Chips From The Chocolate Fireball [Remastered] - Dukes Of Stratosphear (The)

Swindon: it's more than railway museums and a mad roundabout, you know.


==The Everyday Story Of Smalltown==

For a town of its size, it's made a disproportionate contribution to popular culture. Latter-day Status Quo imitators Oasis named themselves after Swindon's swimming pool and leisure centre (can't they rename the sports complex 'Coasting Along On Former Glories That Weren't Actually That Glorious When You Think ...
...born there. The noted DJ, 'comedian' and TV presenter Mark Lamarr too. As was Justin 'Forever Autumn and all those terrible Moody Blues songs while giving Richard Clayderman his look' Hayward. And singing-and-thesping damsel Billie Piper. Like the others cited, Billie wasted little time in leaving the place when she got the chance? Why? Because Swindon has developed a reputation as a place that time forgot, oft mocked by comedians (Mr Izzard in particular) ... more

Swindon: it's more than railway museums and a mad roundabout, you know.

The Everyday Story Of Smalltown

For a town of its size, it's made a disproportionate contribution to popular culture. Latter-day Status Quo imitators Oasis named themselves after Swindon's swimming pool and leisure centre (can't they rename the sports complex 'Coasting Along On Former Glories That Weren't Actually That Glorious When You Think About It' in tribute? No?). The actress Diana Dors was born there. The noted DJ, 'comedian' and TV presenter Mark Lamarr too. As was Justin 'Forever Autumn and all those terrible Moody Blues songs while giving Richard Clayderman his look' Hayward. And singing-and-thesping damsel Billie Piper. Like the others cited, Billie wasted little time in leaving the place when she got the chance? Why? Because Swindon has developed a reputation as a place that time forgot, oft mocked by comedians (Mr Izzard in particular) and whose glories decreased in direct proportion to those of the railway network? Or maybe because she wanted to. Because she wanted to.

(Swindon is twinned with Chattanooga though, which I think is a nice touch. I'm betting Swindon gets the better of that particular arrangement).

There is, however, one artistic titan who still resides in the town (if he's to be believed, this is largely because he can't afford to move out). The great, great Andy Partridge.

New Town Animal In A Furnished Cage

Partridge's band, XTC, were active as a recording entity between 1977 and 2005. Having ingeniously sneaked themselves a deal in the period when record company A&R men panicked in the aftermath of punk, they proceeded to put together an oeuvre of almost comical breadth. Starting as aggressively arty, futuristic and wonky power pop...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HJXW9XpxSg (from their first release, the '3D' EP).

...they managed, somehow, to weave a hugely individualistic path to here. Yes, this is the same band.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm4gm9bmypg (from their last-but-one album, 'Apple Venus Volume One' in 1999).

For a while around the turn of the Eighties there did seem to be a genuine chance that XTC might be the Next Big Thing. But Partridge's surrender to crippling stage fright (and resultant cessation of touring) put paid to that, and so they became the very definition of cult: adored by their peers and a rabid (but 'selective') fan base, comfortably ignored by the masses. What image they had was quintessentially 'English': music that makes the Routemaster Double Decker Bus And HP Sauce Meter glow radioactive postbox red, in a similar fashion to the Kinks.

Complicated Game

Obviously, being a cult act tends not to ensure a constant stream of Rolls Royces in swimming pools. And so, in 1984, on the back of the two excellent-but-unbought albums that had followed Partridge's breakdown, XTC were in humungous financial hock to their label, Virgin. Against that background, he took a job producing the Canadian singer songwriter Mary Margaret O'Hara, who had just signed to the label: feeling inexperienced in the producer's chair, he asked the producer of XTC's first two albums, John Leckie (who went on to a truly glittering career behind the desk), to help him. It didn't pan out very well, and O'Hara fired them in reasonably short order.

The chemistry that exists between people is a magical, bizarre thing, and who could possibly have expected that a man whose views on religion were adequately summed up by this classic song from XTC's 'Skylarking' sessions...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk41Gbjljfo (just look at the number of comments on it!)

...would fail to get on with a fiercely devout Catholic whose hobbies were going to church and sewing? Or that John Leckie's following of an Indian guru who preached free love wouldn't go down very well either? Either way, the pair were ditched. Partridge (who has described O'Hara as being 'a couple of spoons short of a full set of cutlery') was inclined to put it down to experience, but an angry Leckie demanded compensation from Virgin: they'd been hired for several months and not been paid.

