The Big Express by XTC

The Big Express, XTC's seventh studio album, pulled out of the Virgin depot on 15 October 1984, and it's a concept record about home: Swindon, the town that raised them, and the railway works at its heart. The title works both ways, as express train and as self-expression. Off the road since 1982, Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory co-produced with Crescent Studios owner David Lord on a budget north of £75,000, hired the Glitter Band's Pete Phipps to drum, and piled on the colours: LinnDrum, euphonium, an E-mu Emulator, lashings of Mellotron, backward echo and phasing.

Where Mummer had been hushed and pastoral, this one clanks and gleams, bright, fast and crammed with detail, the blueprint for the ornate records that followed. At the time hardly anyone noticed, some critics grumbled about overproduction, and it sold worse than Mummer, but later listeners have called it hugely influential.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.