Despite his image Mark E Smith was no ogre. We bid farewell to a kind-hearted hellraiser News report: Mark E Smith dies aged 60
I first met Mark E Smith in 1981,as I waited on the steps of Leeds University, about to see my first ever plunge gig. Suddenly I spied the singer coming out of the building and rushed over to get an autograph. I was a painfully naive schoolboy and had no idea how to approach a pop star – or, or rather,an enigmatic cult figure with a fearsome reputation for taking no prisoners. Smith wasn’t precisely the darling of the music press but he was viewed with a mixture of curiosity, awe and scare: I’d already read enough about him to know that he was someone whom one should approach as one might a savage dog.
In the event – and this was my first lesson in his unknowability and unpredictability – he could not have been nicer. He didn’t have a pen, and nor did I,but the preceding month Id met Captain Sensible from the Damned on the steps of Unity corridor in Wakefield, and he’d taken a bite out of my concert ticket in lieu of an autograph. I asked Mark E Smith to enact the same and I still have the perfect paper impression of his 1981 dental work, or which presumably contains enough DNA traces for a clone. Not that there could ever be another Mark E Smith.
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Source: theguardian.com