The announcement didn't come as a surprise: XTC had been touring relentlessly for the better part of four years, and its leader Andy Partridge had begun showing signs of a serious impending burnout. He might wake in a hotel room to find he had forgotten his name, or simply break into violent sobbing jags on the floor of the band's van. So his bandmates weren't surprised when, moments before going onstage in Los Angeles in 1982, Partridge told the rest of XTC--bassist Colin Moulding, guitarist Dave Gregory, and drummer Terry Chambers--that, effective immediately, he would never play live again. And, with the exception of a few isolated radio and television appearances, XTC have not performed in concert since.

However much the decision benefited Partridge's health, it did no good whatsoever for the band, which disappeared from the music industry's radar just as it had begun to enjoy real success. Many if not most of XTC's fans today had not heard of the band (some hadn't been born) when XTC folded its tent for the last time, and so Transistor Blast, a four-disk collection of tracks performed live for the BBC, is more than a concert souvenir for old fans to reminisce by. It's a portrait of a band that has changed almost beyond recognition from its wiry punk roots, a band that traded its naive, unbridled energy for increased songwriting craftsmanship and studio proficiency. All but nine of Transistor Blast's 51 tracks were recorded before Partridge pulled the band off the road, and they document an XTC that is long gone: a jobbing New Wave band that worked as hard, and played as well, as any band in England.

Transistor Blast's third and fourth disks, consisting of a composite of 1978/79 concerts and a complete performance from late 1980 respectively, are the real treat for those who missed XTC live. Disk 3 captures the band in its hyper infancy, ripping through a set drawn mostly from its debut album. Partridge's vocal style at this point consists of an emphatic bark and not much else, and he obviously has a ball here, deploying that bark to good effect in performances that often surpass their recorded originals, particularly the band's ballsy remake of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." Colin Moulding, having since evolved into The Quiet One of the group, here fronts a quartet of songs even jerkier and less meaningful than Partridge's; his "Crosswires" is a masterpiece of high-strung, arbitrary weirdness. And throughout the proceedings is Barry Andrews on keyboards, his piano and organ in the group but not of it, floating in a musical space all its own. Andrews didn't last long in XTC--Partridge's prolific output and domineering studio presence saw to that--but when he was there, he was impossible to miss: his playing was the most incongruous element in a band whose primary aim was to not fit in.

Disk 4 takes up the story in 1980. Andrews and his keyboards have moved on and in his place is Dave Gregory, a jack-of-all-trades guitarist who used to floor the young Partridge and Moulding with his note-perfect recitations of whatever happened to be in the charts or on the radio. Suddenly XTC sounded a lot more professional, and its songwriting grew as well, the naive attention-seeking of the early efforts now relaxing into a nuanced, arresting style that served the substance of each song without overwhelming it. The band on these tracks is loose and confident, and still capable of kicking up a ferocious noise, as the thrashing versions of "Generals and Majors" and "Respectable Street" attest. The elasticized, almost psychedelic arrangements of English Settlement are presaged here in the extended workout given "Scissor Man," while the infant XTC is revisited and dressed in big-boy's clothes in "This Is Pop" and "Are You Receiving Me?" Partridge acts as the confident master of ceremonies, Moulding and Gregory provide the meat of the sound while remaining discreetly in the background, and Terry Chambers presides over all, laying down one thundering metronomic beat after another.

Terry Chambers left XTC soon after Partridge's breakdown, and his departure, more even than XTC's ever-declining place in the market, had the most profound effect on the band's development. He played drums with a self-conscious, painstaking quality, as though drumming were difficult for him; you feel you could almost hear him counting each bar under his breath if you listened closely enough. Yet that unschooled approach, coupled with a tradesman's stamina (Chambers worked on building sites for pocket money between tours), led to one of the most distinctive drum sounds in all of rock: emphatic and unpretentious, a style that sweated so hard over every beat that some tracks don't even seem to have a distinct on-beat or off-beat, just a continuous roll of sound that propels the song perpetually forward; XTC could never slack off with Chambers in the drum seat. His departure was entirely fitting: XTC's new sedentary existence and Partridge's increasingly ambitious songwriting both made him obsolete. Had he remained, his technical limitations would certainly have hampered the band's development, but it's equally true that when he left, he took much of XTC?s charm with him.

This is most apparent after close listening to Transistor Blast's first two disks, consisting of songs recorded in the BBC's studios before and after Chambers' departure. The tracks recorded with him have all the energy and humor of their studio counterparts, sometimes more: the version of "Life Begins at the Hop" presented here could replace that on the Drums and Wires CD with nary a tear being shed. The remaining tracks, taken from The Big Express, Skylarking, and Oranges and Lemons, are by no means bad; in fact, "Scarecrow People" and "Poor Skeleton Steps Out?" have an uncluttered, relaxed feel that contrasts nicely with the more congested versions on Oranges and Lemons. Yet the tinny-sounding drum samples on these tracks (XTC never replaced Chambers, hiring session drummers for its albums) are often their most noticeable component, sabotaging what might otherwise have been good versions of "One of the Millions," "The Meeting Place," "Garden of Earthly Delights," and the Big Express material. Why Partridge felt such a strong need to approximate the official recorded versions of these songs, instead of simply busking them with acoustic guitars as most musicians would, is impossible to say. Given the time and budget that went into making these recordings, the effort was doomed to failure, and the results are strikingly reminiscent of XTC's oft-bootlegged home demos: interesting, remarkably full sketches of songs, but not performances to be savored for their own sake.

So Transistor Blast is fun and exciting and even significant, in a minor history-of-rock sort of way. It elevates Terry Chambers to his proper place in the pantheon of rock drummers, unwittingly showing what his departure took away from XTC. It also shows that many of the excuses Partridge has offered for staying off the road--XTC's gigs never sounded that good, the material was too complex to play properly, etc. etc.--are bollocks. The biggest excuse of all, his mental state, is no longer at issue: he doesn't tour anymore because, as a middle-aged father of two, he feels he has more constructive ways to spend his time and earn his living. So one wonders if there's yet another purpose behind releasing Transistor Blast now, when XTC are about to end a seven-year silence with the first of two albums of new material, scheduled for release in February of 1999. If the demos are any indication, these new songs represent the most sophisticated and ambitious work XTC has ever done, work that really would be too difficult to reproduce on stage. Is Partridge symbolically saying goodbye to his younger self, a self he's reminded of every time a critic or fan asks him if he'll ever return to the road? Does he hope that Transistor Blast and the upcoming Apple Venus Volume I will finally put an end to those questions? Whether he does or not, people will undoubtedly continue to pester him on the subject for as long as XTC remains together. As one of many fans who came to the band too late to see them live, I too hope Partridge will one day change his mind and climb on stage again. But it probably won't happen, and maybe that's OK. The band that recorded most of Transistor Blast doesn't exist anymore (Dave Gregory has also recently left XTC, leaving just Partridge and Moulding), and the band that took its place--the band that recorded Mummer, The Big Express, Skylarking, Oranges and Lemons, Nonsuch, and Apple Venus--cares too much for its material to risk spoiling it in a club or an amphitheater. And I would too.