Dukes Of Stratosphear - 25 O'Clock EP (1985)

For what was essentially XTC paying tribute to the songs of their youth wrapped up in a conceptual joke, the 25 O'Clock EP proved surprisingly popular, outselling their previous two official albums and even providing a key piece of The Stone Roses's musical DNA.

25 O'Clock was released on April 1, 1985 and briefly sparked a debate in the music weeklies before it was confirmed that the Dukes were actually XTC in psychedelic disguise.

The band are listed on the back of the cover as Sir John Johns, The Red Curtain, Lord Cornelius Plum and, best of all,  E.I.E.I. Owen, who in reality were Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, Dave Gregory and his brother Ian.

The decision to record an EP inspired by the Sixties bands they'd loved as teenagers came after Partridge and John Leckie had been fired from the job of producing Mary Margaret O'Hara's debut album on religious grounds - Partridge because he was an athiest and Leckie because he was a follower of the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (a free love advocate fond of Rolls Royces who was later accused by a former aide of being addicted to valium and nitrous oxide).

XTC had quit touring in 1982 due to Partridge's own withdrawal after many years of using valium had lead to stage fright-related panic attacks, with the band becoming purely a studio entity.

Turning psychedelic after quitting touring obviously has a fairly famous precedent and who better to guide them through this colourful career detour than Leckie, who had started out as a tape operator at Abbey Road Studios and worked on John Lennon's early solo stuff.

Virgin took some convincing to back this particular ruse but eventually stumped up five grand - in the end they got a thousand back almost immediately due to the band romping through the recording of six tracks in a fortnight in a deconsecrated church in Hereford, finishing in time for Christmas in 1984.

Partridge provided the album cover art that was heavily indebted to Cream's Disraeli Gears with a dash of Richard Hamilton's pop art thrown in for good measure.

The songs inside are just as Day-Glo and tongue in cheek as the cover, paying tribute to English psychedelia topped off with a little Nuggets era garage rock and bubblegum pop. The EP is less than 27 minutes long but there's easily an album's worth of ideas crammed into the grooves.

It starts with the sound of clocks ticking and chiming, a nod to Pink Floyd's Time, before the title track rolls in on Moulding's bouncing bassline and Dave Gregory's vintage keyboards. Partridge's lyrics about seizing control of a magical hour in which he can make the girl love him sounds like it was stolen straight from one of those 1950s Mysterious Tales comicbooks.

Bike Ride To The Moon comes over like Syd Barrett-era Floyd covering Tomorrow's My White Bicycle and features the mighty couplet: 'Now I shan't be pedalling any higher/ As the sharp Sputnick has given me a cosmic flat tyre'.

My Love Explodes brings to mind The Yardbirds and Cream indulging in a double entrende fest before building to a garage-punk climax with Partridge at his shouty finest. No wonder a Woody Allen soundalike asks 'Why would you write such a degenerate type song like that?' during the fadeout.

Side two starts with Moulding's only songwriting contribution, What In The World??, with its backwards swirls of sound and helium trumpets. Suggesting a future where acid is free and women fight the wars, Moulding suddenly sounds like an elderly major harrumphing in the Daily Telegraph letters page when he sings: 'Do you remember when this life was in perspective/ And the grown-ups were respected/ They'd give up their seat on the bus/ Open your door with no fuss'.

Your Gold Dress is built on what Partridge describes as 'the stupidest riff in the history of riffs', borrowing a piano line from The Rolling Stones' She's a Rainbow along the way and somehow ends up a far greater sum than just a few borrowed parts.

Saving their Beatles tribute until the end, Mole From The Ministry (check out this great video) could sit comfortably in Magical Mystery Tour without sounding out of place for my money.

If these attempts to describe 25 O'Clock make it sound dangerously like a Rutles-style comedy pastiche, then fear not. It may be full of nods and winks to heroes past but everything song is strong enough to stand shoulder to shoulder to its influences, which is no mean feat.

25 O'Clock sold more than XTC's two previous albums, Big Express and Mummer, rejuvenating the band's fortunes and leading to their excellent Skylarking LP recorded with Todd Rungren.

It also provided a key inspiration for The Stone Roses on their debut album, which Leckie produced. Ian Brown recently acknowledged the debt, albeit a little reluctantly, in The Observer - but then the Roses have long struggled to appreciate what was brilliant about their own LP, with Brown thinking it not dance enough and John Squire believing it not rock enough - which probably underlines just what a great producer Leckie is.

But the Roses were all paisley-loving psychedelicists back then, whether they care to recall it that way or not. Perhaps the old adage about 'if you can remember it then weren't really there' should be applied here. The Dukes/Leckie influence is probably most blatant on the reversed groove of Don't Stop and the ringing phone that ushers in the extended code to I Am The Resurrection.

