The Agony And The XTC - CD Review, 1989

Dave Judgement (Simon's Note : Day Of Judgement? Oh how clever - that explains the millionth use of the bloody "Agony / XTC" headline) settles down on a Swindon sofa with Andy Partridge, family man, toy soldier collector and the brains behind XTC and The Dukes Of Stratosphere.

A fish, a cow and a cockerel all look down as Andy Partridge ushers me into his front room. The room is furnished with three solidly tasteful Chesterfield sofas, and the watchful animals only exist as primitive paintings, perched precariously on a dado rail above our heads. Further along the rail there's a green plastic dinosaur, a china rabbit and a papier-mâché fish.

The mantelpiece is stacked with tapes and CDs, a Batman video and a model of Thomas The Tank Engine. Andy's large dog, Charlie Parker, bustles around, managing for the most part not to knock down the two children, Holly and Harry. Marianna (sic), Andy's wife arrives with home-made fudge brownies and mugs of coffee. Is this the much raunted (sic) rock 'n' roll lifestyle?

Things perk up somewhat after the usual polite formalities about the weather and new albums, when Andy lets slip the fact that he's actually a werewolf.

"In the old days I'd probably have been locked up," he grins, munching contentedly into his still warm fudge brownie, "because I wake up in the middle of night, howling, tearing at my skin, hammering into the walls. I just can't seem to switch my brain off. It used to terrify Marianne, when we were first married, but she's used to it now.

This wolfish aspect of Partridge's character seems to be the product of working too hard, which he invariably does while in the throes of creating music, such as Oranges And Lemons, XTC's new released double-album (full-length single CD).

It it's 12 year history, XTC has racked up several minor hit singles and sold albums consistently if not spectacularly. To their intense surprise, the 1987 album Skylarking took off like a rocket in America, rapidly overtaking sales of their previous releases.

"It was all down to a track I wasn't even particularly happy with," explains an evidently bemused Andy. "Dear God, which wasn't even on the English version on the album, was released as a single B-side, and people really got into it, almost by accident. So it went on the album in America and came out there as a single."

Which was when all hell broke loose.

"One Florida station had a call from a religious maniac who said he'd burn the place down if they played it again. Onward Christian Stormtroopers stuff. I had threatening letters and everything. It was quite frightening."

The song, revealing some of Andy's choice observation on religion, hit a tender spot in many Americans. The resulting furore helped rocket the single up the charts which, in turn, pushed sales of the album over 500,000. That might mean nothing to Michael Jackson but for us it's unheard of!"

Songs dealing with the nature of God rarely make the charts, but then Partridge has always been, to say the least, an unconventional character. Even in his teens, at a time when most of us lads were affecting James Dean airs, or endlessly combing our hair into Bryan Ferry flicks, he was wandering around Swindon "trying to look like Joseph Beuys, the German artist. Or Albrecht Durer - I struck poses like pictures I'd seen of him. The only pop star I ever tried to look like was Peter Tork of the Monkees. I had the shirt with the panel in the front, hipster trousers with a white plastic belt, and my dad's suede shoes which were too big, so I stuffed newspaper in the toes."

Partridge was so bright at school that he was sent to college a year early. "I was supposed to be studying modern art, but I spent most of the time getting seriously drunk on cider in the town gardens and learning to play an acoustic guitar. Or I'd steal lino from the lino-cuttings class and use it to make toy boats to sail on the pond."

One result of XTC's American success was the decision to record the new album in Los Angeles. "This is the highest-fi album we've ever done, because the people expect it of us now. We're into a different league, and we've made this album in the expectation that there's a large number of people who actually ant to hear it. In the past, we really made the for us; we just fired them out at the world hoping someone was listening."

For Partridge, getting XTC's music right comes before getting their sound perfect but, at home, he likes to listen via the best available medium. "I'm sold on CD. I have a Trio DP700 player, which I'm very happy with, but I'd really like to be able to record directly onto CD, assuming the industry ever allows it."

He is, however, not so sure about DAT. "I suspect either CD-R ('R' for recordable) or DAT will completely take over from the standard musicassette format, although I'm getting the feeling that DAT could well become the 8-track of the '90s. We're already so close to having digital recorders with no moving parts, that I can't help wondering if DAT might be squeezed out before it can find space in the market."

Whatever format you listen to it on, the new XTC album is called Oranges And Lemons. "The songs have almost a nursery rhyme quality about them. Now that I have two children, I'm constantly exposed to children's songs and I love the simplified way they work. I wanted to be less pompous about what we do anyway."

Another change has come over XTC with the new album. "We've turned into The Dukes Of Stratosphere," he explains, referring to XTC's spare time project, a 'psychedelic sixties' group which released two much-loved albums. "The new material sounds like XTC and The Dukes at the same time, so we've had to kill off The Dukes permanently."

