XTC : Classic or Dud.

And you may not like Apple Venus Vol. 1, Alex, but it's at least "decent."

"King for a Day" doesn't remind me of the Police either. It's a fine, pleasant song, but just a little too overproduced for my taste (like much of the Orange & Lemons album, I think).

I listened to Oranges and Lemons for the first time in years recently -- I found a used CD copy for $2, and it's easily worth that. While the production is annoying, what I found interesting is that the track I used to blow past are the only ones I really enjoyed. If you can get past the bad lyrics that infect the entire record, there are a few gems: "The Loving," "One of the Millions," and "Hold Me My Daddy" stand out.

Whatever. It's still all about English Settlement.

Big Express? Ehhhhh......with the exception of a few tracks, it's not their finest. Never cared for Mummer so much, either.

Then, of course....there are THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR,.....who quite thoroughly rock.

Mummer would have been 10 times better had the same tracks been sequenced differently. It's chock full of top tunes, but the running order is just woeful.

O&L's high production really works in favour of the music, I reckon. Apart from King for a Day, which is agony to my ears. The raw power behind Antheap et al really pronounces the strengths in the songwriting. I agree on the relatively weak lyrics though; I think there were a few hassles with Virgin around that time, with the label wanting Partridge to produce hit singles and such.

Anyone heard the Fuzzy Warbles stuff? It's some of the best Partridge has ever done, and it's not overproduced. :)

"Black Sea": well, I do think, just to attempt to take down a peg an album I've always liked, that XTC did progress a bit like Yes. Thus, "Drums and Wires" is their undeniable "breakthrough" album much like "Fragile," and "Black Sea" is their undeniably "accomplished" yet overstated "improvement" upon their breakthrough, just as "Close to to the Edge" is similar for Yes. And to borrow a Meltzerian trope, it's their overstatement that is the point, on both LPs, overstatement as understatement as overstatement or something silly like that. I do like "Black Sea" much better than I do "Close to the Edge" (I have been somewhat obsessed, though, with "Siberian Khatru" lately, and find it very XTC-like). I never liked "Sgt. Rock" from "Black Sea" either, nor do I find the "Kinks-esque" "Respectable Street" all that great. But love "Towers of London," sure.

A Mate of mine used to live in Swindon, and worked in a small recording/rehearsal studio there, that XTC used to use, back in the day. One fateful day, he was assistant producer when they worked on their first attempt to do "Making plans for Nigel". This was one of the tracks on the "cupboard/wardrobe/whatever it was called" rarities/anthology thing, which I managed to get via Kazaa. So, I added it to a compil CD for him, and said "Now you can play it to friends and say "Hey, this track, I rewound the original tape!"

BLASPHEMY.. Oh hahahahahahaha. irony.

I heard "Respectable Street" on my CD walkman Friday morning, totally by accident, I was only trying to re-experience the whole of the Rag & Bone Buffet CD and I was surprised that suddenly reality was shapeshifting underneath my feet while "Respectable Street" played and I teleported to another heavenly post-punk planet and couldn't stop toe tapping and singing and god, what a mess. Surely that song could keep pace with Gang of Four as far as clasic post-punk goes.

Which reminds me, anyone want to join a band? I could bloody use a drummer, me.

Living Through Another CUE
BAH!

I listened to English Settlement all the way through again the other day, and as I get older, the more it becomes apparent to me that the last two tracks are 1) by a fair margin the best things on there and 2) utterly, utterly superb.

I bet you're probably right. English Settlement was always their most difficult album for me (as opposed to Go2, which frankly goes in one ear and out the other for the most part). It has its place in their catalogue, though, and I respect it.

I really need to hear The Big Express.

From some years back:

Anyone heard the Fuzzy Warbles stuff? It's some of the best Partridge has ever done, and it's not overproduced. :)

Hell yeah. The Fuzzy Warbles stuff can be broken down into the following categories:

1) Demos of stuff already released. And often these demos are VERY different (cf "Great Fire", "Me And The Wind") and better (cf anything from _Oranges & Lemons_ and _Nonesuch_)

2) Noodly bits and throw-away gags. Andy laughing uncontrollably, Andy doing imitations, Andy doing an answering machine message. These aren't even for diehards like me. Well, after the first few listens at least.

3) Instrumentals. I always liked XTC's instrumentals - the Homo Safari series is particularly cool. But these are inessential for the most part.

4) Complete, new, unreleased songs. This is the MEAT! And it's soooo tasty. "Sonic Boom" is amazing, "When We Get To England" is gorgeous, "My Land Is Burning" is powerful and politically relevant today, "End Of The Pier" is evocative of an England I never knew in a palpable way. That these songs were in Andy's shoebox for years is a crime, but at least they've seen the light of day.

Classic to the nth degree. XTC is one of the very few bands whose demos are worth hearing.

Thanks for helping me understand it better. I played the first Fuzzy Warbles CD and quit, so I will have go back and try to experience some more of it.

I've muddled my way through volumes 1-7 over the past year and Mr. Odds summation is pretty much OTM - the best stuff is the fully formed, unreleased songs, the rest ranges from interesting to completely unnecessary.

