‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’
 
For about 50 years now, the Residents have operated in secret, hiding their identities behind masks and costumes. But now you can see the members of the band full nude!

Yes, the Residents are the subject of a handsome new coffee-table book from Melodic Virtue, the publisher of like retrospectives about the Butthole Surfers, Pixies, and Ministry. The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 collects beautifully printed reproductions of art, photos, correspondence, press clippings and ephemera from the first 13 years of the Eye Guys’ career, opening in their humble San Mateo dwelling in 1970 and concluding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the triumphant 1983 Uncle Sam Mole Show. 
 

‘Not Available’
 
While their faces remain mostly obscured in these pages, the Residents’ bare genitals are reproduced in black and white in more than one spread, so if you ever run into a pants-less member of the group, you’ll have no trouble recognizing him! That alone is worth the price of this volume. 

But let’s suppose you’re jaded about seeing the Residents’ junk; say you’ve already got enlargements of the Delta Nudes CD cover tacked up all over your walls, and Kinko’s quality is good enough for you. Well, how about a sharp full-color photo of the Mysterious N. Senada’s saxophone and another of its case, bearing the word “COMMERCIAL” in giant red capital letters? Do you have that, Mr. Great Big Residents Fan? How about shots from inside Poor Know Graphics’ design studio circa 1972, hmm? You got pictures of Snakefinger’s wedding? I’m so sure. What about the fucking floor plans for the Residents’ old Sycamore Street headquarters in San Francisco?
 

‘Eloise’ from ‘Vileness Fats’
 
Many of the book’s contents are things I’d hoped to find inside—shots from the set of Vileness Fats, beautiful stills from Graeme Whifler’s “Hello Skinny” film, W.E.I.R.D. fan club papers—but nearly as many are treasures I didn’t know I’d been missing, such as images from a proposal for an Eskimo opera, or screenshots from a prototype Mark of the Mole video game for the Atari 2600, or a snap of a promotional packet of Residents brand Tunes of Two Cities aspirin (to treat “the newest headache” from the band). Old favorites like the black-and-white promo photo of the band shopping for groceries are accompanied by contact sheets and other prints from the shoot. Turn the page, and it’s like The Wizard of Oz: the Residents are standing in the checkout line in Technicolor.
 

‘The Act of Being Polite’
 
Peppered throughout are testimonials from the group’s many-generational cohort of colleagues and fans. Collaborators and Ralph Records alumni like Mole Show emcee Penn Jillette, members of Tuxedomoon and Yello, and all of Renaldo & The Loaf get in reminiscences. Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention tells how he came to play his Moog parts on Eskimo; Patrick Gleeson conveys his delight at the Residents’ “fuck-you-ness”; Andy Partridge of XTC (a/k/a Commercial Album guest Sandy Sandwich) apostrophizes the Eyeballs in verse.

Then there’s Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten remembering the Berlin record store that turned him on to The Third Reich ‘n Roll in the Seventies, and Les Claypool takes us to the living room in El Sobrante, California where his teenage girlfriend first played him Duck Stab on her Marantz. Danny Elfman hears a different path his own life might have taken when he listens back. And bringing down the mean age of this all-star gang are some of the Residents’ “children”: Eric André, members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Death Grips, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum…
 

Handwritten ‘Lizard Lady’ lyrics from the ‘Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook’
 
The book includes a seven-inch of “Nobody’s Nos,” an unreleased song composed for the early masterpiece Not Available. There’s also a signed deluxe edition that comes with a picture disc of “Nobody’s Nos” and a supplementary 24-page book of notes and handwritten lyrics from the making of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Mercy.

Below, the band Star Stunted (Sam Coomes, Rob Crow, Zach Hill, Mike Morasky, and Ego Plum, all of whom contributed to the book, along with its author, Aaron Tanner) performs the Residents’ 1972 holiday heartwarmer (heartwormer?) “Santa Dog” in an exclusive Dangerous Minds premiere.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA
The Residents’ press conference at the Lincoln Memorial, 1983
The Residents demolish ‘We Are the World’
Take a walk around a masterpiece with the Residents’ ‘Eskimo Deconstructed’
‘Oh Mummy! Oh Daddy!’ The Residents’ first show as The Residents, 1976

 
XTC has had its share of surprising collaborations and unusual side projects. There was the psychedelic pop tribute band the Dukes of Stratosphear, which put out two full-lengths. There was the complex proposal to invent a label called Zither dedicated to “excavated” bubblegum pop tunes that never existed. There was also the time Andy Partridge contributed to a Residents album. And there was the Fuzzy Warbles series as well. One thing that was always true about Partridge and Moulding, especially in the early years, was that there was always more than enough creativity to go around, and that creativity took many different guises.

