The Fall on YouTube: Watch BBC 4’s ‘The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith’

“It’s all business as usual, really. Chaos, but good chaos.”

That description of Mark E. Smith and the Fall opens the BBC 4’s 2004 documentary of the Mancunian shit-disturber. A caller on John Peel’s radio show is recalling a recent Fall gig as on camera we watch Smith and band prepare its 24th live performance on BBC’s famed series The Peel Sessions.

By the mid-2000s, the British post-punk band had been together for nearly three decades. Founder and (only consistent member) Smith had somehow turned his cranky, squawking voice into sharp musical instrument. As a bandleader, he had shepherded more than 50 musicians through the wringer, quickly alienating most of them and hiring new ones to take their places.

“If it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s the Fall,” Smith famously quipped of membership in the band.

Rather than petering out as the punk movement wore down, Smith and his hired hands got to work. Through the 1990s they released some of their best work, sounds that merged electronic tones and accents with guitar, big rhythms and That Voice. Smith started the decade, in fact, by collaborating with Coldcut, the influential sample-driven beat group founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More. Best known these days for launching the label Ninja Tune, Coldcut teamed with Smith to create dance punk jams that set the stage for the DFA Records scene of a decade later.

By 2004, Smith was a uniquely British icon who reveled in his notoriety, one enhanced by his love of booze and no bullshit approach to speaking his mind.

All of this and more are explored in The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith. An allusion to one of the band’s best albums, the documentary is an essential introduction to a creative spirit whose direct, insightful lyrics read as well on the page as they do being uttered.