Show Notes
Scot and Jeff discuss the second part of XTC’s career (1984-2000) with Andrew Gretes.
Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Andrew Gretes. Andrew is a fiction writer teaching creative rhetoric at Georgetown and George Washington University. You can find his work at andrewgretes.com.
Andrew’s Music Pick: XTC, Pt. 2
Awaken you dreamers! A month after we took you through the first part of XTC’s career – an Argonaut-like journey across the world of postpunk and pop during the end of the Seventies and the start of the Eighties – we return to pick up the story where we left off in 1984: with a psychologically landlocked band (songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding as well as guitarist Dave Gregory), now forever off the road and consigned to a studio, forced to make the most of their remaining careers without fears of an audience to either drag them down or lift them up.
And aside from the Beatles, it is little exaggeration to say that no studio-bound act ever made quite as much out of such a fate as XTC – though they didn’t make much money, naturally. Instead they made great art, with a series of increasingly ambitious pop albums (including 1986’s Skylarking, which you might even have heard of) that reflected the expanding musical palates and melodic ambitions of Partridge and Moulding.
The first episode of this two-part series proudly featured some of the weirdest, most clashingly irregular sounds of the Seventies. This second features some of the most awe-striking beauty you’ve probably never heard. From their mainstream career (which rarely if ever sold) to their moonlight lark as the Dukes of Stratosphear (which sold gangbusters until people realized they were buying XTC music) Partridge, Moulding and Gregory never quit stuffing every single song they recorded with meaning and melody, and the results are an overwhelming trove of musical riches to discover – one you might only be vaguely aware even exists
Political Beats has been building up to its XTC episodes ever since the day the podcast was founded. The second part of their story is every bit as impressive – and different – as the first. Settle in and listen to us sing a happy-sad ballad about the greatest band in popular music to never quite make it. Oh my, oh my, don’t it make you wanna cry?
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More from Political Beats
Scot and Jeff discuss the first part of The Cure’s career (1978-1984) with Derek Wilczynski. Introducing the Band: Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are joined by guest Derek Wilczynski. Derek is a Michigan attorney with a trial practice, as well as treasurer for the Macomb County Republican Party. Derek’s Musical Pick: The Cure It’s time to paint your fingernails black and adopt your bleakest attitude as we dive into the first part of the story of post-punk’s longest-running and most influential band, The Cure. The Cure were never the loudest or most aggressively weird group of the British late ‘70s and early ‘80s – and they certainly weren’t the most musically adept. (Their original drummer was nicknamed “Lol,” almost as if they knew.) But they were always there, off in their own corner, sometimes held together as a musical proposition by little more than spit, chewing gum, and the songwriting talent and sheer force of will of Robert Smith, their lead singer and songwriter. In their early post-punk years, The Cure – before they hit enduring stardom in America in the mid-1980s with the sheaf of poppy, upbeat gems they’re now synonymous with – were a magnificently surly, forbidding beast, a barebones sound created by three (occasionally four) musical primitives using their technical limitations to create the minimalist bluntness we forever associate with “goth” as a subgenre. But Smith was never a style poseur – he was an incredibly gifted songwriter and lyricist, mining this particular dark ore into the depths of the underground with albums like Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and the legendary (and, in our opinion, overwrought!) Pornography. Then, he turned into a pop writer! For a band as famous and long-lasting as Robert Smith’s, is it strange to realize that The Cure were essentially two (and maybe three) separate groups, at least conceptually. Here we address the first group and embark upon a glorious, long day’s journey into night. Dawn is just around the corner by 1984.
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