TRYING TO TAKE THIS ALL IN

Trouser Press, April 1982
XTC
Blame the Weather/Tissue Tigers (The Arguers)



What better way to start 2012 than ecstatically...

This flexi is a plumb pretty piece of clear red plastic.

Both Blame the Weather and Tissue Tigers (The Arguers) saw the light of commercial day as B-sides of Senses Working Overtime. They are very strong tracks, and only when measured against something as transcendently great as their A-side do they sound like B-sides.

Back in the summer of '83, I took a job doing landscaping work. I was truly awful at it-- I had none of the practical sense to clean a yard efficiently, nor the strong back and clear lungs to do it for any meaningful stretch of time.

I drove my '73 Ford Maverick to the job each morning. The car didn't have a radio, so I'd sling my boombox across the back seat and let it suck down D batteries. I wore out a copy of XTC's Waxworks cassette that summer, many times reaching over the seat to hit auto-reverse so that I could hear Senses Working Overtime again.

The foreman kept me on the job for a month or so as a favor to my brother, but ultimately we all came to our senses and I moved on...