Quality Sweet

March 1992
Interview by Christian Fevret

Born with the punk acne, the vivacious young men of XTC already saw themselves adulated billionaires of the new-wave movement with "Making Plans For Nigel". Andy Partridge and his squad decided, on the contrary, to avoid the spotlights and to devote themselves, secretly in their imaginary pagan monastery, to the making, very much in the style of a cottage industry, of musical toffees. To talk to Sir Partridge is to be subjected to the British insularity propaganda, to tickle the man's enigma, to attempt to visit the scullery of the masterpiece English Settlement. It means to glance through fifteen years of a career concentrated, in the announcement of a spring album, into a winter compilation, The Tiny Circus Of Life. The metamorphosis of the woodlice.

Les Inrockuptibles: You do not like to show yourself, you have not played on stage for ten years. What are you still doing in the world of pop?

Andy Partridge: No idea. I feel like a blundering prehistoric creature, lost in a ridiculously mean world of pop. Now, we are dinosaurs, but if you are interested in dinosaurs, why not? From a musical point of view, we are now much more selfish. We must neglect the audience. In the beginning, we were willing to do some pirouettes for the record companies, but we felt we did not look the part. We did not feel at ease in the role of idols; I could not bear the idea of being idolized. That is all over. But since we sell more and more records, our stubbornness proves us right.

LI: When did you decide to go back into your shell?

A: In 1982, when I decided to stop playing on stage. I realized we were not destined for this pop life, for fooling around, for this professional teenager job. We were so aware of and ill at ease with being in the window. We are three woodlice, we work very well hidden. But as soon as we are in the light, the three woodlice simply do not know what to do.

LI: By existing only in studio, are you not afraid of becoming a navelist and claustrophobic band, without flesh nor blood, an abstraction?

A: We are a band without flesh nor blood in the sense that one can not come and smell our sweat on stage. We exist in a more magical way, by capturing these songs on tapes. I have never been to concerts, live presentations do not do anything at all for me; I prefer to play at home with a desk pad, writing or drawing. This disappearance from public life may have made us less adventurous, but what we do is more genuine. Like a tree with deeper roots, perhaps less loud, but a damn good tree, strong, resistant to storms and to diseases.

LI: In the beginning, did you like to play on stage?

A: I began by telling myself, "Great! That's what I'd always dreamt of when I was a schoolboy!". And we toured a lot, all around the world. Then, the lack of financial fall-outs, combined with the lack of real recognition, combined with the lack of self-confidence, the confusion and the fright that my presence on stage brought to me, all that made a rather dangerous cocktail... I hence drew the conclusion: I was not made for that kind of life. On the other hand, I think I am made for songwriting and for the cottage industry of music, if such a category exists. I announced the death of the pop band, and the birth of the artisan.

LI: Has your family life been another reason for your withdrawal?

A: I must have felt it was time for me to start a family. I now have two children; I would like to have more... Let's say at least six, but I do not have enough room for them, unless I put them in the drawers. When everything goes wrong, it is a good way to win immortality. Immortality for everybody, the immortality for common people. I love children, well, mine, because I hate others'.

LI: Had you thought of the mystery and the cult following such behaviour would create?

A: I first thought, as did our record company, that we simply were going to disappear from the surface of the Earth. I thought, "Here it is, we had our time". But the fact that we had remained in the shadow for so long has made people come towards us. We were not shouting to people, "Hey! Buy us!" any more, but people were going towards us, saying, "Excuse us, but we would like very much to buy you." In the shadow we have become exotic creatures, we have been transformed into rare birds [laughs]... People are more fascinated by what we have to offer.

LI: Do you like the mystery around you?

A: It is very pleasant, because I do not have to be a public character, to tour, to be "rock 'n' roll". I can then avoid this routine, this mediocrity of rock 'n' roll. I was very relieved to leave this spiral which, in my opinion, seemed to be negative. I then thought that the band would very quickly fall into pieces. Honestly, I really did not see us continuing to record music, at least not as well as we have done since. I simply could not imagine stuff like Skylarking. I thought it was the end.

MY LACES, MY TIE

Les Inrockuptibles: A lot of bands from your generation had become very popular, before they broke up. At the time of Drums & Wires and "Making Plans For Nigel" in '80, many predicted fabulous success for you.

