Carpies in the Forest: The World According to XTC by Ray Ellis from Upbeat, January 1981
Contributed by Brad Hancock

"You want to know what I think about handwriting?" XTC's singer-guitarist Andy Partridge asks me in what I take to be mock seriousness. "It's one of the more intelligent questions we've been asked on this tour."

Truth to tell, I hadn't really come here to discuss the intricacies of penmanship. What I need is in-depth thoughts on rock'n'roll as socio-political manifestos, controversial opinions and all that other "relevant' stuff. I also need a gift from heaven to make my tape recorder start working. It had performed like a real trooper when I tested it not more than an hour before, but now, in textbook Murphy's Law fashion, it just sits there, a cube of plastic that I can almost hear laughing at me. As I bring out my notepad and pen for an old-style interview, I find myself feeling a close affinity for the scientist in the Beatle's "Help!" whose gadgets never work when he really needs them.

And Andy Partridge insists on telling me about his handwriting. "I can't write with me letters joined," he says, his finger writing invisibly in the air. I see what he means. It's impossible to make out a word of what he's just written. "I have to write in all capital letters, like this," and his finger moves through the air again. "I just can't write joined," he sighs, resigned to the fact.

Okay, fine. "So that's not really your writing on the lyric sheet of the Black Sea album, then?" I ask, finding myself becoming involved in the subject of graphology.

"No, no," Partridge chuckles. "Somebody in the record company's graphics department did that. I thought it was a bit sloppy, what with the scratchings-out and that. But it did give an air of authenticity, don't you think?"

I couldn't agree more.

Having writ, the hand moves on.

XTC is currently in the midst of a tour across the United States with the Police and tonight, November 12th, they played to a capacity crowd in Dallas' McFarlin Auditorium. It was the first time they had performed in Dallas and, though well-received after they played a few songs, the audience at first didn't seem to know quite what kind of band XTC was. Opening with "Outside World," from the Drums and Wires LP, the band launched a battery of songs at a relatively well-scrubbed audience from all four of their albums, including their latest effort, Black Sea. Though XTC performed strongly throughout the entire set, it wasn't until they unleashed their "Outer Limits"-style visual effects that the crowd began to really react to them. By the time they had played "Respectable Street" a few daring souls were dancing in the aisles. And when the opening chords of "Making Plans for Nigel" echoed through the auditorium, it looked as if no one was still sitting. XTC had taken an audience who were, for the most part, unfamiliar with the band and made them true believers.

Since 1977, XTC has risen from a London pub band that didn't quite really fit into the punk scene to an international act that regularly sell out large halls in Europe, and are rapidly attaining star status here. Throughout it all, they have steadfastly maintained their identity as a band, writing and playing a style of music that goes beyond labels. Structurally and lyrically, XTC's music is unique unto itself. Yet only Dave Gregory, who plays guitar, has any sort of formal training, and that in viola and violin.

"The rest of us just...started playing," Partridge says. "I don't think we play anything very complicated. I keep it pretty simple because I'm basically lazy. If we sound unusual, it's probably because we haven't had a lot of formal training. It's like an old carpy sitting in the forest all alone and he starts making pottery or something. That's what we are - musical old carpies."

"We've been influenced by a variety of things - beatniks, jazz, The Monkees, any old sixties music, psychedelia of the English tea party variety..."

"And my mum's fur coat!" interjects Terry Chambers, the group's drummer.

Fur coats notwithstanding, XTC's music is a potpourri of all these styles melted down and reshaped into a sound that is at once identifiable yet somewhat alien to ears that are used to typical radio fare. They write about a variety of subjects: love ("Ten Feet Tall ", "No Language In Our Lungs"), electronic surveillance ("Real By Reel"), the status quo ("Respectable Street"), East/West relations ("Living Through Another Cuba"), apathy ("Outside World") and warmongers ("Generals and Majors"). In short, XTC's style is, to use an already overworked cliche, "music for the eighties" in the purest sense. Regardless of the subject matter, however, there is always a thread of humor running through their songs. "Living Through Another Cuba," for instance, details the current crisis between America and the Soviets from a British point of view. But the song is uptempo, almost celebratory.

"It's like the tennis match between Connors and...whoever," says Partridge. "You've got all these odd stray balls batted back and forth with no control over where they'll end up. So all you can do is laugh about it - there's really nothing else you can do about it."

Despite the humor inherent in XTC's songs, they are not without a fair amount of controversy. "Making Plans For Nigel", a song basically about losing control over one's destiny, raised a bit of a stir in England because of its references to British Steel. Colin Moulding, who plays bass for the band and also wrote the song, shrugs it off in the typical manner of all the members of XTC.

"Oh, it was just a foul-up in the BBC computer. As soon as the bad press came out we dropped eight places down in the charts, from fifteen to twenty-three," Moulding laughs. "But they got the computer rewired and we came back up to seventeen, so it all worked out."

I'm beginning to understand why these guys get more popular with each album they release. Adversity slides off them like water off a duck's back. It's obvious by now that the members of XTC are Britishers in the old sense. I can picture them sitting in the Gentlemen's Clubs of turn of the century London, sipping brandy and lightheartedly discussing the politics of the British Empire. There's a lot of whistling in their songs - the "stiff upper lip" sort of whistling that the POW's of the movie "The Bridge On The River Kwai" engaged in to aggravate their tormentors.

Indeed, XTC's songs are filled with obscure references to film and comic books (one of the more obvious is Black Sea's "Sgt. Rock").

"Yeah, I love old comic books," Partridge concedes. "Back home, I have several thousand. It was the art in 'em that I liked."

From there, the interview kind of veered away from rock music and socio-political manifestos and moved toward the relative merits of comics art greats Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert and Krazy Kat as historical perspective and things like that...childhood dreams that have helped Partridge cope with things like impending repeats of missile crises.

We're sitting in a backstage dressing room chugging beer as we talk. But for a moment, just a fleeting instant, it feels like we're in a Gentleman's Club sipping brandy.

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