“Is he an idiot like Oasis? Or is he friendly like New Order? Or is he reclusive like Morrissey?” he whines in a fey, airhead manner, before snapping back into reality and fixing me with a surprisingly steely and clear-eyed gaze. “Say what you want. But watch your back.”

MES doesn’t have much time for the people others might regard as his contemporaries. If you see Manchester as one big happy musical family, Smith is the surly step-child in the corner, loudly singing off-key and out of time, spoiling it for everyone. Loving the fact that he is spoiling it for everyone.

The last time I interviewed him we ended up sitting on a bench in a graveyard, drinking cans of cheap lager and arguing about patriarchy in Yorkshire. This time we’re lounging around the bar of Manchester’s Malmaison hotel, still drinking lager but it’s more expensive now and it comes in glasses. Smith seems equally at home, either way.

A well-read, working class lad from grimey Salford relocated to leafy Prestwich, Smith was fired up if not directly influenced by the energy and DIY ethic of punk rock at the end of the Seventies.

Harnessing the mesmerising repetition of krautrock, the emotive thump of northern soul and the cut-up, disorientating prose of William Burroughs, Smith and an ever-changing cast of supporting players have been creating a weirdly absorbing, constantly evolving and very Mancunian kind of rock’n’roll ever since.