Andy Partridge: At one time we would have given everything to become the gods of pop. But I never had any regrets because my ambitions have changed. Some live on this pop god status, which I found pitiful. We have nothing to do with the present English charts. Or even with those from the twenty last years. We surely have more in common with the 60's, or maybe the 50's or 40's. Or even the last century.

LI: When one listens to your very first albums, from '77 to '79, one is struck by their narrow-mindedness: they sound like caricatures of what was then called new-wave.

A: You can put it down to our age, to the age of the music which was in the air, to the fact that we had written only a very few songs, and that we were learning on stage. Those were the albums of some guys who wanted to be pop gods for a day, before saying "Goodbye, and Thank You!" We wanted to come to the party, to make noise, to be noticed, throwing vases on the floor, pulling the carpet out. But as soon as people knew who we were, we could be ourselves. When I am shown the first album, I see a conceited teenager who comes from the hairdresser, his face covered with spots, disguised in the fashion of the day. I am told, "Look! It's you!" "No! Help!"... We were very shy, so we made a shell out of noise. The songs from the first albums, they were not really us, they were some ideas we projected on other people, on other things. We progressively became more personal by dint of writing.

LI: In the beginning, the only songwriter you referred to was Bob Dylan, with a crushed cover of "All Along The Watchtower": more a V-sign than a tribute.

A: We have cut up this lamb of sacrifice... with love and hate. I like the atmosphere and the lyrics of this song very much, I find that it is a marvelous monument, gigantic, medieval and futuristic, a moment of History. I wanted to play this song and to mess it up at the same time, to break it and to own the pieces: nothing flower-power, hippy, or which would sound like Hendrix's cover. I wanted to smash it into tiny pieces, to dissect the machine and see how it worked. But we just squashed it. We wanted to manhandle the old: "Listen, we can take your old-fashioned stuff and make something far better with it". To squash it, that was undoubtly all we were able to do. It was the usual conflict of generations, we wanted to take their place by kicking them in the privates, telling them, "Get off! It's our turn!", with the arrogance and the violence of young men who cannot express themselves. We saw ourselves as very attractive young men who submitted pop to their experiences, dismantling pop to reassemble it in another way. Tearing off the side wings to put them behind, taking off the wheels and putting them in front, tearing off the bonnet and throwing it away. We were looking more for admiration than for esteem. Or esteem in a childish and arrogant manner, like these kids who make themselves noticed only by drinking: a desperate willing to make oneself heard, to take over something. Afterwards, progressively, we became impassioned for what a song is, for its beauty and its sacred nature, all that we were not aware of.

LI: One now gets the feeling you hide behind your songs.

A: Our songs form a multi-coloured armour, the best one we can make; this shell protects us. It protects us from the external world. Inside I am a mollusk. I am paralyzed by the outside world, this wonderful and horrifying place, this paradise crowded with monsters. Terrifying and very exciting, like a fair for a young child. I need armour to face it, so sometimes I drink. Now more than ever, I know how men, the most violent animals, can be horrible. I find it very hard to go out in the world, emotionally naked.

LI: You claim to be normal people, especially yourself, whereas it is obvious you have a strong personality.

A: People tell me I have a strong personality, but I am only a goldfish, I cannot get out of my bowl to see. I do not act, in this sense; I do not intentionally change my feelings to affect people, to manipulate them. It is just like clothes that I cannot take off.

LI: Unlike the two other members of XTC, you seem to like to put on an act, to show yourself, to dress up, to play with this personality.

A: Providing that I feel like conceiving the theater myself, the world in which I show myself. I like to feel that I control it, that I can snap my fingers to remove it instantly and stop putting on an act. When this is the case, I feel good. Dave and Colin are very calm people. If there were people as boisterous as I am in the band, we would scuffle too much.

LI: There is a contradiction between the pleasure you get putting on an act, playing with the images and the appearances, and your deep unwillingness to be a public character.

A: When I am really in public, I feel as if I am losing myself, wasting away and disappearing. I have got to keep away from it if I want to keep in touch with myself, so as not to crumble. The show must be reserved for a limited audience, a handful of persons that I know, that I feel for, maybe that I trust. I have the feeling that the "mass audience" is only a huge, blind and clumsy slug, a primitive animal being, unintelligent and indifferent.

LI: Were you an exuberant child?

