FALL, THE - Shift-Work LP

You’ve made post-punk records for the past 12 years. You’ve taken the repetition of krautrock and made it a signature feature of your music. British DJs love you while the mainstream press ignore you. How do you survive a changing musical landscape?

So was the situation that Mark E. Smith found himself in during the early 1990s. His seminal post-punk act The Fall had skirted on the outer edges of fame, only to be shutout from the big payoff. When The Fall left pseudo-independent label Beggars Banquet for the greener pastures of major labels Fontana and Phonogram, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for growth.

And by large, it was. Their major label debut, 1990’s Extricate charted higher than any album they had previously released. Single “Telephone Thing” was a minor hit in the UK. From an outside perspective, things finally seemed to be going well for the group. But inside, things were far from perfect.

Smith was disillusioned with the direction that independent music was heading in at the time, particularly the independent music being made in his home city of Manchester. The majority of the music scene was enamored with a style at first dubbed the “second summer of love” in 1988 and later Acid House and Madchester. The majority excluding Smith, that is.