The Beat Patrol

This XTC article by Harry George comes from the October 1983 issue of Trouser Press (right before the pioneering New Wave magazine became defunct)… 

Stalking the Rare Partridge; or Where’s XTC?

Nineteen eighty-two was a watershed year for XTC. Their fifth album, English Settlement, showed expanded studio range, featuring alto sax, fretless bass, and l2-string guitar, but sacrificed a lot of attack in the process. The band’s decision to abandon live performance (after a US tour was cancelled due to singer/guitarist Andy Partridge’s collapse at the first gig) thus seemed doubly ominous. Bassist Colin Moulding’s slow-talking fatalism in an interview last fall hardened the conviction that an artistic cul-de-sac lay ahead.

Far from it. A cassette of XTC’s projected next album, Mummer, was a firm favorite of mine for weeks before my meeting with Partridge in his native Swindon. The zest and invention of English pastoral classics like the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake and the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society typifies the 10 songs: Partridge has finally equalled his heroes on their own ground. Yet he seems doubtful the public will hear the LP in its original form.

“There’s so many things against it even being released,” Partridge says. Sitting at home, the relaxed, friendly musician seems poles apart from the exhausted figure who found touring incompatible with his health. The only thing now clouding his countenance is the hint of a goatee.

“We didn’t get on well with the producer [Steve Nye] and went on to another [Bob Sargeant]. Virgin [XTC's British label] said, ‘There’s no singles on it, go away and write some more,’ so I came up with ‘Great Fire.’ They put it out and the BBC ignored it; consequently it never sold a light and Virgin got very pessimistic about the chances of the whole album.”

This despite English Settlement being the most successful (in the UK) XTC album to date, while continuing the group’s in-and-out singles chart career.

“Things that we think will sell are totally ignored. Yet ‘Senses Working Overtime,’ which is like a piece of Russian film music in the verses with a Flamin’ Groovies chorus, became a hit. I suppose it’s a lesson to Virgin to take chances: The safe ones they put out never sell. ‘Ball and Chain’ did nothing.”

Partridge is far from offended at hearing his new album described as “pastoral.”

“I take that as a compliment,” he insists. “When you live in this area the real world happens to be 60 or 70 percent pastoral; you can’t go anywhere two miles in Swindon without hitting downs or sheep. ‘Pastoral’ to me means being more in touch with the country than the city, which I think we are. London gives me the willies.

“The only criticism I can see looming is from all those people who liked our quasi-political songs [on English Settlement]. This album is a lot more unprincipled.”

Certainly, Mummer could not be accused of willful escapism — even if “Love on a Farm Boy’s Wages” and “In Loving Memory of a Name” evoke a tranquility and stability familiar to few of us. “Ladybird” is as dreamy as Pink Floyd’s More or “Grantchester Meadows,” but XTC’s sound is tough enough elsewhere. “Beating of Hearts” opens the album with an insistent drum riff; “Human Alchemy” is ominous and brooding; “Funk Pop a Roll” (“eats up my soul”) is Partridge’s blast at the hollow music pouring from his radio.

XTC’s problems are compounded by Virgin’s dislike of the proposed Mummer sleeve. Mummers represent an old English tradition of dumb show, performed in disguise and usually at Christmastime. In approximation of this the nixed cover photo shows Partridge, Moulding and guitarist Dave Gregory clad in shredded newspaper.

“A lot of mummers wear suits of newspaper and have done so since early Victorian times. I thought it would be really interesting to be disguised in an information process for a once-yearly ceremony — which making an LP usually is. But Virgin said, ‘People won’t understand what mummers are, they won’t know why you’re dressed in newspapers.’ I’m thinking of changing it to three newspaper men, like the ones children make by tearing paper. That’s an image a lot of people know immediately as a childish/primitive device.”

Virgin’s attitude has come a long way from the days of Go 2, XTC’s second album, with a conceptual all-type cover.

“The general feeling at that time was one of experimentation — anything new was worth trying. But since we haven’t risen to Culture Club heights. . . I’m told they really like us but don’t know how to sell us. We’re not the archetypal group; I was in that mold at one time but quickly fell out of it.”

Indeed, XTC is less salable than ever, now that the band has given up touring. Did Partridge have any warning of what seems to have been a nervous illness? “A phobia about being in front of people,” he laughs. “Yeah, it was building for years — being locked away in hotel rooms seeing nobody, then all of a sudden seeing five or ten thousand people. I wasn’t eating very well, eating the wrong things and so I associated being on the road with being ill.”

Dietary problems played their part in his first collapse, in Paris. “I hadn’t eaten for three days, and my not wanting to go in front of the public was getting worse and worse. I ran out on stage and after the first few chords of the first song I just collapsed. We cancelled the English tour. I went to see psychiatrists, doctors — a hypnotist, even — and went to America thinking I might be cured.

“The first gig was as if I’d never played the guitar before. The next night I said, ‘Look, I think I’m going crazy, let’s call a halt.’ I considered myself to have had a nervous breakdown, the second one I’d had through touring. I had a really bad experience in 1979 in which I just forgot who I was, what I was doing and started wandering off aimlessly.”

Partridge’s bandmates were supportive of the frazzled frontman — with the exception of drummer Terry Chambers.

“Terry had no time for anyone, whether it was somebody who’d cut their thumb or somebody who’d had their leg wrenched off in an industrial accident. He would just say, ‘Don’t be a baby.’ After the cancelled show in Los Angeles he flew straight to Australia to be with his girlfriend, who had become pregnant. It’s like Dallas, really!

“We came back to England. I went for more treatments and realized I really enjoyed being at home, writing at home and working in the studio. During my convalescence I wrote lots of songs. We phoned Terry or wrote him letters continuously, saying, ‘Are you coming back?’ He said, ‘Sure, sure’ and delayed it for months and months.

“He came back eventually and just seemed to have lost heart in his drumming. We rehearsed for four or five weeks. Two weeks before making this album he just put his drumsticks down and said, ‘Look, I’m not really a very good drummer, I’m just faking this. I should be taking my wife back to Australia and I’m sick of struggling. We’re never gonna make it, your writing’s got weirder and weirder.’

“He had this huge explosion of downism, said bye-bye and walked out. We tried to talk him out of it, but he’d made up his mind months before and only came back to appease us.”