A: I could say yes. When I was unable to do something, I took some food from the kitchen to bring to school to pay my mates with for doing it on my behalf: to lace my shoes, to knot my tie. I was good enough to swap all that I needed, physically or mentally. I certainly was an ugly kid, and I had terrifying fits of hysterics. Religion worried me a lot, I saw God and angels in the sky many times, staring at me severely. I was a child so anxious about everything that I had visions and hallucinations.

MY GUITAR IS A FISHING ROD

Andy Partridge: At the beginning of the adolescence, one becomes suddenly mad about something, the promotional clip of Jumpin' Jack Flash or the B-side of a Small Faces EP. . . All these little unquantifiable events, the aura radiated by a band, the black and white photographs on the back of a record sleeve that one gazes at for hours, thinking, "But I want to be like that! I want to be him!". It is a way that teenagers need to connect to the outside world, to the rebels. I have been through it too. But the rebel has now become a selling argument. Bands appear as cartoon characters. What is proposed is ready-cooked rebellion: "Which rebellion would you like?" There are now so many variations, for all tastes. When one is young, since one wants to grow faster, one splashes himself with the perfume of rebellion; all that annoys older people is worth taking. I lapsed into it a lot. I gloated at the thought that my mother would be admitted to the asylum as soon as I put the Sun Ra Arkestra album on.

LI: What was your first musical shock?

A: In the middle of this musical ocean, I remember some islands. When I was a child, there was no rock'n'roll on the English radio. The only interesting things were innovative records with strange voices or crazy lyrics. Otherwise, there was only music for the old. As a child, I mostly have listened to these innovative records, like the Randells' Martian Bop. I was 10 when I saw A Hard Day's Night with the Beatles. It was very exciting, but I didn't know what to do with the excitement. At about 13 or 14, the Monkees appeared: I thought it would be easy to form a musical gang with other guys, to use the guitar as a fishing rod for girls. I thought I could be like one of the Monkees, the Who, the Stones. It seemed easy, it was the only kit needed to fish for them in the street or in the audience. The adolescent with wild hormones that I was had found how to succeed in life. I loved women, but I didn't know exactly how to catch them. But it remained very hard for me, because I was excessively intimidated by women, for me they are another race, from another planet, they are so wonderful they still terrorize me today. When I was adolescent, if a girl talked to me, I would shake all over and lose my tongue. I would like to found the religion of the admiration of women, entirely devoted to the cult of women, with breast-shaped churches with vaginal doors.

LI: How did you react to the punk movement?

A: It happened at the very right time for me, because I was worked up for some years, after having been exposed to the New York Dolls, the Stooges and the MC5 at the beginning of the 70's. When punk invaded England, its energy -- and not much its blind and silly fashion -- was the dynamite I needed to explode.

LI: In the beginning with XTC, did you feel close to any other bands?

A: Not really, since even if I liked the energy, I found that what most of them said were rubbish in fashion. We too used a lot of empty declarations, we were at the age where we did not know how to express ourselves. I have never really admired the other bands, but I liked the noise and energy. I hated the way they proclaimed there had never been any music before '77. It showed their stupidity. In England, they like it if you behave as a moron, it's supposed to be a way of being genuine.

LI: Are there bands now which belong to the same family as yours?

A: I think I have more affinity with the bands I listened to at the beginning of my adolescence, the Kinks or the Beatles, whose evolution I like a lot. I feel I am following a similar path. What I listen to most now is some jazz and music from the Renaissance. I have got some very good records of music from the 15th, the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. I love its taste of earth. Something man has lost, he is not linked to earthly cycles any more.

LI: How did you react when, two or three years ago, ecstasy became a very fashionable word?

A: I do not scorn this kind of movement, I realize that technology has progressed at such a speed that the big chill is to mount the technology of computers and samplings.

LI: In many of the Manchester bands there was also an important '60's part.

A: The image was well thought-out. Their parents had surely told them about the golden age. These kids who begin to make music think their parents had known nirvana in the '60's, where everything was paradisiacal, groovy and psychedelic, where the healthy drugs did not spoil the brain. Then they play with this image, just disguising themselves with it. In the '60's, all centred on the songs. These bands have all the external signs, the rhythms, the wah-wah they took out of the drawer, etc. . . They adopt the worst aspects of the '60's, the fashion or the haircut, while the '60's were another thing, people who appropriated music to build their own world on it.

