In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran by John Taylor (with Tom Sykes) (Dutton 2012)

Steve Jones is open about the influence Thunders's playing style had on him. In the documentary The Filth and the Fury, there is a hilarious sequence where film of the two guitarists is intercut, showing quite clearly just how much of Thunders's attitude Steve knocked off.

Something similar could be done with me. I would learn to take Thunders's signature slurs and guitar runs and transpose them to bass, along with the accompanying sneers. The first time I saw the Thunders's magic was on-stage at Birmingham  University. The opening act was a band I had not heard  of before, The Police. At that time I would sneak a cassette recorder into every gig I went to, and I set the machine to record when they began to play, even though I had no idea who they were. It was quite possible a band you had never heard of yesterday could become your favourite band tomorrow.

The singer with The Police also played bass, which struck me as quite clever and quite "un-punk." After the second number, he struck up a rapport with the audience of mostly students. A little too familiar, I remember thinking at the time, not knowing then that Sting had been a teacher and spoke "student" way better than he would ever speak "punk."

Sting: We've got the Heartbreakers coming on next.
(Cheer from me and one or two others)
Sting: They can't play, you know.
Me: Fuck off!
Sting: Who said "Fuck off'?
Me: I did. (all of this going down onto the cassette tape)
Sting: It's true. They're great guys but they can't play.
Me: Fuck off, you wanker!
Sting: You'll see. This next song is called "Fall Out"! 1 2 3 4 . . .

He was wrong about the Heartbreakers. They were awesome that night. At the BBC in 1993, filming "Ordinary World" for Top of the Pops, I was standing next to Sting watching a playback of our performance on a monitor. I thought to myself, I've got to tell him about that night, but before I opened my mouth he half-turned to me and said, "I wish I'd written that song."

Let's leave it at that then, I thought.

Stormy Monday (1988)

An Englishman in the Dock

I'm sure you'll agree that it's the popular front we can all get behind.

Don't worry about the proposed charge. Once Sting's in custody we can charge him with his real crimes. (Scroll down to the bottom of the linked post where Andy Partridge is in conversation with Todd Bernhardt.)

XTC's 'Great Fire'

Latest song under discussion by Andy Partridge and Todd Bernhardt over at the XTC MySpace page is the excellent 'Great Fire' from the 'Mummer' album. (I've previously declared my opinion on the song on the blog here.)

Not as instantaneous a pop classic as a lot of their early singles, 'Great Fire' did have to creep up on me before becoming one of my favourite XTC songs. But for all that, I was still surprised to discover that the song didn't even chart when it was released as a single in '83. Coming so soon after 'Senses Working Overtime' and 'English Settlement', I bet it was a bigger surprise for the band and their record company at the time.

Andy P reveals in the interview that the song was played on Radio 1 a grand total of one time! That was when Radio 1 could make or break a song in a matter of weeks. It'd have probably been better if it had never been played at all. That way they could have at least claimed they were victims of some sort of deliberate campaign to kill their career.

I'm trying to think back to why they might have been so out in the cold by '83. I can only speculate that by that point in their career they were caught between the hard rock and the missing chart place of not being pretty enough to compete with the Duran Durans and Spandau Ballets on the one hand and not having that cache of being new or left-field enough to still be championed by the likes of John Peel and Janice Long (the last XTC Peel Session was way back in '79).

Any chance of being part and parcel of the Second British Invasion of America at that time was effectively killed off by Partridge's stage fright and refusal to tour, and it would be another three or four years before XTC would become an overnight sensation in the States via 'Dear God' picking up airplay on college radio.

OK, I'm getting off topic and before I start hunting high and low on the internet to see if John Hughes ever featured an XTC song in one of his films*, I'll jump back on blogging track by echoing the opinion of one of the posters on the XTC MySpace page in stating that this is definitely one of the best interviews so far in the series between Andy P and Todd Bernhardt.

Granted a great bulk of the interview is made up of the muso bits that leaves me in a fog, but even I in my musical illiteracy recognise that it is in the bridge of the song, when Andy P. kicks in with the line "I've been in love before . . . " and the music totally shifts in mood and tone that moves it up from a good XTC song to a great one.

To placate us musical numpties, the interview also carries the by now expected abundance of Andy P's anecdotes, skewed viewed of the history of XTC and the world, and a brilliant humour which spells out once again that you have to be a clever bastard to write with the acuity and wit of Andy Partridge. I especially loved this passage from the interview:

AP: I was listening to the song today, as is the sort of thing I do when you ask me about these songs, so I put it on and had a listen. But, just to show you how paranoid I am -- I know there are some fans traipsing around the town [there was a meeting of XTC fans that weekend in Swindon, to see The SheBeats and tribute band The Fuzzy Warblers play at a local club the night before this interview], so I sat here with headphones [chuckling] so they wouldn't hear the sounds of my music coming out of my house and think, "What a wanker he is, listening to his own songs!"

I actually heard a horrible story about Sting -- where'd I hear this story, about someone who went to dinner with him, and a few other people...

TB: I sent you that! From the Holy Moly newsletter...

AP: Yeah, you did! He pulls out his iPod during dinner, cutting himself off from the conversation...

TB: ... and the guests ask Trudi if they said anything wrong, to make him be so anti-social. She says, "He always does it, and the worst thing is, he's listening to his own fucking music."

AP: Yeah! Unbelievable. Well, I didn't want that to be the case, I didn't want people thinking, "Wow! There's Andy, and he's listening to his own songs!"

TB: [laughing] Right. Sobbing.

AP: [laughs] Yeah. Sobbing gently.

I think that passage is all the more brilliant and funny, 'cos I can hear him telling this story in his West Country accent. (You can check out more wondeful quotes from this series of interviews in this old post from the old blog.)

And after the recent Colin Moulding slideshow on the blog, I thought would also include a picture of the 'Great Fire' record cover with this post. I'm glad that I sought it out, 'cos it tipped me the wink to the possibility that there is another XTC fan within the ranks of the SPGB back in Britain. How else do you explain that the cover of 'Great Fire' carries such a strong resemblance to a particular Socialist Standard front cover from the mid to late nineties?

At the time of the issue's appearance, I remembering thinking that the layout editor of the Standard must have been on something to come up with such an outlandish design but I now think that it was nothing more than being exposed to a bit too much Psonic Psunshine. OK, I'll stop here before this paragraph turns into a Super Furry Animals lyric.

*It turns out that XTC had the song 'Happy Families' on the soundtrack of the 1988 John Hughes film, 'She's Having a Baby'. Never seen the film, never heard the song. Never will see the film, but I'm off to hunt down the song.