Andy Partridge releasing new EP, reissuing XTC’s “Mummer” with original sleeve art

Andy Partridge’s Ape House record label is prepping both a new four-song EP from the XTC founder — the second in his My Failed Songwriting Career series — as well as a heavyweight vinyl reissue of that band’s 1983 album Mummer with its original artwork restored.

First up is My Failed Songwriting Career: Volume 2, which features four songs — “Seesaw,” “Let’s Make Everything Love,” “Come On Back” and “Love Is The Future” — and will be released on CD and vinyl on April 8. Like last year’s Volume 1, the new EP is a collection of songs Partridge wrote for other artists in the wake of XTC’s dissolution following the Apple Venus albums more than 20 years ago.

The product description on the Ape House site:

My Failed Songwriting Career: Volume 2 presents four more gems resulting from Andy Partridge’s post-XTC period as a songwriter for hire writing for other artists. Containing songs of love, longing and partnership, the songs have now been reclaimed and fine-tuned to a Partridge sensibility. As such, it’s unlikely they sound similar to any interpretation or arrangement that other singers would have used. So, for now at least, here are four definitive, composer-authorized recordings. Who knows, perhaps with greater availability, other artists may wish to record one or more of these, (or songs from the first or future planned volumes). Good songs welcome many interpretations.

The new EPs follow Partridge’s release in 2020 of a free digital demo of a song called “Cavegirl” that he’d intended for an “aborted bubblegum sampler album” called 12 The Flavors of Hercules that was to have been a best-of compiling tracks from “the mythical American bubblegum label Hercules.”

These releases are part of a slow trickle of new music from Partridge in recent years, including the EP he recorded with Robyn Hitchcock and a pair of covers he released on a 10-inch EP.

And on the XTC front, Ape House on May 6 will reissue the band’s long-out-of-print sixth album Mummer on 200-gram vinyl, newly remastered by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering with input from Partridge. The album will feature its “original, but never used, sleeve art,” according to the label.

The album featured the single “Love On a Farmboy’s Wages” and, as Ape House notes, it “represented another turning point for XTC as it marked the first release as a studio-only band.”

Both My Failed Songwriting Career: Volume 2 and the Mummer reissue can be pre-ordered from Ape House.

Here’s the restored cover art for the new Mummer reissue:

PREVIOUSLY ON SLICING UP EYEBALLS

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• Robyn Hitchcock and XTC’s Andy Partridge to release EP that’s 13 years in the making
• Andy Partridge is tired of being woken up by ‘wankers’ singing ‘Making Plans for Nigel’
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