THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR

Psurroundabout Ride APE HOUSE 9/10

Fab form! XTC’S alter egos ride again. By Tom Pinnock

WITH The Beatles’ later work being steadily remixed from the multi-tracks, it’s fitting that the Fabs’ psychedelic counterparts The Dukes Of Stratosphear are now getting the same forensic treatment. A four-piece who dabbled in garage, beat-pop and music hall, all liberally sprinkled with psychedelic fairy dust, the Dukes’ two albums are fine specimens of the mind-expanded pop that sprung up in Revolver’s tyre tracks.

Except, as you well know, the Dukes were a fantasy, created in the mid-’80s by XTC and producer John Leckie. By 1985, Andy Partridge (aka the Dukes’ Sir John Johns) and Dave Gregory (Lord Cornelius Plum) had eagerly been injecting psychedelic textures into their day job for a few years – see the bad-trip black mass of 1980’s “Travels In Nihilon” or the Mellotron on much of 1983’s Mummer. Leckie, who’d started out as tape op on All Things Must Pass, was similarly in thrall to the ethos of the ’60s. So deeply, in fact, that his alter ego on the Dukes’ records, Swami Anand Nagara, was no affectation: Leckie was a fully fledged member of the spiritual Rajneesh movement at the time, orange robes and all.

Psurroundabout Ride compiles 1985’s 25 O’clock and 1987’s Psonic Psunspot along with demos and three later tracks, all previously released, but experiencing Steven Wilson’s revelatory remixes (in stereo, 5.1 and instrumental) is a little like hearing it all for the first time. Partridge and Gregory’s guitars especially ring brighter, and previously buried elements are uncovered, from the acoustic guitar that noodles on the left throughout “25 O’clock”’s fuzz-toned electric solo, to the zither in “Have You Seen Jackie?”’s stomping chorus.

The Dukes’ more out-there tracks are the ones that really benefit from Wilson’s work. The tape loops that swim throughout “What In The World??”, a crossbreed of “Taxman”, “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”, explode in the final two minutes, a coda that Leckie dubs “the most psychedelic thing I’ve ever heard” in his new liner notes. Such was the participants’ knowledge and affection for British music of the ’60s, all this never comes off as just a parody or a joke. Similarly, “The Mole From The Ministry”, written by Partridge while Gregory went to pick up some flute tapes for the band’s Mellotron, is truly as hallucinatory and bewildering as “I Am The Walrus”, its tornado of backwards loops and treated vocals now much clearer. If the Dukes were lime and limpid green before, now they’re available in Technicolor.

Those two songs were highlights of 25 O’clock, tracked in just a few days at a tiny studio in Hereford. When the mini-album sold well, a confused Virgin asked for more from the Dukes, so XTC and Leckie decamped to Sawmills Studio in Cornwall to record Psonic Psunspot. “It was up a tidal creek,” remembers Partridge. “The only way you could get to it was by walking a mile up a railway track, or you could get a tiny boat while it was high tide. You try getting a fucking Mellotron in that…”

Psunspot is strong, but there’s less conceptual unity, with the Dukes embracing American influences – “You’re My Drug” is peak psych Byrds, “Pale And Precious” one of Brian Wilson’s discarded teenage symphonies to God – and sounding rather like XTC on the Hollies power-pop of “Vanishing Girl”, one of the few tracks by Colin Moulding (aka The Red Curtain). The highlights are still a gas, though, as the Dukes might have it: “Brainiac’s Daughter” modulates with a harmonic abandon that even Mccartney would consider audacious, while “You’re A Good Man Albert Brown” (“Play them spoons!”) is Small Faces whimsy magnified to a ridiculous scale.

The Dukes weren’t finished, though, their fragrant essence bleeding into XTC’S next two albums, Oranges & Lemons and Nonesuch. Expensively and glossily produced, today those sound much older than the Dukes’ magical efforts. On a tight budget and an even tighter deadline, Partridge and his bandmates couldn’t afford to handle their influences like artefacts, white-gloved and reverent; instead, they bashed them around and made music for the sheer love of it. Take a trip with them.