First, the bad news.

“At this point,” announces Andy Partridge over the phone from his Swindon, England home, “XTC is pretty much a memory, I’m afraid. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a going concern again. I certainly have a dislike of older bands that re-form; they really, really shouldn’t do it.”

For fans of the legendary British post-new wave group—who managed to survive a good 20 years longer than most of their contemporaries, with the possible exception of REM—this news comes not so much as a shock but rather a grim confirmation of the end of an era. Yet, as Partridge continues, it becomes clear that, while XTC the band may be strictly a historical concern, XTC the brand is in the middle of one of its busiest years in quite some time.

Since the departure of guitarist Dave Gregory in the spring of 1998, the band had been largely an in-name-only affair anyway, a team moniker shared by Partridge and Colin Moulding, who had long been the sole songwriters in the band. After leaving their long-standing, and some would say long-suffering, label, Virgin Records, at the dawn of the new millennium, the pair managed to turn out two more XTC records, Apple Venus Volume 1 and Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2) on their own label, Idea Records. Continuing legal strife between the remaining duo and Virgin, however, has kept most of the band’s back catalog on ice for the past decade.

According to Partridge, however, most of XTC’s Virgin Records releases will get proper reissues—possibly by year’s end—with fan-friendly bonus tracks, liner notes, and remastering.

“They’re doing an expanded English Settlement,” Partridge reveals, “which will be the two discs on one CD, and on another CD will be all the associated tracks from that era, like ‘Tissue Tigers’, ‘Blame the Weather’, ‘Heaven Is Paved with Broken Glass’, and all that stuff that escaped on B-sides or EPs or whatever. So we’ll master it really well and hopefully we’ll get to do good sleeve notes and stuff, although I should say that we’re not in control of the budget because this is still Virgin putting it out.”

It seems that, while Partridge remains engulfed in the flames of optimism, he’s nonetheless wary of being burned yet again by what he feels has been a depressing history with his former corporate masters.

“Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,” says Partridge, “and there were all sorts of bad color separations and misspellings and wrong track listings. It was really heartbreaking. They’ve actually fumbled the ball, radically, twice in recent years. During the whole Britpop thing, they didn’t promote our back catalog despite all these bands like Blur, Pulp, and countless others that, to me, were shamelessly attempting to sounds rather like us. Then it came around again a few years later with another wave of bands like Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Hot Hot Heat, Franz Ferdinand, Maxïmo Park, the Futureheads, and Bloc Party. Everybody would come up to me in the street and say, ‘Hey Andy, that band blah blah sounds just like what you did in 1979!’ So Virgin fumbled it yet again, when they should have been promoting our back catalog there.”

News of the imminent XTC reissues was somewhat upstaged, however, by the recent release of two new self-reissues from XTC’s psychedelic alter-ego group, the Dukes of Stratosphear, on Partridge’s own Ape label.

“We got the crumbs off the table,” says Partridge of Ape’s arrangement to retain certain XTC side projects. “We got use of the Dukes and, I think, Rag & Bone Buffet, The Dub Experiments, and something else I can’t remember. And, of course, Ape will be putting out the vinyl versions, so if Virgin won’t do proper sleeve notes [for their CD reissues] we’ll just pack the vinyl releases with all that stuff.”

The Dukes grew, like much of XTC, out of Partridge’s love of the records from his childhood in the ’60s, a time of heavy experiments mixed with childish novelty songs. Partridge, in fact, makes no distinction between the two.

“Psychedelia is novelty songs for adults,” he says of the tripped-out records of his youth. “It was a time when people were looking for new ways to screw up the sounds and make them more dreamlike. Ultimately, there was very little progressive about it; they were mostly using effects that had been used before, but just laying it on thicker. Things like echo chambers, phase shifting, and experiments with stereo panning. ‘What happens if I move the pan control? Oh wow, it seems to be moving through your head!’ The psychedelic people were dreaming up new ways to sort of floss your head out. But if you compare the wackiest novelty records with the straightest, most government-approved psychedelia of ’67-’68, you’ll see there’s not that much difference. One is supposedly counterculture for the rebellious pot-smoking youth, and the other one is for respectable little kids, or funny stuff for children.”