Repetition was the group’s first watchword; it became a declaration of intent in the song of that name, which was widely taken as a manifesto. But the lyrics of ‘Repetition’, released as the B-side of The Fall’s debut single ‘Bingo Master’s Break-out’ (1978), make no case for repetition – ‘the three Rs’ – other than the fact that ‘we dig’ it. The explanation Smith offers for the song in his (ghost-written) autobiography, Renegade (2009) – that it is about the ‘hell’ of living in a flat in Kingswood Road, Prestwich, with his first bandmates – is wholly unconvincing. The Fall’s hymn to repetition was no satire but a profoundly ambiguous statement: both a petition to ‘all you daughters and sons who are sick of fancy music’ and – in the same breath – a refusal to be their spokesperson. The song ends with a sudden shift from the four-note musical motif and accompanying verbal incantation into punk rock chords and direct mockery of lesser artists, such as Richard Hell, who would channel the discontent into some egoistic chant (‘I belong to the blank generation’). The paradox – in which it is impossible to distinguish the inflections of irony from those of earnestness within the same phrase – would come to define Smith’s most characteristic writing.

The same relation to paradox was pioneered in the pseudonymous works of a writer whom Smith never mentions: Kierkegaard, the first great thinker of repetition. Kierkegaard begins his philosophical novella Repetition (1843) with an enigmatic line: ‘Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.’ Repetition does not mean mimesis or representation. Such words are its antitheses, because they imply the self-identity of everything that has taken place, the finished-with nature of the past. Repetition is possible for precisely opposite reasons: nothing that happens is over; everything, including ourselves, is always other than it is. Thus ‘the individual has a variety of shadows, all of which resemble him and which momentarily have equal status as being himself’. While ‘Greek philosophy’, says Kierkegaard (meaning Plato), taught that all knowing is recollection, modern philosophy ‘will teach that all life is a repetition’. [...]

Smith gave many interviews; but only in the first year or two was he unguarded enough to reveal details of his compositional methods or ambitions for the group. One of the most illuminating was a 1979 article by Tony Fletcher in the magazine Jamming!, in which Smith articulates a long-term objective that, for obvious reasons, has been much cited since his death: ‘That’s my fucking aim in life, to keep it going as long as I can.’ More typical was the public conversation at the London Literature Festival held at the South Bank Centre in 2008 to mark the publication of Renegade, at which the interviewer (Ian Harrison, Associate Editor of Mojo) attempted to pin successive categories or images from Smith’s writing onto Smith himself: ‘Are you not appreciated, do you feel that?’ Smith is riled by the line of questioning and brings the interview to a halt. But this reluctance to talk about his personal life is not only a desire for privacy but a principled refusal of the autobiographical gesture. As he says in Renegade, ‘People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads. Instead of going with it, gambling on an idea or a feeling, they check themselves and play it safe or consult their old university buddies.’ This observation, tucked into a paragraph on his hatred of nostalgia, is as close to an explanation of Smith’s worldview as we get anywhere. The extraordinary implication – although so far behind Smith’s vision are we that the idea is barely thinkable – is that the personality of Mark E. Smith was precisely as necessary, or dispensable, to the success of The Fall as that of any one of the sixty-six members who passed through the group’s ranks during its 40-year existence.

from Timothy Bewes's obituary for Mark E. Smith