At least Chambers’s two appearances on Mummer (“Beating of Hearts” and “Wonderland”) show no fall-off in his playing. Pete Phipps, once of the Glitter Band, does an admirable job on the rest. Partridge, though, says Phipps is not to be considered XTC’s newest member.

“We were rather confused about whether we should accept him into the band. We didn’t, purely because since we’ve decided not to tour there’d be a lot for him not to do. Also, he’s not a local lad. There’s lots of local, interpersonal language that means nothing to anybody outside the band and is very difficult to bring people into.”

Personnel turnover wasn’t XTC’s only problem in recording Mummer. The band found producer Steve Nye excessively thorough.

“He was extremely slow and painstaking,” Partridge says, “and it tended to kill the spontaneity. We might get to the studio and say, ‘Hey, let’s use some platypus ducks on this.’ Steve would go, ‘Now hold on, where are we gonna get them from and what size are they gonna be?’ Silly example, but you know what I mean.”

Moulding, however, had said that he and Partridge (XTC’s two songwriters) make demos of their songs, which the group follows pretty closely.

“Not totally true,” Partridge states. “We give a general atmospheric description and ask if the others can contribute something — even changing the chord structure or suggesting word changes. We don’t pander to each others egos, we pander to the good of the song. We’re not technically outstanding musicians so we try to find the magic in a song and play that.”

Fortunately for Partridge, Moulding shares his views about touring. But what about guitarist Gregory?

“I think Dave misses it for two reasons. He’s an absolute tourist at heart, always has his cameras and notebook handy. Also, he’s in the R&B guitarist tradition: get up, plug in your guitar, stamp your foot and go.”

XTC isn’t the sort of band to get up and play in local pubs. Partridge says what killed that spirit was the experience of playing “huge ice hockey stadiums”:

“Once you’ve done that, it’s very difficult to go backwards. You have lots of stupid things nagging at you, like wondering whether your equipment might break down and where would you get spares, or possibly getting frustrated because the people around you are having a good time more than they are playing the songs.”

His objections to arena-rock reveal the aversions that contributed to his breakdown.

“You do a little improvisation which is subconscious at one gig, then you catch yourself doing it again and again. You get to the point when you think to yourself, ‘When I hit this chord I’m gonna leap on one foot, go to one side and look over to the left. Here I am, yes, I’m doing the action, I knew I would.’ You become detached from yourself.”

Is there any way of making touring more civilized?

A great carrot to carry the touring cart would be the reward of huge commercial success. Seeing as we’ve had no financial reward from it and our success is very ‘underground’ (an old-fashioned word that works very well), it was difficult to keep the momentum of this donkey cart going.

“Discerning buyers all around the globe write us incredible letters. They say we’re the first band they’ve liked since the Beatles split up. It’s quite alarming. We get most of our mail from the States — about 95 percent.”

Perhaps it’s XTC’s flair for colorful in instrumentation that encourages comparison to Partridge’s ’60s idols. “Great Fire” includes cellos and violas, “Gold” has trombones. He holds out for the real thing over synthesized sounds. “It doesn’t sound warm enough if you simulate them.”

Even more fab is a new song, “Seagulls Screaming (Kiss Her Kiss Her),” recorded solo at home using Mellotron and drum machine: the result is a magical mystery tour down Blue Jay Way, right down to the disembodied vocal.

Partridge is beginning to sympathize with Van Morrison’s preference for a small, faithful cult over a fickle mass following.

“That’s where our arrows are falling. But there aren’t many bands who’ve decided not to tour, to do this cottage industry thing, and have a history to learn from. Most bands who gave up touring when it was fashionable in the ’60s self-destructed, but the climate is different now. So is the technology: You can do so much more in the studio. That inventiveness lies in imposing a primitivism on yourself.”

Despite the punk notion that gigs are what it’s all about, pop music has an equally valid tradition of great records which are explicitly impossible to reproduce live. Partridge clearly relates to the Phil Spector aesthetic of studio perfection rather than the hurlyburly world of music promotion.

“I think I see XTC now as the kind of people who would have written music in the 18th century. You weren’t under the magnifying glass; you never went on TV or radio; your music was heard through orchestras playing it in concert, or through people buying sheet music. I’d love not to have to make videos, but to follow the pure way of putting our music down — that is, making records rather than writing out scores for an orchestra.”

He quite enjoys gigs, as long as they’re not his, but has no illusions about the level at which they communicate.

“A gig is mostly a social thing. The best gigs have a communal feeling, like a football crowd, everyone locked into this big vibe. Probably the best gigs around are Rod Stewart’s, where all the moms are locked into this sex groove, or the Grateful Dead’s, where everyone lives out a fantasy of being a down-home, shit-kicking Dead roadie. Whenever we played, I always wanted to be in the audience.”

Far from the world’s hockey stadiums, Andy Partridge has not been idle. He’s produced Peter Blegvad, of Slapp Happy fame, for Virgin. Partridge also played with Blegvad (“a cross between John Denver and Laurie Anderson”), as did Moulding and ex-Feelies drummer Anton Fier. He’s further keeping a producer’s eye on the Cocteau Twins.

Then there’s his soundtrack music for the film Liquidream by Mike Portelly, still unfinished. “He’s an excellent underwater photographer and has done several fashion spreads where the models stand on the sea bed and hold their breath. It’s a modern-day mermaid story; the music probably sounds like some XTC B-sides in the ‘Homo Safari’ series. Somebody told me the other day that we skipped number four in the series; it wasn’t intentional.”

The “Homo Safari” series of mock-ethnic recordings is one example of the artistic freedom XTC apparently enjoys at Virgin. Partridge has also dabbled in dub remixes, among them a solo album, Take Away / The Lure of Salvage.

“We got the leeway only because we paid for it. Take Away was great fun; I’ve gone on to use those lessons in our music.”

Unlike most dub reggae, Partridge’s remixes leave the original tunes virtually unidentifiable.

“It’s like you’ve driven this car around and you’re fed up with its shape. You say OK, I’m gonna get a welding torch, hammer and saw, chop the car up and make something else out of it. I did Take Away totally royalty-free at a cost of £ 2,000 [pounds Sterling], which is nothing, and said, ‘Don’t charge a lot of money for it, ’cause I don’t like expensive music.’ In Japan it was hailed as a work of electronic genius and outsold all the XTC albums. They had to press it up again with liner notes in Japanese.

