The Foreman

Mark E. Smith of the Fall was one of the late 20th century’s great working-class musicians, but his music suffered from his overwhelming resentment of his middle-class audience.

Mark E. Smith of the Fall performs at the Lyceum Theatre in London, December 12, 1982. Smith was notorious for being hard to please, making and remaking his band multiple times over the course of his career. (David Corio / Redferns)

Mark E. Smith, the late front man for the long-running, staggeringly prolific post-punk group the Fall, was typical of people who cross from the working class into the bourgeois intelligentsia in that he never stopped talking about his roots. Born into a proletarian family in what Robert Roberts called “the Classic Slum” of Salford, England, […]

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