Today, a year ago, we heard the sad news that Manchester’s greatest music talent, Mark E Smith, had left us. Wherever Mark has landed you can be sure he is not resting in peace but is giving whoever is in charge a piece of his mind!
A genius, a curmudgeon, an iconoclast, an art terrorist…irascible, irreverent, irredeemable…the late Mark E. Smith, leader of The Fall, the only band to be named after an Albert Camus novella, Manchester’s longest-running group, were formed in the earliest days of punk, spurred on by the Sex Pistols’ 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs, their debut at an Arts Council bash on King Street.
As we wrote when the great man died, “The Fall were more than just another group. They were an institution. They embodied everything about the Manchester music spirit. They were anarchic, awkward, wildly amusing, incorrigible and effortlessly brilliant.
* Mark E Smith’s Manchester, guided tour, this Sunday, 27 January, 3pm from the Queen Victoria statue (where else?) in Piccadilly Gardens.
