The ghost in the spam folder: Remembering Mark Smith

A strange thing happened to me a little while ago. I was waiting for a verification code for a 2FA login, and it hadn’t arrived, so by chance I looked in the spam folder of my work email. About ten emails down was one with the subject line “THE MARK” – the name of a band I used to be in many moons ago.

It turned out to be from the executor of the will of Mark Smith, the singer, who had left me a bequest of archive material from our time in the band together. This was surprising for two reasons: first I did not know he had died, and second we had such an acrimonious falling out that he was the last person I would have expected to hear from – or to think about me.

But before all of that, there was a time when he was a very important person in my life. When I worked at Walthamstow record shop Note For Note, he gave me the keys to his flat round the corner, so I could spend my lunch breaks there while he was at work in town.

We would spend evenings pretentiously smoking Gitanes and planning for our band to rule the world. He – along with BBC2 and Channel 4 – introduced me to weird cult films, which is probably why I go to Bar Trash now. He – along with my parents and my Uncle John, who I still go to gigs with – introduced me to some of the most important records in my life, in the days before streaming. Pre-internet, he was the first person who told me there were missing episodes of Doctor Who, and could produce a typed list of exactly what had gone from the archive.

We spent so much time just hanging out, smoking and drinking and listening to and watching strange things. Everybody needs someone like that in their life.

The band came about because I was working a bit with a band called For Small Mercies, which featured a colleague of mine from the record shop, and Mark was their manager. He wanted to do his own side project, and I played guitar on some demos we recorded at Tinky-Tonk Studios in Walthamstow.

After For Small Mercies split, for a while The Mark also featured that other friend, and we did some promo photos as a three-piece. I think our only gig in that form was upstairs at what used to be The Chestnut Tree pub in Walthamstow. After that it was just me and Mark – I wrote the music, did the keyboard programming and played guitar; he wrote the lyrics and sang.

We played a few gigs in dives where it cost us money to play, and did some more recording. We made a track at Bark Studio with Brian O’Shaughnessy, which is where Loaded by Primal Scream had come together. It all felt like proximity to something bigger and that we were on the cusp of having a success.

It was a different time. Mark sent tapes to college radio stations in the US, and then we circulated the demo in the UK labelled as the “US radio edit”, implying it was getting traction over there.

We did a couple of recording sessions up in Wolverhampton with an engineer whose name I’ve half-lost, funded by a guy who wanted to manage us, who then brought Adam Williams, who had worked with Eurythmics, in to do the final mixes. We even made a video, which is still somewhere in my flat on VHS, quietly decaying.

[Picture caption: Photos taking during recording sessions and making the video for ‘Dawn Breaks’]

It didn’t last.

We fell out over money and equipment. We had lived together for a year, then I was living in Leeds at university, and by then more interested in the songs I was writing myself. It ended up in court – over a sum that seems trivial now, but didn’t at the time. It was unpleasant and really worrying for my parents, who received some quite threatening correspondence.

After that I saw him once more, at some esoteric electronic music event at the Barbican. I clocked him across the room and spent the rest of the evening carefully not bumping into him. He maybe did the same.

At some point later – still in the 1990s, I think – he sent a large box of cassettes and assorted bits to my parents’ house. No note, no explanation. It felt like an underline on everything.

And then, years later, he died, and was still thinking enough about me and those times to leave instructions for this material to come back to me. There are photos I don’t remember seeing, negatives, video masters, cassettes, a veritable nostalgia rush as I unboxed them.

[Photo caption: Printed lyric sheets from The Mark]

I don’t know much about what he did afterwards, beyond that he ended up doing some work and being in Weston-super-Mare and then Thailand with Peter Christopherson of Hipgnosis, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil fame. There is one Coil release that has a Mark Smith credited with artwork. I’m glad he got to do something in music and creativity in the end – he wasn’t cut out for the corporate design world he worked in when I knew him.

This all happened a few months ago. But I’m writing about it now because I went to see Power to the People: John and Yoko Live in NYC the other week, and it is exactly the sort of thing where I found myself thinking: I bet Mark would have gone to this too somewhere. Yoko sings Open Your Box, and I have got zero doubt I first heard it when he played it to me in his Walthamstow flat. Likewise, the John Waters’ movies I recently went to see again with nostalgic glee I definitely saw first when Mark showed them to me.

There’s no glossing over how badly our friendship ended. But it’s also impossible not to acknowledge what an influence he was at a crucial point in my life. It was a strangely heavy bequest to receive – a reminder that even if you can cut someone completely from your life, you can’t cut away their influence.

[Picture caption: A curiously prophetic lyric among the packages sent to me.]

[Picture caption: Some of Mark’s words about himself at the time]