A MASK AND ARMOUR

Les Inrockuptibles: Your forthcoming album, Nonsuch, will be released three years after the previous one, as usual. Is it perfectionism, lack of inspiration or laziness?

Andy Partridge: I humbly apologize for this delay. But none of those reasons is the right one. It is a rather sad story, a big melodrama. We were ready two years ago, but our English record company refused all our songs. Then, we were unlucky with the approached producers. I am very annoyed with it, because I would like to release an album every six months, I feel I am gagged. The ideal solution would be two albums every year, but the situation is for the most part beyond my control. I would like to release a huge amount of albums: if the audience is not seduced by quality, it will give way beneath quantity. I will study the American zen: always more.

LI: Todd Rundgren, who produced Skylarking in 1986, had a very precise concept for that record.

A: While listening to the demos, he noticed that a lot of songs were precisely situated in time and space: in the open air, during the summer, in fine weather, each one was related to a precise hour of the day. He chose a very precise order and asked us to perform these songs one after the other, without any pause between them. It was very tiresome to achieve, because Todd Rundgren's ego was huge enough to keep everybody else in the background. Despite the difficulties getting along with him, he may have been our best producer thanks to his brilliant ideas about arrangements and his overall view of the project. We need somebody from the outside, the goldfish would not know the shape of its bowl if he had nobody outside to tell him about it. We are three goldfishes.

LI: It is rather astounding you had not been working with more nutty producers. When you were immersed in your experimental bath, you never thought about appealing to people like Brian Eno?

A: Brian Eno had been contacted to produce our second album, GO 2. We met him, he came to a few concerts, but he explained to us that we did not need anybody. I think he emphasized what we had in mind but that our modesty prevented us from saying. In the beginning, we had thought it would have been a great honour to work with someone like Brian Eno, very innovative, with good taste, who ploughs his furrow, as farmers say. We have become what we are with the passing years, with our way, we are like nobody else. I know who my heroes are, I am old enough to recognize what has had a lot of influence on me: the Kinks, the Beatles, loads of singles from the end of the 60's, some noises and psychedelic wailings two minutes long. Some strangeness of a day, like Tomorrow's "My White Bicycle", or some psychedelic incarnation of the Small Faces. The psychedelic singles had a great impact on me. With the passing of years, jazz from the 50's and be-bop have become to come back, all that I had been injected with when I was young, by my father, all that I had initially fought against. And recently, during the last five or six years, I realized the influence of the Beach Boys.

LI: Each of your albums is packaged with a strong image. Which one is the most representative of the spirit of XTC?

A: They are all very light and level-headed, you will never see one of us wearing latex, with chainsaws and wigs, it is always politely English. They all have tried, in their time, to approach this spirit as nearly as possible. Except for the sleeve of Skylarking, which was not the original project. The initial sleeve opened at the top: there were then two fronts, or two backs. On one side, pubic hairs of a woman photographed very closely, with meadow flowers tangled, on the other one, pubic hairs of a man with flowers tangled. You then could choose the side you wanted to see. But we had problems with our record company and the record shops. Yet, one could see almost nothing, all was in the imagination. . . I found that it nicely summarized the time, the place and the feeling of the album, and there was a Lady Chatterley's Lover side, mischievous outdoor sex.

LI: Yet sex is not a primordial theme of XTC, your albums are almost asexual.

A: It is because I find that a lot of pop musicians become too easily besotted with sex. It is after all just one of the marvellous physical and spiritual functions, in the same way as eating, shitting, reading, listening. I cannot see why nine pop musicians out of ten concentrate themselves on their cock, that is not in the image of life. . . Our next sleeve, Nonsuch, reproduces a castle which does not exist any more. It was called "the summit of ostentation". It is a very beautiful word, but also one of my favorite record companies, the American record company Nonesuch, which releases this old music I like a lot. I then discovered it was the most marvellous castle ever, covered with gold, sculptures and paints, it looked like a fairy tale's wedding cake. It was built by that tyrant, Henry the eight, who razed a village for it. The edifice quickly disappeared, it exists only on two second-rate drawings.

LI: A much more complicated and much richer image than the one which ornated the sleeve of English Settlement.

A: It was a chalk sculpture on a Cornwall hill, from the iron age. Iron age man pulled up the grass to expose the chalk ground: a piece of art and a very primitive sign of a village or a group of persons beginning to live and work together.

