I know I said a few weeks back that I’d get this series down to basics, and then last week I offered up a lengthy tale of horror.
But I think that was all necessary as it cleared the decks for more or less the 21st Century version of The Fall, one in which all traces of the band’s roots and beginnings were done away with and it became a vehicle for MES and hired hands, albeit in due course he would come to find a settled line-up again.
Work on the next album got underway in late 1998 and carried over into early 1999. The musicians involved beyond MES and Julia Nagle on keyboards were Neville Wilding (guitar, backing vocals), and Tom Head (drums), while Karen Leatham and Adam Helal were both tried out on bass. Indeed, the final few gigs of 1998 had seen the band experiment with two bass players on stage at the same time, but seemingly it only delivered a great deal of chaos. In the end, it was Helal who was kept on as the full-time member once the band took to the road to promote the release of the album The Marshall Suite, which hit the shops on 19 April 1999, once again via Artful Records.
Some four weeks earlier, a single had been released, on 12″ vinyl and CD:-
mp3: The Fall – Touch Sensitive
mp3: The Fall – Antidote
mp3: The Fall – Touch Sensitive (dance mix)
It reached #90 in the charts and largely unknown outside the confines of fans of the band until 2003 when this advert for a car started being aired on the TV screens here in the UK:-
Hey Hey Hey……The Fall were suddenly famous!!
The CD version of this single will set you back about £2 on the second-hand market. The 12″ single goes for more than £50……
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
I wasn’t following The Fall at all by this point, so it was the Vauxhall Corsa TV ad that first drew my attention to the song, although I didn’t have my own copy until a few years later, when I bought The Fall Box Set 1976-2007.
I like Touch Sensitive as of itself, it’s a glorious racket with some pithy lyrics, but as you say, The Fall felt like just a vehicle for MES by this point. The “Dance Mix” is disposable. Ashley Beedle also did a 4:20 re-edit for his Message In The Music box set in 2014, which (excuse the pun) falls between the two – better than the Dance Mix, not as good as the original.
Antidote is an interesting song insofar as it’s very heavily influenced by the songs ME recorded with Simon Spencer around the same time, Plug Myself in by D.O.S.E. and the eponymous Inch.
Love this song, bought the 12″ at the time. Hadn’t realised it had appreciate din value so much. My copy has bene played out a few times when DJing so may not be in perfect nick.
Like @Khayem, I wasn’t following the Fall at this point so everything from here on is uncharted territory. I guess I’ll have to look up the lyrics to see how interesting the songs are. The importance of the music underneath the words seems to be taking a back seat. (Brix/Hanley fan.)
I don’t mind this MES. Certainly less Fall, but I was still interested.