Mark E Smith: an autodidact fired by a singular vision

Sean O’Hagan twice interviewed the Fall frontman, Mark E Smith, who died last week. Here he recalls a true outsider: unpredictable, entertaining… a scabrous post-punk voiceMy connection to Mark E Smith will be forever framed by the infamous NME “summit meeting” interview that took place 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 –