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The man sitting next to me on the tube one morning last week was wearing a leaf green jacket made of that same faux silk material used for shell suits.  But the reason I noticed it as I followed him onto the carriage was not so much the general nastiness of the garment but that it had a white horse emblem on its back, and not just any old white horse but the White Horse of Uffington.  Squinting sideways I was able to make out the logo on the front of the jacket, so that there could be no doubt – it was an English settlement-era piece of XTC merchandise, and it had somehow managed to survive the intervening 26 years.  Despite its distinct lack of sartorial elegance, it would probably fetch a packet on eBay.  I wanted to ask its wearer, who looked very much like he was the original owner, how he came by it – was he road crew on that ill-fated tour when Andy Partridge’s stage fright finally got the better of him, or was he simply a fan? – but he had headphones on.  Probably listening to ‘Snowman’.  ‘It isn’t even winter but I’m freezing, freezing…’

XTC in Too Much Hanky Pantry

 

XTC managed to interpolate themselves among the indie-popsters in the pages of my second fanzine.  But I was extremely harsh on (a) Colin Moulding – why I didn’t have time for ‘Grass’ back then is a mystery to me now; (b) Todd Rundgren, whose music a friend subsequently converted me to with a tape entitled ‘Todd is God’, and who – though his interpersonal skills were evidently lacking – can hardly be blamed for wanting to get XTC to make a great record; and (c) Skylarking in general – only half of it of value?  A letter Mark Fisher was good enough to publish in his excellent XTC fanzine Limelight the same year (1987) was much kinder, though I still had it in for Colin.  I also suggested that ‘Dear God’ – the subject of the latest Backed with – ‘could well be my favourite XTC song… mmm… ever!’ and that it should have been on the LP instead of ‘Earn enough for us’, contradicting what I wrote in my own fanzine about that song.  Teenagers, eh?

Graphically a good idea inexpertly executed.  I would get better at this kind of textual shaping later on.

The Brilliant Corners have not loomed large in my life since those times – whereas hip-hop has.

This excellent piece of (self-)analysis over at Unpopular rather neatly kicks off with a reference to XTC and then moves on to my other subject here: fanzines of the 1980s.  My fanzines, too, were ‘written out of some desperate need to communicate and make connections’, and Alistair was, of course, one of those with whom I connected.

He knows so much about these things

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