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Rossmore Road

Between his stint as XTC's keyboard player ('78-9) and co-founding Shriekback ('82), Barry Andrews released a solo EP ('Town and Country') and this 7" single ('Rossmore Road'): the latter in 1980; and then again in '81 with a different B-side ('Pages of my Love'). It's the B-side of the first version, however ('Win a Night Out with a Well-Known Paranoiac'), that led me to buy the record. I'd known and loved it from the mid '80s, having heard it a number of times on Anne Nightingale's request show on BBC Radio 1.

Where 'Rossmore Road' is a deadpan evocation, with a mellifluous chrous, of the titular London thoroughfare (in Lisson Grove, not far west of Regent's Park); 'Win a Night Out...' is an extravagant six-minute-plus fantasia with an agitated & appropriately paranoid-sounding narration alternating with the track's title repeated as a sung refrain. 

The rear of the picture sleeve lists eleven names of people (other than Andrews) presumably involved in making the tracks, without stating who did what: Robert Fripp's is the most famous among them. I'd never seen a physical copy of the single until last October, when I ordered the one I have now from an ebay seller. It cost me £7.99.

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