Disappointing this took precedence over the next XTC album for the Deluxe editions.

I never cared much for the Dukes, but it certainly was well done.

Just not my thing.

I have actually been playing these two albums again over the last week and think they are among the strongest of their career. They'd both be in my top 5 XTC albums.

I agree, although I think of them as a single CD, since that's how I first experienced them ...

The story – at least according to the press releases – is a familiar one. XTC, as a non-touring band, between the recording/release of The Big Express and Skylarking, adopted the alter egos of The Dukes of Stratosphear and set about writing and recording 25 O’Clock, partying like it was 1967 and stereo phasing had just been popularised. With a clutch of songs as tuneful as Sgt. Pepper’s, guitars cranked up like a Kinks Pye b-side, the collective knowledge of a bunch of psych’s keenest fanboys and the engineering skills of John Leckie… the resulting album sits somewhere in the pantheon of greatness between Evolution, Their Satanic Majesties Request and S.F.Sorrow…

Or, there’s the truth… The Dukes of Stratosphear was England’s best kept pop-psych secret band, a group whose only two albums were released to the sound of indifference from media based in London and a lack of play from the most piratical of pirate stations. Convinced by a manager that invisibility would enhance the band’s mystique, the band only performed two concerts in Pswindon – a debut gig in early 1967 just after the release of the first LP and, although they didn’t know it at the time, a farewell gig to celebrate the release of the impending release of their second LP as the original Summer of Love came to a close in August 1967. Hearing tales of this legendary band, but never having seen them, psych fans Partridge & Gregory from XTC, tracked down Sir John Johns – now mainly a racing pigeon fancier under another name – in a pub and convinced him to let them have access to the master tapes, which had been wrapped in tin foil and buried under a faded merry go round in a playground in a municipal park.

XTC has been passing off this wonderful music as its own ever since that deception, while the real Sir John Johns, still clinging to the mantra that with obscurity comes, eventually, recognition, has long since replaced his garden recording studio with a pigeon loft… thoughts of the front cover of International Times long abandoned in favour of the chance to maybe, someday, grace the cover of British Homing World.

Only the tiny purple fishes can tell… which is real…

How to follow a masterpiece like Skylarking? Well, in the slightly longer term, the answer would be with albums that were every bit as good – Oranges & Lemons and Nonsuch but, in the immediate aftermath of Skylarking and, as an album which was, in sales terms, a slow burner whose peak sales came many months after its initial release, XTC retreated to their alter egos, not as caped crime fighters patrolling the mean streets of Swindon but, as pstalwarts of psychedelia echoing the spirit of ’67 with Psonic Psunspot, ten perfectly formed songs of psignificance, culminating in Pale and Precious - one of the best songs of the decade – (80s or 60s depending upon how you want to carbon date these things..)

Or….

Convinced by a manager who had a strange grip on the band, bolstered by a visit to a guru – Lobsang E. Vibrati – in Frome who claimed that only from obscurity could enlightenment be glimpsed, The Dukes spent the spring of 1967 writing their masterpiece. Recorded during the summer of love, while the TV was broadcasting All You Need is Love to the world and A Whiter Shade of Pale dominated the charts and the radio, The Dukes quietly laboured on their masterpiece. Issued on the obscure (even then) Pre-Primate label and supported by a sole gig in a local working men’s club, the album quickly became one of the most sought after gems of British psychedelia and, these days, an original copy at auction would cost more than the most select turntable on which it would, subsequently, never be played for fear of damage… making this reissue of one of 1967’s lost gems all the more welcome.

(...rumours continue to circulate of an earlier proto Merseybeat/Brit Blues incarnation of the band under yet another name...)

I don't currently do surround sound, so I'm a bit indifferent to this announcement. But this little tidbit sure intrigues me...

Disappointing this took precedence over the next XTC album for the Deluxe editions.

Could be a question of access to tapes.

FWIW, the only session tapes they have on hand for sure are the Apple Venus ones. Andy has said that the English Settlement tapes are missing. Unsure about White Music, Go2, Mummer, and The Big Express.

Thankfully, we do know that they were never in the possession of UMG, so they didn't go up in the fire.

Not sure what the 2016 APE Original Master Edition of English Settlement was mastered from, but it was an improvement over the original 2001 Japanese edition to my ears....