A full Dukes album, Psonic Psunspot, arrived in 1987, again with Leckie in the chair, and while the songwriting remained strong, it never quite hits the heights of 25 O'Clock.

Finally, Mary Margaret O'Hara's debut (and to date only) LP, Miss America, eventually emerged in 1988, after a five-year gestation, but that's a whole other story...

Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs - Flatt and Scruggs With The Foggy Mountain Boys (1960)

Listening to Flatt and Scruggs With The Foggy Mountain Boys, it strikes me that banjo players don't get the credit they deserve as the original 'shredders'.

Metal guitarists like Yngwie Malmsteen and Dave Mustaine drove the whole concept to absurdly overblown squealing extremes back in the 1980s but the bluegrass boys still got there first. And they were snappier dressers.

The lineage was acknowledged in the 1986 film Crossroads when Ralph Macchio went head to head with Steve Vai in a guitar battle inspired by Dueling Banjos (as played by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell on the Deliverance soundtrack and itself an interpretation of Arthur Smith's 1955 instrumental Feudin' Banjos).

Earl Scruggs couldn't belong to a more different era than 1980s metal but he still built his reputation on being the fastest picker in the business.

He first rose to promience when he left North Carolina to play for Bill Monroe's band back in December 1945, providing a key ingredient to the nascent bluegrass sound that Monroe built around fast-paced songs and instrumental virtuosity. Scruggs's three-finger style was fast, fluid and inventive, drawing inspiration from blues, jazz and country, and raised the benchmark for every banjo player in the game.

Having performed on bluegrass classics such as My Rose of Old Kentucky, Wicked Path of Sin, Blue Grass Breakdown and Blue Moon of Kentucky (covered by Elvis on the B-side of his debut single in 1954), in 1948 Scruggs decided to head out on his own in partnership with another of Monroe's sidemen, guitarist/singer Lester Flatt.

Backed up along the way by various Foggy Mountain Boys with such fine names as Jack Shook, Curly Seckler, Jody Rainwater, Chuddy Wise and Everett Lilly, they spent the next 21 years spreading the bluegrass gospel, becoming the first country act to have their own syndicated TV show after flour company Martha White Mills started sponsoring them in 1953.

They survived some thin times in the late 1950s when rock'n'roll was on the rise but kept enough of a loyal following to keep going, with the Flatt and Scruggs with the Foggy Mountain Boys album first released on Harmony in 1960 to pull together recordings dated between 1951 and 1957 that had previously been released on singles before the LP started to take off as a popular format.

Side one alternates between three swingin' instrumentals and two slower country tunes with Flatt singing. Opener Randy Lynn Rag is particularly good, playing off Scruggs' skills, including some great string bending, against Paul Warren's fiddle while Flatt is on fine sweet-voiced form with On My Mind and Before I Met You. Scruggs introduces an impish swagger to Foggy Mountain Special, which also gives Curly Seckler are rare chance to show off his mandolin skills.

Flatt and Scruggs continue to take turns in the limelight on side two, starting with the former's lovelorn lament on Turn Those Brown Eyes On Me.

The dextrous picking of Earl's Breakdown is followed by the oldest track on the album, a beautifully gentle cover of the Carter Family song Jimmie Brown, The Newsboy with Scruggs switching to acoustic guitar.

I Won't Be Hanging Round and Don't Let Your Deal Go Down take the pace back up to finish off the album on a high and it's over in just under half an hour.

Flatt and Scruggs were preaching to the converted at this point but all that changed in 1962 when they wrote The Ballad of Jed Clampett, theme tune to The Beverly Hillbillies TV show, on which they also appeared six times.

Six years later, Warren Beatty used their song Foggy Mountain Breakdown to soundtrack the chase scene in Bonnie and Clyde, opening them up to a whole new generation via the countercultural crowd.

Before long Bob Dylan came calling and Columbia pushed for the duo to record an album of his tunes. That proved a step too far for Flatt, who was in his mid-50s at this stage and 10 years old than Scruggs. The duo finally split in late 1969.

Scruggs took the opportunity to work with several of the new groups, many of which were exploring America's musical heritage in the wake of Dylan and The Band's new direction.

Check out this great footage of Scruggs getting it together with The Byrds in the country. He may still be dressed in a shirt and tie but the loud orange hue certainly seems to be a nod to the times.

It's interesting watching him join in on You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, slowing his playing down to half his normal speed - you can see why he had no fear about running with the new crowd.

Earl Scruggs is 86 now and still with us, even if those incredible picking fingers aren't quite as nimble as they once were. With a musical history that dates from the early days of bluegrass, through rock'n'roll, at least two folk revivals and the Sixties counterculture, here's a man with a few tales to tell.