XTC
Explode Together (The Dub Experiments 78-80)
(Virgin, 1990)

Rock’s last great British post-punk eccentrics, XTC (sorry, Blur), first assaulted American airwaves in 1979 with “Making Plans for Nigel”, a catchy little downerscape culled from their third album, Drums and Wires. By this time, the creatively evolving nucleus of guitarist Andy Partridge and bass player Colin Moulding (along with drummer Terry Chambers and recently enlisted guitarist Dave Gregory), were becoming increasingly comfortable in the studio. Partridge, in particular, had already brought a penchant for sonic experimentation to the band’s second 1978 release, Go 2, and many of that album’s mixes featured the extreme tape echo effects Partridge had heard on (then current) reggae albums by Jamaican recording pioneers such as Lee “Scratch” Perry. This echo-laden sound came to be known as “dub.”

In 1978, XTC were still playing and socializing in the punk and new wave clubs of a racially integrated Britain, which sported a sizable Jamaican population. Unsurprisingly, “dub culture” had been a big influence on punk bands like the Clash and PiL, not to mention XTC.

“Dub used to sit very well with punk,” Moulding told writer Neville Farmer in their co-authored biography, XTC: Song Stories. “In the clubs, you’d have all these girls in tights and heavy makeup dancing to dub reggae, mechanical music from Europe, and Television and Talking Heads all in one melting pot.” 

“If you can dub reggae,” Partridge recalled to Farmer, “why not take any kind of music and make this new sculpture out of it?”

To explore this hunch, in 1978, Partridge grabbed the multi-track masters from Go 2 and devoted a few marathon all-night sessions to “dubbing” them up. A few days later, he emerged with five predictably echoey remixes. Thus, Go 2’s “Meccanic Dancing” was redubbed as “Dance With Me, Germany”, “Jumping in Gomorrah” became “Beat the Bible”, “Battery Brides” was sped up to become “A Dictionary of Modern Marriage”, while “I Am the Audience” was transformed into “Clap Clap Clap”, and “The Rhythm” ended up as “We Kill the Beast.”

Go+, as it came to be known, was issued as a limited edition vinyl EP given away with select copies of Go 2. Judged by contemporary remix standards, the Go+ tracks seem rudimentary and workmanlike.

Still not satisfied, however, Partridge went back to the “dub” well a year later, in October 1979, just after completing Drums and Wires. This time, Partridge and engineer John Leckie went even deeper, and their avant-garde results had more in common with the musique concrete experiments of Stockhausen than the dub reggae that had originally motivated them.

Astonishingly, Virgin Records gave this experimental new album a commercial release in 1980, as a release by “Mr. Partridge” under the split title Take Away / The Lure of Salvage.

“It was fun to pull all this stuff apart,” Partridge told Farmer. “It’s like taking a welding torch to a perfectly good car, cutting it up and sticking it together in a different order to create something good and new out of it.”

Many of Take Away’s tracks were based on the Drums and Wires material, although “Commerciality” had begun life as early abandoned track, “Refrigeration Blues”, and “The Day They Pulled the North Pole Down” deconstructed Mutt Lange’s production of their 1977 single, “Heatwave.”

“Every day we plundered the XTC back catalog,” John Leckie told The Word’s Graeme Thomson this past July. “We took the multi-tracks and picked a song, sometimes playing the tape backwards, or at double speed. We might cut all the drums out, or just leave in the tom rolls, so every eight bars you have a tom roll. Then we’d add to that…”

As a result, the original XTC songs were so thwacked, squashed, and hissed out that they were largely unrecognizable to all but trainspotting fans. “New Broom”, however, retains most of the sonic character of big hit “Making Plans for Nigel” even after Partridge screamed out a poem (about Steve Ditko’s right-winger comic book hero, “Mr. A.”) over it.

The Explode Together CD compilation may only be of interest to XTC fans, but it remains a fascinating document of the turn-of-the-’80s approach to recording and remixing. You can’t dance to it, or sing along, but it still sort of works as an artistic statement.

“It was a huge buzz to sit down in front of a mixing desk, sending things down a thousand miles of echo and adding a million tons of reverb,” Partridge admitted in Song Stories, “but I got the dub thing out of my system… I don’t feel the need to do that now. We didn’t have any programming or sampling then, so most of it was done live at the mixing desk and sounds very rough and ragged. These days, I think a lot of it doesn’t work for me, but some of it is a charming period piece.”

Listen: 30-second choice clips [at 7digital.com]

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