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.
The audiophile reissue of XTC’s fourth album, 1980’s Black Sea, is due out Nov. 10, and will include new 5.1 Surround, stereo and and high-resolution stereo mixes of the record by Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson, plus demos, instrumentals and music videos. More details here.
The highly anticipated XTC documentary “This Is Pop” — the subject of a petition earlier this year to convince the BBC to air it after the network allegedly passed on the program — will, in fact, be seen on TV in the UK this fall: Sky Arts is set to broadcast the film in October. Watch the full trailer here.
For the last few years, Andy Partridge has been overseeing audiophile reissues of XTC titles, releasing a series of albums — Nonsuch, Drums and Wires, Oranges and Lemons and Skylarking — with new stereo and 5.1 Surround mixes by Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson. It appears Black Sea is next.
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.
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