It was at this point that Leckie had a brainwave. As the pair of them now had nothing to do for a while, and Partridge had told him about a bunch of daft psychedelic songs that he and XTC's second songwriter Colin Moulding had lying around, he approached Virgin with a suggestion: give us £5000 (basically what they were owed for the aborted production job) and they'd go away and make a record for them.

In Loving Memory Of A Name

And so it was that the Dukes Of Stratosphear were granted a second chance of life. It was a name that the band had considered adopting when they originally called themselves XTC back in 1975 ('too 1967', according to Partridge), but it was ideal for what they had in mind. As so it was that XTC transformed themselves into the Dukes: Partridge assumed the alias of 'Sir John Johns' (he's a comic book fanatic), Moulding became 'The Red Curtain' (his incredibly long hair as a teenager had earned him the nickname of Curtains), lead guitarist/keyboardist Dave Gregory became 'Lord Cornelius Plum' and his brother Ian (an amateur drummer, as XTC's original drummer Terry Chambers left once they stopped touring) was 'E I E I Owen'. Producer Leckie called himself Swami Anand Nagara and, mustering all the vintage kit they could lay their mitts on, they all trooped off to a village near Hereford and a studio that, ironically, was owned by a Christian organisation and usually used by gospel singers.

25 O'Clock

And after two weeks, during which allegedly they 'wore paisley shirts, burned incense and read Oz Magazine', they had a six-track mini-album. Great pains were taken to use the recording techniques of the period being pastiched: no samples or modern synths, almost everything recorded in one take with mistakes obscured by effects.

1. 25 O'Clock - A mad fusillade of ticking and striking clocks (NOT a Dark Side Of The Moon reference, according to its author) leads into a fuzz and reverb-drenched behemoth of a song, and a perfect introduction to the Dukes' alternative universe. Apparently it sounds like the Electric Prunes: I wouldn't know because I'm not that old (although research has uncovered the fact that said band once included Kenny 'Danger Zone' Loggins, which I find quite funny).

2. Bike Ride To The Moon - A lovely and rather obvious paean to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, with a skittering drum beat and a line in nonsense lyrics gloriously in keeping with the period. 'Why not have a pot of tea on a bike ride to the moon?' Well, being realistic, it'd be hard to balance it on the handlebars and that's even before you consider the suitability of bikes for lunar travel.

3. My Love Explodes - I wonder what exactly this could be about? Sounding like a marginally zonked version of The Yardbirds with added screaming theremin and with Dave Greg...oops, I mean Lord Cornelius Plum in full-on guitar hero mode, this is easily the most aggresive and rocked-up song in the Dukes' canon. Cracking track though it is, it's most memorable for the entirely appropriate 'complaint' (it's a song about orgasm, after all) at the end in a voice that you'd swear was Woody Allen (it isn't): it was actually recorded off the radio by Leckie during a trip to New York.

That is the most obscene abomination of a song that I-I-I...that is trash, that is dirt, that is filth, whatever possessed you to write such a disgusting, degeneratised song as that...

And I'm complimenting you by considering it a song.

4. What In The World?? - The only Moulding song on the LP, an agreeably plodding number dealing with the breakdown of society at a domestic level. With tub-thumping drums and the sort of tape effects that the Beatles fell in love with, it also contains more than a hint of 'In The Year 2525' by Zager and Evans (in both the tune and the lyrics).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdqmCozaLco

5. Your Gold Dress - Based around a riff so simplistic and dumb that even The Jesus & Mary Chain might reckon it not complex enough, this song lumbers and mopes along in a not dissimilar fashion to the last, before a quite lovely 'She's A Rainbow' piano break drags it to somewhere else entirely. And the fadeout...'a thousand melting Dali guitars' indeed.