“Someone did a ballet to Go Plus [a 1978 dub EP included with some pressings of Go 2] in New York when it came out, I discovered a year later.”

Although convinced XTC is omitted from every rock reference book — “They go ‘X, X-Ray Spex, Yes, Neil Young!”‘ — Partridge takes consolation in a select crop of cover versions.

“An all-girl South African group did ‘Complicated Game.’ A Bavarian oompah band did ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ as ‘Making Plans for Otto’ (in German). Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin have done ‘Roads Girdle the Globe’; it’s slick, with a terrific Todd Rundgren board solo.”

XTC’s sophisticated, ironic music doesn’t exactly lend itself to the Hit Parade. David Bowie may be able to resort to the contrived moon-Junery on “Let’s Dance,” but one can’t imagine Partridge writing a modern equivalent of “Twisting the Night Away.”

“We’d feel bad about being that obvious. It would be acting as if I had less intelligence than I really have.”

XTC’s refusal to take the calculated path puts the future of Mummer in doubt. If “Wonderland,” the next single, isn’t a hit, Partridge doubts the album will come out. One hopes the band’s modus operandi finds favor with record company and fans sooner than later.

For the moment, cups of tea, model airplanes and a dog named Charlie Parker are having the best effect on Partridge’s work. May he never become Swindon’s answer to Brian Wilson, Phil Spector and John Fogerty, an isolated talent eroded by self-doubt.

Harry George

Andy Partridge’s side project with former XTC bandmate Barry Andrews. This album shows off their experimental side and is definitely an interesting experiment.
This review comes from Roque Strew, from Pitchfork - May 8, 2007… 

Before Andy Partridge locked down his place in the new-wave pantheon as the brain and public face of XTC, he had two loves. One was a famous affair with slightly-off pop and the other was a secret crush on free jazz. Fans may have seen the signs in 1994’s Through the Hill, his record with ambient composer Harold Budd. Partridge finally fully liberates his love for Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler on Monstrance, reuniting with keyboardist Barry Andrews (who left XTC in 1979, later starting Shriekback) and recruiting Martyn Barker (drummer in Andrews’ band). Together they abandon the domain of shimmery pop with a twist for a moody, dissonant netherworld.
It bears repeating: Don’t expect to encounter XTC here. And good luck finding Shriekback. But if you take Monstrance on its own terms — bringing a yen for improvisational, instrumental music — you might feel the strange thrill of eavesdropping on a freewheeling, nonsensical conversation. Culled from roughly eight hours of recordings, we still get to hear the awkward lulls, the autistic blurts, the little foils that often enrich the surrounding noise. Lightly edited and proudly free of overdubbing, Monstrance allows concepts to roam, phrases to drift.
The record’s long prelude, “I Lovely Cosmonaut” unfolds in slow motion, as a rhythm of silences accrues in the potholes, everyone swerving around it, stubbornly, until a fuller rhythm crystallizes. “Winterwerk” is not as coy. On the contrary, Barker turns it into twirling, tropical carnival. Nevertheless, the longer tracks are the richest here. Coming in at 16 minutes, “Priapple” is arguably the centerpiece of the album. Partridge heroically sticks to a pair of fuzzy chords, as Andrews mounts a relentless and chaotic siege, while Barker answers with erratic percussion.
Every song– and not always for the better — seems to be at war with itself. “Chaingang” milks a sense of unease out of two rhythms, Partridge’s ragged Beefheart riffs in 7/4 and Barker in 4/4, that fleetingly lock into place. These blink-and-you’ll-miss-it resolutions, each one a tiny solar eclipse, give the song its thrilling air of flux and incompleteness. During the whole drama, Andrews remains the outsider looking in. He works this same routine in the first half of “Torturetainmen,” while he drills holes — it literally sounds like heavy machinery — into the oddball groove Partridge and Barker crafted together.
Calling this “unlistenable noise” is baffling. This record falls closer to the viscous, chaotic beauty of Swans than the poisonous crunch of Metal Machine Music. All the stretches of darkness have real depth, while at its calmer and more intimate moments, Monstrance evokes the stoic, spacey impressionism of ECM chamber jazz. 

Roque Strew 

Written by Michael Azerrad for Rolling Stone (issue #548), March 23, 1989…

More than a decade ago, XTC was very much the challenging British New Wave band, making hyperactive, abrasive music – the group’s 1978 debut LP was called, appropriately enough, White Music. On ingenious middle-period albums like Black Sea (1980) and English Settlement (1982), XTC metamorphosed into the quintessential quirky pop group, all the while fleshing out its sound as the group delved further and further into the possibilities of the recording studio – XTC’s only forum since the band stopped touring in 1982. XTC’s endlessly clever records and tight, self-contained singles won a following of fans and critics whose fanaticism almost made up for the band’s lackluster sales figures.

On Skylarking (1986), Andy Partridge, the band’s main lead singer and writer, let a more melodious streak – as well as a dash of sentimentality – come to the fore, which broadened XTC’s audience. In the process, the band has accomplished the remarkable feat of pulling the kinks out of its music without sacrificing its peerless originality. The band members have become the deans of a group of artists who make what can only be described as unpopular pop music, placing a high premium on melody and solid if idiosyncratic songcraft. Throughout their long career, the members of XTC have made consistently excellent music, and Oranges and Lemons, happily, finds them at the height of their considerable powers.

Ambitious, and ultimately delightful, Oranges and Lemons is XTC’s ninth album (tenth, if you count Psonic Psunspot, an affectionate psychedelic sendup the band recorded two years ago as the Dukes of Stratosphear, who also have an EP to their name). It’s difficult to determine whether the beauty of this album stems from the exquisite construction of the songs, the indelible melodies or the relentlessly benevolent mood of the lyrics.

Oranges and Lemons is preoccupied with the joys and tribulations of fatherhood and the state of the world today’s children are entering – Partridge is the father of two young children, ages three and one. When someone sings, “I love you,” on this album, it’s as likely to be directed at offspring as at a lover: “Garden of Earthly Delights,” “Mayor of Simpleton,” “Hold Me My Daddy,” “Pink Thing” and “Chalkhills and Children” all hinge on parent-child relationships. But the music is far from treacly as it wanders through Peter Max rock (“Mayor of Simpleton”), McCartneyesque pop (“Pink Thing”) and leisurely jazz fusion (“Miniature Sun”).

