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OK, it's the start of a new month and after a quarter of a year off, about time to get this show back on the road. And we have an exciting place to start, thanks to the recent discovery of a planned prototype Now! album from 1982, which would of course have predated the Now 1 we all know and love. Apparently Virgin were unable to persuade other labels to contribute on this occasion, which left them compiling the entire album from their own catalogue: arguably their loss but our gain since it leads to some rather unlikely inclusions. But in the end, retailers weren't persuaded to order in enough stock and the whole project was binned at the last minute, no copies being known to have survived.
XTC had started the year as one of Virgin's most exciting acts, scoring their first Top 10 single and album in the spring (of which more later). Just when a major breakthrough seemed on the horizon though, lead singer Andy Partridge suffered a breakdown which led to the cancellation of all planned touring and the band's career was in disarray commercially, with this third single from English Settlement failing even to breach the Top 75. That makes it a strange opener (if indeed it was the opener, since documentation is a bit sketchy) but a powerful one. Perhaps Virgin were trying to assert their credentials as an indie label and purveyors of challenging music.
The song is indeed a political one, a morality play of sorts about parents ignoring their son's fascist sympathies, and I've always felt it to be one of Partridge's best lyrics, with clever use of alliteration: "a Boy in Blue is Busy Banging out a headache on the kitchen door..." And although English Settlement is generally thought of as quite a pastoral folky album, with heavy use of acoustic guitar, acoustic have seldom sounded as aggressive as they do here. Biased though I may be in writing about one of my favourite bands, I think this beats most of the official Now openers and it's a shame they never made it to a real Now! album.
Available on: Fossil Fuel: The XTC Singles Collection 1977 - 1992
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