Knuckle Down: XTC’s Andy Partridge Turns 70
Jim Sullivan reflects on his years interviewing the English pop great
It’s fair to assume that some people hate their names.
But what about rock bands? I mean, your parents named you, but you named your own rock band. Right?
You can practically hear XTC’s Andy Partridge groan over the phone when I asked about how XTC came to be.
“I picked the name because I thought it was a pictogram for the group in 1975,” said singer-guitarist-songwriter Partridge. (We were speaking in 1992.) “It was short, sharp, shocking. It was immediate gratification and wonderfulness. The letters were the right shape, it leapt out in print.”
Alas, over time, Partridge says he realized that “we were stuck with one of those classic punny names that are great fun for a week and then you think, ‘Why did we choose that name?’ You sober up and go, ‘Oh no! We’re called that?'”
Nevertheless – name be damned! – XTC carved out a reputation as an eclectic, clever pop band that tossed a lot of spicy ingredients into its sonic stew. And at the time of our talk 31 years ago, the English band had the biggest U.S. hit of its career with Nonsuch, the country’s No. 1 college rock album.
“We do write catchy songs — that’s a disease with us,” said Partridge. “But I have no concept of why anything on this record should be more in the public eye than anything on the last one. It’s an enormous mystery to me. It keeps me wide-eyed, an ongoing naif. I’d kind of given up attempting to be popular a long time ago.”
AUDIO: XTC “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead”
The album features “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” a catchy tune about heroism and martyrdom and, like all XTC efforts, there were more than a few bits of pop brilliance on the disc. He appreciated the accolades, but none had gone to his head.
“I’m certainly out of my desire for fame, I’m rather out of the desire for fortune. I’ve realized that any fortune that might come my way will be like an accidental dollop of jam. I don’t know what compels me because I’ve lost the 13-year-old’s drive to be a Beatle-Monkee-Rolling Stone. Certainly, I’ve lost the hair that goes with the drive.
“All that kind of rock ‘n’ roll youth gang stuff has completely left me, and mix that with the other stuff that’s left and it leaves a strange, smoky ghost in my life. Where one time I knew what I was chasing, now I don’t, and the silly thing is I think the songs are actually getting better as the years go on.”
XTC’s ideas about making progressive pop music were not dissimilar from The Beatles of the late ’60s. “Our stuff comes out with the essence of Beatles in it,” said Partridge, “but people are always using that as a strange mixture of compliment and boxing-around-the-ears. We don’t steal, but that’s the language we can speak: some sort of Kinks-Beatles-Beach Boys-Captain Beefheart thing.”
So, would XTC — Partridge, bassist-singer-songwriter Colin Moulding and guitarist Dave Gregory — capitalize on this newfound success and take the show on the road?
Not a chance. XTC existed for nearly six years as a touring band, but the trio had been off the concert circuit for more than a decade when we spoke. Partridge suffered a mental breakdown during a 1982 tour and, although they did a few radio station promotional gigs in 1989, their performing days were over. They want to be known as studio craftsmen, two composers and an arranger.
“I feel no more like a rock ‘n’ roller than I do a brain surgeon,” said Partridge, who noted he’s approaching the “butt end” of his 30s. (And this, year, 2023, Partridge turns 70 on Nov. 11th.) “When we were playing live, I felt as if we were howling out in the wilderness and no one was particularly listening. You can stir into that discontent a big pinch of stage fright that got worse and worse. I think my subconscious was telling me, ‘Look, you don’t want to be doing this, so I’m going to make it difficult for you to do.’ Also, there’s the physicality of it. I’m not an athlete and I think you have to have an athlete’s temperament to tour well. And I don’t like reproducing old stuff over and over again for entertainment’s sake. I think that’s crass.”
“I see nothing wrong with just being a record-making group,” he continued. “I figure, you go into a store and buy a slice of our soul on disc. Why on earth would you want to see our carcass for any worship purposes or whatever?”
Partridge cites 1982’s English Settlement — the first album the group made after quitting the concert stage — as a creative turnabout for the band. He said the songs got better because the musicians didn’t have to consider how they could replicate them in concert. XTC’s policy pre-1982 was one Partridge referred to as a period of “misguided stupid honesty.” Now, he suggested that XTC makes “a better use of palette.” He wondered why more musicians don’t.
