'XTC" by Jim Farber from International Musician - October 1981
Contributed by Brad Hancock

XTC's music always begins with a series of words. When the band's lead writer and guitarist Andy Partridge gathers the three other members in the studio to construct a new album he always kicks things off by tossing out a series of vague adjectives meant to be transformed into specific sounds. "Bulldozing," "Frightening", "Sweaty", "Victorian." These words have set the tone for pieces over the band's four album career. "I'm like a set designer," Partridge says. "I tell the band I want a Western set and they go and build me one."

The imagistic origin of the band's music should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with XTC's records. They are all ambiance records of sorts - kind of like what Eno's Music For Airports would be like if there'd been twelve mid-air collisions that day. At root, XTC is a frenzied case of art-rapes-pop-and-gets-away-with-it. Music sections which might seem chaotic in close-up eventually make sense as coherent, catchy hooks. It has certain elements in common with the Steely Dan school of sly-pop, but in place of Steely's sleek, dissenting voices, XTC substitutes nervous yells. With XTC, micro-chip musical bits are powered by the rhythms of non-sequitur. It's jigsaw puzzling music that never fails to catch you in the most unexpected places.

The nicest angle to all of this is that XTC's ultimate pop accessibility has been proven by the relative success of their latest album Black Sea. Perhaps aided by the aberrant/populist sounds of The Cars and Devo, XTC were able to inch all the way into the top 50 of the archly conservative U.S. charts.

Interestingly, the band did not begin as such an adventurous project. "We began in 1973 as a band that was into looking and nothing much else," explains 27 year old Andy Partridge. The group were then called the Helium Kids, playing around their local Swindon, about 75 miles outside of London. "We dressed up in N.Y. Dolls-type outfits and we really didn't play too well. I think I was the best musician of the four, which included our current drummer, Terry Chambers and Colin Moulding" (the band's bassist and second featured writer). "Earlier than this, I had originally come into learning the guitar in a very weird way. My friends lent me a lot of very obscure jazz albums. I was copying the sounds on these records. It wasn't necessarily good guitar playing - it was interesting guitar playing. I'd play along with just saxophone, very esoteric records - Coltrane LP's and Sun Ra records and some others I don't remember. Learning guitar that first - destroying music before I'd ever learned it. Then in '73, with the Helium Kids, I couldn't apply this technique to anything. Our music was amped-up R&B. I found a new lease of life with this. I'd never played that idiotically before and I loved it."

By 1975, glitter had blown it's fuse and the band began looking for a new way to drive people crazy. "I got the band to wear black one-piece boiler suits with white trim," Partridge recalled. "We changed our name to XTC because we thought that was very descriptive of the music we wanted to play. We'd still keep the three minute package, but I'd finally come to terms with the inside-out playing I wanted to use - the jazz, no-scale playing."

Logically, one of Partridge's early influences for the original XTC game plan was Captain Beefheart. With albums like 1969's Trout Mask Replica, Partridge became aware that there were other people who liked the idea of making a guitar sound as exciting and free as the jazz-saxophone records he'd been playing along with. "I liked the humor Beefheart did with it as well," the guitarist adds. "He wasn't afraid to use lyrics that made you laugh or made you disgusted."

When Partridge first started applying these ideas to XTC's tight pop, the band included John Perkins on keyboards, bassist Colin Moulding (a strong singer who has written the band's most accessible tracks, like "Life Begins At The Hop"), plus drummer Terry Chambers. By their first LP in '77, called White Music, Perkins had been replaced by Barry Andrews, who himself was replaced by guitarist Dave Gregory after the band's second LP, Go 2.

Over the course of the last two records (the only ones released in America) Partridge says he's stopped being a domineering figure. "I let other people's ideas filter through the band more. Also, I've found I just want to play simple two chord things now. That's been coming out mainly on the last album. I think the band is getting straighter and straighter as the years go on. I came into music copying very odd sounds, so for me at this point the guitar holds no mystery. I just want to put it down. I would still like to play the sax. I tried it once on an LP I did myself in which I reinterpreted XTC material. On one track I wanted this instant jazz smoke feel in the background. So I stuck a sax in my mouth and blew fragments of scales. We put it down in the mix so you could barely hear it. It's like the nearest memory of a saxophone. I'd like to learn one proper now."

With all the strange sounds that make up XTC's sound it's important to note that the arrangements never come off as gratuitous. "I think a lot of bands make their name on weirding up songs," Partridge says. "I'm more interested in straightening them up instead. They come out a bit unusual to begin with and I get scared that the public won't accept them that way."

