Senses Working Overtime: XTC and Dukes of Stratosphear Song-by-song

There was also plenty of great music released in August/September 1987. The top 20 Billboard albums from any month/year are usually terrible.

 

Of course, there was a lot of great music released in 1987. In my music world Bon Jovi fell more in line with the mainstream stuff included on Billboard’s chart than the ‘other’ stuff. You just needed to know where to look for the good stuff.

 

And all the MTv you could handle to get to the clips you did want to see. Most of what you have posted are not music I sought out to listen to.
Have The Outfield records, and saw them once opening for Mike and the Mechanics out in Concord, Ca. That might have been 1987... Vega
had a song I liked on MTv. Like U2, but unlike most I didn't like that period - they would soon get much better. The Hair-bands and all the
Hip-Hop and Rap, I avoided except for a few cases I don't see on that list. LL Cool J had a couple, and what was his name? Flavor Flav? out
of Oakland was amusing. That stuff was just getting started around '87. By 1989 I had friends that were buying it and playing some at parties.
Was "The Heat Is On" on Beverly Hills Cop Soundtrack? I liked that, but not as much as the Caddyshack Soundtrack, I own that. I liked Kenny
Loggins - don't throw bricks at me!

I was still listening to CSN&Y-types. Going to concerts by Costello, Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen (The Desert Rose Band was just getting
started), Genesis, Beach Boys, of course. Could make a long list, but they wouldn't be on what pasted as interesting on Charts in the mid-'80s.
Madonna had plenty of good songs, but I didn't buy them, just watched on Tv. I have loads of VHS tapes I made out in the storeroom - don't
have a working player anymore! Maybe, like cassettes, VHS will make a comeback. Then I could watch my old tapes by Prefab Sprout and
Swing Out Sister, who don't seem popular enough these days to get their videos on to DVD.

 

Icehouse was the 1980s, KangaMom. You love them. I own some of their videos from MTv on comps I made. Not sure how well their records sold in America,
or rated on Billboard Charts...

 

7:30 pm here. I've got a party about to start at my house. Saturday, Yeah!!!. Want to leave a 5/5 vote/placeholder for "Pale And Precious",
Lance, if you don't mind. In case I don't get back in here tomorrow. I rest on Sunday.

 

Yes, but I like early Icehouse (think 1981/1982) a bit more than late 80s Icehouse.... I will say that Australian music from the 80s was brilliant and so it's not surprising that I wasn't listening to much else...(although my memory could be faulty - it was a long time ago )

The funny thing about that list posted was that I looked at the entire list and just went "bleh.." I don't own a single thing in this list and barely any of the artists.

 

Yeah, those are my thoughts. Not a terrible song but it just does not add up for me. I give it a generous 3.

 

Our votes for "The Affiliated"
1-0
2-5
3-8
4-5
5-6
Average: 3.3542

 

Today's song is "Pale And Precious", written by Sir John Johns and produced by John Leckie & XTC.

The Dukes of Stratosphear – Pale and Precious Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
Background:
A conscious attempt to write a Beach Boys song.
Andy:

Dave:

Line Up:
Andy Partridge: vocals
Lord Cornelius Plum: synths, mellotron, piano
The Red Curtain: bass
E.I.E.I. Owen: drums

Stereo, 5.1 and instrumental remixes were relased on the 2019 CD/Blu-Ray compilation Psurroundabout Ride.

 

Tomorrow, I'll hold up the Psonic Psunspot album for discussion. Following that I will hold. up:

• Happy Families (Partridge) {from She's Having A Family soundtrack, 1988)

So on Tuesday, then, I'll start holding up songs from Oranges And Lemons.

 

"Pale And Precious" is about the best Beach Boys pastiche ever made, and by kind of sounding like “Wonderful”, he picked a good one to pastiche,but the SMiLE type section -- the one that sounds a bit some of those crazy sections from "Heroes And Villains"



is a bit too on the nose, and, as is often the case of people who try to imitate SMiLE gets the goofy weirdness right, but forgets the sheer unearthly beauty of it.

Still, a very nice song and The Beach Boys fan in me loves it.

4.5/5

 

"Pale and Precious"

I might as well confess that I have never owned a Beach Boys record. I know the bigger hits of course, but I tried a couple of times with Pet Sounds many years ago but couldn't get into it. Even I knew what the Dukes were getting at with this one, though. It's very nice - lovingly and beautifully crafted. It probably deserves to be better known and acclaimed, and it may well have become so, had they not done a similar thing on the next album, this time with a song which transcended all thoughts of homage or pastiche and became that all-time classic. Being on a Dukes album probably prevented P&P from being taken seriously enough to fully appreciate its qualities. 4/5.

N.B. I'd often thought that the deep-voiced "fade away, ah-ah, fade away" bits were a nod towards 10cc - "humdrum days and humdrum ways".

 

The Affiliated - Just when it's getting boring, the change up come and it briefly becomes really interesting. Nice lyric though, so 3/5

 

Pale and Precious - the first Dukes song I ever heard. I was big into 60s Beach Boys at the time, including some SMiLE bootlegs, and I heard this in a second-hand CD store and was floored. I'd bought Chips From the Chocolate Fireball instantly - 5/5

 

The Greatest Living Englishman is generally considered the best Martin Newell album. Yes, the one Andy Partridge produced.

 

I'm a huge BB fan but something doesn't quite work for me; however, I don't think it's just Andy P/Dukes, none of the obvious BB 'copies' capture the depth and wonder of real BB music as Lance says. In fact XTC conjured this spirit far better and more subtly a couple of years later with Chalkhills and Children, which sounded more akin to Surf's Up the first time I heard it than anything else I'd heard since 1971 and is a definite 5/5.

