Ice cream for Partridge: "Last Night A Record Changed My Life" - Mojo 80, July 2000

"Not as good as The Beatles," thought a teenage Andy Partridge. He’s since changed his mind.

I only ever heard the first Beefheart album blasting out of the bedroom door of the older brother of my best schoolfriend, Clive Endersby, on his Dansette. I thought, "What horrible music. They’re not in tune. They’re not as good as The Beatles." Another friend, Spud Taylor, used to forcibly loan me albums. He’d say, "You listen to this, because it’s the best thing on earth." I would reciprocate by lending him Sqt. Pepper’s and More Of The Monkees, and a week later he’d come hack and say, "How you gettin’ on with Trout Mask Replica?" I’d say, "I don’t like it. They’re just muckin’ about, you can’t hear the words, there’s no songs. Can I have my Sgt. Pepper’s back please?" And he’d be very evasive.

Eventually, Spud gave me hack half-a-dozen albums with the sleeves ripped to shreds. They had long scratches, and the inner bags had gravel in them. I said, "What have you done?" And he said, "WelI, I had an accident and they went skimming up the road." He was selling them down the market.

But anyway, because Spud insisted, I kept playing Trout Mask Replica, getting more frustrated, until suddenly, the dam burst - WH000FF!!! - all this unbelievable stuff started getting through.

My friend over the road had a stereo and, by turning the balance control, I could hear that what I thought was just a horrible noise was actually planned. He’d have, say, two guitars playing totally different chords in each channel, so it made up a whole new chord. The musical parts were like the interlocking pieces of a really ornate orrery — one of those clockwork models of the solar system. They’re moving and changing all the time, but there’s a strict logic to it.

Much later, I discovered that Beefheart wrote all those parts on a piano. The drummer, the only one who could write musical notation, would transcribe it onto sheet music. The poor guitarists were breaking their wrists to play this stuff. Although Frank Zappa was nominally the producer, they sat for nine months in this little wooden shack, rehearsing endlessly, until finally Zappa arrived with an eight track recorder, and thn recorded the musical parts as two live performances over just two days - one side, then the other.

Once I got to grips with it, it felt like music from the future that had fallen through a wormhole in time and landed in 1969. I still don’t think we’ve reached that level of complexity, of taking pop music towards another art form. It hit me at an age when I needed some big crowbar to open me up and let things in.

I bought my own copy six months later, in a local record store, Kempsters, I think, which sold instruments upstairs and records downstairs. It was a double album, quite expensive. I think I used record tokens and money saved up from my paper round.

I used to sit for hours with a red hardbacked notebook, playing the album over and over to get the lyrics. When I finally saw the lyrics printed, I was going, "Jesus, so that’s what he’s saying! He’s got his Spidel wrist round his honey." A Spidel is a brand of watch, I thought it was something about spiders.

I started to get into Beetheartian humour. Very much stoner humour, all that "Fast’n’bulbous" stuff. But it was even more powerful for being back-to-back with really scary songs. Dachau Blues frightened the pants off me. In the early ‘60s, even Sunday afternoon, my dad would sit me down at the TV to watch a war movie or a documentary, harrowing stuff about concentration camps. It used to give me nightmares. Couldn’t put my feet down the end of the bed — I thought they’d go into a pit of emaciated bodies.

Somehow, in a two-minutes, free-form blues, Beefheart perfectly summed up a concentration camp. How the hell did he do that? It was the choice of words, the tone of voice, the way these barbed-wire guitars grind together. The bass clarinet sounds so horrible and doomy. After that album, it was as if I’d had blindfolds taken off, I felt like I had X-ray eyes and could see into songs. I started listening to people I wouldn’t have given any time of day to, like Sun Ra and John Coltrane.

XTC came from all those British hands like the Beatles, Kinks and Stones with a great chunk of that Beefheart stuff shoved in, especially on our first three albums. Over the years, the straighter influences have gained predominance in my work —Brian Wilson, Bacharach, Ray Davies —but even on the new’ album, if not the sound of Beefheart there’s still his spirit of juxtaposing unusual things.

Johnny Black

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