Stand or Fall

The Fixx's anti-war anthem

I’m a huge fan of The Fixx. I love their distinctive sound. I love the intricate arrangements. I especially love singer Cy Curnin’s dramatic stage presence. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get to one of their songs.

This one, off their debut album Shuttered Room, is their very first charting hit. It captures the cold war ethos of the 80s, where a lot of governments were saber-rattling (especially Regan and Thatcher) and the expectation of extinction via nuclear weapons was everywhere. It calls for the listener to stand up for peace as it describes in detail the horrors of war.

Musically, it uses two chords to great effect. As the producer Rupert Hine put it:

Stand or Fall was always a lovely composition. And I knew from the very beginning of the first rehearsal that it was all going to be down to just these two guitar chords. And they are the two chords that open the song by way of an intro. But they're also the same two chords that permeate the entire track. They just played the two separate chords that really needed to stand out and be a hook in themselves, not just be two chords in a pop song. They really needed to stand out as two sonic moments that you would hopefully get tingles. And I tried to get them to have this sort of hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck quality just being played on a guitar.

But of course, to devise that, we spent quite a few hours working on how we were going to create this unusual impression from sounds like a guitar player just playing two sprangy chords, when in fact it was quite cleverly crafted by a few tracks and a few different methodologies. It was constructed to produce that effect. I remember that most of all. And also the singing from Cy (Curnin) became a definitive vocal performance, the backing vocals particularly on the outro became a hook in themselves. It sounds like backing vocal, which became also a kind of… not a template, but certainly a subplot for lots of the production with the Fixx - I was always working very closely with Cy on completely fresh backing vocal ideas that came about during the recording process. But "Stand or Fall" is still one of my most favorite production tracks, there's no doubt about it.

The white horse in the video represents peace, and seeing it fall sparked banning of the video in the UK. It seems weird now but at that time the videos mostly appeared on what were deemed kids shows and the concern was that it appeared the horse was dying. It was a circus horse and even though at the time of booking they specified that it needed to lie down, it refused. They eventually had to use a rope to get it down. I guess I can understand its fear, as horses rarely lie down unless there are other horses around, as in the wild that leaves them vulnerable to predators.

And that’s really what this song is about in the end. Overcoming fear. Enjoy your song of the day.