Still, we think of a certain thing when the word “XTC” wafts into the conversation: spiky, intelligent pop in the general new wave/punk area, adventurous and tuneful. Beatles-ish popcraft from a later moment. But just as the Beatles had their “Revolution No. 9,” the XTC boys also delved surprisingly deeply into the world of musique concrète, tape manips, cut-ups, dub-versions, what-have-you—none of which is really a part of their regular mythos.

Once XTC got going in 1978, they were quite productive—releasing White Music and Go 2 in 1978, Drums and Wires in 1979, and Black Sea in 1980. While they were developing all of those great albums, they (Partridge mainly, it seems) found the time to release an album and a half of intensely cut-up re-workings of the very same tracks that went into those first albums.

In other words, they put out experimental music as if they had decided to “plunderphonic” their own catalog, to borrow a term invented by John Oswald in 1985. Puchasers of Go 2 in its original pressing also received a curious EP with a strikingly similar cover design called Go+. What Go+ turned out to be was a collection of five “dub” re-workings of tracks from Go 2.
 

 
That was in 1978. In early 1980 an album was released by, ahem, “Mr. Partridge” under the name Take Away/The Lure of Salvage. (It’s not super clear and sources differ, but I think the idea was that Side 1 was “Take Away” and Side 2 was “The Lure of Salvage.”) The cover art appropriated images from an absolutely fantastic photo shoot conducted at the preposterously palatial house of Jayne Mansfield around 1960 that we’ve discussed at DM before. Just like Go+, this album consisted of “dub” reworkings of previously released XTC material. Here’s a handy guide to which tracks the music from Go+ and Take Away/The Lure of Salvage was borrowing from:

Go+
“Meccanik Dancing (Oh We Go!)”—>“Dance With Me, Germany”
“Jumping in Gomorrah”—>“Beat the Bible”
“Battery Brides (Andy Paints Brian)”—>“A Dictionary of Modern Marriage”
“I Am the Audience”—>“Clap Clap Clap”
“The Rhythm”—>“We Kill the Beast”

Take Away/The Lure of Salvage
“Refrigeration Blues”—>“Commerciality (Signal Ad)”
“Heatwave”—>“The Day they Pulled the North Pole Down”
“Millions”—>“The Forgotten Language of Light”
“Real by Reel”—>“Steam Fist Futurist”
“Pulsing Pulsing”—>“Shore Leave Ornithology (Another 1950)”
“Homo Safari”—>“Cairo”
“Helicopter”—>“The Rotary”
“That is the Way”—>“Madhattan”
“Roads Girdle the Globe”—>“I Sit in the Snow”
“Red”/“Day In Day Out”—>“Work Away Tokyo Day”
“Making Plans for Nigel”—>“New Broom”

 

 
Take Away/The Lure of Salvage wore the experimental nature of the project on its (literal) sleeve. The music had been “destructed/constructed at Regents Park Recording Company.” The cover art also presented the following messages:
 

This used to be some XTC records. It is now a collection of tracks that have been electronically processed/shattered and layered with other songs or lyrical pieces.

If you liked ‘Go+’ then this record weighs approximately the same amount.

 
The music was every bit as challenging, adventurous, perverse, and unlistenable as “Revolution No. 9” itself—you choose the adjectives. Well, OK, maybe there wasn’t anything quite as distancing as some stentorian dude intoning the words “Number 9” over and over again, but ... Take Away/The Lure of Salvage was very intensely experimental and was hardly something a normal person could dance to. Some of it sounds a bit like fucked-up versions of tracks off of Peter Gabriel’s first albums or Genesis output from the same era—but those comps (even though accurate) may overstate the accessibility of this music. Variously, Partridge sped up backing tracks, fucked with percussion tracks, added poetry inspired by Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology,” and so on. “Work Away Tokyo Day” programmed all nine of Barry Andrews’ sax parts from “Red” simultaneously.

