The Workhouse, Old Kent Road, London This Nation's Saving Grace is the eighth studio album by the English post-punk band the Fall, released in 1985 by Beggars Banquet.

In contrast to the band's earlier albums, This Nation's... is noted for its pop sensibilities and guitar hooks, and John Leckie's accessible production.

Guitarist Brix Smith and bassist Steve Hanley consider This Nation's Saving Grace to be one of the band's best albums, an opinion widely shared by critics.

[4][6] The self-taught Hanley has since admitted to being disillusioned by being replaced by a multi-instrumentalist, composer of ballets who had scored the 1982 top 20 hit "Cacharpaya" with folk music group Incantation.

Leckie's approach to the project was to both retain the Fall's rough edges and solid rhythm section, while emphasising Brix's more pop orientated guitar parts.

His production created a heavier wall of sound than their earlier releases and Smith praised his ability to bring forward the drum and bass parts.

[14] It is built around a guitar riff from Brix that evokes early horror and sci-fi film music and is clearly influenced by The Deviants' 1969 song "Billy the Monster".

[16] "Spoilt Victorian Child" incorporates unused lyrics intended for the Fall's 1979 debut album Live at the Witch Trials, but had been held back until the band found suitable "daft English music".

Smith's lyrics contain a number of Victorian era reference points, including Pop-up books, aqueducts, poxes and the Cottingley Fairies.

[18] The 1985 cassette version contains the bonus track "Vixen", a melodic surf music song written and sung by Brix, which although well-regarded by fans, is described by Pringle as "rather slight".

It consists of a semi-acoustic tape collage, stream of consciousness lyrics, Karl Burns' cymbal crashes and "meandering" lead guitar line provided by Scanlon.

During the mixing, Smith took the master tape home and accidentally erased part of the track with a section from an Open University documentary lecture by on "red giants stars".

[12] The sudden jump between lo-fi home taped and studio recordings fitted the mood of the track, and he and Leckie decided to include on the finished version.

[22] The track was described in 2019 as "absolutely sublime" by Vulture,[2][26] as "mildly psychedelic" in 2011 by critic Mick Middles, and as "a thing of true wonder" by writer Steve Pringle in 2022.

[12][28] The lyrics describe and evoke Suzuki's stage presence and singing style and are accompanied by Brix's descending chords and Burns' metronomic drums.

The song was described in 2022 as a "hypnotic art-rock anthem befitting of [Can's] name",[29] while in 2019 Suzuki biographer Paul Woods wrote that "MES took the 'Oh Yeah' riff and overrode it with a speed-freak surrealist tribute to Can and Damo himself while throwing in an oblique reference to Fritz Leiber, one of a number of supernatural horror authors who also obsessed him.

The music for the album's second single "Cruiser's Creek" is built around another circular and twangy guitar riff by Brix, while the lyrics detail a debauched office-party.

[24] It was released on 11 October 1985,[32] and was accompanied by a music video directed by both Mark and Cerith Wyn Evans,[33] and stars Leigh Bowery in a role Smith described as resembling "a clerk on acid, like he was from some alternative world".

[34] The other two bonus tracks are a cover of Gene Vincent's rockabilly song "Rollin' Dany",[35] and the original "Couldn't Get Ahead", which was recorded before Steve Hanley rejoined and has Rogers playing bass.

[43] In contrast to the prevailing view of the Fall's development after recruiting Brix, Music Week suggested the album offered more of the same but lacked potential for mainstream crossover.

[49] Listeners of John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show voted six songs from This Nation's Saving Grace to the annual Festive Fifty list: "Cruiser's Creek" (no.

[65] According to Larkin's The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Brix's "partly melodious sheen ... brought an air of 60s subculture to the group's post-industrial rattle", without compromising the band's "stubbornly maverick" roots, as the album "shows the Fall extending stylistic barriers without sacrificing their individuality.

According to Pringle "it contains a flawless balance of everything the group did exceptionally well: aural barrage and grinding repetition, off-kilter pop-hooks, sonic experimentation and audacious weirdness.

"[67] James Murphy—best known as the frontman of New York dance-punk band LCD Soundsystem—purchased This Nation's Saving Grace the year of its release and said its aesthetic initially "terrified" him.