Partridge's sweet music

Anyone who thought XTC's seven-year strike had more to do with the band's laziness than it did with their record contract nightmare will be silenced by the fact that they've released two albums within a year of each other on their new label TVT Records. Wasp Star - Apple Venus Volume Two follows the band's near-perfect Apple Venus Volume One.

While Volume One was comprised of acoustic and orchestral songs, Volume Two finds Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding picking up the electric guitar, their original instrument of choice, and discovering that they still have plenty of rock riffs and catchy hooks to bestow upon the music world. Is it better than Volume One? No. Is it better than 95 percent of all other music released this year? Absolutely.

Wasp Star has some of the most radio-friendly songs ever written by the band. With "Playground," "We're All Light," and "Stupidly Happy," XTC should be able to live comfortably for the next five years on single sales alone.

So for those people who are looking for a happy album with songs that are built on the foundation that Brian Wilson, Ray Davies, Lennon and McCartney built, look no further. Songwriting, as far as the three-minute pop form goes, does not get much better than XTC.

The following is a Q & A with XTC's Andy Partridge:


RW: John Lennon once said that only 100 people really understand what makes a Beatles song a Beatles song? Do you think you are one of those people?

AP: (laughs) No, I don't think he understood it either. Uh, no, I wouldn't put myself up as one of those 100. I'm not sure who those 100 are. I don't, I wouldn't, profess to being a Beatle expert or anything. I'm not sort of...I'm not smitten in the same way Oasis seems to be diseased with it all.


RW: Well, let me ask you this. At what point are you aware in your songwriting of moving from honoring your influences to actually building on what they've created?

AP: It's not honoring them. It's more...I have to kill them. I have to exorcise them. As a kid I listened to a lot of music. Um, you know the main thing that made me wanna do this, I guess, was English Pop bands of the '60s. I was just at that impressionable age, you know? And then sat there in my shorts with...somebody brings a record player around my head and I hear things like "You Really Got Me" and "Autumn Almanac" and "Rain" and stuff like this.

And uh, so the people that went in really strong for me would be Ray Davies, Lennon and McCartney, Burt Bacharach. Burt Bacharach and Hal David are possibly the best songwriting team ever. Really, the whole rocket fuel that powers me on is the desire to write better songs than these people. To write better songs than Brian Wilson.

That's the whole, that's the thing that still drives me. I haven't gotten anywhere near it yet. It's an attempt to get them out of my head. To exorcise them out of me. And the only way I can do that is to write better tunes they did. So I guess I'm always gonna be haunted.


RW: So, in that respect, do you think you'll be writing and recording songs as long as your physically and mentally able?

AP: Yeah I'd like to. I mean, it doesn't stop people from writing and recording songs even when they're not mentally able, does it? Some people have made a career out of that.


RW: With the "Oranges And Lemons" tour you possibly invented the unplugged venue on MTV.

AP: Yeah, I'm sorry about that.


RW: Do you find that you're normally not credited with that?

AP: We're never credited with that and we did start it. MTV really resisted us playing acoustically. They asked if we would go on and do a session but then they only did electric stuff. So I thought, "MTV obviously does not have it together to record and mix bands."

So I thought, what can we do so they can't do that but we can still play? I know, we'll take acoustic guitars and just stand around a microphone and play like...I'd heard that people used to go in radio stations in the '50s, in the early rock and roll days or the sort of country days, and just stand around the DJ's microphone and play. So we did this acoustic set and it got a really good reaction.

And then, suddenly, MTV came up with the notion of "unplugged." We were never officially invited onto the unplugged show but I know that we did the very first one without knowing what it was. It makes me laugh now. They say it's unplugged, and there's the keyboards and there's the bass and there's somebody playing samples. I mean, how much more plugged do you wanna be?