Chips from the Chocolate Fireball

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Chips from the Chocolate Fireball by the Dukes of Stratosphear--vocalist Sir John Johns, bassist The Red Curtain, guitarist Lord Cornelius Plum and drummer EIEI Owen--was a cunning ruse, an academically brilliant pastiche executed by Swindon's XTC in the mid-1980s. In terms of humour and artistry, the 16 tracks included here outwit The Rutles by some distance. The attention to detail is astonishingly refined: Yep, there's mellotrons, garage-band guitars, gongs, bongos, phased vocals, tapes going backwards, sitars, snippets of pot-headed fairytale poetry and a fair amount of cheekily crafted impersonation--Lennon's "I'm Only Sleeping" on "Collideascope", Younger Than Yesterday-era Byrds on "You're My Drug", the brilliant Syd Barrett-eque "Bike Ride To The Moon (with Andy Partridge's affected Cambridge accent) and a host of other ideas cribbed from the likes of the Electric Prunes, the Idle Race, Tomorrow, the Move, Smile-era Beach Boys, the Hollies and--most of all--the Beatles. Chips From The Chocolate Fireball is possibly the most admirable instance of fraudulence in the history of pop. --Kevin Maidment