Though it has always managed to steer clear of Beatlemania territory, XTC has become increasingly open about the Fab Four’s influence, while still remaining very much its own band. Never mind the Yellow Submarine-like album cover – listen to the “Penny Lane” trumpets in “Merely a Man” and to “Here Comes President Kil Again,” with its middle eight straight out of the White Album. In fact, it could be argued that if Skylarking was XTC’s Sgt. Pepper, then Oranges and Lemons is its White Album.

Producer Paul Fox let the band members indulge themselves a little more than did Todd Rundgren, who clashed with them over the making of Skylarking. For one thing, this fifty-eight-minute, fifteen-track marvel is a double album. And where Skylarking was lush and pastoral, Oranges and Lemons has a generally harsher, noisier sound that recalls the band’s earlier work. On first listening to the album, XTC’s melodies seem overwhelmed by the densely layered arrangements and center-stage percussion. But on repeated listenings, the curtains part and hooks are all you hear, thanks in no small part to Dave Gregory’s tasty guitar fills, marvels of elegance that use a wide-ranging palette of sounds.

Oranges and Lemons was recorded in L.A., about as foreign an environment as one could imagine for these inveterate Englishmen, and the city’s hustle and bustle must account for the album’s bright, busy atmosphere. Fittingly, the most gentle song on the album, “Chalkhills and Children,” is an ode to the band’s native southern England. The title of the record itself comes from an old English children’s rhyme (which figured prominently in George Orwell’s 1984 as a reminder of old England).

“Garden of Earthly Delights” – a very young person’s guide to the world – kicks off the album with a clangorous but bouncy psychedelic groove. “This is your life and you’ll be what you want to be/Just don’t hurt nobody/Less of course they ask you,” sings Partridge, addressing some newcomer to the human fold.

“Mayor of Simpleton” is Partridge’s New Wave update of Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World.” Whereas Cooke didn’t “know much about biology,” Partridge admits he’s “never been near a university … but I know one/Thing and that’s I love you.” He goes on to say that he doesn’t “know how to write a big hit song,” which may well be true. But XTC’s second songwriter and inventive bassist, Colin Moulding, gives it his best shot on the very next track. Similar in sound and sentiment to Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” the incandescent “King for a Day” sounds like the massive hit XTC has waited years for.

The Dukes of Stratosphear records, on which XTC looked back in fondness to the Sixties, seem like études for Oranges and Lemons. Having studied the brush strokes of old masters such as the Beatles, the Hollies and Pink Floyd, XTC has effortlessly incorporated them into its own artful music. XTC’s roots aren’t in the Mississippi Delta, the honky-tonks of Nashville or the blues joints on the South Side of Chicago; they’re in the grand tradition of British pop, and finally, in a grand tradition of their own.

Michael Azerrad

Written for the PopMatters website, Oct. 27, 2006. Long article about XTC mastermind Andy Partridge…

There is no mansion and no country estate. There is no fancy sports car collection, nor luxury yacht, nor private jet. The road to becoming one of alternative rock’s most influential artists of the last 30 years has not been paved with riches and rock and roll status symbols. There is no museum, no shrine. Not even a framed gold or platinum album hanging on the wall (though not for lack of sales).

In fact, rather than being a rags to riches story of musical salvation and material excess, it’s a life story enlivened by managerial fraud and graft, financial ruin, frustrated success, marital collapse, industry restraints, and reclusive defiance.

So why does Andy Partridge seem so calm, so happy, so content?

Perhaps because after thirty years in the music industry, struggling against all manner of odds and potential ends, Partridge is finally comfortably ensconced in the place he has carved out for himself. Perhaps it’s that after a strange career marked equally by praise and indifference, the legacy of his work is finally beginning to speak for itself. It certainly must have something to do with achieving that ideal of artistic independence that has wound its Elysian thread through rock history. No matter how modest, as humble as a daisy, it is a niche that Partridge fought for and fashioned to his design. And after years of conflict, the future is finally his on his own terms.

As Partridge explains in his own words, “My expectations of success are that sort of weird invisible horn that grows out of your head and waves around thinking ‘Wow! Where’s success? Where is it?’ I think it shriveled up and dropped off a long time ago. To me, success is really making enough money to be able to carry on making music. That’s success.”

1. Funk Pop a Roll Beats Up My Soul

By some accounts, the rough journey of Andy Partridge and his band, XTC, is due in no small part to Partridge himself. He was difficult, complicated, and contrary. He didn’t play by the rules, and he didn’t play well with others. He was (and maybe is) headstrong, arrogant, and stubborn. He has no one to blame but himself. And, of course, there is The Incident, and all that came, or didn’t come, afterwards.

Any biography of XTC and Partridge himself must eventually return to The Incident. It is the black hole at the center of the XTC galaxy, exerting its gravitational pull on all the history that swirls around the band and its members, bending and warping each of their lights. Over the years, various explanations and descriptions have been given accounting for the conditions that led up The Incident. Most settle for a lazy explanation that Partridge suffers from crippling stage fright. Others chalk it up to exhaustion. Partridge himself refers to it as a nervous breakdown. Whatever the case, there remains little doubt that The Incident changed XTC’s course forever.

In 1982, XTC had released its fifth album, English Settlement, in as many years, cutting their own path out of the UK punk scene, running briefly through new wave and heading into larger pop territories. Each album since their White Music debut had seen XTC grow in leaps and bounds. 1979’s Drums and Wires yielded XTC’s first chart success in the single “Making Plans for Nigel”, while 1980’s Black Sea sold well on the album charts on the strength of its solid post-punk tracks, including “Respectable Street”, “Towers of London”, and “Generals and Majors”.

And the band was active—intensely so. From the moment that XTC signed to Virgin in 1977, they embarked on a flurry of touring and promotional appearances, hitting television studios, club stages, and progressively larger concert venues in a series of almost endless appearances. The band would be home in its native Swindon, England, for only months out of the year following the release of Drums and Wires, spending most of its time on the road around Europe, and eventually Asia and America, where they performed alongside the likes of the Police and Talking Heads. Those shows were high energy as well, with a grinning Partridge front and center the whole time, churning through versions of their tunes that occasionally reached manic pitch and volumes so loud that XTC made the 1981 edition of Rolling Stone’s Book of Rock Lists‘s list of 17 Loudest Bands in the World (coming in at Number 15 and beating out both Queen and KISS—unsurprisingly, the Who was number 1).

