James Murphy’s favourite song by The Fall
When collating the essential artists that scored the 2000s, there’s little argument that New York dance punks LCD Soundsystem sit at the very grade-A top of the era’s essential soundtrack. Born from frontman James Murphy‘s idiosyncratic DJ sets in Brooklyn clubs, their lively blend of mutant disco’s ephemeral crackle wrapped around a sharp pop hook saw them quickly rise to the top of the indie charts after 2005’s eponymous debut.
Two years later, LCD Soundsystem struck sentimental gold with ‘All My Friends’, a seven-minute motorik piano stomper that raced across the existential pangs of adulthood with such stirring affect it makes grown men weep while sloshing a Tuborg at their live sets.
With his exhaustive DJing background and authoritative knowledge of popular music, a chance to peek into Murphy’s personal favourite of any artist is an intriguing one. A band like Manchester’s The Fall presents a tall order for any curator, a whole universe of differing styles and creative fancies across their 32 studio albums, from acerbic post-punk, alternative pop flourish, bastardised techno conjurings, and irascible iconoclasm by the band’s close.
The myriad dimensions of The Fall were all held together by their miserabilist frontman Mark E Smith, the fiercely literate lyricist with a natural invite of chaos and volatility both musically and in the treatment of his band members live on stage.
There’s a lot of Fall to sift through, but their mid-1980s era is a solid starting point. The five records released with Beggars Banquet caught the band pulled into pop’s mainstream with semi-willingness, broadening their confounding punk snarl with a pleasing wash of shimmering keys, hooky garage riffs, and a uniquely acidic coating of discoloured psychedelia inhabiting a weird proximity to his hometown’s lysergic indie rearing its head toward the end of the decade. When considering his favourite, Murphy goes for their peak era and the album that serves as most intrepid muso’s introduction to The Fall’s ‘wonderful and frightening world’.
“I think you hear as many moments of that as you hear me singing like Roberta Flack,” Murphy joked to Red Bull Music Academy in 2013 when selecting ‘Paintwork’. Jokingly commenting on The Fall cut standing as his most-loved while bearing no obvious presence in his work, Murphy’s reach into 1985’s This Nation’s Saving Grace is a safe but no less interesting bet, an immaculate 11-track effort that illustrates everything so beguilingly belligerent about The Fall during their brief pop flirtation with the charts.
‘Paintwork’ mashes together a strange mulch of producer John Leckie’s high-end gloss courtesy of The Music Works studio with four-track home recordings from guitarist and keyboardist Simon Rogers, plus Smith’s off-the-cuff ramblings to a dictaphone. The clashing sonics are driven by a confoundingly lilting indie stroll, a relatively gentle touch for The Fall that scores the disjointed lyrical surrealism that’s only clear to their acerbic frontman: “Then I read Paula Yates on Vision mopeds / Then I found out we were not going to Italy / Later Mam said ‘Them continentals are little monkeys’ / And yesterday we had liver and sausage over”.
Allegedly, the “Hey Mark! You’re spoiling all the paintwork” line and title inspiration came from the complaint of a decorator painting the new house of Smith and bandmember, plus wife Brix’s new house, similarly inspiring the previous track ‘My New House’. ‘Paintwork’ is the kind of aural and lyrical mess that only Smith could command, a tripped-out peephole into domestic banality gunked in esoteric musings and inside-out art-pop charged with that special energy during The Fall’s golden era.
