Taken from Smash Hits Circa 1980 - Optimism Is Next Week's Thing

Terry Chambers said "I want to talk to you". I said "Fine". Fine. Then the drummer walked away and I didn't see him again until early evening when I looked up and there he was, suspended fifty feet above me in the basket of a hot-air balloon bearing the legend "XTC At The Manor."

Let me explain. The Manor is a recording studio owned by XTC's label Virgin and is built within an ancient and sumptuous country house near Oxford. It happened that the place's fifth birthday party with XTC recording some TV clips there so I was sent out to desport myself how I might - as long as that included a conversation with said band in connection with their current releases of a single "General And Majors", and an LP, "Black Sea".

Entering the grounds of the manor was much like passing through a time gate into Camelot. Outside was the modern world - tens of thousands starving in Ethiopia, two million unemployed in Great Britain. Inside several hundred drank and feasted, struck elegant poses by the lake, dived gracefully into the pool, soaked in the sun, frolicked in the meadows, gathered about the spit-roasted sheep and pulled meat from the bone with bare hands.

Nobody mentioned the war or the redundancies at Virgin itself earlier that week. We fiddled and if you could smell something burning, well, it was impossible to tell whether it was Rome or just the barbecue.

The tape of the interview features the most diverse range of audio-interruption I've ever encountered, like a sound effects orgy in the Beeb's radiophonic workshop. First there was the crazy kid, somebody's spoiled child, doing sixty across the lawn in a go-kart...but let's try to get this interview going.

Andy Partridge writer/singer/guitarist, is used to this kind of extravagant rock binge after three years on the fringe of the Big Time, but he still lives on small wages because the band remain in debt to Virgin. His home is a small flat over a shop in Swindon which is rent free because his wife locks up the adjoining factory every night.

Andy sits cross-legged on the grass by the lake, still wearing the waiter's outfit, from filming the video. He murmurs in his soft Wiltshirean: "I'm sorry Mike, I'm not all here. I feel like...a tray of mushrooms. Just sitting here."

That was some kind of keynote for what ensued. Andy was full of his usual crackle-worded humour, but also preoccupied with, well, love and death actually. It was Socrates as stand-up comic.

"Doesn't this remind you of '67?"

Colin Moulding (joining in briefly): "All it needs is someone dead in the swimming pool."

Andy: "It's so unreal. Which is what everybody needs at the moment. We've been thinking that psychedelic music must come back, you know. My favourite album at the moment is 'Satanic Majesties' Request' (Rolling Stones) Oh, I need '67 badly. I was too young at the time and very jealous of people who weren't.

"I was only 12 or 13 so I couldn't afford the records or the clothes and I could only see what the TV news permitted me. (BBC news reader voice) 'Today at the Woodstock Festival someone took all their clothes off. And I think we've got a few shots of that. Yes, there we are.

"So I missed out on flower power and just got pictures of someone's fat arse wobbling about instead. I ended up a glitter kid: very much stack-heeled boots, New York Dolls, eye make up."

A large girl shimmies past partly-clad in a Bunny-girl type waitress costume and Andy gazes after her appreciatively.

"She is bountiful, truly a harvest of flesh. She needs to be reaped." His agricultural 'r' is running amok. Discreetly he reins back: "Hold on, I think the wine's starting talk here."

Possible, but Andy Partridge doesn't need artificial additives.

"It's true, I love getting the verbal going; splashing about a bit."

Then, rather alarmingly, the word wave washes on to engulf your correspondent.

"You know, I enjoy seeing your little head in the paper, Mike. They should put your picture in more often. Now I don't want to be rude. But I might be. You're very hot chocolate, the Light Programme, Oxo. It's a real armchair of a face you've got there."

I'd never been so complimented. Colin says he's going to join Terry in the balloon ride and delights Andy by reporting that it only takes two passengers: "Thank God for that. I get vertigo standing upright."

Slapping at gnats and sucking on a piece of cheese. Andy launches into a discourse on XTC's particular dislike of the rock-band touring cycle they are caught up in: "It's a crazy-inducing process. Have you noticed how all the hotel rooms are done in orange and yellow to make you feel 'sunny'? And 12 hours a day in a van..."

"I can only think when I'm at home and relaxed, the phone's not ringing and nobody's demanding things of me. 'Ah. Nobody's watching. Let's open the gates and see what comes out.' If you write on the road you just get lost in the fantasy world of the white line that goes on forever."

