XTC‘s 1989 album Oranges and Lemons is being made available on vinyl next month. The album, which features the singles ‘King For A Day’, ‘The Mayor of Simpleton’ and ‘The Loving’ is the eighth in a series of XTC Classics to be issued on a 200g vinyl edition. It has been mastered by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering with input from Andy Partridge and is fully approved by XTC.
This is the first time the record has been available on vinyl since the original release and a few improvements have been made, including reworking the sleeve to present the front cover image in all its psychedelic glory and making this a gatefold with song lyrics (the original was a single sleeve). Why the Mayor of Simpleton was not a bigger hit has always flummoxed me. Superbly catchy and Moulding’s bassline alone is a solid classic (apparently he was asked to join Pink Floyd around this time).
The single “Dear God” knocked loudly on the door of commercial acceptance in America, and after over a decade of making some of the best records of the era, it seemed that bigger success was just within reach as they released ‘Oranges & Lemons’ in 1989. The first single from the album, “The Mayor of Simpleton,” actually made the Billboard Hot 100 and checked in at No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart. The bright and buoyant track was but one gem among two LPs worth of great tunes. The only fault of the LP was its somewhat glossy ’90s production values. Fortunately, the songs are able to cut through the glare, for the most part.
XTC “Oranges & Lemons”released on 27 February 1989 in the U.K
“We always think in terms of a colour for each album. The last one, Skylarking, had a pastoral, paisley feel. This album is more aggressive. The songs are up and positive. I’m a pretty optimistic person myself, sometimes aggressively so… like jolly sandpaper. This album has a 1,000-watt bulb where there used to be a 40-watt. It’s fluorescent. Definitely bright colours.”
Andy Partridge
Extract from Oranges & Lemons Blu-ray 5.1 Surround, Filmed by West-One Television ,London ,16 January 1989
UK version directed by Nick Jones (as Ian Absentia) Oranges And Lemons is the third in a series of expanded XTC album reissues, including 5.1 Surround mixes, new stereo mixes and High-Resolution stereo mixes by Steven Wilson, along with a wealth of extra audio and visual material. Steven Wilson produced the mixes with the input of founder band member Andy Partridge and the full approval of the band. This cd/blu-ray edition is presented in special packaging with an expanded booklet and sleeve-notes by Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory.
“Oranges & Lemons” is the third in a series of remixed & expanded XTC classics. The album has been mixed from the original studio masters by Steven Wilson with input from Andy Partridge, and is fully approved by XTC. The CD features a completely new stereo album mix, while the Blu-Ray features a wealth of content, continuing the “virtual box set on a single disc” concept of the first two releases in the series:
5.1 Surround album mix in 24bit/96khz available in LPCM and DTS HD MA
a new stereo album mix in 24bit/96khz LPCM audio
instrumental versions of all new stereo mixes in 24bit/96khz LPCM audio
a flat transfer of the original stereo album mix in 24bit/96khz LPCM audio
2 separate sets of demo & work tape sessions showing the evolution of the album and associated recordings
1 set of pre-recording rehearsals, promos & ID links for radio stations & record companies
a collection of single mixes & XTC’s version of Captain Beefheart’s “Ella Guru”
promo films for “The Mayor of Simpleton” (3 versions), “King for a Day” and “The Road to Oranges & Lemons’, a rarely seen home-made film by the band explaining the album (and themselves!) to Geffen Records USA.
Presented in special packaging with expanded booklet and sleeve-notes by Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding & Dave Gregory.
The story goes that when Bob Dylan heard Jimi Hendrix’s swirling cover of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ he said that the track no longer belonged to him, that Jimi had provided the essential version of the song. He clearly hadn’t heard XTC’s fresh take of the track on the TV show ‘So It Goes’.
While punk rock was sweeping the globe and the need to destroy the past to create a new future was an ethos that many bands latched on to, a rejection of rock ‘n’ roll’s past was a fashionable thing and most punks spent their time describing the acts that came before them with a snotty snort of derision. However, one band was happy to take a look back to the sixties and find themselves a gem, that band was XTC.
The group formed in Swindon in 1972 and quickly merged into an impressive unit. Fronted by Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, they were creating avant-garde rock before punk was a murmur in the streets of London. But with the rise of punk, the band found themselves a home on Virgin Records and released their debut album, White Music.