“I think that by restricting yourself, by aiming at some miniscule target, that doesn’t appeal to me,” Partridge says. “Playing one sort of music all your life would be like sitting down and eating blancmange every day. Awful.”
Skip ahead six years. XTC is down to a duo, Partridge and Moulding.
And there’s this: There is nothing like a disappearing act to foster a myth. Consider this, too: They went on what you might call a strike in 1992, following Nonsuch. Throughout the decade, they’d attempted to extricate themselves from what they saw as a draconian contract with Virgin. (They’re out of it — finally; XTC were to release an album of new material early in 1999, Apple Venus, on TVT.)
The early XTC had a string of hits in England and made a couple of dents in new wave America with “Life Begins at the Hop,” “Making Plans for Nigel” and the impossibly hooky “Senses Working Overtime.” By this point, the term “New Wave” was often spoken with disdain. Too many people think of silly costumes, garish videos, and diluted punk rock. The best of New Wave, however, took punk’s energy and lashed to it an inventive spirit — melodically, rhythmically, harmonically — that gave the music a complex resonance that went beyond punk’s heavy hammer.
This is where XTC lived during its 1977- 1982 heyday, and it’s where they live again on the four-CD set, Transistor Blast: The Best of the BBC Sessions, which, as billed, were songs culled from concerts and BBC radio sessions over the years. Over the course of its career, XTC made 14 studio albums. It should also be noted that in 1986, they created what I consider to be the best anti-religion song extant, “Dear God,” taking John Lennon’s “Imagine” a little further. In a close second place: Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumours.”
Though recorded live, these Transistor Blast takes are crisp, uncluttered, almost pristine — without being antiseptic. The discs are not peppered with pointless call-and-response queries from the band or riddled with gone-bonkers applause from the crowd. It’s all very well mannered. Wrote Partridge in the booklet that accompanies the CD package, of the first BBC concert disc: “The audience, being allowed to eavesdrop by a stern but kindly auntie, never seemed to be given permission to ‘get into it.'”
XTC took naturally its oddball status. The band was too pop for punk, too quirky for power pop; too giddy for post-punk, too sly for the New Romantic movement.
As such, none of what XTC, which then included guitarist Gregory and keyboardist Barry Andrews, has recorded here sounds dated or quaint or, God forbid, stereotypically new wave-y. XTC always went for the baroque, the detailed, in as much as did the Beatles ’round about Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper. XTC plied this trade before any psychedelic revival took hold. Add to this off-kilter framework a certain wry, arch, very English sensibility not unlike The Kinks’ Ray Davies. The result is a slew of multiply hooked, clever pop-rock songs made by guys who knew enough about the rule book to toss it away when called for.
Partridge has likened that early period to XTC being sorcerer’s apprentices, lucky enough to work in an alchemist’s kitchen. On the other end of that, we’re lucky to have these artifacts. No dust on ’em at all.
And in 1999, the beginning of the end … two releases, Apple Venus Vol. 1 and Apple Venus Vol. 2 came out and introduced XTC to a whole new audience.
Apple Venus Vol. 1 starts with the sound of dripping water, then a deep rumbling bass note is plucked. Strings enter, creating this crazy counterpoint. The journey is about to begin, but it could be anybody, the Verve, the Orb. Horns enter. Hmmm. The melody begins to take shape and a high-pitched voice enters. It is then that a feeling of warmth rushes in and washes over you and – nearly a quarter-century after this long trip started, many years since the last album of new material — we know:
We’re back in the Oz that is XTC. Everything might be a little off-center, but it all sounds very much all right.
“So you still think it’s got our fingerprints?” asks XTC Partridge, with a laugh when we caught up on the phone. “It’s true, however you arrange it, it’s still there. It’s still Jell-O, if it’s Jell-O you want.”
Which is not, necessarily, a bad thing.
“No, I don’t think so,” Partridge said “I mean my personality has changed a drop of sand a day and my art is going to come out a certain way.”
XTC always showed more melodic range, and more sense of irony, of storytelling, of quirkiness, than most of its peers. Apple Venus Vol. 1, XTC’s first album of new material since 1992, is an ambitious pop record — more acoustic than electric, with a pronounced orchestral flavoring. As the title suggests, it is one of two halves. The initial plan was to release a double CD, but more rational thinking kicked in.
