I Am Kurious Oranj by The Fall

I Am Kurious Oranj, the Fall's 11th studio album, came out on Beggars Banquet on 31 October 1988, with Ian Broudie producing, and it began life as a ballet score. The music was written for I Am Curious, Orange, the band's collaboration with dancer Michael Clark, and most of it had been worked up in advance by Brix Smith and bassist Steve Hanley.

It closed a good year for the band, one that had already brought the more approachable The Frenz Experiment and a clutch of UK chart singles, but things were fraying inside the camp, with Mark E. Smith's marriage to Brix coming apart. She wrote many of the best-loved songs here, "Overture From Kurious Oranj", "Van Plague?" and "Bad News Girl" among them, yet her name was left off the credits. The sound is classic Fall: Smith's sneering half-spoken rants over circular, repetitive grooves. A live take from the Edinburgh Festival performance surfaced in 2000 as I Am as Pure as Oranj.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.