Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

I can take or leave XTC, but you're onto something with Mould and Hart - Husker Du really were incredible and genuinely groundbreaking for a few albums, both sonically and in songwriting terms. Only problem with the comparison being that they wrote separately, whereas L & M wrote together (at least that's what the credits say...)

I don't agree I think the white album or at least 90percent of it is total shit. sorry

>Maybe because when I first heard it the message was already lost. Vietnam was over etc...


What message? I don't recall the Beatles ever addressing Vietnam in song.

If what you are asking is whether XTC were / are better at being the Beatles than the Beatles then the answer is a firm "no". I am not a big fan of rose coloured 60s nostalgia at the best of times but they invented the form and very little has been done since their demise to advance that form beyond the templates they laid out. XTC have moved it forward not an inch and I doubt they would claim any different.

I don't actually much like most of the Beatles music (I listen to the expanded Magical Mystery Tour and maybe Abbey Road or the Blue album once or twice a year) but there is no getting away from the fact that anyone still working with guitars and drums and keys and voices in straight 4/4 with verse chorus song structures owes them a living. Their ubiquity and mass appeal are I think actually a testament to their transcendence as originators rather than a sign of hidden shallows. Shallowness seems to me to be neither here nor there.

There have been "advances" into complexity and equal and opposite "retreats" into simplification and cod authenticity but very little else has been said in the intervening half century or so that would threaten their place at the head of the Rock pantheon. People have had a fair old dip into jazz and classical and contemporary "art" music to freshen up the sound palette but at the core there is really the same old verse chorus ramalamadingdong whether it is Stock Aitken Waterman or the Velvets. It is no wonder that the genre is so constipated. Here comes another copy of a copy of a copy.

That's why for me the over-reachers who risk absurdity and ridicule and whose wings almost inevitably melt in the process are the people to be really cherished. There are a couple of XTC albums that I think are pretty special but that's being competent at plowing someone else's territory rather inventing an entire art form.

the beatles didn't invent pop music they just added to it as did many before them adding layer upon layer to most likely caveman grunts that came before. everything we know is a copy of a copy of a copy etc...everything is repackaged , repurposed , and replayed if we could live 1000 years we would probably die of boredom.

You are probably not old enough to have heard the likes of Nina & Frederick, Frankie Vaughan, John Leyton, Frank Ifield and the dubious pleasures of the Larry Parnes stable as a kid. That's what popular music was like here before (and during a large part) The Beatles' reign. A lot of the music people really listened to and bought en masse back then was a totally different beast to the 1960s we think we remember today. What we think of as the fundamentals of Rock songwriting and record production (and their packaging into a commercially viable whole) owes The Beatles more or less everything. XTC owe them more than most and that's fine but I am not sure you can really compare them without acknowledging the debt as being fundamental.