The Fireman's Curse was prepared in June and July 1983, Hunters & Collectors had decamped from United Kingdom, where they had been based while touring Europe for six months,[1] to Neunkirchen, West Germany.

When they heard The Fireman's Curse (the second album), they dropped us because they didn't think it was commercial.In Seymour's autobiography, Thirteen Tonne Theory: Life Inside Hunters and Collectors (2008), he recalled that their three-record deal with Virgin was broken when he and fellow band members insulted the label's executive, Simon Draper, by telling him that he was "a poncy little blueblood" with no faith in them.

[5][6] While in the UK and attempting to enter the local market, the group's members "were doing odd jobs, illegally, to keep afloat and getting steadily more miserable in the process".

[7] In the book, Seymour also describes this album as "an unmitigated disaster; an awful collection of tuneless songs full of twisted invective (mine, mostly) and apocalyptic moaning...

Australian musicologist, Ian McFarlane, felt The Fireman's Curse was "overly ambitious and cluttered, and generally suffered from a lack of fresh ideas".

[12] All tracks are written by John Archer, Geoff Crosby, Doug Falconer, Martin Lubran, Greg Perano, Robert Miles, Mark Seymour, Michael Waters.