Mark E. Smith’s Essential Reads: Books That Shaped The Fall’s Frontman

Mark E. Smith's Essential Reads: Books That Shaped The Fall's Frontman

Mark E. Smith was never one for convention, in music, in interviews, or in his literary taste. The Fall's frontman was a genuinely voracious reader, and unlike most rock stars asked to name a favourite book, his answers rarely lined up with what you'd expect. This is a look at what he actually read, and, where the connection is real, how it shows up in the music, starting with the most direct connection of all: the band's own name.

Where "The Fall" actually came from

In 1976, when Smith and his co-founders were choosing a name for the band, Smith pushed for "The Outsiders," after Albert Camus's novel The Outsider. Bassist Tony Friel countered with a different Camus title: The Fall, the French writer's 1956 novel, a single unbroken confession delivered by a disgraced Parisian lawyer to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar, circling guilt, hypocrisy, and moral collapse without ever quite landing anywhere. Friel's suggestion won the vote. The band that would spend the next four decades refusing to resolve into anything comfortable took its name from a novel that does exactly the same thing.

The 1981 NME list

The clearest single record of Smith's reading comes from a specific source: the August 15, 1981 edition of NME, in a recurring feature called "Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer," which asked musicians to name their favourite books, art, comedians, and films. Smith's answers were a genuine snapshot of a working-class autodidact's reading list, pulp and philosophy sitting side by side with no self-consciousness about the mix: Richard Meltzer's music-criticism-as-chaos Gulcher, John le Carré's Cold War procedural A Small Town in Germany, Philip K. Dick's paranoid A Scanner Darkly, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, alongside a U.S. Civil War handbook and a self-published pamphlet mocking Smith himself.

Weird fiction and horror

This is arguably the deepest, most consistent thread across Smith's reading, and the one most directly audible in The Fall's lyrics. H.P. Lovecraft appears repeatedly, At the Mountains of Madness, The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, and in 2007, Smith chose to read The Colour Out of Space aloud for a BBC Christmas broadcast. Asked why, he explained that unlike Lovecraft's usual stories of people living underground or threats to all humanity, this one was "quite futuristic," despite being written in 1927, "which is weird."

Arthur Machen (The Great God Pan, The Novel of the White Powder) and M.R. James (Ghost Stories, Casting the Runes) round out Smith's taste for a specifically British, folklore-inflected strain of horror, less concerned with jump scares than with the sense that something's wrong underneath an ordinary landscape. Smith was, by his own account, a member of the Arthur Machen Society from the age of 16, and called Machen "one of the best horror writers ever," ranking him above even M.R. James.

Crime, noir, and pulp

Smith's reading had a hard, unsentimental crime streak running through it: Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, Jim Thompson's The Getaway and 1280, and George V. Higgins's dialogue-driven Cogan's Trade and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. This is genre fiction with no literary apology attached, plot-first, voice-first, closer in spirit to The Fall's own clipped, sneering delivery than anything more ornate.

Philosophy and European existentialism

Camus's presence runs deeper than just the band's name, The Stranger also appears on Smith's reading list, alongside Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, a novel whose bleak, dark-humoured misanthropy shares real DNA with Smith's own lyrical voice.

Science fiction

Philip K. Dick was clearly a major touchstone. Smith once called The Man in the High Castle "one of my favourite books," in the same breath as complaining, characteristically, that he had no idea "how they fucked that TV show up." Beyond Dick, the list runs through Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, and Michael Moorcock's The Warhound and the World's Pain, science fiction used less for escapism than for the same paranoid, systems-gone-wrong instinct that runs through Dick's work.

British modernism, and one direct influence

Wyndham Lewis stands apart on this list, not just an author Smith read, but a genuine touchstone. Lewis founded Vorticism, Britain's short-lived answer to Futurism, and Smith returned repeatedly to his work: The Apes of God, Blast 1 (the movement's own manifesto magazine), Rotting Hill, and Lewis's autobiography Rude Assignment. Lewis's combative, anti-sentimental prose style, and his genuine outsider standing within British modernism, maps closely onto how Smith positioned The Fall against the rest of the music industry for four decades.

Sport, history, and everything else

What keeps this list from reading like a curated highbrow selection is how much ordinary, unglamorous material sits in it: Kevin Keegan's football autobiography, a U.S. Civil War handbook, Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger's history of German football (Tor!), Malcolm Allison's Colours of My Life. Smith read the way he wrote lyrics, without a hierarchy separating "serious" reading from anything else.

A working reading list, not a highlight reel

Beyond the 1981 NME piece, Smith's reading habits, tracked over years by fans and biographers, stretch to well over a hundred titles, spanning Blake's prophetic books, Orwell's Burmese Days, Frankenstein, Trainspotting, and Isaac Bashevis Singer's Satan in Goray. It's less a tidy "best books" list than a genuine record of an unusually restless, working-class-autodidact mind, closer to a research archive than a highlight reel. If you want the same density applied to the music itself, every track The Fall ever released, that's what this print maps out.

