Recorded at Ca Va Studio, a cavernous converted church in Glasgow, the record was helmed by producers Craig Leon and Simon Rogers: the latter an ex-Fall member from 1985-88 who later worked with Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy and The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie. Adept with beats, samples, and programming, he was a keen techno fan and his love of electronica seeped into the sessions for The Fall’s final Fontana album, Code: Selfish. Code: Selfishīush’s technical abilities soon influenced the direction The Fall pursued in the wake of Shift-Work. Weeks later, he again had to calm his nerves as The Fall played the UK’s prestigious Reading Festival alongside Carter USM, James, and De La Soul. At his first gig, an outdoor festival in Manchester’s Heaton Park, the band played to 17,000 people. A few months later, however, The Fall’s freshly recruited keyboardist, Dave Bush, received a baptism of fire. Compared with Extricate, the promotional tour was light, consisting of just a European tour in the spring and early summer of ’91. Spurred on by a brace of rave reviews (and Vox magazine dubbing it “Album of the year, thus far”), it climbed to No.17 on UK charts and became one of the band’s most successful records. Shift-Work’s accessibility paid dividends for The Fall. Listen to Shift-Work on Apple Music and Spotify. Poppy and approachable by cantankerous Fall standards, the album showcased fine, introspective fare such as “Rose” and “Edinburgh Man” (the latter addressing Smith’s temporary post-Brix exile in Scotland), though “The War Against Intelligence” and snotty anti-Madchester tirade “Idiot Joy Showland” showed that Smith certainly hadn’t gone soft. With additional contributions from ad hoc violinist Kenny Brady, this stripped-down line-up also recorded The Fall’s next album, Shift-Work, released by Fontana on April 22, 1991. During the tour, however, both Bramah and keyboardist Marcia Schofield left the band, and The Fall subsequently recorded a pair of powerful post-LP singles – “High Tension” and a rousing cover of The Big Bopper’s “White Lightning” – as a quartet, with Smith accompanied by the band’s long-term “engine room” of guitarist Craig Scanlon, bassist Steve Hanley and drummer Simon Wolstencroft. The Fall duly signed a deal with Phonogram offshoot Fontana, whose roster also boasted The House Of Love, Pere Ubu, and James in the late 80s and early 90s.Įxtricate was supported by a lengthy world tour, during which The Fall touched down in territories such as Japan and parts of Eastern Europe for the first time. With the Manchester-centred indie-dance revolution making stars of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, record companies were keen to snap up the city’s best bands. Dean Taylor’s Motown staple “There’s A Ghost In My House.”ĭespite Mark and Brix separating (and Brix quitting the band) during 1989, The Fall remained poised for crossover success as the decade drew to a close. The band even chalked up bona fide UK Top 40 hits with memorable covers of The Kinks’ “Victoria” and R. This upswing continued throughout the next five years, with the Brix-era Fall’s creative partnership with producer John Leckie (The Stone Roses, Radiohead) yielding classic albums such as This Nation’s Saving Grace and Bend Sinister. ![]() The band’s commercial viability then gradually rose after Smith married American-born guitarist/songwriter Laura Elise Salenger (aka Brix Smith) and The Fall signed with respected indie imprint Beggars Banquet. ![]() Though consistently critically acclaimed, The Fall were strictly a cult concern from their inception in 1977 until 1983. Certainly, most ardent supporters of these enduring Mancunian post-punks would agree that they enjoyed a sustained purple patch from the mid-80s to the mid-90s: a period, essentially bookended by debut album Live At The Witch Trials and the three albums that comprised their Fontana years, wherein Smith and company flirted with mainstream acceptance on more than one occasion. Yet, while his despotic reputation preceded him, his band’s turbulent history was also punctuated with spells of relative stability.
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