BRRRAAANNNNGG!! – As brash, bright & vibrant as its Alan Aldridge influenced, pop art, outer cover art, Oranges & Lemons, XTC’s ninth studio album, issued in February 1989, arrived like a burst of audio summer at the end of winter. Eloquently answering the question: “How do you follow-up a classic album?” with the most obvious answer “with another great recording”, the album consolidated XTC’s position – especially in America – as one of the era’s finest recording outfits. Following the slow burn success of Skylarking, which by then had become the band’s biggest selling album to date, Virgin suggested the band should consider another American producer. XTC settled on session musician Paul Fox who was just establishing a name for himself as an up & coming producer – having remixed tracks for Yes & Culture Club. Recorded in Los Angeles over a lengthy period, the album allowed Andy Partridge & Colin Moulding to further hone a group of songs that had initially been worked on & rehearsed in the UK with Dave Gregory’s, rarely highlighted but often crucial, contributions to the arrangements apparent in the final mixes. Despite a Top 30 album placing on release in the UK & fine reviews, XTC’s brand of ‘grown-up’ pop music was out of synch when it came to singles releases. In a period more associated with hit singles derived from factory produced pop songs for TV soap opera stars, a song like “The Loving” (issued as the third single), sounded like Stravinsky by comparison, leaving XTC – at least in their home country – to the usual “why isn’t this band as big as …. [insert name of any then current multi-million sellers] from fans & critics. America, however, was a different story & Geffen Records – post Guns’n’Roses but pre-Nirvana, climbed aboard the Anglophile Express – pushing the album into the Top 50 & to Number 1 in the then, all-important, Billboard College Radio/Alternative Chart. In the absence of live shows, the band did extensive radio promotion tours, with accompanying acoustic performances, slightly pre-dating the fashion for “unplugged” shows, which helped to widen their audience. With an expanding audience in the USA & a steady following in Europe & Japan, for XTC the next breakthrough to an audience of millions must have seemed so close it could almost be touched. Steven Wilson’s new stereo & 5.1 mixes retain the vitality of the original & are, as always with his work, faithful to the spirit of the original mix, while adding a new layer of what can only be described as ‘warmth’ to the final sound. Some of the digital processing & reverbs used in the original mix were, perhaps, slightly harsh & of their time. What hasn’t changed or dated is the album itself – a wonderful collection of songs culminating in one of Andy Partridge’s finest “Chalkhills & Children”. As with previous releases in this series – “Nonsuch” & “Drums & Wires”, this expanded edition features a cornucopia of delights on the Blu-Ray – new instrumental mixes, demos, work tapes, rehearsals, radio IDs, videos, even a somewhat tongue in cheek introductory film for the US record company – all of which serve to tell the complete story of “Oranges & Lemons”.