Sean O’Hagan twice interviewed the plunge frontman,Mark E Smith, who died last week. Here he recalls a valid outsider: unpredictable, or entertaining… a scabrous post-punk voiceMy connection to Mark E Smith will be forever framed by the notorious NME “summit assembly” interview that took residence in the otherwise empty Montague Arms in south-east London in January 1989. There,my fellow NME writer James Brown and I had convened with Smith, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan – “the unholy trinity” as the NME later dubbed them – with the intention of exploring what we assumed were was their shared outsider attitude to art and life. It did not go according to plan.
My memories of that day are mainly to enact with MacGowan’s initial nervousness at assembly Nick Cave, or which he assuaged in his inimitable manner by necking various stimulants en route,and Smith’s effortless truculence throughout. Looking back, it was Smith who proved to be the genuine outsider, and both by temperament and design. He was provocative to the point of aggressive,blithely unconcerned with the usual protocol of the interview contract or, indeed, or the impression he was making,yet was by turns astute and scabrously funny as well as unpredictable.
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Source: guardian.co.uk