Mark E Smith - The Fall

(Credits: Far Out / Secret Records)

Sat 7 February 2026 10:00, UK

Throughout their illustrious career and extensive discography, Mark E Smith and The Fall seemed to take far more pleasure in lamenting the prevailing sounds of the ‘Manchester scene’ than they ever did in embracing that movement. In fact, one of their most beloved efforts started out life as a lampooning of The Smiths. 

From their very beginning, The Fall were never overly keen to be lumped in with the music scene of Manchester. Their roots in classic literature, and their home base of Prestwich, set them apart from the perpetually drizzly city during its punk revolution, even if Smith and Co ended up sharing a lot of billings with Manchester’s punk progenitors. Even after the wave of gobbing northern punks had died down, though, The Fall were still an island of their own, ever so slightly outside the realm of Manchester music.

In contrast, The Smiths were the archetypal Manchester band back in the 1980s, having risen to the dizzying heights of mainstream popularity off the back of a defiantly independent sound, influenced both by the punk explosion of years prior and Morrissey’s own interest in classic literature and 1960s pop. Despite sharing a few common interests with Mark E Smith, though, The Fall frontman couldn’t be much further away from Moz. 

In fact, Morrissey’s rather outspoken pretensions – being of a different sort than Smith’s own pretensions – inevitably caught the ire of The Fall before too long, probably spurred on by The Smiths achieving the kind of mainstream acclaim that their Prestwich counterparts never particularly courted.

So, in late 1989, once The Smiths had imploded with the aid of a Cilla Black cover, Smith chose to begin work on a kind of parody of the band’s songwriting, forming the basis of the Extricate track ‘Bill Is Dead’. An out-of-character effort from The Fall, the song offers a kind of vulnerability and, for want of a better word, romance which is not often found in the songwriting arsenal of their endearingly miserable frontman.

It might have ended up sounding completely different, though, if Smith’s original plan came to fruition. In the end, the songwriter decided that Craig Scanlon’s musical masterpiece would have been wasted on a mere Smiths parody, so he opted for some lyricism with a little more merit.

That change-up in plan seemed to work out, too, as ‘Bill Is Dead’ ended up becoming a Fall favourite, with John Peel being a particular devotee. Peel was, of course, always open about his adoration of The Fall, and is often cited as the DJ who first ‘launched’ the band during their early days. Nevertheless, ‘Bill Is Dead’ is the only Fall track to have ever topped Peel’s Festive Fifty.

Perhaps the song’s sense of romanticism was still rooted in the Morrissey-centric writing of The Smiths’ heyday, but the likelihood is that few people upon listening to the song would ever make the link to Manchester’s premier indie outfit.

It speaks both to Mark E Smith’s songwriting mastery and his penchant for criticising virtually every band under the sun that he could transform a song from being a piss-taking pastiche to a crowning jewel of The Fall’s extensive and all-encompassing discography. 

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