Many years later, in 1990, Go+ and Take Away/The Lure of Salvage were made available on the CD-only release Explode Together: The Dub Experiments 78-80.
 
Listen to it all, after the jump…...
 

 
Before YouTube’s algorithm served up the XTC home video Look Look a few weeks ago, I knew of it only as the last line in the discography that concludes Chris Twomey’s fan bio Chalkhills and Children. The lone entry under “VIDEO,” sharing the book’s last page with Johnny Japes and his Jesticles’ single, “Bags of Fun with Buster,” its position in the band’s oeuvre is unexalted. But Look Look deserves better: it brings together all the videos (or “promo films,” if you prefer) XTC made between 1978 and 1982, the period of quality encompassing White Music and English Settlement.

I don’t remember seeing any XTC videos other than the one for “Dear God” when I was growing up, though I was always searching for them. MTV was too busy making our country stupid with a diet of shit and garbage. (Waiter, I can’t eat this shit—it tastes like garbage! But I did catch “Towers of London” maybe, once, late at night?) Released in PAL format in the UK and NTSC in Japan, never issued in the US, Look Look did me no good until it surfaced on the web.
 

 
The tape is about to turn 35, so I would not hold my breath waiting for it to come out on DVD. Anyway, its considerable charms are well-suited to YouTube. These low-budget videos are livened up with such props as bounce houses and banks of TVs, such special effects as rear projection and chroma key, and such unlikely characterizations as Andy Partridge’s evil clown in “Making Plans for Nigel” and Colin Moulding’s straitjacketed puzzle-factory dweller in “Ball and Chain.” Snippets from interviews with Partridge and Moulding set up a few of the clips. Oh, and look look for Richard Branson in the “Generals and Majors” video, playing one of the song’s villains.

More after the jump…

 
XTC’s discography is marked by a depressing seven-year gap between Nonsuch, their final album for Virgin that came out in 1992, and the Apple Venus releases for XTC’s label IDEA (TVT in the U.S.) in 1999 and after. In 1997 Keith Phipps of the AV Club asked Andy Partridge why the band had been inactive for so long; with characteristic bluntness, Partridge replied,
 

Because we’ve been on strike. Because we had the shittiest record deal on planet earth. ... Although we made Virgin Records somewhere in the region of 35 million pounds profit, we were still in debt to them after 15 years on the label.

 
Eesh, that sucks. After parting ways, an audit conducted at Partridge’s behest revealed that Virgin had withheld substantial royalty payments from the band. 

One episode from late in XTC’s Virgin era that surely helped bring their relationship to an end was Partridge’s idea to concoct a fake bubblegum pop label called Zither and perform “excavated” songs in the bubblegum pop idiom. Leave it to the guys who came up with the psych rock tribute band the Dukes of Stratosphear to come up with a notion like this.

In 1998 Karen O’Brien of The Independent on Sunday described the project thus:
 

Partridge had presented a new project, songs he had written as homage to the bubblegum-pop bands of the late Sixties to early Seventies. He felt the idea was blissfully simple: “I wanted Virgin to say that they’d bought this entire back-catalogue from this [imaginary] label called Zither. They said, ‘So you go on Top of the Pops and play one of these songs?’ I said, ‘No, this is a fake historical document!’ So they said, ‘Okay, we get a young band and dress them up in early Seventies clothes?’ I said, ‘No, no!’ They just didn’t get it.” Cue much shaking of pony-tailed heads.

 
One can only imagine the reaction of the Virgin execs (even if they are rapacious thieves) upon hearing that XTC would refuse to go on TOTP to support the Zither project. Actually we don’t have work so hard to imagine it because Partridge has already filled in the blanks in the March 1999 issue of MOJO:
 

“Nicely banal, pitched around 1970, a dozen tracks about sex—Lolly Let’s Suck It And See, Bubbleland, My Red Aeroplane—all in bubblegum form. I played them the demos and it was like the scene from The Producers where they hear Springtime for Hitler. Open jaws. I was virtually offering them this thing for free and they couldn’t grasp it. It was just one more drop in the Virgin pisspot which was really overflowing by now.”