This frenzied pace may have been simply part and parcel of the rock and roll world, but it had dire physical consequences for Partridge. As a child, Partridge was diagnosed as “hyperactive” (in a world before ADD) and placed on a regimen of Valium to calm him down. As the demands of performing and life on the road began to stack up, so too did the demands of the Valium. In 1979, three years before The Incident, Partridge experienced what he believed was a nervous breakdown, essentially blacking out on stage and forgetting who he was and all of XTC’s songs. It was temporary, and he went quickly back to work, but the pressures of performing began to build up more and more from that point on.

The Incident was actually stretched across a small span of time in 1982. On stage at a show in Paris during the first European leg of the English Settlement promotional tour, Partridge relapsed, collapsing on stage and cutting the show short. The collapse prompted the cancellation of the English tour that was to follow, and Partridge began a round of various psychological treatments, which seemed to relieve him of the stress. It was revealed that he’d stopped eating three days before the Paris show. The Valium was fingered as a culprit, and Partridge’s wife Marianne tossed the pills, forcing him to kick a serious dependency.

Believing he was cured, Partridge joined the band in California to kick off a sizable US tour—their first as a headlining act in the States—and took to the stage for the first night’s show in Sand Diego. Once on stage, however, the entire flood of stressors returned, and Partridge fell apart once more, struggling through the show, unable to focus, and collapsing once more. Though the band tried to resurrect him for the second show, a sold out Los Angeles performance, Partridge was physically unable to take the stage, and the tour was cancelled, much to Virgin’s dismay. Partridge resolved to never tour again.

The fallout of Partridge’s refusal to tour was an increasingly impatient and unhappy parent in Virgin Records, who saw XTC as untenable as the studio-only act Partridge declared them to have become. Drummer Terry Chambers no longer saw a place for himself in the group, and abruptly quit as the band was trying to record their next disc, Mummer. And while convalescing at home in the generally more rural Swindon, Partridge’s rediscovered love for the English countryside he grew up in was reflected in the new material he was writing. None of this was a formula for pop-rock success in the mid-1980s.

But it’s also a fallacy to chalk up XTC’s semi-transparency to the simple problem of the band’s refusal to tour and call it stubbornness. While it certainly limited the band’s marketability, and therefore their label support, XTC suffered more from the hands of industry forces than they did from failure to find an audience. While XTC defied expectations by retaining a dedicated fan base that grew with each release, despite their low profile, the most damaging trials came from within the ranks of their own management.

While Partridge and company have a court-enforced gag order preventing them from discussing details, what is known is that their initial manager, Ian Reid, inked a deal with Virgin that wound up working out primarily for Reid, secondarily for Virgin, and not at all for XTC. Throughout their first five years of existence, XTC never saw a penny of profits from either album sales or touring revenue. Reid, on the other hand, took out large loans from Virgin, borrowing against XTC’s royalties, to the tune of millions of pounds by some estimates. Even after the band settled out of court with Reid, because of the terms of the contract, Virgin was able to hold XTC liable for the sum. Because of XTC’s failure to tour, the likelihood of ever repaying Virgin dwindled further and further away. Over the course of a 20-year contract with Virgin Records, and after achieving gold and platinum status in album sales on a number of discs, XTC never saw any publishing royalties.

Moreover, despite of the increasing presence of Partridge in the greater music scene as something of a muse in his own right, working as a co-songwriter and producer with a number of other artists, Virgin continually rejected XTC’s demands for creative control of the group’s output. To the end, Virgin demanded an outside producer be in charge of each release, not trusting the sometimes fanciful and unpredictable whims of Partridge to deliver the album with the best chance of paying back their debt. Recording sessions were followed by tales of resentment settling into resignation, as producers and Partridge butted heads. The time spent recording and producing XTC’s probable masterwork, Skylarking, with Todd Rundgren was famously charged with tempests of clashing visions. Nonsuch was wrapped up with producer Gus Dudgeon and Partridge no longer speaking to one another. And Partridge, a talented visual artist before deciding on music as a teen, was constantly having sleeve designs and packaging concepts rejected by Virgin executives (often later picked up and used in the final output without crediting Andy himself).

So XTC went on strike.

Following the 1992 release of Nonsuch, Partridge, bassist Colin Moulding, and guitarist/arranger Dave Gregory demanded to be released from their contract, citing both creative differences and the money they felt was owed them by Virgin. Virgin, still in the red where XTC was concerned, refused to void the contract. And so an industry strike quietly raged past the point of more famous (and publicized) strikes by Prince and George Michael. Partridge and Moulding continued to write and record demos, planning what they hoped would become their first post-Virgin release, but the label dragged the fight out over five long years. In the end, XTC won, despite making some heavy concessions, and 20 years after punk first broke, they were DIY for the first time in their career.

XTC immediately went to work recording their triumphal return, but the strike years had strained relations within the band. Partridge’s new material forced a further evolution of the band’s sound. The incorporation of more symphonic elements led to Partridge arranging those parts, duties that had previously fallen to Gregory. Tensions came to a head and Gregory quit XTC while preparing to record the long-awaited Apple Venus Vol. 1. Still, Partridge and Moulding pushed on, and the album release was met with critical acclaim (and very modest commercial success). The follow-up, Wasp Star: Apple Venus Vol. 2, debuted a year later, to similar results. Moving forward, rather than shopping itself around to small independent labels, XTC took the logical step of forming its own label, dubbed Idea Records. Partridge also struck out on his own, resolving both his solo work and his production history into one entity by forming his own APE House Records label.

All of this is not to say that XTC’s is a sad-sack story of a band to be pitied. On the contrary, despite challenging many music industry foundations, XTC managed to continue to record and thrive where many bands failed, split up, and moved on to more respectable jobs. At one point in time, XTC were seen as contemporaries of Public Image Ltd., Wire, Joy Division, the Human League, the Specials, Gang of Four, Blondie, the Cure, Buzzcocks, and the aforementioned Talking Heads and the Police. But by striking out on their own path, rather than merely being lauded as new wave icons, or godfathers of such and such, XTC is also frequently and reverentially compared to larger than life icons like the Who and the Kinks, and most especially the Beatles.

