"Paint Work" (often written as "Paintwork") is a 1985 song by the English Post-punk band The Fall that first appeared on their album This Nation's Saving Grace.
Widely considered the high-point of the album, the track was described in 2019 as "absolutely sublime" by Vulture,[2][3] and as "mildly psychedelic" in 2011 by critic Mick Middles.
[4] The semi-acoustic music is blended with tape collages and Smith's stream of consciousness lyrics which reply on the refrain "hey Mark", Karl Burns' cymbal crashes and Craig Scanlon's meandering lead guitar lines.
During the mixing, Smith took the master tape home and accidentally erased part of the track with a snippet from a documentary he was listening to from an Open University lecture by the astronomer Alan Cooper titled " How do red giants make Carbon?".
"[10] Smith said in a 1986 interview that the song lyrics contains "personal jottings and bits, but there's a lot there about England compared to Europe; how if you're not some flag-waving moron you don't fit in.