 
To be clear about this, Partridge doesn’t say it in so many words but it seems clear that the Zither project was intended to be one degree more radical than the Stratosphear side project. Rather than make up a band that had been rediscovered and play songs by that band, Partridge was proposing to make up a label and play songs by many of its acts!

As proof, check out this list of proposed band names connected to the Zither project that has circulated online—Partridge’s fecundity is quite impressive here:
 

The Lemon Dukes
Knights in Shining Karma
The Captain Cooks
Sopwith Caramel
The Ten Commandos
The Twelve Flavours of Hercules
Solid Gondolas
The Barbers of Penzance
Anonymous Bosch
The Brighton Peers
The Tweedledeens
The Herbert Fountains
Irving Merlin
The Lollipopes
The Four Posters
The Periwig Pack
Cake’s Progress
Jellyache
Funnel Of Love
The Rubber Ducks
Ancient Grease
The Piccadilly Circus Tent Rip Repair Company
Kitchener’s Sink
Isambard Kingdom Necessary On A Bicycle?

 
More after the jump…

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…

 
In late August 1980, XTC spent an extended weekend at Richard Branson’s Manor Studio in order to lay down another version of “Towers of London,” a track that would eventually become the second single off of Black Sea, following “Generals and Majors.” Someone clever at BBC sent a camera crew along to document the proceedings, and the result is the delightful hour-long documentary “XTC at the Manor.”

The “Manor” in question was a legendary estate that Richard Branson purchased in 1971 and promptly turned into a recording studio. (The documentary repeatedly features the memorable image of Branson teetering on one of the building’s many precarious rooftops.) Many, many albums were recorded at the Manor, including Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, PiL’s Metal Box, and Radiohead’s The Bends. In 1995 it ceased being a recording facility.

 
XTC also recorded White Music and English Settlement at the Manor. An interviewer points out that the weekend ends up taking on “a bizarre quality.” Andy Partridge mentions that for the previous album, the sessions were rather “sleepy.” This 1980 stint features the band’s very own bouncy castle—acquired, of course, for the shooting of the video for “Generals and Majors.”

The late, great postpunk website Slicing Up Eyeballs refers to this documentary as airing on BBC2 on October 10, 1980. My info says it was October 8, but it don’t much matter.

This is a must-see for all serious XTC fans.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Brilliant fold-out ‘chutes and ladders’ cover for XTC’s ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ single
XTC’s Andy Partridge wants to do the nasty with the ‘Statue of Liberty’

Nishimatu Nisei, 1996
 
Nonsuch, or “Nonsvch,” as the album cover technically rendered it, was XTC’s final record for Virgin. It was released in 1992 with an arresting medieval cover concept (one might also surmise that this extended to the album’s songs as well). I don’t know anybody who counts it among XTC’s strongest efforts. In fact, last year, when Robert Ham of Stereogum endeavored to undertake a full ranking of all of XTC’s albums, the only XTC album he rated worse than Nonsuch was Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2). Christgau gave the album a bomb, which might be a little harsh.

An advertisement for the album in Alternative Press featured a cute little poem with the title “Subscribe, A Poem,” the idea being that subscribing to AP would enable you to receive a CD sampler of Nonsuch and also enter the subscriber in a raffle. The poem went:
 

It slices not.
It dices not.
It belches not.
It squelches not.
It lives for you.
It lives by you.

 
Meanwhile, in what today seems like an agglomeration of dropped names that were extra certain to identify the year as 1992, an ad in the August issue of SPY claimed that “George Bush doesn’t get it. David Duke thinks it contains communist codes. William Kennedy Smith just wants to know if it gets chicks hot.” (Ahem, the “George Bush” in question here was George Herbert Walker Bush….)

Chalkhills, the XTC fan mailing list that later became one of the most exhaustive XTC fan websites, at some point noticed that the attractive woodcut-looking back cover art lent itself to, well, a coloring book (or a “colouring book,” depending). So they asked XTC fans to send in their best “coloured” versions of the various images. Naturally, this became known as The Nonsvch Colouring Book. The results, mostly executed in MS Paint or similar programs, aren’t half-bad.
 

