For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we flash back to XTC’s early turn as a touring band for this 1979 performance filmed in Paris and broadcast by French TV. The 20-minute set comes a few months after the release of Drums and Wires, and opens with three songs off that album.
Today was Record Store Day, and as one eagle-eyed Slicing Up Eyeballs reader alerted us, the Transportation Security Administration took to Instagram to relay an important message for traveling collectors: pack that fresh vinyl in your carry-on, not your checked baggage.
An XTC fan in the U.K. has launched a petition to convince the BBC to air a new documentary about the band called “This Is Pop” following reports the British television broadcaster has passed on showing Special Treats Productions’ film. By Saturday, the petition had collected more than 1,600 digital signatures.
There’s a new documentary about XTC in the works that’s currently titled “This Is Pop,” and a 6-minute, 20-second trailer for the film — featuring archival footage of the band and much screen time by frontman Andy Partridge — has made its way online. You can watch the whole thing here.
By all appearances, XTC’s 1989 album Oranges and Lemons is next up in the band’s current series of audiophile reissues, as bandleader Andy Partridge has been tweeting in recent weeks about work on the 5.1 Surround mix, including an attempt to transfer the baked album tapes that were “in a very bad way.”
This week’s new releases include a huge number of reissues, with re-released titles coming from Siouxsie and the Banshees, XTC, The Afghan Whigs, The Wedding Present and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, plus a brand-new live album from The Fall compiled by Mark E. Smith.
The audiophile reissue of XTC’s classic 1979 album Drums and Wires — with its new 5.1 Surround mix that frontman Andy Partridge last summer boasted is “so good it’s upped my opinion of the album” — finally arrives Oct. 27 on CD and Blu-ray, with the latter format stuffed with bonus material.
This week’s new releases include XTC’s “corrected polarity” version of ‘Skylarking,’ finally arriving on CD, plus Johnny Marr’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 soundtrack, a live set from The Fixx on CD and DVD, plus a reissue of The Godfathers’ 1993 self-titled album.
Back in 2010, Andy Partridge announced that XTC’s 1986 album Skylarking was being reissued “as it was intended to sound, but never has due to human error” — a new double-vinyl pressing that corrected the sound polarity that had been reversed on all prior releases of the album.
This week’s new releases include an expanded 2CD/1DVD reissue of David Bowie’s 7-month-old album ‘The Next Day,’ featuring five brand-new songs, plus an audiophile reissue of XTC’s ‘Nonsuch’ with multiple new mixes, and a new studio album, ‘Tres Cabrones,’ from The Melvins.
XTC will follow up its just-announced expanded reissue of 1992’s Nonsuch with a similarly made-over re-release of the band’s classic 1979 album Drums and Wires sometime next spring that will feature a new 5.1 Surround mix that Andy Partridge reveals is “so good it’s upped my opinion of the album.”
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