The album was full of fresh new sounds and, in a 2009 interview, Partridge said of the record which began with their song ‘Radios in Motion’: “We couldn’t think of any better way to start off our first album than with the ‘kick the door in’, breezy opener we used in our live set… the lyrics are very silly, picked for their sonic effect rather than meaning. The first refuge of an inexperienced songwriter, forgive me, but they do have a youthful scattergun energy.”
While the record was brimming with youthful exuberance, one moment on the album stands out among the rest though with their cover of Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’. The idea for a cover was a toss-up between the Dylan song and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Citadel’, as he explained: “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to cover one of these songs, because they’re both from people who represent the Old Guard,” remembered Partridge. “I think it would be mischievous to do either of these songs in a radically different way, and to show that we’re not in awe of the Old Guard, and that we can take something that they’ve done, smash it all up, and put it back together in our way.”
There was no better place to show of this newly smashed and glued back together track than Anthony Wilson’s ‘So It Goes’. The TV show was quickly becoming known for giving new punk talent a shot at a television spot, a coveted thing in the late seventies. XTC knew they had an opportunity to take and they certainly grabbed it with both hands. That moment as XTC smash it all up and put it back together again with a smirk and a dubby rhythm which is truly intoxicating. It may not be Dylan’s favourite cover version but it’s right up there as the most unique seen on independent TV.
Following the identity detour of the Dukes of Stratosphear, XTC hunkered down to make their next “proper” album with producer Todd Rundgren. On paper the match made in heaven became the stuff of legendary head-butting between artist and producer Rundgren’s appointment secured the savvy pairing of two brilliant and doomed minds. Between the anglophile producer and songsmith Andy Partridge were a thousand common interests and one great chasm that would subsume egos and tear up the studio floorboards. The rift did not concern taste or etiquette so much as In one corner, the shaggy-haired, acid-frazzled Philadelphian whose passive-aggression belies a loose, honky-tonk approach to life; in the other, a three-piece reputed for 1) turning down their record label’s cocaine and 2) crafting technically brilliant pop. It was a match made in some 5-star hotel-lobby hell, and the calamity of it all enriches every second of Skylarking.. The masterful chamber-pop of XTC’s 1986 album Skylarking was one of the band’s finest hours. ‘Skylarking’ is loaded with classic songs like “The Meeting Place,” “Earn Enough For Us,” “Big Day” and “Dear God,” a song left off the original LP but issued as a b-side. It was later added to the lineup when it became a surprise rock radio hit.
Rundgren was optimistic about working with XTC. A few years earlier, he had caught the Swindon group in their element, twisting from off-brand punk toward whip-smart new wave. Soon after, in 1982, Partridge suddenly quit touring, suffering from valium withdrawal and on-stage panic attacks. He announced XTC would join the ranks as a studio outfit, a commercial disaster, to nobody’s surprise. Singles flopped, fans lost faith, and before the year was up, the group shrank to a trio when drummer Terry Chambers stormed out for good during a rehearsal.
Virgin Records had hoped an American producer would collar the firebrand and hammer the new album into the transatlantic mold of U2 and Simple Minds—a notion that, like almost everything involving the label, Partridge found this laughable. Consider the demos: Back-garden symphonies like “Summer’s Cauldron” and “Season Cycle,” among his ripest compositions to date. Fellow songwriter Colin Moulding, inspired by his move to the ancient Celtic settlement of Marlborough Downs, was clomping down the same path, composing pastorals like “Grass” and “The Meeting Place” from sampled lathes and thrums of pagan folk. Hatching a plan, he accepted Virgin’s $150,000 fee and quickly discarded dozens of the band’s demos, assembling a tracklist around a concept of his own. The song cycle would plot a lifetime over the course of a day: daybreak in “Summer’s Cauldron,” then a suite of infatuation, heartbreak, marriage, temptation, and existential reckoning that concludes—on “Dying” and “Sacrificial Bonfire”—in the dead of night. Guitarist Dave Gregory, a Rundgren superfan, was thrilled, and the docile Moulding—by now immune to Partridge’s arm-twisting—sided with Virgin, reasoning they all had mouths to feed.