August 15, 1981 edition of NME. “Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer”

READS

Gulcher – Richard Meltzer
A Small Town in Germany – John Le Carré
A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Deer Park – Norman Mailer
The Black Room – Colin Wilson
Ritual in the Dark – Colin Wilson
Cogan’s Trade – George V. Higgins
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Beyond Good and Evil – Frederich Nietzsche

AND
U.S. Civil War Handbook – William H. Price
How I Created Modern Music – D. McCulloch (a weekly serial)
True Crime Monthly
Private Eye
Fibs About M.E. Smith by J. Cope (a pamphlet)

Mark E Smith's Favourite Reads

The Fall
by Albert Camus

The Stranger The Stranger
by Albert Camus

Gulcher: Post-Rock Cultural... Gulcher: Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism in America 1649-1993
by Richard Meltzer

A Small Town in Germany A Small Town in Germany
by John le Carré

A Scanner Darkly A Scanner Darkly
by Philip K. Dick

The Sirens of Titan The Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Deer Park The Deer Park
by Norman Mailer

The Black Room The Black Room
by Colin Wilson

Ritual in the Dark Ritual in the Dark
by Colin Wilson

Cogan's Trade Cogan's Trade
by George V. Higgins

At the Mountains of Madness At the Mountains of Madness
by H.P. Lovecraft

Beyond Good and Evil Beyond Good and Evil
by Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/132623.Mark_E_Smith_s_Favourite_Reads

Books mentioned so far...

The Bible - God?
Colours Of My Life - Malcolm Allison
The Drowned World - JG Ballard
Borstal Boy - Brendan Behan
The Book of Thel - William Blake
Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion - William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - William Blake
Fascist Scotland - Gavin Bowd
Cities of the Red Night - William S. Burroughs
The Fall - Albert Camus
The Outsider - Albert Camus
Breakfast At Tiffany's - Truman Capote
Sartor Resartus - Thomas Carlyle
A Small Town in Germany - John Le Carre
Journey To The End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
North - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Killer in the Rain - Raymond Chandler
The Fall of Crete - Alan Clark
The Divine Feud - Shaun Considine
Book of Lies - Alesteir Crowley
A Clown Too Many - Les Dawson
The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
The Man Whose Teeth Were All The Same Size - Philip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Time Out Of Joint - Philip K. Dick
The Circle - Dave Eggars
British Tastes: an enquiry into the likes and dislikes of the regional consumer - D. Elliston Allen
Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
The Nose - Nikolai Gogol
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula Le Guin
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
No Retreat - Dave Hann and Steve Tilzey
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
Kingdom of Evil - Ben Hecht
Tor!: The Story of German Football - Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger
Cogan's Trade - George V. Higgins
The Friends of Eddie Coyle - George V. Higgins
Ghost Stories - M. R James
Casting the Runes - M. R James
Ubu Le Roi - Alfred Jarry
My Autobiography - Kevin Keegan
The Shining - Stephen King
Immortality - Milan Kundera
The Joke - Milan Kundera
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T. E. Lawrence
The Knight, Death and the Devil - Ella Leffland
The Apes of God - Wyndham Lewis
Blast 1 - Wyndham Lewis
Rotting Hill - Wyndham Lewis
Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography - Wyndham Lewis
At the Mountains of Madness - H.P. Lovecraft
The Call Cthulhu - H.P. Lovecraft
The Colour Out of Space - H. P. Lovecraft
The Dunwich Horror - H.P. Lovecraft
Ultramarine - Malcolm Lowry
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
Shoot the Women First - Eileen MacDonald
The Great God Pan - Arthur Machen
The Novel of the White Powder - Arthur Machen
The Deer Park - Norman Mailer
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Gulcher: Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism in America - Richard Meltzer
Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz - Richard Meryman
The Warhound and the World's Pain - Michael Moorcock
Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Niezsche
Burmese Days - George Orwell
Shooting An Elephant - George Orwell
The Morning of the Magicians - Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier
The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe
U.S. Civil War Handbook - William H. Price
The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart
Blindness - Jose Saramago
The Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer
Satan in Goray - Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright - Bryan Talbot
Pan Book(s) of Horror Stories (anthologies) - ed. Herbert Von Thal
1280 - Jim Thompson
The Getaway - Jim Thompson
The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
The Fighting Barbel - Peter Wheat
The Black Room - Colin Wilson
The God of the Labyrinth - Colin Wilson
The Outsider - Colin Wilson
Ritual in the Dark - Colin Wilson
In God's Name - David Yallop
The Deepening Pool - Peter YatesThe Fall of Crete - Alan Clark
The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
Killer in the Rain - Raymond Chandler

Source: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/thefall/the-mark-e-smith-book-club-t28033.html