On the surface, it made no sense at all. Their first two studio-only albums bombed. Critical reaction to Mummer and The Big Express was mixed at best; the latter album was almost entirely ignored by critics and music buyers in the United States. The recording sessions approached the chaotic and weren’t all that fun for anyone involved. XTC seemed headed straight down the road to oblivion.
So when Andy Partridge informed Virgin that the next project would attempt to revive a form of music that had been dead for over a decade and would be recorded under a different band name, management responded by limiting the budget to a mere £5,000. Given that Virgin had spent £33,000 on the video for the single “All You Pretty Girls” from The Big Express (which also bombed), it seemed that the suits were getting pretty wary about indulging in Andy’s fantasies.
Andy’s idea involved recreating and recording the psychedelic music of the 60s. Both Andy and Dave Gregory were devotees of the form; as far back as 1978 they had mused about the possibility of making a psychedelic album, even before Dave joined XTC. Andy explained to Todd Bernhardt that while they were hard at work on The Big Express, the urge to realize his dream overpowered him: “. . . during spare minutes I’d sneak off upstairs in Crescent Studios, in Bath, with my cassette machine and whisper these ideas for psychedelic songs into it. I was beginning not to be able to contain the desire to do this. You can see it leaking out earlier—you can see it leaking out on Mummer—‘Let’s get a Mellotron! Let’s put some backwards so-and-so on here.'”
Due to the limited budget and a two-week timeline, they had to hope that some good karma was headed their way. Andy managed to get top-tier producer John Leckie excited about the project and Leckie found a suitably cheap studio with 60s-era equipment while the boys scoured the music stores for period instruments. Caught up in the excitement of transforming themselves into a forgotten ’60s psychedelic band called the Dukes of Stratosphear, they dressed in Paisley and gave themselves fresh pseudonyms. Alas, they didn’t have enough time to create a full album, so the project was whittled down to a six-song mini-album.
Everything I’ve written so far sounds like the perfect recipe for a career-killing embarrassment, but lo and behold, 25 O’Clock sold twice as many copies as The Big Express and did pretty well in the USA. The keys to its stunning success were the ingredients missing in Mummer and The Big Express—a clear artistic vision, an accomplished producer and exceptionally positive vibes. From the documentary This Is Pop:
Dave: I had more fun in those two weeks than I’d ever had in the studio with anybody. We just put ourselves in the mindset of bands from the mid-60s and just find as much vintage gear as we can so we can it sounding as authentic as possible.
Andy: There’s a long tradition of - whatever media you’re in, writers do it all the time but musicians do it as well - where you want to not be you, to go to like a costume ball as some other character - a masked ball - wouldn’t that be great fun? So in our case, let’s make an album by a different band. So in two weeks, we wrote, recorded and mixed the Dukes of Stratosphere’s first record. It was so much fun, I’ll tell ya. So much fun not being yourself.
Ironically, the recording approach of “tarting things up” and overloading the mixes with superfluous sounds that made Mummer and The Big Express unsatisfactory listening experiences turned out to be just what the doctor ordered on 25 O’Clock. Psychedelic music is one of the few musical forms that embraces excess—you expect to hear all kinds of weird and unusual sounds coming out of the speakers. The key difference between the great psychedelic songs and the mucky messes released in the 60s was the presence of a skilled producer, and John Leckie cut his teeth at Abbey Road, where much of the best psychedelic music of the era was engineered and produced.
25 O’Clock and its follow-up Psonic Sunspot are truly labors of love. The Dukes worked hard to reproduce the sounds and styles of their favorite psychedelic bands and have been open and honest about which bands inspired each song. You will hear clear echoes of the Electric Prunes, Pink Floyd (especially Syd Barrett), the Move, Small Faces, Tomorrow, the Smoke, the Pretty Things, the Stones of Satanic Majesties, and of course, the Beatles. I found myself giggling with delight every time I recognized a classic psychedelic trope: “Oh, there’s the cheesy organ!” “And there’s the anti-resolution chord!” “Yay, backward loops!” “Oh, my, that is so walrusy!” I am thoroughly convinced that at least three of the tracks would have been Top 10 hits back in the day and the other three would have made for excellent B-sides.
That said, the Dukes had several advantages over their forebears. They were accomplished musicians in contrast to the sometimes questionable skills of fly-by-night psychedelic bands. The Psychedelic Era operated under the mantra “anything goes” and many of the experiments should have been left in the can. The Dukes had no need to experiment because the practices and values of psychedelic music were well-established. By embracing those core elements, the project became a testament honoring those who came before:
“In the later ’70s, I found myself longing to be doing the music that I loved as a kid of 13 or 14. I’d be listening to the radio then, and there’d be stuff like “See Emily Play,” or “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “My White Bicycle” — you know, all these great psychedelic singles, and I thought, “This is wonderful! When I grow up, I’ll be in a group, and we’ll make music like this!” Of course, as a kid, I had no grasp that this was just the whim of fashion, and that this music was going to last only a year or so, and then it would be gone! But it affected me so profoundly that when I was in a position to be in a group and making records, I thought I should say thank you to the people who made those records, and to say thank you to them by sounding just like them.” -Andy Partridge. From: https://altrockchick.com/2023/12/10/the-dukes-of-stratosphear-25-oclock-classic-music-review-xtc-series/
