EXTC by bev davies, not to be reused without permission
bev taking that photo, pic by me
In truth, before I get too far, I should say that I am still a relative noob to the whole XTC canon. Like Sparks and Frank Zappa, my other big musical enthusiasms of the last year, they're a deep pool that takes some swimming in. The stuff of theirs that I love tends to be earlier - the albums that I heard as a teenager and still know best, like Black Sea. Yes, there is astonishing sonic sophistication to some of their post-touring albums, especially Skylarking, for instance - which I listened to a couple of times through in the hospital on headphones, and found beautiful and soothing (I was high as a kite on pain meds and lingering anaesthesia, note). It was also well-represented in the EXTC set last night, more than any other album of the post-Terry catalogue, with the band playing "Sacrificial Bonfire" and "Big Day" in their first set, and "Dear God" and presumably "Grass," "The Meeting Place," and "Earn Enough for Us" in their second, all of which they played a couple of nights ago in Seattle. [No setlist was contributed to Setlist FM for the Vancouver show, as I wrote this, but it looked to be identical to Seattle's to me for the portion of the night I stayed for]. The pleasures of Skylarking, plentiful though they are, are unlike the pleasures of everything up to and including English Settlement. There's nothing anthemic on it, nothing you can really walk or drive or do housework to, nothing you can put on a mix beside the Gang of Four (playing Vancouver later this week) or the Clash or the Members or the Slits or such; the level of detail and richness, the delicate textural layers to Skylarking make it very clear that it is meant to be *listened* to - maybe not necessarily with the opioids I was on, post-surgically, but very near in a state like I was in, completely relaxed, eyes closed, music in my ears, half-dreaming to it, being soothed, healed, comforted. If I'm putting on an XTC record do do housework to or to keep my pace up as I walk down the street or dance around the living room, patting the cat to the beat - which are the three main things I use music for, most days - it won't be Skylarking.
Also by me - Rickshaw proprietor Mo Tarmohamed is the second head up on the left
But English Settlement? Maybe. It's a really interesting album. It has some of the sophistication, the layering, that you hear in later XTC, has a genuine ambitiousness to it, but songs like "No Thugs in Our House," well, Tybalt could get a real good petting to that. The album makes sense as a bridge between the two phases of their career, *is* a headphones album like Skylarking, with a very sophisticated palette, but it also has energy, a beat to it... a beat being played by Terry Chambers, at that! I don't think it's just a coincidence that my current favourite of their albums - the one I find most compelling, am most likely to play - is also the last one he was on. One of the cool things about the EXTC show was being given a chance to kind of imagine how later XTC material might have sounded if the band had continued to tour, continued to write arrangements that could be delivered live, continued to have Terry as their drummer.... Now here's what "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" might have sounded like if Terry had drummed on it! Okay, I'll bite (note to Steve: I didn't "hooray" on cue as requested the first few times because I didn't know when to come in, exactly, but one of the people hooraying out in the audience was Dennis Mills, so that's pretty fuckin' cool...).
...Now, I must confess, I left the show last night at the mid-point break, but it was no fault of the band's, nor should be read as a comment on their music. It's true that I hadn't figured out 100% how to fit into it yet, since I also haven't yet figured out how to fit, 100%, into the XTC catalogue in general, and there is a bit of a neither-fish-nor-fowl feeling with EXTC; they're not a cover band, but they aren't XTC, either, and I found myself thinking things like, "So since Terry is the original member, should I listen more attentively to the drum parts?" (which, for a time, I did, as if the rest of the players had come along just to enhance hearing the original XTC drummer doing his thing - which is a bit of a foolish way to listen to a band, really, but I did catch some very cool flourishes in Terry's drumming that I'd not noticed previously, and was, as I say, impressed by his intensity - though a bit worried that he might have been pissed off about the show having started so late,more on which below). No question that they did really good renditions of the songs, which I enjoyed the most when I just shut my eyes and listened. Weirdly, my favourite moments, the ones that grabbed me hardest, came in a TC&I song, presumably written by Colin Moulding, called "Scatter Me," and another of those later songs, "Wonderland" off Mummer., that they'd played just before it. I didn't know either song before last night, but there was real beauty to their playing, especially the lead guitarist's (Steve Hampton, the guy who looked most likely to have been an original member next to Terry).
...But things had started over an hour and a half late due a border SNAFU and I still had to a) commute for an hour to get home and b) be awake and functional at 7am to make breakfast for my working wife, who c) probably wouldn't appreciate my rolling in at 1am on what for her was a worknight. I'd kept her up late this past week for Sparks (which she was actually at) and Bison (which she wasn't), so I would have been pushing my spousely luck in being much later than I was last night - at it was, it was close to midnight when I got in. Plus Bev Davies, who I was with, also had a long commute back to her home, and the band starting around 10pm on a Sunday means there is a good chance that by the time you get to it from the Rickshaw, the Skytrain will be shut, the last train rolling out of Waterfront at 12:15; any suburban concertgoers like us will have had the experience of arriving at Main Street Station on a Sunday to a locked gate, and having to grab a late night drunk bus to get home; neither of us wanted to deal with that last night. With many audience members in such a position, the band probably would have been wiser, in the circumstance, not to take a break at all, so as not to give those of us concerned about such things an excuse to duck out (because if you're going to duck out of a show, it feels better to do so when the band isn't actually playing). Without the break, I probably would have held out for "Dear God," for sure - the first song of the second set, according to the Seattle setlist, anyhow - though I don't think, given the train situation, that there's a universe in which I'd have ever gotten to see the encore...
