. Curiously, while Fall songs usually struggle to contain Smith’s epic volume of words, Light User Syndrome is full of uncluttered musical spaces, punctuated, rather than swamped, by Smith. “They were doing so much on the music that a lot of the vocals weren’t meant to be the final vocal, just guide vocals. When it was mixed, I went up the wall. But,
in retrospect, I think it works.”

The album also features three other vocalists, including Smith’s ex-wife, Brix, the Californian guitarist who first served in the band 13 years ago, then bringing a touch of glamour and some proper rock’n’ roll licks to the early 1980s Fall’s slouching aggregate of becardiganed men. “I was trying to get like a country and western frontline thing going,” explains Smith, “with Karl, Lucy (Rimmer) and Brix all singing. In gigs we’ve been doing recently, I’ve been walking off halfway through, and of course the audience think, `Oh, he’s p again, old Mark.’ But then the music gets tighter and tighter and I can come back.” So, does Smith envisage a situation where he wouldn’t have to perform with the band at all? “Like a conductor?” he laughs. “That’d be ideal. I’ll just stand down the front watching with a pint.”

The idea of the Fall having a return to form is something of a contradiction in terms, but Light User Syndrome is the next best thing. That said, it will probably be greeted by indifferent critics, who, after 20 years, have largely run out of Fall-related angles or superlatives with which to do them justice. On the sleeve of Extricate (1990), Smith saved them the bother and wrote his own review: “What a hotchpotch! What’s up with him!?? He’s off his
tree!!!!! The format hasn’t been invented that can cope!!”

This is still the essence of the way the Fall are viewed today. They’re reliably above average to brilliant. They’re taken for granted. They’ll be on at about quarter to six this summer, I expect.
And Mark E Smith is mad. These are the safest options. Treating Smith as sane necessitates viewing most modern British rock with the contempt it deserves. Sadly, Light User Syndrome probably won’t change a thing.