Pop's Dan Archer - Sounds, October 1986

An everyday story of pop music folk. Nine years on XTC are still waiting to break it big in the USA. Their noise used to annoy but now they're content to mellow with age. So, what chance have three balding, fat garden gnomes from the West Country got in today's high pressure pop stakes? Plenty, reckons slip of a lad Roy Wilkinson.

In a Covent Garden piazza illuminated by an English summer's last ditch renaissance stands a man in search of a maypole, a misdirected morris dancer.

The baggy whites and chintzy floral waistcoat tell you this is XTC mainspring Andy Partridge long before you focus on the curiously uncommitted face behind those tinted NHS specs.

"Actually, this is the nicest I've been dressed for a long time. I'm usually a mismannered Marks And Sparks but I found this waistcoat in a junk shop and I've been wearing it ever since - the Dave Swarbrick look."

So cast out your Crolla, veto that Versace, this is the next big thing?

"No, that's looking like Maddy Prior - if only I could encourage the hair to come on a bit."

XTC have a new album, "Skylarking", out in three weeks time. It's an irritating mixture of the inspired and some moments of bland hat-tipping song smithery. Not that this blend should be surprising - after all XTC are an enduring anomaly in the span of Britpop. Mr Partridge's wassailers have long since thrown off the tutored anarchy and clever-clever wordplay of their 'punk' days and with the last two albums, 'Mummer' and 'Big Express', have confirmed a romance with things rustic. But still they don't really fit anywhere.

Their hack Hardyisms grate a bit, but at the same time they're likely to throw out one of their idiosyncratic pop hooks to fly deservedly into the top ten. Still, singing of love on a farmboy's wages is hardly very cool and it sits uneasily beside today's prevalent cynicism. It can't be easy being the Dan Archer (God rest his soul) of pop.

"Yeah, our position is pretty difficult. I feel sorry for Virgin Records. Just how the hell do you sell us? We're not young funsters - we're balding and fat. We're three garden gnomes from the West Country who deal in a pop format. I feel like one of The Residents but without the masks - that's how high profiled we are."

As he points out, their career has continually oscillated between high and low points. This, combined with the fact that contemporaries like U2 and Simple Minds are making big bucks in the States, has led Virgin (who they've been with for nine years) to believe that they must step in and sort out "funny old XTC". The first step has been to bring in Todd Rundgren to produce an 'American' album which will therefore sell lots of copies in America. Rundgren was given (for them) unprecedented executive power - choosing the tracks and deciding of their presentation, but perhaps not with the desired result.

"We gave him demos for three albums worth of material and he phoned back saying he'd got a running order, which was weird because at that stage we hadn't recorded anything. he went for all the softer stuff, steering away from the tougher, more difficult stuff and he wouldn't entertain anything with a political lyric. The idea was to produce an American LP but I think the idea has backfired horribly - we've ended up with an LP which I don't think will sell very well in the States."

Are you unhappy with the product?

"Well, I feel he hasn't let the bollocks show through - basically, his opinions were at opposite poles to mine. It's the first time that we've been induced to hand over total production control, but despite the fact that it was difficult for us to make, I'm still proud of the music - I'll hold my hand up and say that's mine."

The album starts off with three songs, 'Summer's Cauldron', 'Grass' and 'Meeting Place' which bear all the hallmarks of XTC's arcadian craftsmanship - a sort of musical illustration to Cider With Rosie. After this the tracks have been ordered to move from light to dark, building to a sombre climax with 'Dying' and then lightening again with the final song 'Sacrificial Bonfire'. Sounds suspiciously like a concept album to me.

"Well, if I could think of any other word...it's not a concept album in so much as there's no songs about deaf, dumb and blind legless pinball players who take lots of acid. The songs are just conceptually ordered."

"XTC recently popped up on So It Goes, Granada TV's collection of archive punk performances. Sandwiched between a petulant Pete Shelley ("Don't gob at me") and a parodic Jimmy Pursey, they didn't really fit then either.

"I was holding my sides with laughter. At the time, it felt dead right but ten years on I just think who's that young twat pulling funny faces. Back then I just wanted to upset people. I was much more a shouter and a yeller."

Speaking to this quiet voiced, thoughtful, shockingly reasonable 32 year old with his bucolic Swindon burr and a wife, a kid and a mortgage, it's difficult to imagine him wanting to upset anyone. In 1978 he got a buzz from "hurting someone's ears with a guitar", but today the satisfaction comes from writing a well honed song.

"The XTC of '78 had more in common with Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra - someone who deals with noisy things. I think we've got better as song writers - it's like any craft, the longer you do it, the better you get."

So you're still excited by the process of making records?

"I love records - the sleeves, the paper bag, the label. I like the idea of music going in your ear and giving you that magical picture in your head. That's still the most important thing in my life."

XTC's pop pepped tales of life, love and death in the backwaters are essentially timeless, removed from the inflections that mark out a Britain at the end of her tether, post industrial and pissed off. Thinking particularly of Matt Johnson's cataloguing this country as the 51st state of America, are XTC relevant today? "Well, we were probably topical in 1978. What's relevant News At Ten is pretty relevant. Relevant to me means essential to the time, I think we're worthwhile, but I'm not going to grab people and say eat this. I think things are much more precious if you have to dig down and find them rather than to get someone flogging them at the door."

So it's fair to say that XTC won't be seen as a benchmark of the '80s, an indicator of the spirit of the age. This doesn't worry this ruminative rural sage (something he swear is unaffected: "People put that on us. It's not as if we're Pentangle or Fairport Convention.") This Ted Moult (God rest his soul) of a tunesmith is happy that what he's doing is of worth and for that matter so am I. XTC may be inconsistent but they have their moments: 'Plans For Nigel', 'Ten Feet Tall', 'Senses Working Overtime' and 'Summers Cauldron' (from the new album) are outstanding if not important songs and it's about time XTC had another of their anomalous hits. As Andy says, they need the cash.

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