Senses Working Overtime

I know you like the back of my hand, dear reader. And right through these here internets, I can feel the vibrations and emanations. Your chakra and your aura and your vibes come through, and as I lay my hand on the cpu, I can hear it, in my very bones:

The eighties were a time when the world was waking up from a kind of torpor, or stasis. New possibilities were opening up. The shooting wars had calmed down a bit. And the ideas from the technology and commerce side of the aisle were ascendant, and things got downright hopeful compared to the enuui mixed with depression the seventies encapsulated. My high school yearbook in 1976 had a two page spread that simply had the word APATHY in big letters across it. Hey, when you’re taking a beating, sometimes it’s best to curl up and wait for the blows to stop raining down.

Anyway, XTC encapsulates the marvelous and clever hive of activity that eighties music was, if you scratched the chrome off the arena rock edifice and looked a little deeper. They embodied the ideal of a few talented guys writing quirky, pleasant, tuneful ditties for our –and their own — amusement. It was nice to see people look like they were having fun, and not taking themselves too seriously for a change. To paraphrase Jeff Lebowski- God, I hate the Eagles.

XTC look like dweebs, and they are. The lead singer and one of the founders, Andy Partridge, canceled a whole tour because his wife hid his valium, and he was terrified to go on stage without it. He really belonged in a cubicle somewhere, or a library or something. He wrote songs about his comic book collection. His sort of Star Wars action figure collector comic book guy ugly guitar buyer home studio recorder computer geek TV Guide obsessed Avengers wannabe persona didn’t exist yet then in pop culture. Everybody’s like him now.

We dragged poor Andy out onto the stage he feared so, to distill the intellectual and the artisitic and the pop culture wag “vibe” into those toe-tapping songs. My, they were clever.

Enjoy it. I did. You’ve worn out your Talking Heads records anyway.