Anyhow, I hope the room wasn't noticeably thinner for the second set, because the band had had to work hard to even get there last night. Apologies that I had to duck out when I did. Incidentally, the SNAFU at the border apparently involved two members of the band having gotten the wrong COVID tests or something, requiring them to drive back to Seattle or such to get new tests; there was a moment or two of fear, where we were hanging on Mo's every status update, to see whether the band would ultimately be allowed across. And the show, which was supposed to have doors at 7, ended up having doors at 9, which actually meant for most people in line not getting in til 9:30 or later (the music started not at 8, as previously planned, but at 9:45). This led to an interesting and unfamiliar experience for those of us out of practice at concertgoing - which means, basically, everyone - where a fair number of people were lined up outside the Rickshaw for half an hour or more. I got a good long look down an alley that I don't think I have ever been lined up on the other side of before, for all my concertgoing at the Rickshaw...
...and got to watch people clean up after their urban pets, and gave two perfectly good laundry loonies to one of the spare-changers working the line, while some other fella smoked heroin? meth? coke? out of a folded up piece of tinfoil in the doorway adjacent to me. (For obvious reasons, I did not take a photo of him!).
All of which was worth the trouble, even if I ended up having to leave. The real compliment to the band, here - the best one that I can give - was that they provided the "Aha!" moment for me in listening to "No Thugs in Our House" (lyrics here). The song tells a story of parents being visited by a police officer who has found their son's wallet at the scene of a hate crime. The art for the 7" encourages a more general reading of the "house" as not being just some Swindonian flat, but the UK itself, put "on stage" by racially-motivated crimes; the lyrics themselves rise above treating the crime as an isolated incident, implicating the British justice system as well (the family returns to "normalcy," the incident having blown over, because the father is a judge!). If were to ask Andy Partridge a question about the song, it'd be if there was any particular incident that inspired it; it feels moored in specificities, from the name of the kid in question - Graham - to what the mother and father are doing when the cops come to the door, to the young constable's failures to grow a moustache. It may just be great storytelling-in-song, but I wonder if I'd been reading British newspapers in 1982, if it would have any deeper resonances?
Anyhow, there are a few things I still don't understand about the song, like what papers the father is burning at the beginning (evidence of some other questionable past judgments on his part?). But here's the ultimate testament to EXTC (and, in a broader sense, to bands playing their catalogue live, like XTC ceased doing shortly after that song was released): it was only last night, listening to the song nice and loud at the Rickshaw, that the pennies fell from my eyes about one of the choruses. I had always wondered what Andy was saying by talking about Graham "dreaming of a world where he could do/ just what he wanted to." It's interesting phrasing - because there doesn't seem to be anything particularly bad about dreaming about a world where you can do just what you want to do - people do that all the time! ...But where what you want to do is attack people because of the colour of their skin... it feels like Partridge's lyrics depict Graham experiencing himself, almost sympathetically, as if he were sweetly innocent of any wrongdoing; it seems to let him off the hook just a bit! There was something lingering there, some nuance that escaped me...
...which I finally figured out last night. In fact, Partridge phrases the chorus thus not to let Graham off the hook, but to put the rest of us on it. Not only are the parents in denial that their son is some sort of neo-Nazi - "We can't believe our little angel is the one you picked!" - but Graham himself is innocent of that knowledge; he has no idea that what he's done is wrong, he just wants to have fun, to bond with his mates, to keep England for the English.. "I don't see what the big deal is, the guy was only a ____" (insert appropriate racial epithet there). By framing Graham's own self-absolution, we're invited as listeners to question in ourselves the things we absolve ourselves from - our entitlement, racist attitudes, etc. It's a very clever chorus, preventing us from taking it just as a song about "them," the bad guys. We're implicated. What kind of world do we want, anyhow? ...It's a testament to how powerfully the band played the song that instead of thinking about what it meant to be seeing EXTC, and not XTC, doing it, I just thought about the song itself...
Anyhow, despite a few setbacks, it was a great night. Great to see Bev again, too - been too long. She gave me a copy of the softcover version of the Butthole Surfers coffee table book that some of her photos appear in - back in print, but in a limited edition, so if you're craving it, act now. I had used a photo from the same show - but not one of the same photos as the book - to illustrate a Big Takeover interview I did with Paul Leary of the Butts recently, whose debut solo album from 1990, The History of Dogs, is also coming back into print soon via Shimmy-Disc.
Bev, looks like I will be able to join you for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, after all...
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