Partridge and the other XTC members have always had a soft spot for what he calls "those 3-minute slabs of psychedelia which made my youth so purple," and those sounds have now been incorporated into the most accessible XTC music yet recorded.

To my observation that some Oranges And Lemons tracks sound almost Steely Dan-ish, Partridge nods. "When Colin first played me King For A Day, I thought the chord changes sounded very like Steely Dan, but everybody else said it was more like Tears For Fears. Our other guitarist Dave Gregory is an enormous Steely Dan fan and, if there's the vaguest hint of it in our songs, he'll tend to pull us towards it."

He's equally ready to concede that their recent single, Mayor Of Simpleton, was lyrically the same idea as Sam Cooke's Wonderful World, a hit in 1960. "Yes, but if someone does a painting of a dog, no art critic says there's already been a painting of a dog! What they want to know is whether or not it's a good painting of a dog, or maybe even the best painting of a dog. We thought Mayor Of Simpleton was a new idea until after we recorded. Then everybody started telling us about Wonderful World and, of course, it's absolutely true. But then, how many love songs are there that you can actually write?"

For that matter, how many types of song are there in the world anyway? "Not many, I don't think," he ruminates. "You get songs about being miserable, about being drunk or stoned, about dancing, money, sex, politics... All the major human activities really. You just have to look for new ways to approach them."

One new approach that has spontaneously emerged on Oranges And Lemons is that Andy has, to some extent, swapped roles with Colin Moulding. "Colin has written all the songs with the depresso-bongo lyrics, and I'm writing all the cheerful stuff."

Traditionally, Colin has been associated with XTC's more melodic and accessible material, "our soft-edged shrapnel" as Andy calls it. But, he reasons, "I think with the kids around I'm just not miserable enough to write that kind of thing at the moment."

Holly and Harry invade the front room yet again, so Andy and I retreat, climbing the stairs up to the loft room where he keeps his guitars, keyboards and tape recorders, but a vast collection of toy soldiers, occupying dozens of shelves on every wall. "I used to have hundreds of American comics as well, but I got rid of them and I think the soldiers are my main obsession now."

A brief inspection of the Swindon armed forces follows, in which general Partridge shows me everything from plastic spacemen that came free with Sugar Puffs in the late 1960s to hand-painted 17th century miniatures in a range named in honour of his group.

"I wrote off to this specialist firm and asked them if they made a certain kind of soldier," he recalls with obvious relish. "They wrote back saying no they didn't, but was I the Andy Partridge they thought I was?"

To cut a long story a tiny bit shorter, the upshot was that the company decided to start manufacturing a brand new range, and called it the XT Series, because it had been Andy's idea in the first place. "Best of all I get to buy them at a massive discount!" he laughs, "Otherwise I probably couldn't afford the damn things."

After ten reasonably successful years in the business, Partridge does quite nicely, thank you, but he's hardly a wealthy rock star. There have been times when he's been under pressure to buckle down and write a deliberately commercial hit, but he has always resisted the idea. "I couldn't live with myself if I thought I was doing this purely for the money. I have to enjoy what I'm doing. That's why I stopped touring - because I hated doing it."

His hatred of touring built up over a period of five years as XTC's audience grew. The early days of playing in small clubs were enjoyable, "in fact they were great fun, with a big F-U-N," he remembers, but facing 20,000 fans in a huge hall terrified him. "You couldn't see them, you felt you were playing like a robot. You can actually feel incredibly lonely in a hall with 20,000 people in front of you. So I stopped.

"Actually, if you work it out, we're selling more records now than when we we're touring. Maybe it put them off when they saw what we looked like." He laughs at the notion. "Obviously I made the right decision."

So far, the increased sales of Skylarking haven't changed Partridge's way of life. "I'm still Mr Aggressively Ordinary. The Genghis Khan of Nothing Particularly Happening. The people who live in this street probably think I'm a millionaire but, if you average it out over a year, I probably earn about the same as a long-distance lorry driver, or an office worker."

Out shopping in the streets of Swindon, it occasionally rankles when he meets old school friends who clearly expect him to be living in a mansion on a country estate." Who gives them these ideas? Most of the people you see on Top Of The Pops haven't got two pennies to rub together. It's all borrowed or advanced. The nicest things they own are probably the guitar around their neck and the clothes they stand in. After the show they go home to some grotty bedsit in London."

Andy Partridge seems destined to remain on of popular music's most enigmatic figures. As long as he goes on making music, there will be discerning listeners to buy it, but it's unlikely he'd ever deliberately change his music in order to reach a wider audience. It's almost as if he doesn't want the fame that would accompany success on the scale U2 or Pet Shop Boys.

"Certainly. I've come to the conclusion that this is a hobby which keeps my head above water. I'll do the bits I enjoy doing, the writing and recording, but I won't tour and I won't be seen in fashionable night-clubs just to get my name in the gossip columns. I think I've earned those privileges."

All original work is acknowledged as being the copyright of the originator.