4 ARTS r. SJ Y. R ( f. c The Michigan Daily Friday, November 2, 1984 Page b Oak !1 Give no By Pete Williams I'll bury Paul. P 1DITURE THIS: You sit down with a once-famous British musician for two hours while he tells you in depth how lucky he is, has absolutely talented he is, and how simply terrible all this money can be. "Oh horrors," you say as you look at your watch for the fourth time that minute, "I just remembered that I have to get my cat spade this evening." That's the idea behind Paul McCar- tney's newest self-serving presentation, Give My Regards to Broad Street-the 35 mm slide show of Paul's (gasp) pain- fully successful pop/rock star lifestyle. There is a plot to this fiasco which peeks up out of the MTV production on occasion. And since no one, not even the most devout McCartney fan, not even a curious Beatles admirer, not even Lin- da McCartney (who does a brilliant job with both of her lines) should go within a mile of any theater while the film is playing, I don't feel at all out of line by explaining the plot. Lets just see how detailed I can do so. Some hard-luck criminal type that Paul believes in loses the master tapes of Paul's most recent session. Paul fin- ds him and everything is hunkey-dorey. Sure you may have to see the last ten minutes of the film once to pick up on ..t *0@ I regard all the delicate details and intriguing situations surrounding the plot, but why bother. But every movie has its strong points, I used to think, and Broad Street is not much of an exception. McCartney's music is fun enough, if you're not in the mood to see a movie. He plays a couple of new tunes presumably to prove that he's not over the hill just yet, and quite a few of his dated hits. All of this is quite necessary to pull in the Beatles fans, with Wingites, et. al., and I suppose that this was the reason for playing a sappy studio-version of the one McCartney hit that is well known even in the drawing room of the John Birch Society, "Yesterday." Oh, how the teen crowd (born during Paul's third midlife crisis) sighed over that one. This crowd, I believe, was the only cluster of enthusiasts in the theater. By the way, I think the word is getting around, the audience filled about one- fifth of the available seating. It really is nice to think that Paul can't pull the wool over everyone's eyes long enough to get them to shell out top film dollar for a ticket into his professional lifestyle. But what a professionally good time this guy has, (so says the film) driving around in his fire-breathing circa 1950's mod machine for most of the movie. The London licence plate reads something like "Paul I," which is as boring as the man and his creation. C'mon Paul, we long for the days of plates such as "281F. So that's it. Paul's still dead! Now it all makes sense. A group' of cut-rate filmmakers and songwriters, com- missioned by the infamous "powers that be;' sat down and figured out how to ressurect the corpse for profit once more. The plate should have read, "421F". Remember, you heard it here first. to 'Bored Street' .4. , a' COUPON ___ THIS ENTIRE AD GOOD FOR TWO $3.00 TICKETS 0 AN EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT 0 WHEN THERE'S NO ONE ELSE ... . ERICAN CHOOSE ME : DREAMER JOBETH $ , WILLIAMS , TOM CONTI 3 JPG . FRI 1:00, 7:00 9:00, 11 PM FRI. 1:00, 7:20 9:30, 11:30 P M" SAT. 1:00, 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, 9:00, 11 P.M. SAT. 12:50, 3:00, 5:10, 7:20, 9:30, 11:30 P.M. SUN. 1:00, 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, 9:00 SUN. 12:50, 3:00, 5:10, 7:20 9:30 . e"eoee..@@@*@.@..........." 00 00"..00000ii""" 4 Paul McCartney belts out another one in his latest attempt to blow his own horn, 'Give My Regards to Broad Street.' ' Records T HAT XTC was/probably still is one of the truly great early wave bands has never been in question among those with a sense of humor and a brain in their heads. Their decline has been fair:; steady if gracefully since the classic '78 White Music; through the almost equally minimalist-eccentric Go 2, then the more accessible pop riddlings of Drums and Wires and Black Sea, XTC were almost periously funny and smart, a shade too sharp-edged as wave popsters to capture the B-52's et. al. audience they deserved. With '82's English Settlement, they left longtime producer Steve Lillywhite arty X for hitmaker Hugh Synchronicity Padham, resulting in a sprawling, less focused (in the U.K. it was padded out to a double album) but still appealing record of basically excellent if drawn- out songs, with two-"Senses Working Overtime" and "Ball and Chain"-that were very near-hits in the U.S. Still, there was a sense of unease and potential loss of personality in English Settlement's cluttered, more commer- cial production, and last year's Mum- mer was fragmented enough to hint that the end might be near. Lurching in every direction from Middle Eastern music (Beating