Mark E. Smith

“It's just like music when you reckon it up. It's like listening to Pavement it's just The Fall in 1985, isn't it? They haven't got an original idea in their heads.”

“'Re-Mit' is going to terrify people. It's quite horrible. The Fall have had enough and we're coming for you.”

“The manners thing's got worse. People think they can just text you if they've got bad news for you. It's not on. And as for people taking pictures at gigs on their phones, that's just weird.”

“I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.”

“My earliest memory is learning to read 'Muffin the Mule' when I was about three.”

“I'm just never getting there. I'm getting round to it. I'm beginning to understand it a bit more.”

“Every day is great for me. I dislike rose-coloured glasses.”

“All these cities I go to, I never see them. They may be the most beautiful places in the world, but I'll just usually go to the nearest bar. I need a couple of hours by myself.”

“Fear is something I try not to absorb.”

“I like to push people till I get the truth out of them.”

“Being in The Fall isn't like being in another group. It isn't a holiday. A lot of musicians are really hard to deal with. They aren't as smart as me.”

“When I was 18, the vision was to make music that didn't exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory.”

“I used to be psychic, but I drank my way out of it.”

“If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall.”

“I was picked on because I was timid. I had younger sisters; I couldn't turn to them for help. I didn't have an older brother.”

“There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There's a lot to learn from that generation -- the stoic approach. I think it's disgusting how they've been forgotten about in this way. It's the American hippies' fault, they saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods. That's all it is most of the time. You can't expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day. My mam and dad's generation understood this. They were just thankful the bombs had stopped threatening their lives. They just wanted to get on with living.”

“They're weird aren't they, Prince fans?”

“When I was 14, I used to have a calendar on my wall, crossing the days off until I was 15, because the school leaving age was 15. Then three months before I turned 15 they changed the leaving age to 16.”

“The only good Philip K. Dick film is 'Total Recall.' It's faithful to the book. Arnie gets it.”

“He told me I didn't understand, that we were from the bleak industrial wastes of North England, or something, and that we didn't understand the Internet. I told him Fall fans invented the Internet. They were on there in 1982.”