Code : Selfish

Front cover

Group

Mark E Smith – vocals, tapes
Craig Scanlon – guitar
Steve Hanley – bass
Simon Wolstencroft – drums, keyboards
Dave Bush – keyboards, machines

With:
Cassell Webb – vocals
Craig Leon – keyboards
Simon Rogers – keyboards
Recording

Air Studio, London and Glasgow late 1991
Production
Craig Leon, Simon Rogers and Mark E Smith
Releases

  • UK ; 9 March 1992 Cog Sinister via Fontana : LP: 512.162-1; cassette: 512.162-4; CD: 512.162-2 (tracks 1-12)
  • UK : 23 September 2002 on Cog Sinister/Voiceprint. CD: COGVP133CD (tracks 1-14)
  • UK : 22 September 2003 on Cog Sinister/Voiceprint. CD: VP241005CD (2 CDs) Double pack with the 2002 Voiceprint reissue of Shift-Work. (tracks 1-14)
  • UK : 7 May 2007 on Fontana/Mercury Records/Universal Music CD: 9847302  (tracks 1-12, 15-28)

 

Tracks

  1. The Birmingham School Of Business School (Bush/Smith) 6:45
  2. Free Range (Smith/Wolstencroft) 3:58
  3. Return (Hanley, S/Smith) 4:04
  4. Time Enough At Last (Scanlon/Smith) 3:48
  5. Everything Hurtz (Hanley, S/Smith) 4:07
  6. Immortality (Scanlon/Smith) 4:30
  7. Two-Face! (Scanlon/Smith) 6:01
  8. Just Waiting (Smith/Williams) 4:38
  9. So-Called Dangerous (Bush/Hanley, S/Smith) 3:46
  10. Gentlemen’s Agreement (Scanlon/Smith) 4:33
  11. Married, 2 Kids (Hanley, S/Scanlon/Smith) 2:45
  12. Crew Filth (Smith/Wolstencroft) 5:20
  13. Ed’s Babe (Smith/Scanlon) 3:18
  14. Free Ranger (Smith/Wolstencroft) 4:05
  15. Free Range (Smith/Wolstencroft) 4:21
  16. Return (Smith/Hanley, S) 4:04
  17. Dangerous (Smith/Hanley, S) 4:01
  18. Everything Hurtz (Smith/Hanley, S/Bush) 4:07
  19. Ed’s Babe (Smith/Scanlon) 3:17
  20. Pumpkin Head Xscapes (Smith/Scanlon/Hanley, S) 3:49
  21. The Knight The Devil And Death (Smith/Scanlon/Wolstencroft) 3:23
  22. Free Ranger (Smith/Wolstencroft) 4:04
  23. Noel’s Chemical Effluence (Smith) 6:24
  24. Legend Of Xanadu (Blaikley) 3:29
  25. Free Range (Smith/Wolstencroft) 4:05
  26. Kimble (Perry) 3:55
  27. Immortality (Scanlon/Smith) 4:27
  28. Return (Hanley, S/Smith) 4:10

Notes

  • Tracks 13 and 19 are the same
  • Tracks 14 and 22 are the same
  • Tracks 15-18 originally part of the  Free Range single
  • Tracks 19-22 originally part of the  Ed’s Babe single
  • Track 23 originally on The Twenty Seven Points
  • Track 24 originally on of Ruby Trax
  • Tracks 25-28 originally from Peel Session #15

The album entered the UK chart at number 21, although it spent only one week there.

Reviews

David Cavanagh – Select, March 1992

The worst Fall album in years is still better than anything by Carter (letters to the usual address), but ‘Code Selfish’ is definitely a disappointment. From the aimless seven-minute opener, ‘Birmingham’, it has little of the grooviness of ‘Pitsville Direkt’, little of the pathos of ‘Edinburgh Man’ and very few great lines.

The arrangements are fussy and almost Industrial with loads of drum programming. The cleverly layered ‘Free Range’ is pretty bitchln’; ‘Immortality” and ‘Dangerous’ have shades of ‘Wrote For Luck’ and, unfortunately, not much else.’Time Enough’ and ‘Just Waiting’ are bleak-oramic shrugs of shoulders that the band inject a little life into, but, lyrically, Mark E Smith sounds utterly sapped as he views his mid-30’s. ‘Return’ is much more spiky, although even here Smith is intoning “baby baby baby baby come back to me”. You’re well into the penultimate ‘Married Two Kids’, before you laugh aloud, and then it’s over a horribly self-deprecating crack from Smith about his life going nowhere.

‘Code Selfish’ has bashes of brilliance – ‘Everything Hurts’ is a killer, with Craig Scanlon sounding like he’s using a 50p piece as a plectrum. But when Smith mutters “too busy to think…too busy to work…just can’t cut it” (‘Married Two Kids’) you’re asking yourself serious questions. It’s the glummest, least sarky Fall album ever, it doesn’t wanna talk about it. It sounds worryingly like Mark E Smith is no longer buying the drinks. (3/5)

Mathew Hyland – Rip It Up, April 1992

In an age of rampant platitude and compromise (if only we’d known that “breaking down the barriers” meant Push Push on BFM and a Hollywood movie staring Matt Dillon as the singer of Pearl Jam…) we need people like Mark E. Smith (if indeed there were any people like him) more than ever. His asceticism, his work ethic and his misanthropy are more “real” and certainly more passionate than the love, lust and whatever else most people’s heroes pretend to be overwhelmed by. And, of course, there’s more wit and intellectual rigour here than in 90 per cent of English novels, or in a lifetime of what TV companies call “quality British drama”. There are far too few rock lyrics in the world featuring the words “prurience”, “abject” and “vermin” and Smith is on a one-man mission to right the balance.

The music for this part of the crusade continues the themes of the first two albums: almost pastoral guitar pop defiled by the slur and sneer and miraculously unfunky collisions between dance machinery and garage ultra-primitivism. It’s un-natural, it’s anti-social, it’s got to be good for you.