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That time when XTC’s Andy Partridge sang for the Residents
09.23.2016
09:16 am
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Andy Partridge in the Black Sea tour program, via 10ft.it
 
During my childhood and adolescence, XTC was an enigma. When I first heard their minor hit “Dear God,” the band had already long since retired from the stage, and then for years after 1992’s Nonsuch, they seemed to have walked out on the record business, too. They could write a song so anodyne it has now crept into our nation’s drugstores, yet they could also render an apparently note-perfect cover of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s “Ella Guru.” None of the musicians I knew who had the chops to attempt such a feat even liked Beefheart.

So while I played my tape of Waxworks over and over again in my teenage bedroom, these were among my thoughts: Who was this Andy Partridge guy, anyway? How did he play those weird chords? Why was he so reclusive? Was it all because he was, like, mental?
 

XTC 1980: Dave Gregory, Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, Terry Chambers
 
As you can see, the stray bits of gossip my imagination had to work with all focused on Partridge and his reasons for abandoning the road. I think that explains why I don’t remember wondering even once about the inner life of Colin Moulding—the writer and singer of “Making Plans for Nigel,” “Ten Feet Tall,” “Life Begins at the Hop,” “Generals and Majors,” and “Ball and Chain”—which should have been just as interesting to contemplate, in retrospect. But there were no tidbits on which the mind could feed. (Here in 2016, Moulding has not written any new material in over a decade, though he occasionally works with producer Billy Sherwood, while Partridge just wrote a song for the Monkees.)

It wasn’t until I found a copy of the authorized biography Chalkhills and Children that I learned the facts of the XTC story. In the intervening 20 years, I have, of course, forgotten most of these (except that Andy Partridge is not “mental”) and lost the book, but at that time I sort of expected XTC to tour again someday, and I would have given a fucking eye for one evening’s entertainment from the swinging swains of Swindon. Part of the mystique came from listening to bootlegs and watching Urgh! A Music War, and part was this: a stone Residents junkie, I knew that Andy Partridge sang lead vocals on the Commercial Album‘s antepenultimate track, “Margaret Freeman.”
 

Commercial Album (1980)
 
He was credited as “Sandy Sandwich,” though the jacket didn’t say which special guests sang which (ha ha) song, or songs; for that, you needed a copy of Ian Shirley’s Meet The Residents: America’s Most Eccentric Band! (recently updated), where you could read in plain English that Andy Partridge sang “Margaret Freeman” and Lene Lovich sang “Picnic Boy.”

Here’s Partridge’s answer to a fan’s question about the collaboration in the Swindon Advertiser:

The simple truth of the Residents rubdown was that they were fans of XTC and came to some shows in San Francisco. At one of these gigs they approached me and asked could I come over to their studio to sing on a track of the record they were working on, the Commercial Album.

I was delighted and of course agreed. They chose for the me the suitably Residential nom de mic of Sandy Sandwhich, put some coal in the headphones and off we went.

I had no instruction as to how any melody for the song went (titled “Margaret Freeman”) but was just encouraged to get odder and odder.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.23.2016
09:16 am
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Psychoactive sci-fi surrealism: The book covers that inspired XTC’s Andy Partridge
01.15.2015
10:19 am
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STURGEON CAVIAR
 
I’d love to live in a world where the great commercial artists of the past—the visionary men and women who could easily have been heralded “fine” artists if they weren’t jobbers—were household names, while blandly inoffensive pop singers had to hold yard sales to make rent. But it ain’t so and surely never will be. Today’s case in point is that great painter of otherworldly pulp sci-fi covers, Richard M. Powers.

Trained in Chicago, Powers became a force in the publishing industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, working for houses like Ballantine and Doubleday, and bringing an incredible stylistic versatility to his work—his work in the horror genre could be a whole separate post, and you’d not likely know just by looking that they were by the same artist who executed the works you see here. His early covers were of a type with much mid-century pulp fiction art, but as the ‘50s progressed, he began a move towards a signature style derived from surrealism. Less the sort of an-ordinary-object-is-doing-something-weird surrealism associated with Magritte or Dalí, more the timeless, placeless, deathless dreamscapes of Gorky, Matta or Tanguy, set as much in outer space as inner. By the mid to late 1960s, that style harmonized rather nicely with the psychedelic art that was spreading from music culture to, well, everything.

The best bio I’ve found for Powers is by film writer C. Jerry Kutner, on an Earthlink site that looks like it could almost date back to Powers’ 1996 death:

Powers became the virtual art director of Ballantine’s science fiction line, creating not only the cover illustrations (front, back, and occasionally wraparound), but the entire design of the books including positioning of the title and other text, selecting and coloring the typefaces, and sometimes even handpainting the lettering. Ballantine gave Powers the freedom to experiment endlessly. The more he got away with, the further he went. Reach For Tomorrow is a striking early experiment. The subject matter is a city on an alien planet. Or is it? The shapes of the city, alternately rounded and spiky, resemble blobs of clay or melted wax more than they do any realistic architectural construction. The city rests in the middle of a silent desert, closer in look and feel to the paintings of Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy than the other SF artwork of its era. Furthermore, the format of this painting is horizontal. To view it correctly, one has to hold the book sideways!

By the late ‘50s, the world of the SF paperback had been conquered by “the Powers style.” In addition to painting more than a hundred covers for Ballantine, Powers was the artist of choice for Berkley, Dell, and numerous other SF publishers. Powers’ success encouraged other SF artists like Ed Emshwiller, Jack Gaughan, and Paul Lehr to experiment with surrealism and abstraction. Powers’ art, in turn, assimilated the styles of most of the major surrealists of this century, not only Dali and Tanguy, but Calder and De Chirico, Miro and Kandinsky, Klee and Ernst. Sometimes the homage is obvious, as on the cover of Star Wormwood, a non-fiction work in which a watercolor of a man sitting in an electric chair resembles Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Pope.”

 
REACH FOR TOMORROW CLARKE
Arthur C. Clarke, Reach for Tomorrow
 
VOICES OF TIME BALLARD 1
J.G. Ballard, The Voices of Time
 
VOICES OF TIME BALLARD 2
And another one, because why not.
 
ROBOTS AND CHANGELINGS DEL REY
Lester Del Rey, Robots and Changelings
 
SPACEJACKS WELLS
Robert Wells, The Spacejacks
 
OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS TENN
William Tenn (pseudonym for Philip Klass), Of All Possible Worlds
 
More brilliant covers, plus music after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.15.2015
10:19 am
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