 
Here we present a few of the highlights from the colored-in gallery and then the entire panels in their original b/w form.

 

Jeff Parker, 1998
 

“Jen,” 1998
 

Molly Fanton, 1998
 
After the jump, the uncolored versions as well as the album’s first video…...

 
In 1979 XTC released their third album, Drums and Wires, which featured what would prove to be their second-most successful single, the Colin Moulding-penned “Making Plans for Nigel” (“Senses Working Overtime,” which came out three years later, charted slightly better). The content of the song sketched a familiar tale of a couple desirous that their son Nigel pursue a “future in a British steel” over any individualistic ambitions Nigel may have carved out for himself. The title phrase is so creepy that the song succeeds on little more than sarcastic repetitions of phrases like “Nigel is happy in his work.”

The first 20,000 pressings of the single came in a very special and very ambitious cover that folded out into a fully playable gameboard of Chutes and Ladders (or Snakes and Ladders, if you prefer) with the gameplay adapted to details of Nigel’s miserable life. Ingeniously, the gameboard was reproduced twice, one to be played by Nigel and the other to be played by his parents. The details of the game flesh out the narrative of Nigel with the purchase of a scooter, job interviews, a holiday in Spain, and an engagement to “a very nice girl,” to the point that it becomes something more like a short-story or an hour-long TV drama.

According to the back cover, the illustrations were by Steve Shotter and the sleeve by Cooke Key. I take that to mean that Key did the general concept and execution of the cover.

Here’s the full game board, cobbled together using separate scans of the different game areas—the different parts aren’t aligned perfectly, but they still read fine and you can still play the game successfully. Click on the image for a larger view.
 

 
The game was advertised in the September 6-19, 1979 issue of Smash Hits:
 

 
... and the October 4 issue featured a little item in which Andy Partridge explained the rules of the game (click for a larger view) under the title “Making Rules for Nigel”:
 

 
Here are the rules of the game written out, complete with additional information on Nigel and his overbearing parents.
 

Rules:
Use two markers such as stones, pennies, buttons, etc. Decide who is to be Nigel and who is to be his parents.
If you have no dice use the spinner with a match through the centre.
The highest throw starts first. You then proceed along the course until you land on either a picture space, or an up or down space.
To finish the game you must land on 70 exactly. If you overthrow, you must go backwards by the remainder of numbers from 70.

Nigel:
5 parents insist you spend your pocket money on a suit for Sundays. Back 3 spaces (yawn).
9 You sell Dad’s old bike without him being told. Bit of money for the pictures. Have another throw (ting ting).
16 Parents phone up for job in bank and Dad drives you to the interview. No escaping. Miss a turn (zzzzz).
24 Your girlfriend offers to take you on holiday to Spain for a week. She’ll pay for everything. Move on 4 spaces (olé).
30 Mum and Dad decorate your room one day while you’re out. Mum rips up all your pop posters. Go back to 22.
39 Dad asks your advice on something (about time they listened to you - a good sign). Go on 2 spaces.
44 Big argument with parents. They refuse to keep you anymore, unless you accept the job they’ve found for you in the steel factory. Go back to 36 (swear).
56 Parents decide to go on holiday to Butlins without you (great eh!). Go on 4 spaces.
63 You fall in love with a girl who expects nothing of you other than to be yourself (how nice). Throw again.
66 You get in a real low mood and you need money to repair your scooter. The factory gates seem to loom nearer (gloom). Go back to 50.

Parents:
5 Nigel spends his pocket money on a scooter. Back 3 spaces (vroom).
9 You find cigarettes in Nigel’s coat. You confiscate them (chuckle). Have another throw.
16 Nigel ill on day of job interview. He doesn’t particularly want to go anyway (drat!). Miss a turn.
24 A friend of the wife’s says she can get Nigel a job in her factory (respectable like). Move on 4 spaces.
30 Nigel brings home weird hippy girl for tea (too far out for the boy). Go back to 22.
39 You spot Nigel parting his hair (a good sign). Go on 2 spaces.
44 Big argument with Nigel. He refuses to accept the job you’ve found for him in the steel factory. Back to 26 (cuss).
56 Nigel agrees to take a Saturday job in a supermarket. Go on 4 spaces (stack stack).
63 Nigel announces his engagement to a very nice girl, who makes him take a nightshift job to save for their mortgage (poor Nigel). Throw again.
66 Wake up to find a note from Nigel. “Dear Mum and Dad, I’ve gone to sea. No factories for me (gasp).” Go back to 50.

