My roof is currently in full replacement mode. The crew started Monday and, as of this morning, they're still hammering away. Cooper has spent the week convinced civilization is ending while the cats have discovered hiding places so well concealed I'm half expecting them to emerge sometime around Christmas. If all goes according to plan, the roof gets finished tomorrow and I get the privilege of writing a check large enough to make a grown man cry.
Let's talk about records that disappeared and somehow found their way home. This 12" could have easily been called "Vanishing 12" instead of "Vanishing Girl". The story of my missing records has been told so many times it's become part of my personal collector lore. Thankfully, I found this copy cheap a few months ago. Even better, another formerly "stol... er... lost" 12" showed up in today's mail. That one will get its own post in a few weeks since it's actually the record that made me realize I was missing a disturbing number of records in the first place. Nothing quite like attempting to pull a record and discovering you've accidentally curated an exhibit called The Mystery of the Missing Vinyl.
As for today's entry, The Dukes of Stratosphear were XTC operating incognito, and they were clearly having the time of their lives. By the mid-'80s, XTC had already evolved from nervous new-wave oddballs into one of the smartest pop bands on the planet. The problem was nobody was handing out major-label budgets for albums that sounded like obscure British psychedelia from 1967. So XTC essentially put on fake mustaches, adopted ridiculous pseudonyms- Andy Partridge (Sir John Johns), Colin Moulding (The Red Curtain), Dave Gregory (Lord Cornelius Plum), Ian Gregory (E.I.E.I. Owen), and created The Dukes of Stratosphere. Freed from expectations and armed with a deep love of late-'60s psych, they stuffed their record full of obscure references, glorious harmonies, backwards-looking experimentation.
The joke was supposed to be that they would make a loving parody of psychedelic records. The problem was they were too good at it. What started as a novelty project became one of the best psychedelic records of the 1980s. And if you're wondering how much affection they had for the project, just look at the songs and these aren't songs written by a band chasing trends. They're songs written by record nerds who finally got permission to turn their record collections into an album. Every groove is packed with references. You can hear echoes of Pet Sounds, Sgt. Peppers, The Kinks, The Creation, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett era, The Pretty Things, Kaleidoscope and just about every obscure psych 45 you can think of. Instead of winking at the audience, they recreated the sound so convincingly that some listeners thought they'd uncovered a lost relic from the Summer of Love. It was basically XTC geeking out over the records they loved and somehow making one of the best psychedelic "tribute" albums ever recorded.
The funniest part is that the Dukes wound up selling so well and becoming so beloved that the "fake band" eventually became almost as legendary as the real one. That's a very XTC thing to accomplish. Normal groups struggle to make one successful band. XTC accidentally made two.
Honestly, the Dukes LP deserve a post of its own. There is enough XTC lore packed into these grooves to fill a notebook, and unlike my missing records, this copy has thankfully stopped vanishing.
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