"We've wrestled with the giant and it's horrible. Nylon golf trousers mixed with fake mashed potato mixed with a choice of forty TV channels. People dressing up as vegetables to get noticed in TV quiz audiences. Car crashes played back in slow motion on the news every half hour. The media are screaming at you all the time. American's live pornography - and yet you won't find any sex there!"

Colin: "Come on, I enjoyed it. It got the gluttony out of me, the animal."

Partridge: "The United States Of McDonalds."

Moulding: "They are very fat people, very pudgy."

Partridge (poking at his cheeks): "You think I've got nuts in these pouches? You should see American kids. It's a crime to see overweight children like that. It cut me up. I was close to tears at times."

At that moment a relative of Colin's tries the rope slide across the lake and takes the inevitable early bath. Then just beside us someone picks up a large dog and throws him in to the amusement of all but the pooch.

This reminds Andy of the Manor dogs, Irish wolfhounds, about the size of small horses: "They bay at four in the morning. Aaoooo! (he mimics). I sit bolt upright in my four-poster bed thinking. 'Can I hear breathing next to me?' It's probably Branson's accountant going over our books."

We tiptoe towards discussing "Generals And Majors" via some waffle about our generation not having experienced war. Colin eggs Andy on with "I'm sure you'd like to go to war against France, though wouldn't you?"

Andy: "I'd certainly like to give everyone in France a damn good spanking. And a decent menu. French food is all oil and long words. Isn't this getting a bit xenophobic?"

Andy takes a break to restore his liberal good will to all men with a ride on the mini-hovercraft which is plying the lake. He journeys back and forth on the floundering skirtful of air, waving like the Queen Mum, and comes back wind-swept and refreshed except that he's demanding the St. John's Ambulance because he'd just met his original guitar hero for the first time. No, not any of them - Ollie Halsall.

Who? Andy is joined by his fellow guitar player Dave Gregory in going gooey over this worthy who they eventually admit hadn't made a good record since 1970 when he played with a group called Patto. But Halsall had apparently had a good influence. By persuading them that they could never match up to his playing technically he had cornered them into playing simply, the dynamically struck chord rather than the mind-warping solo, from the heart rather than the head (as Dave Gregory puts it).

Behind us there's a great breath of flame from the souped-up Calor gas stove which puts the necessary into a hot-air balloon. Andy watches my attention to his golden words wavering: "Mike, you're enthralled, you've come over all Montgolfier haven't you?" (Out of the vast Partridge trivia bank has popped the name of the nineteenth-century inventor (sic) of the hot-air balloon.)

Slowly the XTC rhythm section lollops into the ether. Then my mike is drowned out by the arrival of the "pterodactyls", a huge wing, a pilot suspended from it and a motor buzzing, like some giant insect from a horror film.

Andy loves them: "They look like flying bath chairs. Hey these geriatrics have really got it together!"

Then one of the flyers decides to give us a fright by cutting his motor and, turning his back on me, Andy yells out "Don't die on me!" That strange fear of some disaster happening before his eyes seemed to lurk beneath the whole afternoon for him.

At last we get to grips with the matter which after all was the reason for us being there: XTC's fourth and brilliant album "Black Sea". With "Making Plans For Nigel" they had "poked their heads around the door" of pop stardom, says Andy.

Now they're are challenging for that mass audience with another volume of razzle-dazzle in sound and word. In fact, their lyrics are their best and most interesting yet by quite a distance, not least because they're so clear.

Except when you get towards the end and find that the cheery "Burning With Optimism's Flames" and the panic-stricken drum-dominated "Travels In Nihilon" are total contradictions of one another. Andy?

"They were written at different times when I was severely low and severely high. 'Travels In Nihilon' was very 'God what a waste of time we've all been'. In particular it's against fashion. I hate the way fashion disposes of people.

"The clothes survive. They can come out of the wardrobe in ten years for the next mod revival as good as new. But the person is done in permanent. You've grabbed hold of what you thought was a saviour, '67 to '77, any movement, and six months later you're turned on by people saying 'Ho ho, what a silly you are, still wearing your stack-heeled boots, bondage trousers, mod haircut and Acker Bilk bowler hat.' You're cast away.

"The last time I went through that was in '77 when I thought punk would save me. It didn't and I learned to swim. XTC learned to swim."

How?

"Slow down, don't go out so much, be private, be understanding, love and peas and if you've got any more chips I'll have them. I'm still at the 'Burning With Optimism's Flames" level now. Optimism is Next Week's Thing..."

"That's topped it off really. You'll find a lot of people wailing round with smiles on their faces when they've read this. Right, I'm off before someone dies."

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