Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

Reading Renegade is a bit like being locked in a bar with its subject, a man described on the fly leaf as equal parts Johnny Cash, Brian Clough and the classic British pub contrarian with rather too much on his mind. It starts with a good old fashioned rant about former members of his band, The Fall, pauses for biographical notes about Smith and his life in Manchester and Salford, before carrying on in a stream of cantankerous grumbling about the state of the nation, the North, issues about drinking and a potted history of his music. Rambling yes, but never dull.

Smith, known for liking a drink or too, describes getting into LSD as a teenager in an attempt to avoid the drink of choice of his young contemporaries; bottles of booze purloined from parental sideboards:

If anything, I was doing acid to get away from the cider clubs and the sherry clubs. Kids of about fourteen used to nick their mam’s ‘British Sherry’ and be sick all over the house. You could tell where they lived by the drink and vomit stains on the carpet.

After leaving school and working at the docks in Salford, Smith formed The Fall, one of Britain’s most exciting and unpredictable avante garde rock groups, or a noisy racket, depending on your point of view. Smith’s song writing is a combination of distinctive wordplay and characterisation built from the experience of his native North West. Drink plays its part:

The problems started soon after Totale’s Turns, when I began thinking of albums more in the way of documents; elongated newspapers, so to speak. ‘Fiery Jack’ was a turning point; I guess in hindsight you could look at it as the beginning of Grotesque. I’ve always written from different perspectives, but that one seemed to have more weight to it. I still see ‘Fiery Jack’ types like that. They’re quite heartening in a way. Manchester has always had men like that, hard livers with hard livers; faces like unmade beds. Even though they’re clearly doing themselves damage, there’s a zest for life there. And that’s a rarity. They’re not as oblivious as you might think. They’re not all boring cunts. Drinkers have a good sense of the absurd. I like that.

The Fall are one of the more prolific bands in the country and have toured and recorded relentlessly since the 70s. Smith’s trip to Iceland where they record Hex Enduction Hour included a gig where about a third of the island’s youth came to see them (he apologises for almost certainly having brought about Björk and the Sugarcubes) and copious amounts of the local hooch:

We recorded parts of it in Iceland, which was a very inaccessible place at the time, totally unlike what it is now. Beer was against the law. You could only drink shit like pints of peach schnapps. I remember firing into it one day and night. I thought my legs had been stolen afterwards.

Continually messed around by hopeless record labels and enjoying a strained relationship with other band members (Smith has sacked over forty musicians over the years) things take a turn for the worse when he divorces his wife (and fellow band member...) Brix. He moves to Edinburgh, which introduces him to whisky:

I think that’s where the problems started. I got a real taste for it. There’s nothing quite like being drunk on whisky. Things can get mental on that stuff; and things did get mental years later; but while in Edinburgh I handled it well.

As the 90s progressed, the already uncompromising Smith started getting a reputation as a drunk who should keep of the sauce before the gig:

What gets me is when I get daft promoters like Alan Wise saying, “Don’t give Mark the whisky before he goes on.” It’s written into the contract – “Do not give Mark whisky before he goes on stage.” I’d rather have it upfront... To a certain extent I understand where they’re coming from. I did happen to lose it a bit when I was drinking too much whisky in the mid 90s, but I checked myself. I knew I had to curb it. And I did. I stand by Whyte and Mackay though, it’s a lovely drink. The worst thing I could do now is completely stop. You look at the amount of people who have died because they’ve just stopped drinking or doing whatever. The list is endless. The thing is with me, I don’t get hangovers. I’ve never been bothered by them. Red wine gets to me; it makes me very violent. I think it’s bad for you. Women who are into red wine are always manic-depressives.

He remarks that a lot of people who complain about his drinking are taking copious amounts of other substances as well. Stick to drink, he says:

At least you know where you are with booze. You drink two bottles of whisky and wake up in the morning, you know you’ve done something wrong, you know you won’t be doing that again. But experience tells you it’ll lift soon. And with liquor, if you drink any more you’ll be dead. You can’t move. But with E you start seeing chickens on the road – I know I was.

The boozy nadir is a fight with the band in New York when he is convicted of a drunken assault:

The bottom end of it was that the New York court said I had to go on this alcohol programme, twice a week for six weeks in Bury. But the staff there seemed to have more problems than I had. I didn’t have any problems, to be quite honest. I don’t think I did.

It’s a self justification, but it works for him. Anyway, there’s a method in the madness:

It’s sort of good for me, though, this idea that I’m a mad drunk. It makes people frightened of me.

Picnics and Other Outdoor Feasts by Claudia Roden

I believe that food writing, when done well, can be just as emotive and inspiring as any other form of literature. I have already covered Elizabeth David, although I am much better acquinted with Claudia Roden’s recipes (her red lentil soup is a favourite) and this recent acquisition on picnics is a gem.