P&P covers rather too many of the bases; the rather turgid tune sounds more like Chris Rainbow (Dear Brian etc) than the real thing, the 'up she rises' bit I suppose is either California Girls or the Love You album, can't decide, and the Good Vibrations thereminny bit echoes one of the (then officially) unreleased sections of the original, so unlikely AP would have heard that before 1990 and the Smiley Smile CD bonus tracks.

I dunno, too much of a mess, 3/5.

 

It was a great year for music. I was 16, and could barely keep up with the things I wanted to buy.

CLASSIC 1987 ALBUMS
The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come
The Triffids - Calenture
Suzanne Vega - Solitude Standing
Jane Siberry - The Walking
REM - Document
Eurythmics - Savage
The Chills - Brave Words
The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
Cleaners from Venus - Going To England
Danny Wilson - Meet Danny Wilson
The Lilac Time - s/t
Tom Waits - Frank's Wild Years
10,000 Maniacs - In My Tribe
Dead Can Dance - In The Realm of the Dying Sun
The Jesus and Mary Chain - Darklands
Love and Rockets - Earth, Sun, Moon
The Housemartins - The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death
Sinead O'Connor - The Lion and the Cobra

CLASSIC MAINSTREAM ALBUMS
Prince - Sign O' The Times
Pet Shop Boys - Actually
John Cougar Mellencamp - The Lonesome Jubilee
Fleetwood Mac - Tango In The Night

DON'T PERSONALLY APPEAL, BUT DESERVED THEIR SUCCESS
INXS - Kick
U2 - The Joshua Tree
George Michael - Faith
Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of Love

CLASSIC COMPILATIONS
New Order - Substance
The Smiths - Louder Than Bombs

CONTENTIOUS ALBUMS I ENJOY VERY MUCH
The Go-Betweens - Tallulah
Echo and the Bunnymen - s/t
Aztec Camera - Love
Railway Children - Reunion Wilderness
Men Without Hats - Pop Goes The World
Swing Out Sister - It's Better To Travel
Alison Moyet - Raindancing
Siouxsie and the Banshees - Through The looking Glass
Westworld - Where The Action is
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Mainstream
Hoodoo Gurus - Blow Your Cool!
Sonic Youth - Sister

 

Don’t forget:
The Silos - Cuba
Dumptruck - For The Country

 

Missed a couple of days

Brainiac - probably my least favourite on the record. 3/5.
The Affiliated - perfectly captures the spirit of dusty drinking clubs and pubs, but has a necessarily dreary atmosphere. 4/5.
Pale and Precious - on the money Beach Boys pastiche but lacks a little heart for me. Still pretty tasty. 4/5.

 

I admire the work put into Pale and Precious but that’s about it.

Talk about a band starting out with a bang (the outrageously fun and loud garage rock of 25 O’Clock) and then ending with a whimper with this.

It all feels a bit self conscious, which is a problem with PP overall but at its greatest here. And this doesn’t sound like the Dukes. It sounds like Andy P doing his best Beach Boys imitation.

At least 25 O’Clock set a mood and didn’t let go. PP has a tougher time with that, but Pale and Precious totally breaks the mood.

2/5 on a good day.

 

I just can’t with “Pale and Precious”. It uses a cast of transparently Beach Boy trademarks, chord progressions, vocal arrangements, instrumentation and jams them together in a cluttered mess of a composition. It obviously took a lot of work but misses the mark by a mile, with none of the mystery, joy and sorrow. The lyrics are particularly bad. I don’t enjoy listening to it.

It was clearly research that ended up leading to sublime Brian Wilson-influenced work like “Chalkhills And Children”, “Rook”, “Frivolous Tonight” and many more less obvious examples in future songs. What, after “Season Cycle” (which is also miles better), becomes an increasingly important strand woven into XTC’s tapestry. But here it sounds like a parody, especially the “up she rises” part. That sudden blast of theramin is painful.

I’m sorry to sound harsh. It was a necessary experiment but it’s a mad-libs version of The Beach Boys and ends the album on a ponderous note. It sounds like a homework assignment. 2/5

 

Pale And Precious, perhaps too obvious a pastiche, but a lot of fun nonetheless. Gets 4/5 from me.

 

"Pale and Precious"

The first half of the song just plods along in a positively sleep-inducing manner and then turns into a way too obvious BB pastiche before descending into something utterly boring and plodding again. Possibly the worst song on the album for me, helped by the fact that I've never been much of a BB fan.

 

"Pale and Precious" -- 4.5/5

One would have to be a either a little nuts or incredibly self-assured to try to pull something like this off. That's our Andy.

This pastiche does manage to perfectly capture the spirit of Smile-era Beach Boys -- which as Lance stated, many others have tried, and not come this close. Andy is, of course, an incredibly gifted songwriter. He's written quite a few things that I would rank in the upper echelon of pop perfection, but aping 1966-1967 Brian Wilson is...a daring feat...to say the least, and I'm not sure that the song scales those heights. How could it, really?

I'm still giving it a high rating, though, because from an arrangement standpoint, they really, really nail it. There are some BW songwriting earmarks that are hit right on the nose, and like Neil Innes finding that secret formula for The Rutles, the Dukes successfully capture the essence of the Beach Boys, dressing this tune up to legitimately resemble a long-lost Smile track that had yet to be uncovered in 1987. For that alone, it deserves high marks!

 

I realized that the song is not really SMiLE era Beach Boys -- but Smiley Smile era, and it's specifically a pastiche of "Wonderful [kinda creepy version]" but with the middle bit sounding more SMiLE than the middle bit here.