Re: XTC & personal taste

[Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK>]

> Date: Mon, 27 Jul 87 20:20:25 PDT
> From: Greg Earle <earle@gov.nasa.jpl.jplopto>

>> I'd be surprised if there were as great a consensus on XTC as there is (or
>> seems to be) on Kate, Peter, and the Beatles, but anyway...

> Judging from your response, I'd agree ... :-)

> If we ignore `Mummer' and `The Big Express' ...
     (What *do* you think of them, by the way? 
      I've said that I don't much like them, but
      then I haven't played them very often.)
>                                             ... it looks like you've thrown
> `Go 2' (the 2nd LP that you couldn't remember the title of) and `English
> Settlement' on the bottom of the heap.  Well, so much for consensus as in
> private email these were the two I recommended *most* of all.

Well, it's not really fair to say "bottom of the heap" because I put only
two above them: Black Sea and White Music.  (I didn't give any particular
ordering for Drums and Wires w.r.t. Go2 and ES.)  Actually, no that you've
made me think about it some more, I do think ES is somewhere in the top
three.  But the UK version is (or used to be) quite expensive and there's
something to be said for brevity...

> If the double LP that contained the A sides and B sides of their mid-period
> singles is still in print, then this too is to be recommended

This appears to be a single LP in the UK, but I think it's one of the
two rather than a condensation of both.  There is also at least one
single (Life Begins at the Hop, perhaps?) that's on the US version of
an LP but not on the UK.  (This seems to be a common result when the
order of release is UK lp, UK (hit) single, US lp.)

And, of course, there's also the Dukes of the Stratosphere...

-- Jeff