THE HOT SEAT … XTC’s ANDY PARTRIDGE, Sydney Sun Herald, June 2000
Contributed by Peter Holmes

 XTC formed in England’s Swindon 25 years ago and in the early 1980s had a series of hits including Making Plans for Nigel, Senses Working Overtime and Generals and Majors. In 1992 the band’s founding pair Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding began a 7-year strike, refusing to record for (now) ex-label Virgin.

YOU STILL IN SWINDON?

Yes, unfortunately. I must have committed some terrible sin in past life because I find myself still here.

WHAT BECAME OF THE PENHILL ESTATE YOU GREW UP ON?

Oh Jesus, you’re joking. I’m going to go on a pilgrimage one day and wander around the alleyways and lanes and freak myself out. I’m putting it off a bit because they say don’t go back.

YOU THANK ‘SPOOFY’ ON THE NEW ALBUM.

(Laughs) The house I live in is populated with an enormous amount of make-believe characters. Already I can hear you backing away from the phone. Spoofy seems to be the most mischievous of the lot; he’s a demonic, chubby gingerbread boy who is the leader of a gang of two other gingerbread boys and a one-legged gingerbread dog. I suppose it’s my soul really. I bet you wished you hadn’t asked.

HAVE YOU EVER TAKEN A SWING AT COLIN?

(Laughs) No, but at one point during the making of Skylarking (1986) where nobody was getting on with anyone he did actually suggest I take his bass guitar and shove it up my arse. I offered him some KY jelly and said, “Do you fancy a go? I’ll call the Guinness Book of Records.”

XTC CEASED TOURING 20 YEARS AGO AFTER YOU SUFFERED CRIPPLING ANXIETY ATTACKS. WHAT IF YOU’D PLAYED AT 10AM AND DIDN’T HAVE ALL DAY TO BUILD INTO A STATE OF PANIC?

(Laughs) Then I wouldn’t have slept. I realise now a lot of what it was now is that all through my teens and early twenties I was addicted to Valium. Coming off my Valium addiction co-incided with not wanting to tour any further, thinking about where the money had gone, where my future was going, thinking deeply about stuff for the first time. Valium wasn’t fogging my head and consequently I became a lot more nervous about life in general, but also I became malcontent with being stuck in this circus, I felt like a performing monkey.

HOW NORMAL WAS IT TO PRESCRIBE VALIUM TO CHILDREN?

If a child was worried or screwed up by his parents behaviour, which I was, they didn’t look at the parents, they looked at the kid – “Wow, he's really upset, he wants to urinate all the time and he’s nervous and emotional all the time, he must be weird”. They didn’t look at what was causing it, that I was living with these parents attacking each other with knives, hurling ornaments and torturing each other. They stuck the kid on drugs rather than smashing my parents heads’ together and saying, “Bloody well grow up”.

XTC’S Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2) is available through Cooking Vinyl/Universal.

- PETER HOLMES

 

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