Thursday, 10 July 2003 | Concert

I stood at the base of the stage in the stiff heat, crammed against the other sweaty, impatient people. The opening band had left the stage for perhaps 45 minutes before The Fall took their place; it took another 5 minutes before Mark E. Smith swaggered on stage to join his backing band. (Was that a swagger or a stumble?)

He clung to the microphone and blared some unintelligible words into it, in a voice I immediately recognized as The Fall, the voice that is their one distinct characteristic. (Were those words, or was that a moan?)

He got frustrated with the mic stand and threw it to the ground, got tangled in the wires, and then barely missed tripping over the stand repeatedly, in an uncoordinated sort of dance. The muscles in his aged face seemed unnaturally relaxed, making it hard for him to use his mouth to form recognizable sounds. (He is definitely on something.)

He tried to pick up the mic stand and make sense of the folded legs at its base, which had rearranged themselves so that they were all poking in the same direction (rather than spread out like the foot of a hawk). He concentrated on it, tried to correct it, and threw it down again, before he resumed singing.

Two or three songs into the set, he stumbled off-stage again. The band continued to play, looking around at each other, carefully compensating for his erratic behavior. They seemed calm and responsible and ready; they were like parents, though considerably younger than him.

A minute later, he was back on stage, sloppily licking his fingers. He would go off the stage and on again at least three more times during the set, once dragging his two guitarists with him, who were, at the time, wearing their guitars which were attached to amps. He just grabbed them and pulled them along, as they fumbled to disconnect their umbilical chords.

He wound his band members up in wires without noticing. During the set, he: squatted beside the drum kit with his back to the audience, rifling through papers and reading the words to his songs, seemingly unaware that there was a sold-out venue behind him. Threw another mike stand, this time at the back wall. Swayed above me at the edge of the stage, looming like a tree just before it falls. Shoved a lyric sheet in the hand of his new keyboardist, who (apparently) hadn't expected to sing. Kept stuffing his hands down the back of his pants in an ungraceful effort to tuck in his mis-buttoned shirt. Took over his bandmates' microphones after losing his own, eventually handing one of the mics to an audience member who passed it around. (It came my way but I declined.)

It wouldn't have really surprised me had he tripped, fallen on the audience, or even died. It made me wonder what it would be like if he had died. It made me think about him, and about people, rather than about the music.

My friend Sean tells me that at the last show he went to, Mark E. Smith was angry, and had thrown a microphone at the head of the (former) keyboard player. The keyboard player, Sean tells me, was bleeding from his head, but continued to play the rest of the show as if nothing had happened.