IF THOSE DOLLARS ARE
BURNING A HOLE IN YOUR POCKET,
ANDY TELLS YOU
HOW TO RATIONALIZE THE
MUSICAL UNIVERSE

	WHITE MUSIC Four years' worth of songs saved up and recorded (virtually) live in one short burst. Noisy, arrogant, stark, triangular and desperate for your attention. Four young snots dismantling pop!
	GO 2 Four weeks worth of songs, hastily scribbled on hotel notepaper and beermats. We were living out of carrier bags and in rental vans, making nasty noises at each other and with each other. Something had to give and here it is.
	DRUMS AND WIRES Twang! Barry goes, Dave comes and the band is reborn. We revel in electric guitars, voodoo tom toms and the discovery of our songwriting muscle (which is becoming delightfully erect).
	BLACK SEA The band are becoming a slick-sounding, commando, trouble-shooting unit, ready to go anywhere on earth, songs written on the hoof, rehearsed in dressing room and slammed down here on our hardest album. The live machine captured with minimum trimmings.
	ENGLISH SETTLEMENT I gave away my acoustic guitar in a TV contest and had to buy a new one, suddenly all these new tunes flowed out! Colin gets fretless, Dave goes 12-string, Terry still "just 'its 'em". This 15-track warehouse of songs sounds expansive, fresh, unfinished and vast. It was to become many people's favourite XTC album.
	WAXWORKS: SOME SINGLES 1977-1982 Spooky, unreal, dripping and unstable. The thrills and horrors of modern life in three-minute scenarios. No adult allowed unless accompanied by a child.
	MUMMER Five years of solid touring "wigs out" yours truly and the band comes off the road. The result was a record built in troubled times. Is he dead? Will they split? Have they lost it? The answer was no, no and no. Try a spoonful, out of the sour came forth the sweet.
	THE BIG EXPRESS If Mummer was a gentle chug through the countryside, then The Big Express is a loco derailing itself in the rusty goods yard. An altogether more industrial affair. Slashing electric guitars, sheets of steel bass and diesel oil drums. An iron opera, steam powered and brick encased.
	SKYLARKING Musician and producer Todd Rundgren squeezed the XTC clay into its most complete/connected/cyclical record ever. Not an easy album to make for various ego reasons but time has humbled me into admitting that Todd conjured up some of the most magical production and arranging conceivable. A summer's day cooked into one cake.
	ORANGES AND LEMONS Strip it down, build it up, here comes the dragster, polished and chrome, it's big, it's long and supercharged with song. She's hard and she's fast, eats future and shits past. Fifteen songs, a fluorescent feast, you'd better be hungry!
	RAG AND BONE BUFFET So the world goes urrph! grunt! shifts gear and in comes the new technology of compact discs. Suddenly someone says, but what about all those vinyl B-sides, pseudo-name singles, film tracks and giveaways that are going to be lost forever? Embarrassed that this is the only reason the Rag And Bone compilation exists, it then goes and gets great critical reviews. Sometimes I can't figure you folks out!
	PSONIC PSUNSPOT -- The Dukes Of Stratosphear The Dukes were the band we all wanted to be in when we were at school. Purple, giggling, fuzztone, liquid and arriving. If you want to know where those cheap charlatans ‘The Beatles’, ‘Pink Floyd’, ‘The Byrds’, ‘The Hollies’ and ‘The Beach Boys’ stole their ideas from, well just listen to this and weep.

THANKS FOR THE EARTIME -- ANDY