XTC's Psychedelic Breakfast

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).