Blast from the past

Transistor gives us a live XTC

by Brett Milano

XTC's Transistor Blast (TVT) is that rarest of items, a mostly live boxed set by a band who are famous for not playing live. In recent years, XTC have been even more famous for not playing at all: they've been "on strike" since 1992 because of label disputes that sprang up after that year's Nonsuch (Geffen). The silence is set to be broken in February: a new album, Apple Venus, is in the can, and a follow-up to that is reportedly half finished. Meanwhile, XTC have been less an active band than a friendly ghost, a fond memory or a name that young bands can drop as an influence to prove their legitimacy.

Transistor Blast is the first step in XTC's reapparance: four discs of live and BBC recordings covering most of their history (Nonsuch is the only album not represented). Like most boxed sets, it will provoke grumbling over what's absent, especially since the four discs check in at about 50 minutes each. Most of the BBC sessions that fill the first two have already appeared on an import CD, Drums & Wireless, and the 1980 concert on disc three was readily available on another import set, Radio 1 in Concert. So the only new discovery is disc four, a fiery 1978 show by the earliest and punkiest edition of the band (with keyboardist Barry Andrews, who probably did them a favor by splitting after two albums). Fans will love Transistor Blast, but TVT missed the opportunity to bring out some of the more elusive tapes that have been bootlegged -- notably recordings of the 1982 English Settlement tour, which lasted just six dates. Or the acoustic radio performances in 1989, the closest thing they've done to a concert tour since then. Or the dozens of unreleased songs that exist on demos and are worth a box set in themselves.

The current line-up has been reduced to singer/guitarist Andy Partridge and singer/bassist Colin Moulding, and they've earned their reputation as studio-bound recluses. Yet before Partridge had his stage-fright-induced nervous breakdown in 1982, XTC were a ferocious live band. I was a starry-eyed fan at one of their Black Sea tour dates at the Metro (now Avalon) in November 1980, when they opened for Joan Jett. Having grown up on the Beatles and gotten seduced by punk, I'd adopted XTC as my dream band. And now I have the third disc of Transistor Blast, which was recorded in London a month after the Avalon show, as my witness: this is exhilarating stuff, catching XTC when they weren't quite a punk group and weren't quite a pop combo. Instead they landed somewhere in the middle and wound up playing -- you guessed it -- timeless rock and roll.

At the time, of course, nobody realized that they were playing so hard because Partridge was terrified on stage: the tempos would keep getting faster, till finally, on the next tour, he collapsed during a show. The band were savvy enough to work Partridge's jitters into the performances; by the time of this London show, his stage fright was pushing the music well into the red. His tongue-tied sputters on "Are You Receiving Me" make musical sense, even though he was probably tongue-tied for real; "Scissor Man" and "Living Through Another Cuba" achieve the edge of panic that the lyrics called for (the songs deal respectively with kids' nightmares about the bogeyman and real-life nightmares about the arms race). Moulding's beat-group homage "Life Begins at the Hop" also gets the audio-vérité treatment -- this version really sounds like a bunch of horny adolescents on a rampage. It doesn't hurt that the songs were impeccably crafted in the first place, but the rhythm section is out for action -- there's evidence here that XTC might have gone toward funk or ska, instead of folk and psychedelia, if drummer Terry Chambers had stuck around.

They're more punk but more playful on the 1978 disc, which draws mainly from the raw material on that year's White Music. Included is an endearingly awful rendition of "All Along the Watchtower" -- maybe that's why the band never played many covers.

The BBC sessions catch XTC in more relaxed circumstances, playing live in the studio during the post-touring years. Most of these performances differ only marginally from the studio versions (and it's no small feat the way they re-create the unearthly keyboard sounds on "Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her"), but by this point XTC had edged away from the big beat and cast their lot with the knack for melody Partridge and Moulding were showing. "You're the Wish You Are I Had" proves that Partridge went through his Burt Bacharach phase before such things became fashionable. And "Snowman" anticipates the achingly lovelorn school of pop -- anyone who can come up with a line like "People will always be tempted to wipe their feet on anything with `Welcome' written on it" has earned a permanent entry in the sensitivity hall of fame.

Transistor Blast may jumble early and recent songs together, but it turns out that the attitude was pretty much the same on the band's early rants against conformity as it is on their current odes to fatherhood. XTC just wanted a life that went beyond the ordinary. And they came up with a fitting soundtrack.