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...