As war raged, the sessions remained a spring of wonder. Moulding, a psych-pop reformist, came into his own with songs like “The Meeting Place,” reflecting Swindon’s rituals and industry in gorgeous stained glass. Partridge specialized in the melodic trapdoor, establishing awkward patterns and flooding your serotonin receptors at unexpected moments. The lyrics are just chewy enough to distract from each incoming sugar rush, creating endless replay value. (“Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?” he quips wonderfully in “Season Cycle.”) Themes and images trespass between songs, from the vaudevillian pomp of “Ballet for a Rainy Day” into the melodramatic “1000 Umbrellas,” whose Dave Gregory string arrangement makes heartbreak seem an ancient, noble fate.
It’s been a busy few years for XTC‘s 1986 album “Skylarking” wth the vinyl reissue back in 2010, the ‘corrected polarity’ CD of 2014, this year’s boxed deluxe vinyl version and now – thanks to the discovery of the multi-tracks – a double-disc 30th anniversary definitive edition which delivers a Steven Wilson 5.1 surround mix on blu-ray audio, along with a wealth of other bonus material.
This new edition eschews the pubes (not a phrase I’ll write too often) and restores the original sleeve (“it was agreed that more people recognised this as the sleeve now” Andy Partridge replied on twitter, when quizzed about it) and offers a new stereo mix of the album on CD
XTC studio recording ‘ Little Lighthouse’ from the Todd Rundgren produced “Skylarking” sessions, newly mixed by Steven Wilson. Track taken from “Skylarking 30th Anniversary Definitive Edition CD + Blu ray” .
“This was destined for the ‘Dukes’ from the outset really. It was sent to Todd along with all the other “Skylarking” demos and even though we tried recording it in San Francisco (its spiritual home!), it was never going to fit with all of its pastoral playmates.”
Lead single “Grass” bombed in the UK, and the album sales stalled. A death sentence even by their commercial standards, albeit grim vindication for Partridge. But in America, a one-time single contender demoted to a B-side was making itself known especially on college radio, “Dear God” had sparked a moral panic: its narrator, griping with an absent god, appalled Bible Belt Christians and prompted a bomb threat to a Florida radio station. Everyone else seemed to love it. In a sheepish U-turn, the band’s American label, Geffen, smuggled the track onto the U.S. release of Skylarking. Over six months, the album outsold XTC’s entire prior catalogue three times over.
Moulding, who stepped back from XTC in 2006, effectively ending the group.) Among his arsenal of guitars, Partridge now keeps company with a legion of toy soldiers,
If you’ve bought any of the previous XTC CD+blu-ray reissues, you’ll know how good they are and what to expect… The blu-ray here offers the 5.1 mix, the new stereo mix in 24bit/96kHz, four additional songs from the album sessions in stereo and 5.1, the very original (uncorrected polarity) album mix in hi-res stereo, along with the same for the corrected polarity version, instrumental mixes, a complete alternate album in demo form (following producer Todd Rundgren’s original suggested running order), numerous demo and work tape sessions showing the evolution of the album and the promo films for Dear God and Grass! All that for less than £20 – amazing, as usual.
This definitive edition (for once the title lives up to the content) comes with an expanded booklet featuring sleeve-notes by Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding & Dave Gregory and will be released on 14th October 2016. the original was Released 27th October 1986.
October 17th, 2016: It’s here, the one you’ve been hankering for. Steven Wilson produced these mixes with the input of founder band member Andy Partridge and the full approval of the band. This CD/Blu-ray edition is presented in special packaging with an expanded booklet and sleeve-notes by Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory.
CD features the 2016 Steven Wilson stereo album mix plus four bonus tracks mixed by Steven Wilson.
Blu-ray features:
A 5.1 Surround mix in 24bit/96khz mixed from the original multi-track tapes available in LPCM and DTS HD MA.
The 2016 stereo album mix in 24bit/96khz LPCM audio.
Four additional songs from the album sessions in stereo and 5.1 mixed by Steven Wilson.
The original (uncorrected polarity) stereo album mix in hi-res stereo, plus 1 non-album track.
The original (corrected polarity) stereo album mix in hi-res stereo.
Instrumental versions (mixed by Steven Wilson) of all 2016 mixes in 24bit/96khz LPCM audio.
A complete alternate album in demo form (as per Todd Rundgren’s original suggested running order based on the demo recordings).
Numerous additional demo and work tape sessions showing the evolution of the album and associated recordings.
The Fat Angel Sings 