XTC next month will reissue its 11th album — 1989’s Oranges & Lemons, featuring “The Mayor of Simpleton” and “King for a Day” — on 200-gram audiophile vinyl with remastered sound and a reworked sleeve “to present the front color image in all its psychedelic glory.” Full details right here.
In a move meant “to help lift spirits during lockdown,” XTC’s Andy Partridge has released a free digital track called “Cavegirl” — a demo for a song intended for an “aborted bubblegum sampler album” that was to have been a best-of compiling tracks from “the mythical American bubblegum label Hercules.”
On the heels of their just-released Planet England EP, master songwriters Andy Partridge of XTC and Robyn Hitchcock are back at work on new music, according to a post by Hitchcock on Instagram, and are hoping this project won’t take a dozen years like the last one. Details right here.
The complete works of The Dukes of Stratosphear — XTC’s short-lived psychedelic side project — have been remixed in stereo and 5.1 Surround by Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson and will be reissued in October as a CD/Blu-ray set called Psurroundabout Ride. Get the full details right here.
Songwriting greats Andy Partridge of XTC and Robyn Hitchcock next month will release a four-song EP that Hitchcock says “began in his shed in Swindon in 2006” and is now finished after the two re-teamed last year to write one final song. Full details on the project right here.
Former XTC frontman Andy Partridge took to Twitter this morning to declare his irritation with fans — or, rather, “wankers” — waking him up at night by chanting the lyrics to “Making Plans for Nigel,” the very popular 1979 single for the band that he neither wrote nor sings. Instead, Partridge says they should visit Colin Moulding.
Record Rack: A round-up of the week’s new albums, expanded reissues and/or box sets, appearing each Monday on Slicing Up Eyeballs. All releases due out this Friday unless noted. (Since we missed last week’s round-up, this includes titles that came out this past Friday, too.)
XTC’s Andy Partridge will release new music next month, having christened his newly upgraded studio by recording a pair of his favorite songs: the Syd Barrett-penned early Pink Floyd single “Apples and Oranges” and the Bonzo Dog Band’s Humanoid Boogie, written by Neil Innes. Full details right here.
John Dent, the mastering engineer who worked on albums by U2, Love and Rockets, The Stranglers, Bob Marley and others, and is credited by Andy Partridge with figuring out XTC’s Skylarking suffered for years from “reversed polarity,” died of cancer last week at 63.
The Showtime cable network has released a trailer ahead of its airing of the new XTC documentary “This Is Pop,” a 30-second tease that’s a fraction as long as the nearly 6 1/2-minute trailer that leaked earlier this year. Still, for fans in the U.S., where the doc has yet to air, it’s a tantalizing glimpse of the film that will screen Jan. 11.
American fans clamoring to lay their eyes on the new XTC documentary “This Is Pop” — which premiered on UK television in October — finally will get their chance in January when the 75-minute film has its U.S. premiere on the Showtime cable-television network. The program will be available on demand, too.
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