The final outcome is almost always like the inside of a clock, with each part propelling another. All the instruments are interdependent geometric shapes, creating music where push and shove alternates with give and take. It is a logical music - simpler than it sounds. "We don't play anything difficult," Partridge explains. "Only one song we do isn't in 4/4. All together it may sound complicated but the actual parts each member plays are extremely simple. I'm a lazy player. Dave Gregory is probably the best musician in the band, but he's learning to play straighter too. Terry is not a very accomplished drummer. He falls into a very personal pattern. The three other instruments usually weave through that drum pattern. I think there's a certain oriental bent in me that calls for being effective with less. The Orientals have a certain aesthetic where they can place one or two brushstrokes down and it looks incredible."

Characteristically, Partridge has a refreshingly simple view of guitar equipment as well. His main guitar is a black '69 Les Paul which he claims he purchased simply because "it's easy to press the strings down and it looks okay - not like a piece of furniture or a cocktail cabinet. I believe as long as a guitar has a certain amount of wires on it and it's got a volume control, it's fine. Beyond that I don't give a damn." Similarly, Partridge's reason for owning a Marshall amp is simply because "it's reliable."

The guitarist is more exacting with his lyrics, which can be as nervous as the band's jerky pop. Like Talking Heads, XTC's words - both Moulding's and Partridge's - are often alienated observances of the outside world; viewing formal reality as a complicated game where the author is repelled or puzzled by the rules. "I'm not nearly as nervous an individual as David Byrne," Partridge says. "He seems to be at the point of dying of nerves twenty-four hours a day. I like Talking Heads' first album best of all. After that I went off them. Now I quite like the new one. I'm sure they'd be very hurt if they knew the reason I like the new one. I think it sounds so much like Can, the German group. The first three Can albums had tracks that were frighteningly funky. I think they used several drum kits. It sounded like tribal Zulu's stomping around in concrete footwear. It became hypnotic like Terry Riley or Phillip Glass."

In its own hyper way, XTC's music can be oddly hypnotic as well, which greatly adds to the band's intention, which according to Partridge is to "unsettle the listener suitably."

A striking moment in the group's live show is "Living Through Another Cuba" - a song which is about living in a country (England) which is stuck precariously between the two cold-warring superpowers. Live, this is visually represented with Partridge, as the panicked narrator, stationed in between Moulding and Gregory who send guided missile sounds soaring overhead from one side to the other. Partridge claims this bit of literalized theatrics is unintentional and similarly several other band effects have come about as accidental art. On "Complicated Game", Moulding's electric razor is used on the backing track. "One day he noticed it was in G - the right key," the guitarist smiles. "Also, I was supposed to play the guitar solo on that song but when I was recording it there was some problem and the backing tracks weren't coming through my headphones. Out of frustration I just began smashing the guitar wildly. I was trying to get the attention of the others in the control room to tell them something had gone wrong. But they didn't look up to see. I didn't know the track was recording my guitar. But when I went up to yell at them in the control room for not listening, they said, 'Great solo. We'll use it'."

Partridge lost his voice for a day after shouting out the lead vocal on that track. But he claims it generally doesn't hurt his voice to sing in the XTC style of elongated enunciations and finely chopped syllables. "Too often singing is the victim of someone who thinks he's a singer," Partridge winces. "They tremolo it to death. Or it can be the victim of someone singing over music, rather than integrating it. For us, the voice is another instrument that must be part of the pattern."

Mirroring the sharp, jagged-edged singing is a steely guitar sound, which is factory-level noisy without ever seeming mechanical. "I'm not too crazy about the cliched guitar sound - especially the Pat Benatar-type baby pig squealing solos. I hate that wall of fizz. Generally with us you can hear all the notes in the chord and there's just enough raw edge so when you play single notes they don't sound idiotically rubber-bandish. It's not as cranky as the B-52's sound but not as fizzy as the Pat Benatar squealer. It's somewhere in between. We use a lot of ambiance. We record things in bright rooms with mikes using a lot of room sound."

With his band's "logical" sound, it should come as no surprise that Partridge is a dedicated gamesman. He's even trying to market a game he created himself called "Babel" (as in "The Tower Of..."). For right now, though, the guitarist is trying to write some new material for a follow-up to the successful Black Sea. Partridge is a bit worried about finding inspiration. "I feel so content now. But if I write songs about that people will scream and say, 'What's this ass doing?'."

Partridge needn't worry too much. XTC's music carries its own kind of tension. It is pop that inherently jolts as well as pleases. Or as Andy Partridge concluded: "It's like a vibrant carpet - but when you step on it, it may turn out to be deeper in certain places than you first expected."

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