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Mark E Smith’s lyrics “hard to hear”, rules High Court judge

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 4 June 2015

It’s been commonly assumed to be the case for many years, but this week a High Court judge has confirmed that The Fall’s Mark E Smith doesn’t enunciate properly when delivering his lyrics.

The news came during the ruling in a legal battle between former Fall member Julia Adamson (backed by Smith’s publisher Minder Music) and producer Steven Sharples over the ownership of 1999 song ‘Touch Sensitive’, reports the Manchester Evening News.

Sharples argued that he was entitled to a share of the song as he co-wrote both the lyrics and the music. But Adamson said that the lyrics stemmed from an earlier version of the song which she co-wrote with Smith and performed in 1998 on John Peel’s Radio 1 show, and that Sharples had made no contribution to the words when the song was subsequently recorded.

This was despite a 2013 agreement between Adamson and Sharples which gave the latter 50% of the former’s two-thirds stake in the song. Both Adamson and Minder Music wanted that agreement set aside.

To aid her decision, the judge overseeing the case, Amanda Michaels, was given three versions of the track to listen to – the original radio session, a live recording, and the album version that Sharples says he co-wrote – accompanied by lyric transcriptions provided by Sharples to support his claim the lyrics evolved between versions.

Unfortunately for Sharples, it was these transcriptions that convinced the judge that Smith was probably the sole author of the lyrics, as she felt that the producer had struggled as much as she had to work out what the vocalist was banging on about. “Mr Smith delivers the lyrics in a manner which at some points makes it hard to hear the words”, she said, adding that Sharples’ transcripts did not seem to be “completely accurate”.

Honing in on one line, she mused: “I accept the contention that the line is not ‘And a Star Wars police vehicle Paul’s off’, but the more comprehensible ‘And a Star Wars police vehicle pulls up'”.

However, Michaels did agree that string passages on the album version of the song had been written by Sharples and made a “small but significant contribution” to the finished song. This, she felt, would give Sharples a 20% stake in the piece if she were ruling without the earlier agreement. Ultimately, though, the judge felt her duty was to uphold the existing contract, meaning Sharples can continue to claim a third of the publishing income from it.

But exactly how hard to understand are the words to ‘Touch Sensitive’? Here’s a crappy YouTube upload of the video to make things extra difficult: