I Am Kurious Oranj is The Fall’s eleventh studio album. Released by Beggars Banquet 30 years ago in 1988, it contains some of their most loved songs including “Cab It Up!” “Jerusalem” (which takes its lyrics from a poem by William Blake) and “New Big Prinz” which Pitchfork called “one of the songs that defined The Fall and Mark E. Smith”. They also said that it “has the sort of jaunty bass line that would later emerge on Pavement’s “Two States” to Blur’s “Parklife.” When Smith utters “check the record, check the guy’s track record,” the words melt into glorious nonsense a la “Surfin’ Bird.”

The album was written as the soundtrack to an avant-garde ballet titled “I Am Curious, Orange”, produced by the experimental Michael Clark Company and performed in London with The Fall playing live. As it said in the original ballet program, replicated inside this reissue, “Mark E. Smith is a history buff and admirer of Michael Clark, and I Am Curious, Orange spawned the idea of a thematic delving into the foibles and little-known psyche of William of Orange.”