The Fall pick themselves up

Mark E Smith (second from right) says his current lineup, including wife Eleni, is the best he's had. Photo / Supplied

The umpteenth incarnation of Manchester post-punk legends The Fall return to Auckland next week. Frontman Mark E Smith talks to Tim Cumming about his band's long and rocky road.

Mark E Smith, lead singer of The Fall finally appears in the hotel bar, grinning like a wizened schoolboy. After 33 years fronting one of the most volatile groups in rock history, Smith is no stranger to controversy, coercion, violence or breakdown. But since the group's last major implosion in America in 2006 - followed by the emergency recruitment of Californian musicians to finish the tour, record an album and play the last-ever concert, things have settled down in the Fall camp.

Perhaps it is part of the ageing process. Smith turned 50 in 2007, and the following year's Imperial Wax Solvent saw him "reflect" on that fact with 50 Year Old Man, the album's raging magnum opus. Since then, he has worked with the German electro duo Von Sdenfed and had a second spell in a wheelchair (the first came in 2004 after he collided with a lamp post at a rockabilly festival).

Most performers would take time off for a broken hip; not Smith.

He booked into a studio and completed a British tour with a line-up that has been stable for the best part of three years - not bad going for a group whose history is studded with more arrivals and departures than a budget airline.

It wasn't always the case. At the end of the Nineties, many saw Smith and The Fall as a spent force. An infamous gig in New York ended in on-stage fighting, band departure and a brief incarceration for Smith - lovingly retold in the singer's hilarious, if ghosted 2008 memoir, Renegade.

The brilliantly catchy Touch Sensitive from 1999's comeback The Marshall Suite found its way on to a car ad in Britain and set the course for one of the great career revivals in rock'n'roll. The Fall albums of the Noughties have consistently delivered, even on the tin-hatted mayhem of 2001's Are You Are Missing Winner, which sounded as if it had been recorded during a fight in the hold of a cargo ship. Gigs can be variable, with start-times edging perilously close to midnight, but the current line-up has delivered some of the most bracing Fall performances in years.

Keyboard player Eleni Poulou, Smith's beautiful German-Greek wife of 10 years, is behind the disorientating lashes of synth and electronica that punctuate the band's recent music. "Mark's lyrics get a new dimension being layered over that sound, rather than over a regular song with normal song movements," she says.

Poulou's noise interventions are coupled with the guitar wizardry of Peter Greenway, a technician handy enough to make his open effects pedals, and the rhythm section of drummer Keiron Melling and bassist Dave Spurr, the two of them fusing like base metals in an alchemist's retort.

"I know people have ideas about The Fall, preconceptions, but we're really friendly and there is only happiness," she says of the current band dynamic. Pretty far, then, from the tales of genius, paranoia and victimisation streaked through most journalistic accounts of the group, such as Dave Simpson's The Fallen, a book that set out to track down every former member of The Fall, and which became out of date between proofing and publication. An updated paperback edition recently appeared, and a documentary is being filmed for the BBC. "That'll be a scream, won't it?" remarks Smith with acid sarcasm. He's not a fan. "I can't read it really, and also he's taken advantage of a lot of them. It's like a dirty book I keep under the stairs, a porn book."

Stability, it seems, has come to the house of The Fall. "There's three parts of the group," Smith tells me. "There's me, there's the lads, and there's Eleni and me. That's the beauty of the mix. I think this is the best line-up I've had, touch wood."

Their most recent album Your Future Our Clutter is a return to peak powers, harking back to the group's seminal 1980s albums, Hex Enduction Hour or The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, latter due to be re-released in a boxed, four-disc remastered edition.

Clocking in at around 50 minutes, there is no filler, no drift. The lyrics are as cryptic as ever, but they haven't sounded this clear in years.

Smith's recent health issues figure heavily in the new songs, with references to medication, incarceration and mortality scattered throughout the set. It's there in the spaghetti-Western gallop of Cowboy George, a song that enters a vortex halfway through and re-emerges transformed into tranquilised, psychedelic splashes of synth oscillating over Smith's ominous mantra of "unseen forces, unseen facts, unseen footage".

"It is a bit mystical that one, yeah," agrees Smith. "I don't even know what I'm saying really, because I'm still on medication from the wheelchair."

With more than three decades, dozens of albums and thousands of gigs behind him, you wonder if Smith fears the latest Fall sound being drowned out by the old. Will the reissues interfere with what he's doing now? "No, not at all.There is a lot of interest there, very much, from young kids." He leans forward conspiratorially. "I haven't been in touch with them [former label Beggars Banquet] since 1990. They're saying, 'We didn't understand what we had at the time.' Like, join the club - neither did anyone else." He leans back, shaking with laughter.

LOWDOWN

Who: The Fall, the post-punk band still led 33 years on by Mark E Smith

Where and when: Powerstation, Auckland, Monday (Soldout)

-TimeOut / The Independent