Possibly one of the dumbest questions ever brought up by a rock journalist was, when sometime in the nineties a Japanese reporter asked XTC's Andy Partridge why they had named their band after a drug. XTC had actually been around since 1976 - long before 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine started killing off around 30 suckers yearly in the UK alone. Between that year and 05, just missing their thirtieth birthday, XTC produced a small number of reasonable hits, of which imho Making Plans for Nigel is their best, and then (in that order) Dear God, Senses Working Overtime, and The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead. But that's just my opinion. Oh well. Generals and Majors and The Mayor of Simpleton aren't bad either.
In 1988 the song Fisherman's Blues and the album with the same name kicked off the start of the second phase of Scottish-Irish-English band The Waterboys' long life, which was formed in 1983 around Mike Scott and continues to this day. Fisherman's Blues explored folk and country songs. Before that, The Waterboys produced a run of the mill rock sound which included a couple of good solid hits (A Girl called Johnny, The Whole of the Moon). After that, that is past 2000 - the band was actually on hiatus between 1996 and 2000 - came a mix of alternative rock and acoustic folk.
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