CDNOW
May 30, 2000
Buyer's Guide

Features

XTC: Back to Drums and Wires By Barney Hoskyns CDNOW Senior Editor, London Hailing from unglamorous Swindon, seventy miles west of London, the members of XTC were clever-clever new-wavers who quickly outgrew the late-'70s punk scene and matured into purveyors of skewed, Beatlesque pop-rock. Such hits as "Making Plans For Nigel" (1989) and "Senses Working Overtime" (1982) consolidated their reputation in the U.K., while 1986's Todd Rundgren-produced "Dear God" became a college-radio staple in America. With frontman Andy Partridge suffering from stage fright, XTC became primarily a studio entity, making albums dripping with English history and mythology. Eventually, after spending most of the '90s at war with Virgin, its record label, XTC was reduced to Partridge and bassist Colin Moulding. Against all odds, the duo returned last year with the wondrous Apple Venus, Volume I, a feast of pastoral acoustic pop with typical Partridge themes, including harvest festivals and fertility symbols, packed with melodies that could have been by a dream team of Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney. Now XTC present the flipside of Volume 1's coin, the more streamlined and more rocking Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2). Once again, the majority of the songs are by Partridge, once again complemented by a sprinkling of Moulding gems. Partridge tells CDNOW the story. CDNOW: It must have been very cheering to get the acclaim you did for Apple Venus Volume 1. Did you worry that the world had forgotten about you? Andy Partridge: No, because the world never knew about us, largely. I think the people who liked the band -- fans, for want of a better word -- would never go away. They're a faithful lot. But as far as the rest of the world goes, in England we can't get arrested so it doesn't matter. Most people in England think we went away in 1981. In America, things have been growing over the years over there. With the size of the place, it's like a massive vat of treacle, and if you're gonna make any impression, you've got to start rocking it violently at one end, and then 10 years later the ripples might start to show. Volume 1 was very well received in America. How did it sell? It got great reviews, but it didn't get any radio play, because it's obviously not the sort of thing that radio programmers want to hear on their shows. It didn't sell very many, but it keeps the wolf at bay, and we do have decent record deals and might make ourselves a bit of money on that one. Is Wasp Star in theory more radio-friendly? Oh yeah, I think the whole record's much more instantaneous. You know, that's the other side of the sort of thing that we like. We can get very baroque and very fancy -- like icing chefs -- but we can also be basic. There's a bit more cake on the Volume 2 side. Will there be a single or a lead track for radio? In America I think it's a toss-up between "Stupidly Happy" and "The Man Who Murdered Love." I prefer "Stupidly Happy," but the Americans have erred on the side of caution ... With a song that sounds like an older XTC ... And it actually is. "The Man Who Murdered Love" was written in 1991 for the Nonsuch album, but the producer, Gus Dudgeon -- bless his Lurex socks -- couldn't hear any more songs so we never got to record it. Which was a shame, because I quite liked it. "In England, we're considered to be exceptionally uncool, and for people who like the band, it's like the love that dare not speak its name. It's like sex with chickens -- you only sort of whisper it when you've had a few drinks." How often are you "stupidly happy" these days? I was when I wrote that song. I was right in the throes of being in love. I'd been through a lot of shit, what with not being able to work with Virgin -- storing up a mass of songs but unable legally to do anything with them -- and being dumped by my ex-wife, which at the time was exceedingly painful but which I'm really grateful for now. And just when things seemed to be at their blackest, I found myself falling in love again, and I just felt really silly and daft. And I think that song sums it up -- the one-chord repetitiveness of it and the very optimistic sentiment was exactly me at the time. How many of the songs for the two Apple Venus albums were finished before you actually began recording Volume 1? They were all written because I originally wanted to make it a double-disc set. It should all have been Apple Venus but broken down into the two sides, the two faces of XTC. The whole Apple Venus project, as far as I see it, was all the material written while we legally couldn't work. And the best of the first batch of that would have been what constituted Volume 1, and then the best of the second batch would have constituted Volume 2. Now we started recording all of that in one hit originally, but we didn't get very far because Dave Gregory was throwing too many wobblers, and so he was off. Haydn Bendall was very thorough and very pleasant to work with but a little too slow. And so we found ourselves having run out of time and money, and all we had was half of one volume finished. And so we said, Let's concentrate on finishing up Volume 1 -- the string/acoustic stuff -- and we'll do the noisier stuff later. So it just came out that way. Now I'd like people to imagine they'd bought Volume 1 and spent a year with it before discovering that the tray lifted up, and there was another disc stuck underneath. Clearly, there are songs on Volume 2 -- Colin's "Boarded Up" and "In Another Life," in particular -- that could have been on Volume 2. What determined the selection? If a song looked like it was going to be more electric, then we put it in that direction. But generally they did seem to divide up neatly: In other words, the earlier batch became Volume 1, and the later batch mostly became Wasp Star. If Volume 1 resembled Skylarking, as some admirers thought, to which previous XTC album is Wasp Star closest? It's connected to much earlier albums, stuff like Black Sea or Drums and Wires, where the sound is more stripped-down and more immediate. With Skylarking, Todd Rundgren leant on the gentler material that we gave him, and also that was really the first time we'd dug into working with strings. Which is probably why Volume 1 sounds a bit like it. But we do like different kinds of things. Colin likes more thoughtful and introspective music, whereas as the years go on, I seem to really get off on repetitive things. Is Colin ever hurt that you get the lion's share of the songwriting? Well, we record roughly -- approximately -- the same proportion of songs as we write. If I write 20 songs, and we record 10, Colin writes six songs, and we do three. He writes less songs; that's all there is to it. It filters down roughly to about the same proportion of what we bring