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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 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.
