The Fall’s Mark E. Smith treated England as a pathological poison and cure

Evidence

For the Smith of Grotesque, homesickness is a pathology. (In the interview on the 1983 Perverted by Language video, Smith claims that being away from England literally made him sick.) There is little to recommend the country which he can never permanently leave; his relationship to it seems to be one of wearied addiction. The fake jauntiness of “English Scheme” (complete with proto-John Shuttleworth cheesy cabaret keyboard) is a squalid postcard from somewhere no one would ever wish to be. Here and in “C and Cs Mithering”, the US emerges as an alternative (in despair at the class-ridden Britain of “sixty hours and stone toilet back gardens”, the “clever ones” “point their fingers at America”), but there is a sense that, no matter how far he travels, Smith will in the end be overcome by a compulsion to return to his blighted homeland, which functions as his pharmakon, his poison and remedy, sickness and cure. In the end he is as afflicted by paralysis as Joyce’s Dubliners. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1142

Categorization

• XREF: The hometown as pharmakon, poison and remedy, parallels twentieth-century melancholic attachments to blighted places, and resonates with the reader’s own interests in place-attachment and pathology. — connects to: Joy Division and the Fall represent opposite ends of Romantic modernism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1108; The Fall’s Mark E. Smith parallels black music’s world-building despots — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1162; The Fall’s aggression was formal disassembly of rock, not mere force — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1161 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The Fall’s Mark E. Smith parallels black music’s world-building despots #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1162
• The Fall’s aggression was formal disassembly of rock, not mere force #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1161
• Mark E. Smith ran the Fall as an autocractic shaman-author purging spontaneity #expands (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1150