A man walks on stage in New York in 1998 and starts tampering with his own musicians' equipment mid-song. Then the fists come out. By the time the police arrive, the Fall's longest-serving bassist has quit, the drummer has quit, and Smith is in handcuffs, charged with assaulting his girlfriend. It is, by any measure, rock bottom.

Mark Edward Smith was born in 1957 in Broughton, Salford, the eldest of four children in a working-class family. His father kept a record player out of the house until Smith was around fourteen. The first single he bought was "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath.

Everything changed on a July night in 1976, when he attended the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Within months, Smith had formed the Fall, named after the Albert Camus novel, with a handful of friends including Una Baines, his girlfriend and future keyboardist.

Smith gave up his job as a shipping clerk on Salford docks to lead the band full-time. Over the following decades, the Fall cycled through roughly sixty musicians while Smith remained the one fixed point, writing in dense free-form prose, then cutting it into lyrics with a scalpel's precision.

In 1983 he married American guitarist Brix Smith, who joined the group and pushed the sound toward something more pop-oriented. The mid-1980s brought the Fall their closest brush with mainstream recognition: minor hit singles, sessions for the DJ John Peel, and a reputation as one of the most important post-punk bands alive.

After his divorce from Brix in 1989, Smith's drinking worsened steadily through the 1990s. That 1998 night at Brownies in New York was the culmination: the onstage brawl, the arrest, a court order for alcohol and anger management treatment. Smith called it a low point. The charges were eventually dropped.

He rebuilt the band, as he always had, by replacing everyone and pressing forward. He remarried twice more, released album after album, and refused on principle to play old songs live. Critic Simon Reynolds described his lyrics as "a kind of Northern English magic realism that mixed industrial grime with the unearthly and uncanny."

By 2017, Smith was performing in a wheelchair, his body worn down by lung and kidney cancer. He kept recording anyway, releasing new material almost annually until the very end. He died on 24 January 2018, aged sixty. The Fall had made thirty-two studio albums. Smith had been its only constant member for all forty-two years.

John Peel once said the Fall were "the group against which all others must measure themselves." Smith himself was characteristically unmoved: proud one day to find the Fall ranked between Mozart and Puccini, and the next, he said, just "the guy with no teeth who beats everybody up." Both things were true, and he knew it.