The Fall's Mark E. Smith: "It gets a bit weird at times, to be honest..."

Mark E. Smith has now fronted The Fall for thirty-five years, but they remain a peerlessly inventive, idiosyncratic and unpredictable outfit. With their 29^th studio LP Ersatz G.B. out this month, the band’s legendarily prolific workrate shows no sign of letting up. When The Skinny catches up with Smith ahead of their upcoming tour, he sounds as enthusiastic as ever, expressing some frustration over the relatively long time to get the previous record, 2010’s Your Future Our Clutter, released: “It was a bit too long to wait for the last LP, bloody two years or something like that. I’m not used to that.”

When asked if that delay had anything to do with Smith’s departure from Domino Records to release the new album on Cherry Red, he explains that the band were only really with the high profile London indie for a one-record deal. “It was all very amicable and that. Cherry Red appealed to me, because they made a promise to get it out fast.” Evidently that remains a priority, and Smith states that he expects to make at least “a few more” albums with the label.

Ersatz G.B. continues to develop The Fall’s sound in a startlingly intense, frenetic style: songs like Cosmos 7 and Nate Will Not Return are in a similarly rambunctious, riff-driven vein to Clutter’s O.F.Y.C Showcase, or Wolf Kidult Man, from 2008’s Imperial Wax Solvent. These three albums, which have seen the band’s core personnel unchanged, work as a series, and demonstrate that The Fall are still finding plenty of room for innovation within their own distinctive parameters. Has Smith aimed to develop the ever-evolving outfit’s music in a particular way over these records? “Yeah, we made a conscious effort. I mean it’s not like I said to the group exactly what we’ve gotta do. But we worked on the songs in a new way. I sort of did this thing where we had to do three new songs a night – it all sounds a bit crackers, but it seemed to work, so that’s why they sound pretty tight.”

There is, undoubtedly, a sense of focus and discipline to Ersatz G.B. that isn’t always present on Fall records, evincing the benefits of having a relatively stable lineup over the past few years. Partly, Smith puts this down to a different approach to recording, which saw the band laying down guitar, bass, drums and keyboards in Chiswick, while Smith recorded the vocals separately, in Hounslow. This had the consequence that “the band didn’t know what the songs were about half the time” – something which Smith feels may have helped in certain ways. That sort of difficulty and uncertainty, he explains, is “something I’ve always wanted, y’know. And they’ve been quite flexible.” The method has enabled the band to develop an intuitive approach which complements Smith’s notoriously eccentric attitudes to musicianship: “We’re talking about a group here,” he explains, “where I can sort of hum a tune about three hours before, and they can get it pretty much on the nail. It’s quite amazing really.”

Smith’s comments suggest that inter-band relations are going well, and he’s looking forward to their upcoming tour, which will see them play Edinburgh's Picture House on 3 November. Their recent set at Glasgow’s Electric Frog festival in September boded well; it was telling, too, that they were one of the few guitar bands on an adventurous dance-oriented bill. He says, though, that he’s “not listening to much” these days, although “the group are all into dance music.” Smith has always consciously avoided thinking too much about influences when writing: “I wouldn’t be in a group otherwise,” he says. “I’m just writing a lot myself, really. I just keep trying to keep the words as sharp as possible. You get into a self-editing process. It gets a bit weird at times, to be honest.”

Even now, the 54-year-old feels that he’s still developing as a lyricist, and Ersatz G.B. pursues some unusual avenues: the song Greenway, for example, describes a Danish rock video featuring a singer bearing “a remarkably coincidental resemblance” to current guitarist Pete Greenway, and sets this tale over a cod-heavy metal riff borrowed from “this Greek band, whose name I can hardly pronounce.” The process of writing songs, Smith emphasises, is something that should be constantly revised and re-examined to keep things fresh.

The new album’s first single, Laptop Dog, obliquely critiques technological dependency, bemoaning the “laptop ignorance” that increasingly permeates British culture. Smith feels that addiction to technology is a real problem, and one that tends to stifle creativity: “There are people like that – it is a true story, that song. I know some people who are worse than alcoholics.” Characteristically, Smith is sceptical about developments that are assumed by some to herald genuinely significant cultural shifts. Producing valuable music remains something that depends upon hard work, dedication and the gradual evolution of ideas – but also upon being prepared to adopt a new direction when life gets too familiar.

For now, though, Ersatz G.B. showcases an incarnation of The Fall buzzing with ideas; one that has evidently benefited from the record’s unusual recording process. Not doing everything as a group in the studio is also, Smith hints, good for the cohesion of the band, and he declares himself “really happy” with the current lineup. He is already writing songs for the next record, and expects to continue working with the same group. Does he see this as a long-term arrangement? “Yeah, yeah, but I’ve said that before haven’t I?” As ever when The Fall are involved, the only safe prediction to make is that Smith will always be there, making challenging, strange and utterly distinctive music.