LI: This sleeve is very representative of the album and of the very beautiful acoustic, rich and rough, sound. How do you explain this radical change?

A: If that record was made of wood, the first, White Music, was made of fluorescent plastic, with an excessively shiny surface, and rather impersonal, because the songs were very early attempts of songwriting. Progressively the songs were less and less intended to make an an effect -- with noisy bells, fluorescent lights and all this stuff. With English Settlement, we finally made music to please ourselves and which, apparently paradoxically, affected much more people.

LI: On the album, one of the tracks is "All of A Sudden". This change happened all of a sudden?

A: For the most part, because the previous album, Black Sea, had been in my mind the last record for a tour, the last time I would ever write songs to play them on stage, with two guitars, bass and drums, harmonies to a minimum. It was our concert on vinyl: a perfectly oiled machine, geared for performance at that time. When we were writing, Colin and I were very much fed up with the incessant tours and wanted to try different musical textures, maybe more difficult to reproduce on stage: acoustic guitars, more keyboards, more subtleties. A lot of bands of that time, people like Aztec Camera, became conscious that that was something to follow, that the acoustic guitar brought a bit of fresh blood to a world made of electricity, synths and electronics. We were looking for a more personal domain. We spent more time at home, less on the road. Since English Settlement, the English countryside setting is much more present in our music.

LI: The songs that ends the album, "Snowman", is amazingly personal, you seldom expose yourself so much.

A: I found it hard to take the mask away. I usually wear it to protect my feelings. I call myself "them", or "she", I even sometimes hide behind an inanimate object. A way of writing behind a mask of metaphors. From time to time, the mask slides a bit and then I simply must be myself. It may be wrong to think one increases his strength with armour and a mask. Even if it was hard to let so much out of myself, I felt stronger by getting away from this stuff. I had difficulties with "Hold Me My Daddy" because I imagined my father listening it. He could have taken it for weakness, to expose my feelings in front of him in such a way.

LI: It didn't happen?

A: No, I am from a family rather not much emotional, we had difficulties to show our emotions, we were real icebergs. The English are for the most of time icebergs, then imagine frozen icebergs [laughs] . . . In my family, we had difficulty to give a cuddle, to say what we felt.

LI: You say you have a very ordinary everyday life. Is it really true?

A: Yes absolutely, very ordinary, with the only difference being that I do not work at the factory but in a pop band. I try to immerse myself in the world of children, to guide them, to show them the world.

LI: No vices?

A: I drink a bit, that is all. I have never taken any drugs. I had consumed prescribed medicines for ten or eleven years, valium. The docs prescribed it to me because of a nervous system in poor condition. I did not know what these tablets were, but I was addicted to it during all my adolescent years. Until an American tour. My wife, at that time my girlfriend, did not like to see me taking all these tablets, increasing the doses. She threw everything in the toilets one night. I became raving mad, I turned all the hotel upside down thinking she had thrown away my emotional crutch. After feeling very bad for two weeks, I felt good. I now distrust medicines and drugs, even if I sometimes drink a lot.

THE VERDURE AND THE DAIRY PRODUCE

Andy Partridge: England belongs to another century, it's one hundred years behind the times. The only other country which I could imagine living in is Holland. I like the verdure and the dairy produce. England has been sacrificed to cars. They have devoured everything. This country is a huge salad bowl progressively devoured by cars which proliferate like worms.

Les Inrockuptibles: Do you like the cultural insularity of England?

A: We are terribly arrogant, we need to believe that what we have invented is the best thing ever done, even if it may last only one week. England is a highly productive cattle-breading area, but we never know what to do with the Frankenstein's creatures once we have created them. We have the terrible habit of bringing out something new, and saying it is the best thing ever, just to see it fall off its pedestal two weeks later, because it had no substance. Saying that in fact it was awful, that we had never really liked it. We do not have an ear critical enough to really listen to it at the beginning, we always make up our minds in a rush.

LI: Your influences are strictly English, nothing American.

A: I like the Beach Boys' music, when it begins to sound like Handel's or Bach's. The best of the Beach Boys did not sound American, it was rather in the tradition of European classical music. America has nothing to offer to me. I feel jammed in England, for better or for worse, standing stock-still in English history. I know that a great part of English history is very far from brilliant, but I feel I cannot get out. And there is something satisfying in my imprisonment. I like history. It is very enjoyable to search it, to exhibit all its atrocities and to cover yourself with it. Now that I am old and decrepit, I am interested in older and more decrepit stuff.

