Freedom begins at 40

XTC claim they would be quite content if they were never interviewed, never photographed and never filmed again. It is not perhaps the most sensible approach for a (still) working rock band, and definitely not the most auspicious of beginnings to a transatlantic phone interview. But you can't really blame the group for feeling aggrieved, not to say fatalistic.

It is 23 years since the band, from Swindon, Wiltshire, were signed up by Virgin Records and squeezed awkwardly - and never entirely convincingly - onto the punk bandwagon (they knew too many chords). Since then, the lead singer, Andy Partridge, and bassist, Colin Moulding, have seen enough false dawns to know better than to expect much more than critical indifference or jaded approval.

That their new album, Wasp Star: Apple Venus Volume 2, is one of the greatest they've produced will no doubt be a source of quiet satisfaction to its creators, and to the small, rather troglodytic army of true believers who've stuck with them through good times and bad. XTC last troubled the singles charts in 1982 with Senses Working Overtime, another of those jaunty, slightly infuriating singalonga songs that Partridge occasionally managed to insinuate onto the playlists and into the more spongelike recesses of your brain. At the time, the band were on a commercial and creative roll: their previous album, Black Sea, had kept the record company happy by spawning three hit singles - Generals and Majors, Towers of London and Sgt Rock - and only Partridge's panic attacks during the subsequent American tour, brought on by acute stage fright, gave any cause for concern.

What happened over the ensuing decade was the familiar mix of crossed wires, hubris and naivety that characterises the relationship between the music industry and the pop musician. Speaking about the episode now from a New York hotel room, the 46-year-old Partridge can afford to laugh about it, though rich seams of bitterness and unresolved anger are easy both to locate and to arouse.

Unwilling to tour, and thus unable to promote his records, the singer's dealings with Virgin became increasingly strained, verging at times on the surreal. "At various stages they'd ask us to do things with our sound so they could make more money from us. First it was the Police, then Simple Minds got flung in briefly. But then suddenly it was, 'We want you to sound like ZZ Top - guitars are coming back in, and we know you can do guitars.'"

The band's characteristic reaction was to go in the opposite direction, so that the traces of bucolic, folk-infused psychedelia detectable in their early work now received full, madcap prominence. It ran riot over 1986's Skylarking, for which Virgin had roped in Todd Rundgren as producer in the hope that the American could somehow magic a hit out of what it saw as increasingly unpromising material.

Rundgren's response was to go native, to Virgin's despair, but in the process he captured the abiding and unmistakable Englishness of XTC's work, which to fans is as powerful and acute a chronicle of our national pastimes and peculiarities as anything by the Beatles, the Who or the Kinks.

But Virgin was not impressed. Relations with the band dissolved still further, yet even when the group went on strike, the suits refused to release them from their contract. "In the end," says Partridge, "I think they let us go because they'd just got sick of us bad-mouthing them in the press and ringing them up and just begging, abjectly begging, 'Please let us out, we will never make any money for your label.'"

It took five years for Virgin to relent. When it did, XTC's pent-up creativity poured forth in the string-drenched, unstructured glory that was last year's Apple Venus Volume 1, released on the tiny Cooking Vinyl label. So how - and why - do the band still do it: two songwriters in their mid-forties, raising families in modest terraced houses in Swindon and sitting in their garden sheds to record quintessentially English songs about quintessentially English things? It's certainly not the money. "All the people I knew in my street have made more money than me," Partridge insists. "One is a computer salesman, another's an anaesthetist and one's a flight simulator, whatever that means. They'd all go, 'Aah, you're a big star now, when you gonna take us down the pub, you cheap bastard?' If only. And now I've found out that Virgin owns my songs till 70 years after my death. So even my kids don't benefit, not unless they live to some freakish Guinness Book of Records age."

It would be heartening to think that all this will change - that Radio 1 will playlist the glorious, once-heard-never-forgotten The Man Who Murdered Love; that other new songs on the album, such as the brazenly priapic My Brown Guitar, will propel Wasp Star into the charts and Partridge into his rightful place in the pantheon of great British songwriters. But don't bet on it. Partridge certainly isn't.

"Yes, there's still a little person in there who screams, 'What's wrong with you f***ers, why aren't you buying my record?' but it's very little now. In any case, liking XTC has always been the love that dares not speak its name."

The man who admits that as an adolescent he fantasised constantly about being a pop star is fluent on the venality of the record industry, and the increasing ghettoisation of music - "It's just their way of slicing the meat up finer and finer to sell to select markets. Soon it'll be, 'Oh yes, we only listen to ambient-garage-operabilly.' But all that will ever interest us is the music we make; that's our only connection with Mr & Mrs Musically Appreciative."

His gift for the scurrilous anecdote is in fine fettle. Apropos of nothing he embarks on a salacious tale about a former manager's cameo in a blue movie, with a rocking horse. And the story of what lies behind the devotional song Church of Women on Wasp Star is charmingly evocative and poignant. "I think if people have to have a religion, why not make it the worship of women?" he says, before recalling his own first carnal communion. "I was very frightened of women when I was a teenager. I lost my virginity late, with a girl who insisted on leaving the bedroom curtains open. There was this bloke mowing the lawn next door, and she kept saying, 'Keep your bum down or he'll see and tell me dad.' Which wasn't ideal."

Today, the composer who is responsible for some of the most perceptive and beautiful British songwriting of the past two decades remains as indefatigably chippy as ever. "We've always been patronised as yokels from Swindon: 'It's a joke town, therefore they must be a joke band, and now they're a joke band in their forties who are past it.' " Then, in the same breath, Partridge makes a typically self-deprecating remark that seems to sum up his inherently contradictory approach to his chosen career. "Mind you," he says, his Wiltshire burr lilting down the crackling phone line, "Swindon is what the word bypass was invented for."