Waiting For The Psun - Sounds, September 1987

We all know the Dukes Of Stratosphear are really XTC. But why have they gone to such lengths to replicate the psounds and pstyles of the psixties. Roy Wilkinson hears their reasoning.

It was 20 year ago today that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to endure a delayed action media blitz.

It was 20 days ago today (give or take a week or two) that top rhythm and lilacs beat combo The Duke Of Stratosphear released their 'Psonic Psunspot' LP a meticulous work of phonographic forgery.

This is a record that surely signals the end of psixties psentimentality - the last word in looking back at the love in.

Everyone and their guru knows that The Dukes are really XTC and that Sir John Johns, the mauve mind behind this project, is really Andy Partridge, the infamous rural pop technician.

Following the Dukes' previous psychedelic pastiche '25 O'clock', 'Psunspot' is a collection of pop facsimiles. Two decades on from the originals, Partridge and Co are paying tribute to their '60s inspiration with ten imitations worthy of Tom Keating. Everyone from The Beach Boys to Moby Grape get replicated.

Coming as it does in 1987, the year of the mushroom, a year in which '60s retrospection is a major growth industry, 'Psunspot' is released with immaculate timing.

Aside from the 'Sgt Pepper' assault, this year has seen the rise of those free festival textured Gaye Bikers, '60s scum rock disciples Crazyhead, and the continued emergence of Creation, a record label bursting with self confessed '60s obsessives.

Of course, Andy is blissfully unaware of the minor fashion timewarps that make 'Psunspot' particularly relevant.

"Oh yes, is it better to be a nouveau acid hedonist or to deal with hip-hop-crasy?" he sneers when I tell him of his record's uncanny pertinence.

In reality 'Psunspot' owes it's existence not to the efficiency of The Duke's resident seer, Swami Anand Nagara, but to the unanticipated success of '25 O'clock'.

This record sold 50,000 copies in Great Britain, a figure that dwarfed the 18,000 sales of the contemporary XTC album, 'The Big Express'. When you add the respective recording costs of £4,000 and £80,000, you can understand why Mr Branson, Virgin's arch hippy free-marketeer was so keen to see The Dukes ransack the '60s again.

From the 'Arnold Layne' period Floyd of 'Have You See Jackie' through 'Little Lighthouse', a song written in the style of Stones plagiarists Moby Grape or the Blue Magoos - "they used to set everything on full treble, the first equipment they'd get was a fringe and maracas" - to the Kinky, pubby good-time tones of 'You're A Good Man Albert Brown', 'Psonic Psunspot' reveals The Dukes as tripping trains potters of the first degree.

This is an album in which that common British recording malady known as 'collecting' reaches psychotic proportions.

Not content with owning the original records, these sonic stamp collectors have ruthlessly rebuilt whole songwriting styles, an obsession just one step removed from building scale models of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. Witness the lunatic glee with which Mr Partridge recounts the album's recording.

"The thing is we've tried to got for the old instruments and avoid synthetic sounds. And tried to use cruddy material; if you're using a fuzzbox then you've got to hear it being switched on, like on 'Satisfaction' where they've got Keith's amp miked up and him standing beside the mike. When he switches the fuzz in you hear this great clodding cluunkk. Also, you've got to keep the fuzz sounding cheap and ropy, like and electric shaver."

This attention to detail runs through Andy's life, manifesting itself in the massive toy soldier collection which crowds his Swindon home and in his loft where he sits all day making more soldiers out if hair curlers and reconstructing the most abstruse and convoluted Captain Beefheart songs for his own pleasure.

Evidently, this is a condition common to all XTC members, judging by a tape I hear on which Dave Gregory (aka Lord Cornelius Plum) has laboriously mimicked 'Strawberry Fields' right down to getting his drum machine to play just like Ringo.

But according to Andy most of today's new copyists simply don't get the details right.

If you look at band from the '60s a lot of them look really uncool. They've got really duff haircuts, slacks, shirts that don't fit. A lot of today's '60s influenced bands avoid that fact - they just don't look duff enough. They go for what they think is the romantic idea, maybe the skinny trousers and the hair low in the eyes.

"In the '60s, most of the bands looked really cloddy, with short back and sides grown out a little bit. Today they'll got for a Brian Jones mop but avoid that kind of realism.

"Do any of these band's have polo neck pieces? Just the piece you wear under your shirt? No, because it looks to cloddy."

But aside from stylistic aberrations, musical derivation is fine.

"Obviously they've never lived through it, so they're discovering a brand new music. Any music up to the early '70s is fair game."

Fittingly for an album so intimately linked with the British collectormania affliction, most of 'Psunspot' mines an English brand of psychedelia. Reflecting Mr Partridge's affable, country paced demeanour, the rampant, drug crazed nihilism of the likes of the MC5 and The Stooges is ignored in preference for the more benign English period stylings.

"I used to find American psychedelia just too political. It was all Country Joe And The Fish because they were in Vietnam and we weren't. We were just interested in carrying a daffodil and walking about in a striped blazer on a lawn with the mauve smoke drifting by while we ate fairy cakes and said things like, life's a pair of orange bongos.

"There was that kind of garden party attitude whereas in America it was your last fling before getting shipped off to Vietnam."

And just what is the dividing line between a Dukes song and an XTC composition?

"It just depends how mauve it is. For example, the track 'Shiny Cage' was actually put for an XTC album a couple of years back but said no because it was too psychedelic. It was far too purply, but it's ideal for this thing."

It seems that this is the last chance to see this purple haze, because like all good '60s pop stars, The Dukes are dead.

"There's nothing for them to do - they've murdered everything in sight. They're gone forever this time."

All original work is acknowledged as being the copyright of the originator.