LI: American people like Phil Spector seem to have a musical spirit close to yours, in the sense of melody, the arrangements, the combination of simplicity and complexity. Do you like these eccentricities of American music?

A: "Americanism"? It's true it is fascinating, but I do not completely understand the language spoken by Americanism, people like Spil Factor [laughs] . . . I like, but I do not really understand, I remain an external listener, I cannot participate because I do not understand the wheels of it. You must come from there to really participate. It remains a mystery for me. I never had any particular admiration for Spector, whom I took for rather trigger-happy [laughs]. . . Captain Beefheart is in my opinion the greatest American poet, he had a way of filtering, concentrating the Americana, old and modern, into some little pieces of music, three minutes long; I admire him enormously for that. His music is a never ending bomb, surprising one from the first to the last noise. I do need elements of rigour in order to understand music, but I like to lift the lid and find surprises. Some people do not appreciate uncertainty, do not like to look under a stone to find something marvellous. I like to put it in music. I know we have been criticized for that, but I cannot help being myself, so love it or hate it! [laughs] I am easily bored, so my favourite music is the one that takes you by the ear to bring you to another horizon. You lift up the lid and suddenly there is something marvellous in the box, something you did not expect.

LI: You could not live in America?

A: I would feel too much like a stranger there. England, with all its flaws, is now entirely part of my own system. I realize that it is a weird place, where everything seems to work under different rules from the rules of the rest of the world. Each time I come back here after a journey, it is as if someone threw a bucket full of sweet water at my face. "Humm. . . the taste of England!" It is a sickly drink but with a subtle flavour. The English race is now the only one which does not understand us. Americans do not understand the way we act, but that is what seduces them. These Americans like to feed themselves with anglicism, with fancy England: the tea towels, the beefeaters, the HP sauce, the London cabs. . . I am sure they like all this comic book anglicism in our music. That is the language we talk. They must see England like a negative of Hollywood, the theater of ultimate decadence.

LI: In France, the Monty Python symbolize the spirit of English imagination. Do they too, in your opinion?

A: English are this way: the Monty Python put the English under a microscope and reveal the stupidity of all these mannerisms. David Lean's movies and Dickens' novels are the quintessence of distilled anglicism. David Lean's version of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist is dreamt anglicism in a deadly dose. Throw it and anglicism splashes all over the place. Nitroglycerin of English. I need to watch his Great Expectations every two months to reaffirm my vision of the world. Among the contemporaries, there is also Mike Leigh, very embarrassing, who puts his finger exactly where he has to.

LI: Your main influence is the rock of the 60's. Yet one can think that the original rock of the 60's was American, that the English just adapted it.

A: The best music of the 50's was American, but by dint of copying it clumsily, we finally ended with something much more exciting and innovative in the middle of the 60's in England. Then, during the 70's and the 80's, it was musical ping-pong. But we won the 60's play. Even Jimi Hendrix had to leave the United States to settle in England. I did not like Dylan a lot, I found he copied too much Donovan [laughs]. . . That is what I say to Dylan fans to annoy them. Ray Davies has always been an extraordinary songwriter, I have a relationship of love and hate with the Kinks, marvellous and sometimes awful. Yet, I believe in musicians who get better with the age, in good artisans. I am still feeling I am learning and progressively coming near to songwriters like Burt Bacharach, a marvellous guy. I would like to write music that, as his own does, would follow the meanders of the most beautiful melodic landscapes. The song is dying, yet everything is here. You now hear only sung grooves, which are not songs. My conception of a song is very much out of fashion.

LI: You seem to be obsessed by growing old. Are you anxious?

A: Without a doubt, but I try to get rid of it by thinking one can get better with the age. Nothing is worst than rotten fruit, but nothing is better than an old wine bottle, at least until it is completely emptied. I hope I will not become a rotten fruit, I want to improve. I hope that is what happens to our music. I am paralyzed at the idea of not having exorcized the ghosts of all of the people who I admire, of not having been better than them. Paralyzed at the idea I could not defeat them in a song duel, like knights in armour. I am about to equal some of them, but I want to defeat all of them [laughs]. . . The task is long, so I sharpen my weapons, I want to defeat Ray Davies, Lennon and McCartney, Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson. . . I want all these people dead at my feet.

THE END.

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