Continues after the jump…

 
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.”

 

Arthur C. Clarke, Reach for Tomorrow
 

J.G. Ballard, The Voices of Time
 

And another one, because why not.
 

Lester Del Rey, Robots and Changelings
 

Robert Wells, The Spacejacks
 

William Tenn (pseudonym for Philip Klass), Of All Possible Worlds
 
More brilliant covers, plus music after the jump…

 
British viewers of a certain age will know this show very well, it was called Crackerjack, and it was a children’s show that ran for a whopping 30 years, from 1955 to 1984. The hosts in this era were Peter Glaze and Bernie Clifton. (Some credit Glaze with inventing the phrase “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”)

As you can see, this video depicts a bunch of sophomoric comedians making fun of XTC’s 1979 single “Making Plans for Nigel.” I was trying to think of what the comparison of this would be in the United States, and the closest thing I could come up with was Hee Haw—but Hee Haw didn’t do song parodies, did they? It does have a certain flavor of The Carol Burnett Show spoofing Gone With the Wind. Since Crackerjack was a children’s show, I suppose you could say it was a bit like Captain Kangaroo or Soupy Sales? Again, neither of those were exactly known for parodying well-regarded post-punk acts, right?

Sadly, according to the end credits, this episode seems to have featured Sparks, but there’s no trace of their performance on the Internet that I could find.
 

 
Listen to the original by XTC after the jump….

 
When XTC’s Skylarking was released in 1986, “Dear God” arguably the groups’ most iconic number was not a part of the album’s running order. The song was recorded during the Skylarking sessions produced by Todd Rundgren—who XTC’s Andy Partridge famously did not get along with—and was relegated to the B-side of the UK single, “Grass.” However, US college radio DJs flipped the record over in favor of the bitter anti-theist “Dear God” and the song became hugely popular. Geffen Records promptly deleted “Mermaid Smiled” from Skylarking and replaced it with “Dear God.”

It’s been reported on music-related blogs from here to kingdom come for the last few months that while remastering engineer John Dent was working on a vinyl re-issue of Skylarking in 2010, he found and corrected a previously-undetected problem with the original master. As explained in the press release:

Somewhere, possibly in the transfer from the multi-channel tape to the stereo master, a polarity had been reversed. This is not the same thing as a reversed left/right channel which puts a stereo picture out of phase & makes the sound unlistenable, but a much more difficult to pin down event that can be triggered by something as simple as a badly wired plug in the overall system which, nonetheless, removes some of the punch & presence from a finished recording.

The audiophile reviews of the “new” Skylarking: Corrected Polarity Edition sound like the purchasers are thinking that it’s pretty good and punchier sounding. Maybe it does, I haven’t heard it yet, but there was something that stood out as somewhat odd to me: the press release promises an eventual 5.1 surround mix done by Steven Wilson (he did the surround version of XTC’s Nonsuch last year)–but with the curious caveat: “when & if the multi-track tapes can be found.”

How did they locate and pinpoint—let alone fix—the polarity issue if all they had were stereo masters made—we can presume—from the multitrack masters? Wouldn’t the polarity problem have been kind of baked in? Anyone care to comment on this?
 

“Dear God” from the Skylarking: Corrected Polarity Edition CD
 

The lyrics to “Dear God” were sung by a little girl, Jasmine Veillette, the daughter of a friend of Todd Rundgren’s, but in the video a boy lip-syncs her vocals.
 
More XTC after the jump…

 
It’s well-known that Andy Partridge of XTC exhibits one of the severest instances of stage fright in popular music; therefore it follows that only a small percentage of their fans have ever seen the seminal postpunk act perform live. Perhaps it was this fact that made my recent discovery of a video for their song “Statue of Liberty” all the more striking. The song is off XTC’s first full-length album White Music (I always thought that that album title was more suited to Talking Heads, but XTC beat them to it.)

