Music: The Fall guy

Mark E Smith has never been one to mince his words and his hilarious memoirs are no exception. Aidan Smith meets the outspoken singer in Manchester's Malmaison – and ends up with Albert Tatlock in the Rovers.

MARK E SMITH doesn't have the face for this fancy hotel. He doesn't have the build for his Tony Soprano-style leather jacket. He doesn't have any money in his pockets. And he doesn't have a mobile phone so he borrows mine to tell his wife that a cabbie requiring payment is headed her way.

"Women!" he rasps. "She nicked all my money to go shopping, though I don't know why, because none of these big, new Manchester stores ever have anything in them. Elena will read about these fancy tights in a colour supplement – 'Sorry luv, only available in London'. Or she'll go looking for a fancy cake and come back with an Eccles as per bloody usual."

German-born Elena, who Smith calls his "diamond" and who plays keyboards in the Fall, is always suggesting they go and live somewhere else. "It's always places we've just toured – 'What about Italy, Mark?' It might be all right, for a week tops, but then the police would start following you around."

Smith likes it fine in Manchester. In fact, he likes it so much here that halfway through our afternoon together, I will swear I'm in the Rover's Return, not the Malmaison Hotel, and nattering to Albert Tatlock as we watch the rain fall. Smith took his band name from another Albert – Bert Camus. He liked the world better when there were more people called Bert and Alf and Stan. And in his new book, he reveals his deep mistrust for anyone – journalist, album-cover designer, whatever – called Luke.

The Lukes of this world are in stellar company. John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton are grumped about in Renegade – so, too, Joe Strummer ("a phoney"), Madonna ("bone idle") and Elton John, for being "the king of the New Homosexual Elite all of a sudden", nominal head of the wardrobe police who slag off people's lifestyles – especially the brass fittings.

Albert Tatlock was partial to a bit of brass and I suspect Smith is, too. In his home in the Prestwich district of Manchester there are only three chairs, meaning just one guest at a time, otherwise it could turn into a hippy commune. So let's stay here and have another beer.

Smith orders two Coronas to my one and is soon on to whiskies as well. How's his health? "Well, this morning I could hardly walk. I'm coughing up green gunk – it's the Chinese flu. But I'm a lot better than the last time you saw me, har har." The smoking ban has been bad for him because now he lights up as soon as he wakes up. In public places he substitutes with snuff and the habit suits him: he's like a self-made Lancashire mill tycoon as he spoons a tiny hillock of the brown powder. Running the Fall and keeping the toerags in check calls for stern discipline, the sort that went out of fashion when the old king died.

The band have a fine new album – Imperial Wax Solvent, the 27th – on the go and here Smith rants: "I'm a 50-year-old man, deal with it." But the real delight is the memoir. Keith Richard's forthcoming autobiography is being more touted and hyped, but I doubt it will be as funny as Renegade, already hailed as the funniest rock book ever.

"The publishers kept on at me to make it doomy and gloomy," he says. Perhaps they hoped Smith would exploit his love of horror fiction (Arthur Machen is his favourite; as a teenager he was a member of the Machen Society). More likely they wanted the horrors of life on the road with the Fall, and Smith gives them his version of the on-stage fights, the walk-outs halfway across America, the wedding-day sackings – likening ex-Fall members to David Beckham and all those England World Cup football flops who "couldn't stay away from their birds and couldn't stop crying". But Renegade is even better when it's not about music and Smith is revealing his deep love for Neighbours and expostulating why Bargain Booze is such a great concept for a shop.

This must be the first rock book – the first of any kind – to quote Arthur Schopenhauer (like the German philosopher, our hero adheres to a daily regime), Thomas Carlyle ("Produce, produce – it's the only thing you're there for") and Grandad Smith's old plumbing manuals.

Smith also quotes Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Hardy and Knut Hamsun, but he wears his literary influences lightly. I tell him I'm surprised by all the unlikely name checks – Neighbours and also the Glitter Band for a double-drumming din, "like a war tank", Alvin Stardust and Shakin' Stevens for entertaining being their "duty", Peter Waterman for being a "good worker" – and he puts an arm round my shoulder.

"Only a Scotsman would have made those connections." Surely not, I say. "No, lots of English tossers wouldn't have done the research. You're a product of a superior education system, almost as good as Germany's." Another round is ordered and the chat drifts towards Smith's Edinburgh years, fondly remembered by him if not by any doctor who's checked the condition of his liver in the interim.

In 1989 he decided he had to get away from his first wife, Brix. So – living alone for the first time in his life – he spent spells first in Leith then the New Town, witnessed the emergence of the Trainspotting culture, drank with doctors and acid-heads, marvelled at all the history and lost himself in books.

"I spent a lot of time in these specialised science and law libraries," he recalls. "They were great places to go before you had a drink. I'd peruse all these psychiatric reports and case files. It was like a second education in a way – and it was free. You could have a cig, and some fellows used to bring in hip flasks. Dead civilised."

But after two years all the men in his family started "dropping off the perch," and Smith returned to Manchester. "Edinburgh was too nice. That's a funny thing I do. When life's going too well I get worried. Is that self-destructive?" If this sounds like Smith engaging with his feelings in a New Man way, you should know that he's long since removed his arm from my shoulder.

New Man takes a bit of a pasting in the book – for all the magazines devoted to him, for his fussing over children, for instigating conversations about curtains. So what does Smith talk about with his male friends? "Let me see, I was out with a couple last Saturday... crossbows."

Edinburgh gave Smith the song 'Edinburgh Man', but he needed to get angry again and the Madchester scene duly obliged. "I went to the Hacienda once. It was full of pseudo yobbos in flares." Smith has little time for musical poseurs who don't put in the graft, don't read enough, compose bland, generic lyrics and "act the rock star without delivering the goods" (Pete Doherty, he means you). He says he runs the Fall "like a platoon" and has always believed that "writing about Prestwich is just as valid as Dante writing about his inferno".

Not for the first time today, Smith calls on a Scot for inspiration. He admires how Sir Alex Ferguson rules Manchester United, for his rigour and his refusal to embrace celebrity culture. When a footballer doesn't comply with Fergie's orders, the rant that follows is called the "hairdryer treatment". Smith's commands can be bizarre – "Play it like a fookin' snake!" – but, as at Man U, there are still plenty of musicians willing to become Fall guys. Being abused by Smith must be a badge of honour.

Because I have come from Edinburgh and am not called Luke, I have got off lightly. "Thanks cock," he says. The wind has got up; this is no place for an apprentice snuff-taker. But Smith heads out on to the Manchester streets he will never leave. When I half-shut my eyes I can see Albert Tatlock's old bunnet perched on his head at a jaunty angle.

Renegade, published by Viking (£18.99), and Imperial Wax Solvent (Universal) are both out tomorrow