6. The Mole From The Ministry - The rest of the tracklist comprises songs the band had already come up with, but this one was written during the sessions, apparently by Partridge (who can't play the piano) at the piano one morning. And it's the best one: a brilliant spin on the Beatles' 'I Am The Walrus' (and it really doesn't suffer by that comparison: it even has a corresponding video). A welter of cold war allusions play out over a superbly embroidered tune that gradually degenerates into a berserk backwards version of itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0cl7hP4ZI8

To the band's surprise, Virgin 'got' the joke, and agreed to release the album in packaging sympathetic to the era being homaged (and with a congruent budget, it must be said). They also agreed to go along with the ruse that this was a lost album rediscovered in a vault from an actual Sixties band: there was to be no mention of XTC anywhere on any press releases. The only conspicuous promotion was a showing of the video for 'The Mole From The Ministry' on 'The Old Grey Whistle Test', but that was still enough to have it start to sell by the (comparative) lorryload. In fact, it comprehensively outsold the then-current XTC album 'The Big Express'...a situation that is wryly typical of XTC's entire career.

Psonic Psunspot

A couple of years on, and another painfully underperforming XTC album (the utterly brilliant 'Skylarking') later, the Dukes returned. Initially Andy Partridge had been unwilling to repeat what had been intended as a one-off joke, but his memories of how much fun the '25 O'Clock' sessions had been (and his memories of the just-endured nightmare that was 'Skylarking') soon overcame his misgivings. This time around Virgin were enthusiastic from the get-go, and gave them enough money to record a full-length album. So the Dukes and their Swami decamped down to Cornwall, to a studio only accessible by boat.

The aim was to concentrate more on late Sixties influences overlooked on the first record, and to have a more united, 'continual' feel. To that end, many of the songs were linked by nonsensical little Lewis-Carroll-cum-Edward-Lear-esque spoken word pieces. These were originally meant to be read by veteran character actor Deryck Guyler, until his agent asked for most of the record's budget: so instead, the band went with a combination of Sir John Johns and the studio manager's daughter Lily Fraser, who presumably did it for sweets. (Guyler went on to have a glittering recording career, playing washboard on three tracks on Shakin' Stevens's album 'There's Two Kinds of Music... Rock and Roll'. He must have died a proud man).

7. Vanishing Girl - An absolute nugget of a three minute guitar pop song from Colin Moulding, and a demonstration of how little he could remember of actual psychedelia: a few years younger than Partridge or Gregory (who loved the genre) he was about eleven at the onset of The Summer Of Love, and was always more into the likes of Free. No matter, it has a gorgeous dual lead vocal and 12-string guitar that nods to the Hollies, and is something of a lost classic.

8. Have You Seen Jackie? - The Floyd are revisited in a brazen tribute to 'Arnold Layne', the Jackie of the title being a bizarre creature of constantly switching gender (and indeed species, to be entirely accurate). It's a bit more of a foot-stomper than the song which inspired it, with a raucous singalong chorus, and the bizarre sound of a backwards autoharp in the background throughout. Y'know, in case you were wondering.

9. Little Lighthouse - Like many Dukes tunes, this was originally offered up for an XTC album, then subjected to a suitable injection of the ole 1967. Opening with a foghorn apparently nicked from a BBC sound effects album and progressing on the back of an army (well, a few) of tremolo guitars, this is a song about Partridge's newborn daughter, Holly (he's written a fair few songs about his children, and is most definitely in the elite group of musicians where such efforts don't make you want to kill him).

The puffin sipped at his herbal tea and sighed. 'You can't get the buttons these days...'

10. You're A Good Man Albert Brown (Curse You Red Barrel) - A song that sounds like an unfortunate accident involving a time machine, some mild hallucinogenics, and Chas 'n' Dave, locked inside a pub with poor ventilation where everyone's been smoking way too much weed. Which shouldn't be a recommendation, but it is. Kind of. A tribute to Partridge's grandfather Albert, who did indeed marry a wartime nurse named Else. And it has Sooty in the video, which should happen more often.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBmNiHrvRbk

11. Collideascope - This song has a distinction: it's the last one Andy Partridge ever sang live in front of an audience (at an Aimee Mann gig in 1993). Affecting his best Lennon impression, Partridge embarks on what sounds like a particularly dark narcotic episode: quite a feat of the imagination for a renowned drug-free writer. The track clunks along with a fair degree of menace, with woodsaws and quotes from 'Nearest And Dearest' (the only video the band had available to watch at the studio) galvanising (of a fashion) the mellotron that is heavily deployed on almost all the Dukes tracks.