Yet, in looking back on the career of Andy Partridge and XTC, it’s difficult to justify claims of greatness without trying to understand exactly why they never managed to rise above the status of cult band. Respect and recognition are the real validation of such claims, not financial success, and for various reasons that came slowly to Partridge. But perseverance, even stubbornness, pays off, and come it has.

2. Feeling Extrovert

Partridge’s Fuzzy Warbles series certainly encourages us to look back on that past. Whereas the recorded output of Idea Records has been fairly limited to demo albums of the Apple Venus discs, culminating in last year’s beautifully rendered Apple Box collection, APE House has been busier in true label fashion. In addition to signing and releasing work by pop bands new to the scene, Partridge quickly went to work on a long-discussed project to release all of the home demos, outtakes, and unused songs that had piled up over the last two decades. In a nod to the rough and tumble quality of home recordings, Partridge dubbed the project Fuzzy Warbles. But the motivation for the series doesn’t lie in nostalgia.

“It’s going to sound really banal if I tell you the truth, but the truth is that I was sick of bootleggers,” Partridge explains. “I kept hearing from people, ‘Hey, yeah, I bought a disc of your demos.’ Or, ‘Hey, I got a 3 CD set of your demos from somebody,’ or you’d see them advertised on the Net, or people would tell me about them. And sometimes even bootleggers would send me a free one and they’d say ‘Well, I had a 1,000 of these pressed, and they’re selling really well, and I thought you might like one, ha ha.’ And I was just going insane with rage at this, because, you know, I never made a lot of money at this game. And the thought that my music was being stolen from me… and, you know, bad quality copies of it, because you hear some of it and it’s obviously taken from tenth generation cassette dubs and it’s all the wrong speed and it’s all full of flut-tt-tterrr and stuff like that.”

“I thought to myself, ‘Look, if anyone’s going to bootleg me, it has to be me.’ Because I’ve got first generations of these recordings, I can clean up some of the older stuff, I can remix if they’re not good mixes, I’ve got stuff they’re never gonna have because it never left my possession, I’ve got stuff that, you know, just stuff that bootleggers could never get hold of. So it was just a case of, I’m going to bootleg me really, really well.”

Originally envisioned as a ten-disc series that collected all the castaways from XTC’s past, the project quickly became an Andy Partridge solo venture when Moulding decided that he wasn’t interested in adding his songs to the series.

“He’s been a bit cagey about all this. It’s a combination of things… I think he’s uncomfortable with people hearing him scrabbling around for ideas,” Partridge says. “I’m the opposite. That thrills me. If I can see the sketchbooks, visual or aural or whatever, of the people I really admire, I find that incredibly thrilling. I like to see the germs of ideas, I like to see where they came from, and the failures… I guess it’s the stuff that makes them human.”

“But Colin feels a little difficult about that. That was one reason. Another reason was that maybe he didn’t want to get involved in something where the mass of material was going to be mine.”

Going it alone and releasing Fuzzy Warbles through the APE House imprint, Partridge has been putting out two volumes a year since 2002. With the release of Volumes 7 and 8 this year, the series comes to a close. To commemorate, APE has put together an elaborately packaged “Collector’s Album” that turns the Fuzzy Warbles discs into a box set. As a bonus feature it includes a booklet penned by Partridge (“Hit Record and Play, or a Brief History of Home Sound Capture”) and a CD of bonus tracks, Hinges, that culls a few remaining home recordings that didn’t make it onto the proper eight volumes. And like last year’s Apple Box, this collection revels in the newfound freedom Partridge has in making packaging designs.

Discussing it, he lights up. “Oh, I love it! I’m a complete packaging whore! I just lay on my back and open my legs… package me, baby! I just love packaging. You know, sexy, good packaging is, it’s… whaa, yeah, you just want to eat it!”

In keeping with the stamp collection motif used on the Fuzzy Warbles discs, the box itself is designed to mimic a stamp album, and even includes a sheet of stamps using the cover art from the eight discs. In a clever marketing maneuver, APE has also made the collector’s box available as its own separate purchase, complete with bonus materials, allowing fans who’ve spent the last four years purchasing Fuzzy Warbles discs as single items not to have to re-purchase the whole series just for the collector’s item. It’s the reflection of a musician with the soul of a collector, a true bag to keep life’s souvenirs in.

“I think the ‘Collectors Album’ is possibly my favorite piece of packaging. Actually, that’s a tough one. It may be a tie between this and the three-dimensional ammonite cover for Fossil Fuel,” Partridge enthuses.

There’s no doubt that XTC has inspired some serious collecting among it’s most ardent fans, including fan magazines and conventions. And that collector’s spirit is a drive shared by the band’s leader. Partridge readily admits, “I’m a collector. I just can’t resist it.” In fact, while the Fuzzy Warbles series was being produced, Partridge confesses to finding himself getting pulled into the world of stamp collecting as well. Of course, when asked whether it would replace his reported passion for toy soldiers, the answer was an emphatic denial.

“No, no, it mustn’t. There’s gonna be war if it happens. No, that’s really my first love. That’s my cocaine: toy soldiers.”

As a collection itself, Fuzzy Warbles offers an interesting assortment of treasures, each arranged onto its own album-length collection, leaving the whole collection a scattered, seemingly disorganized hopscotch through 20 years of recordings. Unlike a more historically minded box set, this collection as a whole (and each disc in it) deliberately does away with any sense of linear progression or chronological sequencing.

“That would be awful,” he says bluntly. Explaining how the songs were picked and arranged on each volume, Partridge says, “It’s the balance thing. The older I get I really feel very strongly about the kind of ‘middle of the road’ attitude. I don’t want to be upsetting right or left, I want to be bang on that fulcrum in the middle… I guess it’s the balance principle of composing any album. You need a great opening song, great closing song. You need to look at the sort of… the orgasms within an album; you need to look at the shapes where it gets excited and then calm it down a bit. It’s a bit like… I’m gonna sound like such a cheesy Frenchman: It’z a beet like making love to a beautiful woman.”

“Or like, you know, cooking a big banquet or something, where you’ve got a great starter, and then you have a little palette cleanser, and then we hit ‘em with a very flavorable so-and-so, so then you’ve gotta take it down a bit and have a little bland something after that so the too-strong flavor things don’t kill each other. So maybe planning a banquet is more of an adequate metaphor.”