of Hearts ) to acoustic folk balladry ("Love on a farmboy's Wages") to Biblical psychedelia FIVE HOURS OF SIZZLING ADULT FILMS FRI. & SAT. - STARTS AT MIDNIGHT ... - BOX OFFICE OPEN TILL 2:00 A.M. - FREEI TWO FOR ONE PASS TO ALL WHO LAS UNTIL THE END 1. "Blue Ribbon Blue" 2. "Women at Play" 3. "Working It Out" 4. "Summer of '72" THIS WEEK-END ONLY ... COME ON DOWN AND SPEND THE NIGHT ... FRI. 2.50 - SAT. 3.00 ("Deliver Us From the Elements"), it was a sort of half-misbegotten Sgt. Pepper, as fascinating as it was uneven and for-fans-only. One detected the rumbling sound of a band falling apart. Andy Partridge's closing "Funk Pop a Roll" counterpointed the LP's only old- XTC dance happiness with some of the bitterest ruminations on the pop biz ever sneaked onto a platter: Funk pop a roll the only goal/The music business is a hammer to keep you pegs in your holes/But please don't listen to me/I've already been poisoned by this industry. Given that sourness, and the fact that a nervous condition apparently preven- ts lead singer/guitarist Partridge from further live dates, seemed to make it probably that XTC would retire to a farm in the Cotswolds, happy in isolation while we sadly kept spinning their previous six albums. So it's a big shock-a comeback of sorts, even if they never really went away in the first place-that the new Big Express album is not just a sur- prising sign of life but easily the best XTC since Black Sea. Completely in- vigorating pop music, The Big Express has none of Murmer's introspective feel; it sounds like a real band's work, not a disunified collection of studio noodlings. There are still notes of disillusionment in the delightful "I Bought Myself a Liarbird" and the grunt-and-thunder closer, "Train Run- ning Low on Soul Coal," which pushes "Funk Pop a Roll's" frustation close to midlife breadkdown: Think I'm going south for the winter/Think I'm going mad in this hinterland/Between young and old/I'm a thirty year old puppy doing what I'm told/And I'm told there's no more coal for the older engines... But the music is anything but depressive. Produced by David Lord and the band, The Big Express is bright, clever, full of invention that never tumbles into gimmickry: the kazoo chorus on "The Everyday Story of Smalltown," trademark XTC whistling on the swinging sea-chantey "All You Pretty Girls," the Police-type rhythms of the gently anti-nuke "This World Over" (a rather pleasant turn towars solf-pedalling after the striden cy of some of Partridge's previous political rants). Andy Partridge, always king of vocal cartoonery, finds plenty of fun noises to work into the fabric of by far the best set of songs he's written in a long time. There are woR derful tunes just about everywhere you turn, like the heavily syncopated "Shake You Donkey Up" or "Reign of Blows (Vote No Violence)," which couches its politics in a crashingly dan- ceable big-beat setting with a har- monica more funky-garage than the Beatles could have ever thought polite enough to unleash. A mild disappointment is the fact that Colin Moulding, who has always writteji a minority of XTC songs, but many of the best ("Crossed Wires," "Making Plans for Nigel," "Generals anti Majors," "English Roundabout") all the same, only has two songs here. Still, they're both among the album's best. "Wake Up," which opens the album, is, in typical XTC fashion, jaunty guitar- driven pop, so jaunty you probably wouldn't notice how caustic the lyrics are if a song sheet wasn't helpfully provided. Possibly the most charming song on the record is Moulding's "I Remember the Sun," a further exten- sion of the British Empire of whimsy of Murmer's "In Loving Memory of a Name" (which was an unabashed ode to Brit war heroes). This time it's a sweetly tear-stained hommage to boar- ding school days - Another Country without the dark side. This sort of sen- timent may sound a fright, but the piano-guided song is so genuinely cheerful melodically that you can't smirk. The Big Express doesn't fit easily in- to any currently fashionable musical genre-it's not really "new music" even, for the simple reasons that XTC has been around since the dawn of "new music," and they're not really doing anything they hadn't mapped out before. Still, XTC is hardly about to create that genre we all dread: dinosaur new wave. The Big Express may have arrived a bit late to capture XTC's big commercial moment, but it's terrific fun. -Dennis Harvey 'SH IRT 'PBINTINc Ann Arbor's fastest! From 10-800 T-shirts screenprint- ed within 24 hours of order. Multi-color printing our specialty. Vni in..eanaI~ rtnr a nii n, r CO MEDYAnn Arbor's own Comedy Theater COMPANYTroupe I Live .. ... .. .. ..... .. ....-.... ................................... ................................... ................................... I ORIGINAL MOVIE POSTERS - LOBBY CARDS - STILLS I I The . Di..Cub i pip.m- ,cahq ft , ludef, f..haly. Affil