12. You're My Drug - So 'Eight Miles High' it's probably got vertigo. The oldest song recorded (it had kicked around since 1978, but was ludicrously inappropriate for the pretending-to-be-punk early XTC), aircraft noises, tambourines and a guiro (you know, that scrapy percussion thing) underpin a super West Coast Summer Of Love xerox. One of the more blatant cribs on the record, but all the more effective for it. I suspect the Byrds would approve.

13. Shiny Cage - And back to the Beatles: even author Moulding admits this is rather close to 'I'm Only Sleeping', hence its relegation to the 'not to be taken seriously' Dukes album rather than 'The Big Express' for which it was originally written. In fact, it's basically a cannibalisation of most of 'Revolver', wonky Ringo-esque drumming, faint Indian overtones, the works. And probably the weakest track on the album.

14. Brainiac's Daughter - No matter, because the last three songs are aces. First up is another evocation of Partridge's love of comic books (Brainiac was one of Superman's enemies) in the form of a cracking bubbly Fabs-esque piano-led novelty song. Literally, as there are bubbles being blown in the background all the way through it, and the track opens with the sound of a bloody great rock being thrown into the creek surrounding the studio. And it has an ocarina solo, just like the Troggs's 'Wild Thing'. Excellent, and no mistake.

Brainiac's daughter
Took me on a sleigh ride underwater
And I'm crazy for girls like that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGcaDYSrMM

15. The Affiliated - One suspects this is an attempt to turn a Moulding track into 'A Day In The Life', with its doomy verses and incongrously upbeat middle eight. Slightly unfair, as it really is a great little song (a wonderful example of the insightful, 'domestic' songs that he excels at: it was he who wrote 'Making Plans For Nigel' after all). Opening with a snippet of the announcement of Hitler's death from BBC Radio, it relates the tale of a man whose hardened 'working mens clubs' social life is undone by his marriage. Beautifully executed, acoustic guitar and twinkly piano (and a middle eight that sounds like the Mike Flowers Pops)...and the ultimate demonstration that The Red Curtain hadn't really owned any 13th Floor Elevators records when he was a kid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO2ZS62ieAc

16. Pale And Precious - Saved for last, the best. Distilling the essence of the mid-period Beach Boys into five glorious minutes, this is the finest song Brian Wilson never wrote...it really IS that good. A lightly churning organ leads into another track about Holly Partridge, and so it goes on with such obvious nods as 'ba ba ba ba' backing vocals, theremin, and a wonderful 'up she rises, each and every morning' chorus that's so Wilson-esque it's miraculous. It is one of the very best things Andy Partridge has ever written, and it's almost a shame it ended up on an album based in a supposedly throwaway side project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRcXWGLummo

Garden Of Earthly Delights

Which of course is dependant upon whether you consider the Dukes as being suitable for 'side project' dismissal in the first place. Once again, Psonic Psunspot comfortably outsold its contemporary XTC album, and plans were hatched for Dukes Of Stratosphear to take over the world. (Well, to make a third album, a rock opera entitled 'The Great Royal Jelly Scandal' at least). Then Partridge, sensibly, remembered that the whole thing had been intended as a laugh anyway, and announced that the band had retired. A decision to which (apart from one new, rather duff track on a charity album in 2003) he's stuck. Leckie went on to produce such cornerstones of record collections as Radiohead's 'The Bends', the first Stone Roses album (the Roses having approached him because they loved the Dukes, oddly enough), and Verve's 'A Storm in Heaven'. (Oh, and Kula Shaker: presumably he'd been at the Nuttalls Mintoes the day he took that gig).

To be honest, XTC didn't need the Dukes anymore: most of their later albums have smoothly absorbed those same Sixties influences present on 25 O'Clock and Psonic Psunspot and articulated them in slightly less 'obvious' form. Anyway, this leaves us with 'Chips From The Chocolate Fireball' which compiles both Dukes albums. Played one after the other in this context, one has to conclude that 25 O'Clock is the better pastiche of the period, whereas Psonic Psunspot has the better songs. Both of them are capable of making you grin a big, gormless moony grin. And both combine to give you a little taster of the wonderful and not-that-frightening world of XTC: a vast catalogue with treasure buried absolutely everywhere.

(Apologies for my probably-wildly-inaccurate song descriptions: I'm useless on my Sixties influences. They do say that if you can remember the Sixties then you weren't there, so maybe I was there: I am dubious though, what with the '1971' written on my birth certificate.)

Available for seven quid on Amazon 

...less