In that sense, Fuzzy Warbles is a set of eight distinct albums. And yet, assembled in one place, it also acts as a collection of Partridge’s songwriting history. Some of the best known tracks and near-hits from XTC’s albums aren’t included here, the album versions are not buried in the mix, and no album cuts are found here. Aside from attempts to collect the usable scraps that haven’t made it onto previously commercially available releases, this collection does not pretend to a sense of comprehensiveness. Such attempts tend to fail anyway, and Partridge clearly thinks little of them to begin with, including Virgin’s assemblage of XTC’s own Coat of Many Cupboards box set.

But what we do gain in total is a sense of Partridge in the home studio over the years, and some insight into the songwriting process—though, in his typically straightforward manner, Partridge states in the “Hit Record and Play” booklet, “Don’t even start me on ‘how does one acquire songwriting wherewithal?’. All the time you are moving down the road to good quality home recording, every time you click the ‘on’ switch, you are taking another learning step, and it never stops. But you still have to do the walking yourself.” And rather than being a plodding travelogue of each step that Partridge has taken along that path, Fuzzy Warbles is instead a collection of some of the marvelous discoveries made along the way.

Casual fans of XTC will recognize some of the familiar album tracks that make demo appearances here. “Merely a Man” and “Complicated Game” are strange bedfellows across time on Volume 1, and clusters of songs from studio albums appear on various discs, such a Volume 5‘s handful of Skylarking songs, or Volume 7’s concentration of songs from Oranges and Lemons. Tracks like “You’re the Wish You Are I Had”, “Human Alchemy”, and “Helicopter” are all revealed in their toddler years, before being polished into their flashy adult lives by mixing and mastering. And for these tracks, there is a sense of looking at the baby albums of these songs, revealing what chord progressions and hooks made up the central creative core around which all the other instrumentation and arrangement was built. Sometimes lyrics have obviously been changed, with the intricacy of Partridge’s expected wordiness still being worked out in the rough. These tracks don’t replace the studio versions, but they certainly enrich their appreciation, giving a back door into what makes them work.

For fans with the glint of obsession in their eyes, the Fuzzy Warbles series is yet more familiar, and more rewarding. This collection helps replace the seventh-generation cassette tape copies of Jules Verne’s Sketchbook, The Bull with the Golden Guts, and Window Box—fan-club releases put together by Partridge and XTC over the years—with improved sound quality on such gems as “Young Cleopatra” and “Goodbye Humanosaurus”. There’s also a fair number of tracks written for XTC’s psychedelic alter egos, the Dukes of Stratosphear, including a back-to-back run through XTC’s “That’s Really Super Supergirl” and the Dukes’ “Braniac’s Daughter” that shows the songs to be clear sisters. Plenty of rarities make appearances as well, such as “Cherry in Your Tree” from the Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? soundtrack, “I Don’t Want to Be Here” and other songs donated to charity benefits, tracks written and recorded for the unused James and the Giant Peach soundtrack (decidedly better than Randy Newman’s), and more. Unfortunately, there’s no “Wonderfalls” here, though diehards have probably already bought the DVD just for the music video. And there is plenty of music here that is brand new to all but the most rabid and well-connected XTC fans, giving Fuzzy Warbles enough of that taste of new experience to keep older fans satisfied.

But it’s also a series that could, under the right circumstances, be a hallmark of Partridge’s career. Perhaps, for those who’ve never heard XTC and don’t have prior interest, this set will seem off-putting, like doing some navel gazing and gathering up the lint collected there. On the other hand, without prior expectations, it’s possible that the vast amount of variety, styles, and interests collected here under one umbrella (rather than 1,000 umbrellas) could serve to introduce the novice to a singular songwriter with a deep and rich history to explore. With 180 tracks covering decades of recording, the Fuzzy Warbles series makes the case for Partridge as a consistently engaging and often brilliant pop talent too often ignored. In that sense, it may work as well as (and in some respects better than) the entire XTC discography.

This set also carries the danger of feeling like a final closure. Partridge claims that this set represents the majority of the previously unheard or unreleased Andy Partridge library. “People say, ‘Oh, what’s the Andy Partridge archive?’ They expect it to be cupboards of tapes and stuff, or a vault. No, it’s two shoeboxes.”

As a piece of reflection, Partridge is rather sanguine about whether it’s really closing the door on the past, however. “Yeah, in a way. But only for now. Because what’s going to happen is, if I keep recording, another ten years down the line, the kitchen drawer is going to be full up with more weird shaped bottle openers, strange corks, and weird bits of plastic out of Christmas crackers, pieces of string, and strange cutlery… That’s like my musical brain. If I keep recording, in the next ten years I’m gonna have enough stuff in the musical kitchen drawer to probably do another… another ten volumes of Fuzzy Warbles.”

But for now, this represents nearly all the usable remainders of the past two-plus decades of Partridge’s work: “I guess it is closing the lid on my home recording to date.”

Even if perceived by some as marking the passage of time, it comes at a moment when XTC’s bike ride to the moon is finally being hailed as the quiet-but-important musical legacy that it is. Asked the loaded question of what mark Partridge feels like he’s left on music, he pauses, considering the answer before saying “Am I allowed to be immodest? I think we’re pretty, largely influential.”

XTC’s later material has been monumentally praised by those who carry on the power pop tradition. Bands like Jellyfish and the Apples in Stereo nodded to XTC publicly, they were one of the motivating factors for mid-’90s Britpop (Partridge was, in fact, initially slated to produce Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish), and the entire pop underground recognizes Partridge as one of the icons of contemporary songwriting in the field. And, of course, the current resurgence of post-punk formula has led to XTC being revered in association with the groundbreakers of that era, being name-dropped by everyone from Dogs Die in Hot Cars to the Futureheads. And while Partridge doesn’t make a huge deal out of this level of accomplishment, he acknowledges that it’s something that he takes some measure of pride in.

“It’s only now, rather, that people in England start to recognize this, certainly,” Partridge says, pointing to the frequency with which XTC’s name has been popping up in the British press. “I feel like a benchmark or something. So, I guess there’s some sort of legacy there. But I think we may be one of the most influential groups—quietly influential—to come out of Britain. That does sound a little pompous, but from the stuff I’ve been seeing in recent years, I don’t think that’s too wide of the mark.”

