In her blurb for this appealing memoir, the former Mrs Mark E Smith – Laura Salenger, AKA "Brix" Smith-Start – says of Steve Hanley that "for all the years" she played in the Fall she "never knew what he was thinking". She does now, for the band's long-serving bass guitarist (1979-1998) has, with the assistance of Olivia Piekarski, written a long and detailed account of exactly what it was like for him to live "inside" the indie-rock institution that John Peel famously enshrined as "the mighty Fall".
"Inside" is a telling preposition for Hanley's and Piekarski's subtitle, for the Fall during Hanley's 19-year stretch was often more like a cult than like a pop group, even a wilfully uncommercial one. Mainly this was because of the personality of Mark Edward Smith, one of the more obtuse characters to emerge from the nexus of northern punk. If The Big Midweek at times reads like the testimony of a prison-camp survivor, it's because Smith ran the Fall like his own miniature army, subjecting ever-replaceable musicians to awful treatment – mainly psychological but occasionally physical (not least during Hanley's last ever show in New York).
"What is it about Manchester and bands?" Salenger semi-rhetorically asks Hanley shortly after meeting the Fall in 1982. One could ask the same of many cities, I suppose, but Manchester – from Howard Devoto to Noel Gallagher – does have much to answer for. A year after Morrissey's Autobiography, and on the eve of the publication of a volume of handwritten lyrics by Joy Division's Ian Curtis, The Big Midweek tips us back into the dank romanticism of that metropolis. "Mark Smith", as Hanley prefers to call him, probably couldn't have hailed from anywhere else on the planet.
Like Morrissey – whose book was, I suggest, overrated to about the same degree that Smith's own splenetic memoir Renegade (2008) was underrated – Mark E Smith was a born outsider and a natural malcontent. When I met him in 1981, I admired his working-class antiheroism and liked the fact that he sat unglamorously in a pub with a pint – little knowing that 30 years later he would have become a wizened Prestwich boozer of the kind he then loved to natter with. But Smith himself wondered whether he might not become the 45-year-old "Fiery Jack" of one of the Fall's best early singles. As the Mancunian writer Paul Morley once asked: "What if he wasn't a genius … [What if] he was just an old drunken tramp?"
In 1981, Smith made me think more than anything of a northern John Lydon: both clever misfits, both deeply into contrary music that few of their contemporaries liked – in Smith's case Can, Captain Beefheart, Peter Hammill, the Velvet Underground of the searing "Sister Ray". Neither exactly oozed the milk of human kindness. Smith would have scoffed at being dubbed an intellectual, but the Fall were born out of poetry readings in their original keyboard player's flat – and, of course, were named after Albert Camus' novel.
The Fall that Steve Hanley came into was the lineup that Smith – with his bulldog of a girlfriend/manager, Kay Carroll – pieced together after purging the original quintet. A control freak whose gift for subverting everyday language in surreal cut-up lyrics made him a genuinely radical post-punk voice, Smith was a man who'd rebelled against – but also internalised – the berserk discipline of a bullying father. He was fortunate, therefore, to find such a loyal and unquestioning aide‑de‑camp in Hanley, whose book overflows with tales of Smith addressing his band like a drill sergeant.
Phlegmatic and gently droll, Hanley seems to have endured years of unpleasantness at Smith's hands because the only viable alternative was working in his own dad's pie shop. "The only reason we're not fighting back is because we love being in the band," Hanley writes in the present tense that makes the book so gripping. Not because of Smith: "In spite of him." Later, with grim persistence, he asks: "Why should I pack it all in just because of him?"
I doubt indie rock still needs demystifying. If it does, The Big Midweek is the perfect antidote for anyone who thinks touring America in a cool band is remotely exotic. Hanley's on-the-road anecdotes are, in the main, stories of exhausting pettiness and resentment, as well as of relentless caprice on the part of his boss. Alcohol and amphetamines combine to make a grotesque martinet of Smith, the possessed "Hip Priest" who revels in belittling his accompanists – The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall, indeed. Smith isn't the first bandleader to make life miserable for his employees: everyone from James Brown to Beefheart himself has done that. It's only sad that a Salford lad who started out with such a democratic ethos should eventually turn into such a persecutor.
None of which detracts from the scratchy, shamblingly amateurish power of Slates, Hex Enduction Hour and other great Fall recordings. At once avant garde and proudly proletarian, Smith's words – declaimed in the sprechgesang tones of a hellfire pub-comedian – were a caustic riposte to the demonisation of the working-class that was fully under way in the early days of Thatcherism. There's an irresistible tension in The Big Midweek – one the book shares with James Young's subtle memoir of backing Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio – between the Fall's glum ordinariness and the brilliance of their best music, which after all concerns the terrible strangeness of the mundane. Original guitarist Martin Bramah, who returned to the group for a second bout of masochism, once described their early songs as "Coronation Street on acid".
"You Englishmen with your stiff upper lip … ", Brix Salenger remarks after joining the Fall and before marrying Smith. The Big Midweek is the upper lip loosening, especially when Hanley writes sweetly of the stresses of juggling the band with young children – evidence that even laconic bass players have feelings. His recall is impressive, suggesting he may have kept some sort of journal of his Fall years. Then again, the authors profusely thank "the far-reaching website The Fall Online, without which our research would have been virtually impossible".
There are priceless Smith quotes that sound verbatim to anyone familiar with his turn of phrase. "Don't have kids if you can't afford them, eh, Steve?" he says after Hanley mentions Live Aid. "Bloody Victorian do‑gooding." Clearly Smith delights in his cranky flat-cap conservatism: "I don't see why I should give you lot pocket money just so you can spend it on arcade games!" he barks, like some fuming father on holiday. Musical instructions are delivered as if by an apoplectic schoolmaster: "Change the sound! You're all bounce fucking bounce. We're not fucking Simple Minds pop‑rock bollocks!"
The Fall story goes on long after 1998, of course – long after they had influenced a great number of other bands: post-grunge slacker-eggheads Pavement, for instance. The possibility that Smith has mellowed in late middle age cannot be discounted, though it seems unlikely. Hanley remains his begrudging admirer – "all those early albums are rich with brilliant words", he writes – and in his acknowledgments thanks Smith for "the opportunity and unique life lessons".
• Barney Hoskyns's most recent book, Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin, is published by Faber. To order The Big Midweek for £13.99 (RRP £17.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