“When, legally, we were allowed to make records again,” said Partridge, “I said to myself, ‘Well, why don’t we just take the best of all this stuff and make a genuine, bona fide two-disc set?’ As the music that was written across 1992 to 1994 came out acoustically or orchestrally, that would make a great disc 1. And then the music that came out from ’94 to ’96 — I’m being very broad here — was mostly noisy and electric, so that would make a good Vol. 2. They could reflect two sides from the same coin. But, naively, we didn’t really take into consideration the money it would cost to get these recorded well, the studio time it would take, and the fact that we picked a very good producer [Haydn Kendall] whose painstaking qualities are kind of tortoise-on-glue speed.”
The early XTC was a more raucous outfit than today’s unit. There was “a very charming naïve energy to it. They really don’t know what the hell they are doing, but they are doing their darnedest,” ventured Partridge, slipping into the third person.
“It is like naive painting — the perspective’s all wrong, color choices are maybe not great, but they are trying to finish off as nicely as they can. It’s charming, it’s folk art.”
As noted, XTC is down to a duo. Before Partridge and I spoke, I noted that Gregory recently let loose with an anti-Partridge screed in the English pop music magazine MOJO. Partridge says the interview reads as though Gregory is Islam and Partridge is “Salman Rushdie, the devil incarnate.”
And, oh yes, Partridge’s 14-year marriage fell apart. “The whole thing about finding myself out to be a cuckolded husband was extremely painful,” says Partridge. “But I seem to have predicted it all in [songs] and anyway, I did find myself thrown away. I said to myself, ‘OK, this is the most painful thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’m going to do two things: I’m going to cut out drinking or cut it right down because I don’t want to be over at the pub crying into my beer like a Country and Western casualty. I don’t want to be a country lyric. And the other thing was: I’m not going to write any divorce songs, because I don’t want to turn into Phil Collins. I didn’t want to write songs for swinging divorcees.
“So I carried on writing and oddly enough felt very inspired. I suppose the more hammer blows, the sharper the sword gets, and things built up. I was so built up, I was so angry and so upset, that I thought, if I don’t write this down in some way, in some form, I’m going to explode. It was written in ’93, in the depths of my despair. I gave myself the luxury of writing one divorce song.” That is “Dictionary,” a pointed and joyously profane number.
“It was like a therapeutic treatment,” Partridge continued. “I immediately felt better. And then I fell in love again and my life took a great big upswing.”
This, too, is reflected in the music. There’s both a sense of giddiness and maturity in today’s XTC – some bitterness, some spite, a lot of wonder. Rather than suggesting an old pop group’s calcification, the orchestration helps bring the songs alive, albeit in a gentle, pastoral fashion. XTC’s music recalls the more experimental sides of The Beatles and The Kinks.
Did Partridge consider it a mature record?
“I think so,” he said. “But ‘mature’ can have negative connotations, especially in the music business — ‘Well, they passed their finest point and they are still making records, isn’t it cute.’ It can have that kind of let’s-be-nice-to-them-they-are-old-now connotation. I have to say, though, that most records with a tag of mature tied to them are not good, they have a tiredness of life… Let’s reclaim ‘mature’ and say mature as in, confident, more relaxed with what you do, and getting better, like a piece of fine furniture or cheese.”
Coming as no surprise to any of its fans, XTC will not be touring. Partridge had a notable freakout on stage years ago, but says his stage avoidance these days is based on principle.
VIDEO: XTC “Dear God”
And here, Partridge makes a salient point, one I’ve always seen the logic of but one 99 percent of working musicians would disagree with.
“Music,” Partridge said, “seems to be the only art form where making your finished art product is not enough. You make an oil painting and love it or hate it, that’s the oil painting. You put your life and soul into making a record, which you are proud as punch of, and they say, ‘Yeah, but when are you going to tour?”’
When he was young, he says, it was “good fun, the sense of being in a gang with guitars instead of knives. We were young men drinking the world dry and going around the planet for the first time, and making a horrible sound, just being young and arrogant and stupid. And it was great fun. And then, after five years of it, you start to think, ‘I don’t really want to do this. I want to live in a house. I don’t want to live in a hotel. I don’t want to wake up every morning and see orange wallpaper and corporate art and have to ring down a receptionist and say, “Excuse me, where am I?”’
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