along. Talk about the studio in Colin's garden. Because we ran out of time and money on Volume 1, we had to finish up the album in Colin's living room -- all of the vocals and the acoustic guitar and the bass and the trumpet -- we sort of turned to ourselves and said, "Look, this sounds just the same as if we'd spent a thousand pounds a day in a studio. So doesn't this give us a big lesson -- the fact that you can record at home, and it sounds the same?" Having agreed on that, I pointed out to Colin that he had a big double garage that he didn't use, plus an old coal shed next door. So the garage became the studio, and the coal shed became the control room. And it looks dead swish in there, but we've put a fraction of the money that we would have spent on Volume 2 into building it. Say that Volume 1 cost us £200,000 to make, we spent a fraction of that building and equipping a whole studio. We can't mix in there, because we haven't got enough toys, but for recording it's lovely. It's crazy chucking a thousand quid a day at a studio when you might as well chuck a fraction of that at yourself and own the place where you're recording. You signed your notorious Virgin deal in August 1977. How at odds with punk did you feel at that point? The only way I related to punk was through the energy and the DIY aspect of it all, which I thought was the best bit about it. England desperately needed energy at that point. It was one of the few times in English history where anybody could do this. Grab a guitar, nick a guitar, make a guitar. Get up and make a noise. That was American positivism -- colonial revolutionary positivism -- and the English don't usually do that. Where did it come from? Normally, it's like, "I wouldn't bother to do that, mate; you're just a working-class tosser." And suddenly it became the thing to be a working-class tosser, but a working-class tosser who was doing something. For five minutes I thought this is fantastic. But it rapidly turned into those up above waking up and realizing they could make money out of this. We wanted to make a noise too, but we wanted it to be our noise, what we thought was our own variety of noise. Have the kudos accorded you by some of the brighter Brit pop contenders been any kind of consolation for what you went through with Virgin? What, you mean Blur? It's only Blur, isn't it? The others are too hung about it to admit any influence. In England, we're considered to be exceptionally uncool, and for people who like the band, it's like the love that dare not speak its name. It's like sex with chickens -- you only sort of whisper it when you've had a few drinks. I think it's all about the English culture of resentment. That permeates everything we do in this country. We're not brain boxes by any means -- I left school at 15; we all have council-house backgrounds -- but we're proud of what we've done with our brains, and we absolutely will not pretend to be more stupid than we are for anyone. We've fought the whole of our lives to get out of the background that so many people resent you for getting out of. And because we won't play stupid, and because we seem to have got up a lot of people's noses when we first hit the scene, we've never been forgiven for it. We're just old art punks, and that's all there is to it. The funny thing about a band like Oasis is that they idolise bright people like the Beatles -- a band who were relaxed and funny, and they read books -- and yet they're always thinking down. We did get up people's terms, because we wouldn't play that stupid game. We wanted to do it on our terms. By the same token, do you think XTC is perceived by American fans as something exotically English, what with all the references to maypoles and Green Men, and so forth? The age group of people that like us in America is about 10 years or 15 years younger than the average age group of people who like us in England or Europe. It's more college kids or university kids. That's how a lot of it's trickled down. And because of their age, they don't have a background with us. They don't see us as White Music or "Making Plans For Nigel." Their idea of "Making Plans For Nigel" is the cover version by Primus. I mean, I get 17-year-old Texan kids writing to me, and we've been making records for 24 years. And there isn't a culture of resentment in America. It's completely the opposite; you're encouraged to do the best you can, whereas in England you're encouraged not to step out of your box, or else you'll get it, sonny. "When I stopped being addicted to Valium, I sort of went, 'Ooh, I'm not happy with the world; I don't know what's going on.' And I went, 'Wait, I've just read my record contract properly for the first time, and I'm in prison for perpetuity.'" Where do you currently stand on the stage-fright issue? Are you ever likely to perform the Apple Venus material onstage? I don't know. I don't think so, but I'm undergoing hypnotherapy and that sort of stuff. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to do it before we start off on all this world promotional stuff. I want to go and see behaviourial therapists and all this, because I realise that my life has been full of fears, and I've had them drilled into me as a kid, and I haven't shaken them off. And the only reason that I could function when we first started was that I was addicted to Valium and didn't really realise it. And that although I was still Mr. Hyper, I was obviously internally functioning in a more relaxed way. When I stopped being addicted to Valium, I sort of went, "Ooh, I'm not happy with the world; I don't know what's going on." And I went, "Wait, I've just read my record contract properly for the first time, and I'm in prison for perpetuity." And it all sort of crowds in on you. Plus we had done five years of touring, and it did seem to be slower in terms of acceptance and progress than I, in my little Hard Day's Night head, thought it might be. I thought it was going to be a bit more like the Monkees, whereas you're living with those bastards in one house, and you do actually want to kill them slowly with a rusty drill bit. Could you see XTC as a proper band again? No, because I think a lot of the joy of being in a band is a gang thing. It's late teens, 20s, and it's you and your guitars against the world. You're going to drink the world dry; you're going to do everyone's daughters; and you're going to deafen dad. And then as life goes on, you think, "I don't want to be in a gang; I want to be an individual." And with some bands of our age or older, I can see this horrible fake camaraderie, and I think if they force it, it will permeate their work as well as their social lives. From 1982, I've thought of us as being a record-making unit. I love the idea of being a record maker. To me that's the art.

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