(This is an article I wrote last year and as you'll see I really cut loose....)
Picture the scene. It’s a late summer afternoon in 1967, somewhere deep in the lush English countryside. Children wave union jack flags and a brass band plays on a village green as the musical adventurers known as The Dukes Of Stratosphear prepare to board their ornate, Art Nouveau flying machine to explore the outer limits of the psychedelic universe.
And we have a message from the Dukes themselves, featured in the liner notes from their first album 25 O'Clock, recently re-released: "The Dukes say it's time. It's time to visit the planet Smile. It's time the Love Bomb was dropped.
"It's time to eat music. It's time to kiss the sun. It's time to drown yourself in soundgasm and it's time to dance through the mirror.
"The Dukes declare it's 25 O'Clock."
The Dukes Of Stratosphear, a 60s psychedelia pop band headed by Sir John Johns, whose manager Mitch Mengele, when interviewed by the BBC in 1985, announced that the band were gearing up to play concerts in Wales and Cornwall as soon as he returned from a holiday in Barbados.
Mengele did not come home from Barbados and the Dukes never played those concerts because it was one of British music's greatest in-jokes writ large.
The Dukes were, in fact, a side project by XTC of Senses Working Overtime fame.
Out of kilter with the musical trends of the mid-80s and the over-produced sound of Trevor Horn et al, XTC channelled their undeniable talents into the creation of a faux psychedelic band.
It was a conceit that tickled XTC mainstay Andy Partridge who had managed to convince Virgin to free up £5000 so he could he create a record that sounded as if it had come out in 1967.
And with producer John Leckie he eagerly went to work. The result was the successful 25 O'Clock released in 1985.
The LP drew plaudits from Tears For Fears who adored the Beatles-esque single The Mole From The Ministry, echoes of which can clearly be heard on their own 60s-styled epic Sowing The Seeds Of Love from 1989.
The Stone Roses also demonstrated their fondness for the Dukes when they asked John Leckie to make them sound like the aristocrats of the air when recording in 1988.
In 1987 the Dukes, who are vocalist Sir John Johns, bassist The Red Curtain, organist Lord Cornelius Plum and drummer E I E I Owen, returned with Psonic Psunspot.
Now both albums have been re-released in fantastic pocket-sized cases which resemble children's storybooks.
The Dukes re-issues are the opening salvo of an XTC revival as EMI, who own most of the band's back catalogue plan on releasing three albums during the summer - English Settlement, Skylarking and Oranges And Lemons.
25 O'Clock, circa 2009, is a cracking package containing the six tracks from the 1985 original mini-album and a plethora of demos including the superb 80s as imagined by the 60s song My Love Explodes and the Ringo Starr-like nasally vocals of Susan Revolving.
There's a nice dollop of extra recordings on the CD too with the demented Doors-go-cabaret Black Jewelled Serpent Of Sound being a laugh out loud delight of OTT proportions.
Returning to the album proper; there's the 60s superspy playground machismo motifs of the title track with wonderfully overwrought lyrics like "The ticking seconds hear them call/My spell of hours will make you fall" and "At 25 o'clock, that's when you're going to be mine."
In the liner notes for 25 O'Clock, Andy Partridge says: "This psilly psong [sic] is about juvenile possession, teenage control and time all coming undone."
The next two tracks are the Laughing Gnome-era Bowie trippy warmth of Bike Ride To The Moon and the epic fuzziness of My Love Explodes, which underscores psych pomposity with a delicious garage urgency.
Wallowing in the Dukes' output is fun and the perfect way to spend an afternoon, and as you nod conspiratorially with the perfect aping of 60s musical tropes perpetrated by Andy Partridge and his comrades you understand just how restricted he and the rest of XTC must have felt during the 80s.
As the Dukes, XTC were able to express themselves far better and influenced at least one prevailing soundscape of the late 80s and early 90s.
The penultimate track on the main section of 25 O'Clock is Your Gold Dress.
A summer groover with suitably dark undercurrents that is a tribute to keyboardist Nicky Hopkins whose keys, mellotron and Hammond organ provide the heart to 60s classic Their Satanic Majesties Request.
And when you listen you'll hear how the Stone Roses, Blur and even Pulp, draw upon that sunshiney July vibe albeit with sinister, top-hatted figures with chalk white faces lurking under the weeping willow to unsettle the idyll.
The Mole From The Ministry is a sprawling epic that feels much, much longer than four minutes and 45 seconds thanks to the sumptuous, temporal molasses quality inherent in the music and the disturbing air given to it by the inserted homespun homilies of Benjamin Franklin.
Commenting on this track in his notes, Andy Partridge says: "No great daft Mad Hatter of a song like this would be complete without lots of indecipherable babble in the background so a trip to a local junk shop supplied an album of the phrases of Benjamin Franklin."
Follow-up LP Psonic Psunspot, released in the blue-eyed soul and Stock Aitken and Waterman saturated days of 1987, is the Dukes' take on a 60s concept album with the owner of the studio's well-spoken daughter Lily reading some Alice In Wonderland-esque whimsy around the tracks.
In fact, Psonic Psunspot merged the reality of XTC with the mythology of the Dukes as the album contains You're My Drug from the former's early days in 1978 and a couple of rejected tracks from 1984's The Big Express and 1986's Skylarking.
Ironically, it was the financial success of Skylarking that had put XTC back in Virgin's good books. As a result, the record company decided it was time for another Dukes album.
Andy Partridge takes up the story in his notes: "Our initial response was to say well no, actually.
"The whole raison d'être of the Dukes was to be low-tech, religiously retro and anti-modern in every way. Odd then, that it took the record company the barest minimum of arm-twisting in order to change our minds.
"In the spring of 1987, with another ten songs written, and with John and Ian on board, we loaded our cars and headed for Cornwall to record the full-length LP."
And it's quite an LP. There's the mock 60s rock opera quality of a concept album running throughout, with the songs which ooze verisimilitude, ably adding to the feeling that Psonic Psunspot was released in 1968 with an eye on the American market.
Tracks such as the foreboding Collideascope and the cosmopolitan, sun-kissed You're My Drug, the XTC number dating back to the late 70s, being two examples of this bold new direction being embraced by the Dukes.
Whereas You're A Good Man Albert Brown shamelessly revels in the Kinks and the Small Faces' tradition of British music hall bawdiness heard in Sunny Afternoon, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion and Lazy Sunday.
As with 25 O'Clock, there's a smattering of demos that kick off with the relaxed Squeeze-like No One At Home which could easily be a song receiving airplay nowadays on Radio 2.
Next up is Little Lighthouse, on both the main album and in the demo section, described by Partridge as a "mighty mess", it had been intended for Skylarking but oozing the ambience of the Dukes, it made more sense to feature it on Psonic Psunspot.
Commenting on Little Lighthouse, Partridge says: "This slice of ersatz West Coast pop is probably saved from out and out mimicry by the very complex chords in the verse."
Demos of Collideascope and Brainiac's Daughter follow. Both tracks have merits but it's apparent why these cuts are demos when compared with the actual versions.
Thus we have the Dukes Of Stratosphear, a glorious experiment in faux 60s psych-pop fashioned in the excess of the 80s and restored for the Noughties. Nice to have you back, sirs. A little something extra in your tea, perhaps?
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