In the video Partridge sings of his crush on the great green symbol of untrammeled freedom: “You must have been all of a thousand feet tall / Nearly naked, unashamed like Herod’s daughter.” Later, he owns up to his envy of all the boats that get to sidle up to the Lady: “A little jealous of the ships with whom you flirt / A billion lovers with their cameras / Snap to look and in my fantasy / I sail beneath your skirt.” This first single off of White Music was banned by the BBC for its purportedly lewd references to the famous statue.

The video was released on XTC’s Look Look video compilation. Partridge somewhat ridiculously warbles into a microphone perched atop Lady Liberty’s torch. As the song comes to a close, Colin Moulding decides to scrape his bass guitar all over Barry Andrews’ keyboard setup; Andrews then joyously goose-steps the keyboard around the room while the video fades out.

Eight years later, on Skylarking, Partridge would flip this fantasy around somewhat in “That’s Really Super, Supergirl,” contemplating his frustrated weakness in comparison to a dream girl who’s always “on a mission saving some other man.” 

It’s such a peppy number, the video can’t fail to be amusing; that they would eventually cease live performances altogether makes it that much more intriguing.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
XTC live in Germany, 1982
XTC’s Skylarking as you’ve never heard it

 
Gifted with great chops and a fine ear for melody, XTC was and remains one of my favorite bands to come out of England in the mid-70s. Too poppy for punk and too quirky and smart for the mainstream, XTC stood apart from most everything going on around them. At a time when hard angles and rough energy dominated the London and NYC scenes, the lads from Swindon seemed to be on a Beatles and Kinks high. Kind of like the Buzzcocks with visions of grandeur. The tunes catchier than hell and the lyrics dipped in candy- colored psychedelia.

1. “Respectable Street”
2. “Towers of London”
3. “Runaways”
4. “Jason and the Argonauts”
5. “Burning With Optimism’s Flames”
6. “Snowman”
7. “Ball And Chain”
8. “Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)”
9. “No Thugs In Our House”
10. “Senses Working Overtime”
11. “Making Plans For Nigel”
12. “Living Through Another Cuba”
13. “Generals and Majors”
14. “Real By Reel”
15. “Life Begins At The Hop”

XTC performs for ‘Rockpalast’ on German TV in 1982. The performance lacks the delicacies of XTC on record, but it is very fine none-the-less.
 

 
This Channel 4 UK program from the mid-80s compiles some incredible performances culled from Tony Wilson’s late 70s Granada TV series, So It Goes. Includes the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop (with horsetail sticking out of his ass and saying “fucking” on 70s TV), The Fall, The Jam, Elvis Costello, Blondie, Penetration, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Tom Robinson, Magazine, John Cooper Clarke, XTC, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sham 69 and ending with the classic clip of Joy Division performing “Shadow Play.” Many of the groups represented here were making their TV debuts on So It Goes, a regional tea-time program.
 

 
I’m amazed to find this morning that one of the finest LPs ever recorded, XTC’s Skylarking has never been heard properly. Evidently during the process of re-mastering it was discovered that every version that went out to the public was out of phase ! I can tell you from personal experience that this can really take the life out of a recording. I can’t wait to hear the corrected version ! From Andy Partridge himself:

The band themselves always had a nagging doubt that the album sounded a little too thin and bass light, not like they remembered it sounding from the recording process. Well, what John has identified is that the previous vinyl and CD’s {including the flashy US Fidelity version unfortunately} have been manufactured with their sound polarity reversed. In laymans terms this mix up means that sound waves that should be pushing out from your speakers are actually pulling them back and projecting from the rear. Something as simple as a wrongly wired XLR plug in Todds studio or the Master room would have resulted in this sound mishap. Making the record sound distant and thinner. He has identified that the original tapes appear in very good condition and with this problem now rectified APE will be able to present to you shortly a splendid double deep vinyl cut of this classic XTC album as it was intended to sound, but never has done due to human error.

In the meantime, enjoy the best song The Beatles never wrote from Skylarking :
 

 
And here are the…