XTC - How they were made

I would love to see a Colin Moulding / Eric Matthews / Richard Davies get together, Cardinal-Deluxe, instead of songs about televisions and seasons it'd all be about watching television and gardening.

This was considered, but nixed by Virgin.

I have to correct that although the Fuzzy Warbles sets are full of weak stuff, they're actually split about half-and-half between released songs and songs that were either on the fan club demo tapes or were never released at all. From the 12 discs he's got planned, you could cull at least one full CD of stuff that would rival any other XTC album. And even if it costs me $240, that's what I'm gonna do!

One more defense of Patridge: he's doing this on his own website. What an artist tries in the privacy of his own site is fair game, as long as it doesn't scare the horses.

Kristin Hersh, this new high-profile ArtistShare site with Maria Schneider and Jim Hall, and others have tried to do the same thing - cash in on online-only value adds where you pay more money to hear the artist discuss the work, or present a lecture on it, or give you extra demos that let you research for yourself how the stuff came together. Only diehards get that far into the artists' website, or hit the site at all, so the artist gets a pretty self-selecting audience that can be counted on not to vomit at the solicitation. I've heard of much, much crasser things.

Well fuck that fucking fucktastic fuckness.

Partridge's recouping has been reasonable to date, but this is just ridiculous. I'm a fairly solid XTC collector [some 100 items in total, I think], but I wouldn't bother spending AU$2.50 just to hear him bang on about a song he recorded 15 years ago. Fuck that.

Of course he could make a bit of money by recording some actual proper music, but apparently that involves WORK, as opposed to blathering into a mic for 11 minutes.