“In the last four or five years in England, every band that comes up gets compared to us, whether it’s the Kaiser Chiefs, or Franz Ferdinand, or the Futureheads. It’s like a band a week, and an awful lot of them do get compared to us. And it doesn’t annoy me or anything like that, because I’m not interested in the place where they are musically now. It’s a place that I’ve sort of been through on the journey, and I wouldn’t want to go back there. But it does mean that we’ve been quietly, largely influential for a band that hasn’t had hits.”

Partridge acknowledges that this is unlikely to ever turn into sudden wealth, but he seems to be accepting of this fate, so long as he can continue to make the music he cares about.

3. Eternally and Ever Ermine Street

While Fuzzy Warbles may have effectively cleaned out the closet for older material, and hopefully achieved its goal of thwarting bootleggers from capitalizing on Partridge’s work, the present and future remain busy for Partridge as he continues his work building APE House into an artist-friendly home for new acts. Currently developing the Milk and Honey Band and singer-songwriter Veda Hille, Partridge’s goal is to use the intensely negative experiences that XTC went through in the Virgin years to reverse the relationship of ownership and provide a label that works positively to the benefit of bands.

“Most record companies give artists very poor deals. That’s one thing with APE, that taking on other artists at APE, I wanted to give them the best deal possible. In fact, the artists make a lot more than we do, which is, you know, that’s completely brobdingnag of an idea. Swift would be proud of that. It’s completely upside down of an idea, because most record companies, they’re grasping and grabbing, and the artists are the last ones to see any money.”

In addition to his work as an independent label head, Partridge remains an active songwriter on his own. Recent years have found him in a primarily collaborative role, working and recording with a number of artists. With Peter Blegvad, he co-wrote and recorded the synesthetic Orpheus: The Lowdown in 2004. He’s also co-written songs appearing on a number of discs, working with Mitch Friedman, Dave Yazbek, Pugwash, and the Nines. Most recently, Partridge worked on a song collaboration for Robyn Hitchcock’s new album Ole! Tarantula, a pairing that seemed particularly fruitful and was unfortunately cut short by a sound engineer’s studio mistake that left Partridge battling a severe case of tinnitus.

Partridge reports that Hitchcock sent him word that “when he comes off tour, he’d very much like to get back with me and carry on writing. Which I’d like to do as well, because we came up with about half a dozen things. A couple of them I thought were pretty damned good, actually.”

Partridge seems the most excited about a new project that’s just wrapping up and nearing a release date. Labeled Monstrance, this project brought him back into the recording studio with founding XTC member Barry Andrews, who quit the band after its second album, Go 2, following some creative differences with Partridge in particular, and went on to form Shriekback. Having long since patched up old wounds, Partridge even adding his guitar to last year’s Shriekback release, Partridge approached Andrews about working on a non-pop album, scratching the itch he’d long suppressed to explore jazz-influenced improv music.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do forever. A lot of my background is a bit of a schizoid split thing. As a kid I loved pretty much straight pop music. I mean, my real love was slightly psychedelic pop music. But it would be thing like Beatles, Stones, Small Faces, Kinks, early Floyd. Pretty straight pop music. And then, just a year or two after that, a friend of mine who was like two years older than me, he was really big on avant-garde jazz music and he used to get these import records from New York and Scandinavia and he kept inflicting them on me.”

“At first I resisted, ‘cuz I had a very straight sort of background. And then suddenly something kind of snapped where I became as addicted to these things as he did,” Partridge explains. “I’ve always wanted to make albums of purely improvised music.”

This project promises to be a new direction for Partridge, whose reputation has always been recognized as musically diverse, yet still based squarely in the pop tradition. Such free-form experimentation requires an entirely different set of sensibilities, and Partridge laughs about the effect it might have on his core fan base.

“It’s probably going to piss off a lot of XTC fans. Because they can be a bit conservative, you know.”

Unfortunately, a larger question mark hangs in the air as to the precise status of XTC. While Partridge is quick to say that XTC’s long journey isn’t over, he explains that Moulding’s heart is no longer in music.

“He’s going through the change. He said to me a couple of months back, he’s not interested in writing any more songs. And he’s, in fact, not interested in listening to music full stop. He’s stopped listening to music and stopped wanting to write it.” Partridge encouraged Moulding to view it as a potential writer’s block, and not treat it as final, but rather to wait and see if the urge to write surprises him in the next few years, and to put things on hold until it does.

It’s certain that fans hope, along with Partridge, that Moulding finds his muse once more, and connects with Partridge in the studio once more. Partridge acknowledges that XTC is not, and should not be, a moniker being exploited for a Partridge solo show. “It’s no good making a record and calling it XTC, certainly, if Colin isn’t involved. I wouldn’t want to do that; he wouldn’t want me doing that.” However, he remains hopeful that the situation is indeed temporary, and is unwilling to say that XTC the band is done for good.

“We’ve not killed off the XTC head. I mean, we still have the head cryogenically frozen. It’s up next to Walt on the shelf.”

But for the immediate future, Partridge will continue to work in his quiet, semi-hermetic way. Partridge notes that working on Monstrance has been an invigorating process, and that if successful enough, he’d like to repeat it. Additionally, having spent the last several months recuperating from a series of injuries, Partridge seems to be itching to return to his garden shed recording studio, hit record, and play some new material.

“I think I’m gonna have to make a solo record just to get rid of all these songs I’m amassing. And, also, lots of other projects, things that I fancy trying, and areas I would like to go into,” Partridge asserts. “But it’s difficult to stop music. Not being able to play the guitar for six months, and not being able to hear any loud noises or put on headphones and stuff with my hearing, that’s been tough. It’s sort of made me want to do it even more now.”

With the completion of the Fuzzy Warbles series, another layer has been added to the ziggurat of Partridge’s monument in music history. The role XTC has played in defining pop excellence and inspiring other musicians to pick up instruments and attempt to write songs of their own seems to have become clearer over each passing year, and Partridge is finally being given the respect that he has earned. And while modest by some standards, Partridge’s life affords him the opportunity to continue to explore new avenues and write more songs. Partridge says that his only rule as a songwriter has been to better himself continuously. If he succeeds at this, then the future has a rich tapestry yet to offer. So if chalkhills and children truly do anchor Andy Partridge’s feet, he seems content with it.

Patrick Schabe