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, Smith had a brief spell on the docks at the Manchester Ship Canal, but he spent nearly all his life as the singer, lyricist, and despot of an experimental rock group. As a self-described “Prole Art Threat,” his interviews alternated between reeling off lists of his favorite writers — Wyndham Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick — and spouting ostentatiously offensive right-wing opinions on matters ranging from Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands War (firmly in favor) to immigration (firmly against). But in this, his legions of fans on the Left inevitably gave him a free pass — one not granted to other aging reactionaries like Morrissey or John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon, perhaps because it was assumed Smith’s cantankerousness was just a pose, or perhaps because his music, unlike that of his contemporaries, mostly remained strange and original.

What was most notable about Smith, though, was his relentless output  —  an astonishing rate of productivity, with at least one album a year from 1978 until his death in 2018. Factory metaphors abound with the Fall, but Smith was not so much a worker as a hard-driving manager.