Picnics are as much an excuse for a few drinks as they are for unwrapping sandwiches out of acres of Bacofoil and peeling hardboiled eggs. The natural choice is wine:

One tries to simplify things outdoors and I am quite happy to wash down pies and cold meats, vegetables and desserts with one wine only. But for the dedicated drinkers who believe like Brillat-Savarin that ‘the palate becomes cloyed and after three or four glasses, it is but a deadened sensation that even the best wine provokes’, it is right to offer two. Have a light refreshing white, commended by Savarin as ‘less affected by movement and heat and more pleasantly exhilarating’, which you can carry chilled in a refrigerated box or keep cool in the river, and a hearty stout red wine which cannot be unduly harmed by the journey, or a rosé, which is said to be particularly delicious by the sea. Serve straight-forward and relatively inexpensive wines. They will taste better on a picnic, while the fine aged ones are too delicate for rough outdoor handling and will be overpowered by all the competing perfumes of nature.

Not everyone drinks wine though:

If you are not having wine, it is well known that Englishmen are happy with good beer and women with good cider and that beer mixed with Stone’s ginger wine makes Shandy Gaff. And, of course, there is nothing as grand as a champagne picnic.

Which leads us to her champagne menu for Glyndebourne:

Indeed there can be few delights to compare with the pleasures of an elegantly chosen meal taken by one of the lakes, while watching the sun go down with the second half of Mozart still to come. People travel in evening dress... They leave their hampers in a favourite spot in the gardens, sometimes with the champagne bottle left to cool in the lake, tethered to a tree, until the interval.

I feel stirred to dig out the dinner jacket and go along myself, if I could actually afford the ticket. Nevermind, the next picnic will be enjoyed with a bottle of something chilled in the River Wey and with a couple of sonatas brought along for playing on the Victrola.

Polo by Jilly Cooper

Partly as a reaction to a surfeit of what I like to call ‘worthy fiction’ and partly on the strength of an article in the Graun detailing her as one of reading’s great guilty pleasures, I recently picked up a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Polo. I will confess that I had mixed expectations but Cooper when she’s at her best is a hoot, and Polo is a fun, exhilarating and sometimes exhausting read. Bit like a polo match, I suppose...

It would be futile to try and list the cast in a single blog post. Cooper stretches it out to five pages; (...Kevin Coley: A petfood billionaire and polo patron of Doggie Dins. Enid Coley: His awful wife...) and the plot meanders over another seven hundred. In short: Perdita, the spoilt but precociously talented teenage daughter of Daisy McLeod, has fallen for Ricky Francis-Lynch, the brooding but magnificent polo player with a nine goal handicap. Unfortunately, Ricky’s life has just disintegrated into disaster after his wife Chessie leaves him. The night it happens he has just won an important match and is celebrating:

After drinking at least a bottle and a half of champagne after the French Championship, Ricky tried to ring home, but the telephone was dead – probably been cut off. Suddenly, missing Chessie like hell, he decided to accept Victor Kaputnik’s offer of a lift back to the Tigers’ yard in Newbury... Victor’s helicopter seated eight, so the drinking continued on the flight, and Sukey, who didn’t drink, drove Drew and Ricky back to Rutshire, so they were able to carry on boozing, reliving every chukka.

Ricky comes back to an empty house and a note from Chessie to say that she’s left with their son, Will. Ricky finds out that the new man is his polo patron, super-rich American Bart Alderton. He sets of in his Beamer:

It was a warm night. The clouds had rolled back leaving brilliant stars and a rising moon. As Ricky couldn’t find the top of the whisky bottle, he wedged it in the side pocket, taking repeated slugs as he drove. He covered twenty miles in as many minutes, overtaking two cars at once on the narrow roads, shooting crossroads.

Chessie jokes that she’ll take him back, if he achieves a hat-trick of Herculean horsey tasks, culminating in being made a ten goal handicap, the first British polo player to rise to that level since the Second World War. Ricky snatches up their son and drives off, but tragedy strikes as his car leaves the road. Ricky is badly injured. Will is killed outright.

Ricky at least has the sense to stay off the sauce (after he gets out of prison, that is) but the rest of the cast are pie eyed for most of the novel. Daisy is perpetually topping herself up with vodka and orange, except for one dreadful Christmas with her mother-in-law when ...upstairs in her bedroom, with a bottle of Benedictine, she started frantically cocooning presents with Sellotape.

Even the horses, themselves fully drawn characters in this book, are partial to a drink:

“Can you wait somewhere else”? snapped Phil. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got a critically sick horse here.” “Sick, my eye,” thundered Miss Lodsworth, “That horse isn’t sick, it’s dead drunk. It’s just eaten all my cider apples.” There was a long pause. Crouching down, Phil sniffed Wayne’s breath. “I do believe you’re right. How many apples d’you think he ate?” “Close on a hundred.”

It all ends happily, at least for the nice people. Daisy gets a new man, and Perdita finally grows up and gets herself a suitable feller as well. On the way Cooper’s cast shift enough drink to float a battleship, indulge in some fairly fruity extra-marital sex and take part in some truly exciting polo; (her descriptions of the matches are breathtaking). It’s unashamed escapism, and all the better for it.