Thread here: S/D: Fuzzy Warbles (an XTC thread)

4) Complete, new, unreleased songs. This is the MEAT! And it's soooo tasty. "Sonic Boom" is amazing

Isn't it though?

I've created an iPod playlist of this MEAT of which you speak. It's 46 tracks and it's bliss.

see also "Wonder Annual", "Ship Trapped In Ice". If you took off the worst two songs on Wasp Star, and replaced them w/these, that album goes from C+ to A-.

I dunno, I totally love the Dukes of the Stratosphear stuff, but I can't stand XTC. In fact I kinda hate them. Am I a hypocrite for digging "Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" when I just cannot abide the "real" band?
It just seems like the Dukes are openly derivative so that changes the valence completely.

I think you'd like "Fuzzy Warbles" then, it's closer to the Dukes spirit than XTC, I'd say.

DD, so you're saying XTC's more (imo still pretty thinly) veiled references to 60s pop is the deciding factor in your hatred?

It's hard to put into words. I suppose it is that the sheer anachronism of the Dukes becomes kind of critical, like a gesture of defiance against what is current. Whereas the mixture of "classic" moves and au courant stuff in XTC feels kind of reactionary in a bad way; a kind of after punk return to Real Musical Values that is just reactionary enough to be annoying to me, but isn't so reactionary that it goes over the edge and becomes camp, like the Dukes. Does that make sense?

Yes. Also many of the DoS songs are just really really good with less opportunity for "cleverness" and fannying about

ic -- tho I fear for my own reception in the Drew house based on that criteria...:/

also wonder if there are particular albums/songs that rub you the wrong way. I definitely see A.Partridge in particular as having a pretty unique hangup of being obsessed w/both pop forms of Beatles/Beach Boys/Kinks and (basically modernist) notions of progress and tech in pop, via bands like Can, Capt Beefheart -- seems like this would easily end in many trainwrecks for songs, tho for me anyway, also ends in songs that no one else has ever written (+ I like em!)

Dominique, you know yer always gettin' a warm reception in my house . . .

I honestly must also confess that my childhood friend's annoying older brother *loved* XTC (and Wings!) in a smug way that really bummed me out, and so perhaps I am simply prejudiced and it's not really rational or worth sharing with ILM.

XTC drummer Terry Chambers is out touring the US now. I missed the dc area gig near me

Wiki says :
Terry Peter Chambers is an English drummer who was a member of the band XTC from 1972 to 1982 and the popular Australian–New Zealand group Dragon between 1983 and 1985. He appears on all of XTC's albums between White Music and Mummer

see current revive

yeah in retrospect some of Colin's early songs like "Cross Wires" and "Dance Band" are such amusing outliers in that way, I've always wondered if those songs were Colin making fun of Andy's style

feel like Andy was one of the last remaining guys to be really into the idea of having songs 'sound' like the words in their title. you can especially hear that on The Big Express.

the similarity between "Stupidly Happy" and Third Eye Blind's "Never Let You Go" gets mentioned a lot so I figured I'd have a go at combining them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn54ksYvyrk

Thanks a lot, frog, now I won't be able to listen to anything but Wasp Star again for weeks.

(Smooooooth mix.)

omigod

Well made!

feel like Andy was one of the last remaining guys to be really into the idea of having songs 'sound' like the words in their title.

Pretty much every time I've seen him talk about writing a song, he describes coming up with an initial riff and then thinking — for instance — "this feels like earth and soil, it reminds me of farming and my great-grandparents, this will be a song about a farmboy's courtship." I feel like I've seen him explain this with lots of songs and it always makes wonderful immediate sense, like ... yeah, that riff on "Mermaid Smiled" really does have a hint of sea spray to it! He calls this "synaesthesia" but it seems more in the range of just, like, having really well-developed real-world associations with sounds. (And wisely letting them guide you toward writing about all sorts of interesting topics, instead of trying to choose and impose the subject matter.)

something about Andy's songs always reminded me of model train sets, like a miniature version of the real word recreated in painstaking detail, the songs themselves feel like little miniature worlds that he's exploring. I remember reading something about him spending a long period of his childhood confined to bed due to illness, and I think a lot of XTC songs have this quality of sounding like a make-believe world invented by an imaginative child who go outside, simultaneously impossibly vast and also and hermetically sealed. (Like a fantasy novel that spends a lot of time and effort detailing the fantasy world's landscapes and history and languages etc, where the fussy level of detail makes it seem bigger in some ways but smaller in others, in that it makes it discernible that this is something that has been invented by one mind and where everything fits neatly together)

I think Steve Harley also spend some of his childhood confined to bed, and his music has a similar quality in some ways

In some old interview I read that Andy and Colin were once discussing their approaches to songwriting, and they decided that Andy was an indoor guy who wrote outdoor songs and Colin was an outdoor guy who wrote indoor songs.

The transition from The Wheel to The Maypole just gave me big-time chills. Awe!

gotta be one of the very best "final songs" ever, up there with "I Can't Give Everything Away"

Ha!! Just noticed that Colin sings the lines that follow "and my friends all said" in Wounded Horse -- great touch. I still love this song (and whole album).

just found out that Andy's daughter Holly (who is referenced in several XTC songs) is making her own music now and it's uh...not bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIW9-JXLHqE

She’s got her dad’s love of wordplay