For the third of my Eighties Bonus albums, I’m cheating a little bit here, since Chips From The Chocolate Fireball is really a combination of the 25 O’Clock EP and the full album Psionic Psunspot, but who cares? Besides, I stealthily snuck in two Bowie albums a few days ago.
The Dukes of Stratosphear are Sir John Johns, The Red Curtain, Lord Cornelius Plum, and EIEI Owen, better known as Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, Dave Gregory, and Ian Gregory of XTC. This is their side project, and a bit of playing around with late Sixties psychedelia, but much to Partridge’s chagrin sometimes, is perhaps more beloved than any of their work with XTC. After Skylarking I was in two minds if this needed adding, but it’s very much its own thing – leaning far harder into the psychedelia than Skylarking did.
You can have great fun spotting the influences – strongest are The Beatles (from between Revolver and Abbey Road) and The Byrds (notably from Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday), but you will spot elements of The Electric Prunes, Pretty Things, Small Faces, and other bands from that era. The track The Affiliated, about a mundane man having his life turned upside down by a vibrant woman (who is consequently hated by his friends) owes a large debt to The Kinks. Pale And Precious, with its high harmonies, jangly percussion and wavering theremin, is the Dukes’ homage to The Beach Boys (although hilariously Brian Wilson apparently thought it sounded like The Beatles. Given his prodigious drug intake he probably thought he was in The Beatles).
The tracks from 25 O’Clock were made using only the technology available in 1967-68, and do sound the more “pure”. The title track owes something to the Electric Prunes (I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night), while the light-hearted Bike Ride To The Moon feels like an early Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett track (“And I shan’t be pedalling any higher, because a sharp Sputnik has given me a cosmic flat tyre”). The Mole From The Ministry is pure Beatles (I Am The Walrus especially). There’s lots of backwards overdub, raga-style soloing, and lyrics that are scantily disguised allusions to drug use throughout.
Psionic Psunspot’s songs, meanwhile, are somewhat less purist in terms of the equipment used, and are slightly more varied in terms of influence, but still largely adhere to the psychedelia era. The Byrds show through strongly in the jangle-pop Vanishing Girl (not a million miles from Feel A Whole Lot Better) or the bass-driven You’re My Drug (a step or two away from So You Wanna Be A Rock And Roll Star). The Beatles show through most strongly with Brainiac’s Daughter (bearing a resemblance to some of Ringo’s underwater compositions), Collidascope, and the Cockney knees-up You’re A Good Man Albert Brown (with jangly pub piano and a solo on the spoons).
This last also recalls the “Gor blimey Mrs Jones” of Small Faces’ Lazy Sunday Afternoon, and throughout Psionic Psunspot there are drop-ins with a little girl (Lily Fraser) reading fragments of a hallucinatory Lewis Caroll parody - “The puffin sipped at his herbal tea and sighed ‘You can’t get the buttons these days’”. The influences extend forwards in time too. Listen to Shiny Cage, then listen to Oasis’ Importance Of Being Idle. Either Noel Gallagher “borrowed” from this song, or both he and Moulding borrowed from the same source. Since Oasis also “borrowed” from Neil Innes, himself no stranger to Sixties pastiche with his work on The Rutles, I wouldn’t be surprised if this album was his source. Producer Dave Leckie was recruited by various Nineties Indie groups, and you can hear Stone Roses elements in Your Gold Dress. Or, really, vice versa.
While Innes and Eric Idle directly copied specific Beatles songs for The Rutles (Ouch! for Help!, for example), the Dukes have a more blended approach. Each song may sound a bit like one Beatles track for the bassline, but then the melody sounds more Byrds, and the lyrics Pink Floyd, with a dash of Country Joe and The Fish in the guitars, or whatever. The songs are all excellent in their own right, without needing the influences, but it’s also a fun game to play spot the inspiration.
By the criteria that Dimery and his editors seem to apply to other albums, I think this is definitely worthy of inclusion. It forms an evolutionary link between the late Sixties music and the early Nineties music, as an album it has a purity of purpose behind it and is has a specific intent behind its creation rather than the outcome of having written twelve tunes in search of an outlet. Every single song is a mini masterpiece. It’s also one of those cult artifacts that afficionados want to share with a wider audience, but also don’t, because knowing and loving it demonstrates belonging to an elite group with impeccable taste.
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