Record Collector No. 231, November 1998

XTC: Album At Last.

Eight years after the release of their last album , "Nonsuch", XTC have finally complete work on a new CD. "I can't tell you the title," says the group's Andy Partridge, "because we haven't decided on one yet. But we have finished the albunm, which shoulf be in the shops at the end of January or in early February."

The album won't be the first product of XTC's tie up with Cooking Vinyl, though, because the first week of November will see the release of "Transistor Blast", a four-CD collection of BBC sessions and live concert recordings.

"I couldn't stop laughing when I listened back to those tapes," Partridge says, "at our naivety and cheek - the sauce of this gangly youth who thought he was going to change the world!"

The set includes the material from two earlier radio releases, Windsong's "BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert" and Nighttracks' "Drums And Wireless," plus another disc of "In Concert" material and around 20 extra session tracks. It comes with copious sleeve notes from Partridge and his bandmate Colin Moulding - but not Dave Gregory, who quit the band in March just as the long-delayed sessions for the new album were about to begin.

"The atmosphere had been getting appalling, especially between me and Dave," Partridge explains. "He always seemed to be so negative about everything." His central complaint was about the musical direction of the new record: "We had two groups of songs, one lot acoustic and orchestral, the other electric," Partridge explains, "and Colin and I wanted to start with the orchestral stuff. Dave was adamant that he wanted nothing to do with that idea, so it was inevitable that he would leave."

Partridge claims that Gregory's depature, "cruel as it may sound, has actually improved the atmosphere within the band. It's changed the dynamic between me and Colin. We're much more willing to experiment now that we were in the past."

He describes the new record as "adult-sounding, without being a Phil Collins album", but explains that the electric material, which will be taped soon, is more upbeat. "We've had five years in the fridge without being able to record," he says, "so it's really liberating to able to make another record."

But anyone hopeful of seeing XTC on tour should think again: "That's a young man's game," Partridge says. "It really doesn't interest me anymore. I see myself as more of a manager or a trainer. Let the kids go out on the park and play!"

 

Song Stories, Review and Interview.

The personal crises, thr touring phobia, the protest "strike" against Virgin Records - for a band who came out of Swindon and are still based there, 21 years later, XTC's history has been surprisingly dramatic. This authorised retrospective - not so much a biography as a critical guide, written with the band's input - even comes with every Hollywood screenwriter's dream, the shock ending, as Dave Gregory quits the band in the postscript just as XTC are about to begin work on their first new album in seven years.

The structure of the book is unorthodox, but it works. In place of the usual historical narrative, Farmer provides a breif precis of the period surrounding each album, then switches to song-by-song coverage, complete with plenbty of quotes from Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding. But what really brings the book to life are the sections of dialogue between XTC's two songwriters, which capture their humour and their different approaches to life, music and Todd Rundgren. The converted will relish the trivia and insight; anyone else who picks up the book is likely to head for a megastore shortly after to pick up the back catalogue.

No Thugs In Our House, Andy Partridge on XTC

Record Collector: Was it a strange experience having to sit down and talk through every song you'd recorded for the last 20 years?

AP: It was bizarre. I was hearing some of those albums for the first time in 15 years, as I never play them at home. It flooded a lot of useless trivia back. I could remember what shoes I was wearing at a particular session, or what I'd had for dinner when I did that vocal. It was like a wall of minutiae.

RC: Did you feel proud or embarrassed about what you'd done?

AP: A mixture of both, really. In some ways, the earlier stuff is easier to listen to, because it feels like a completely different person. Well, I was someone else then. Mostly, though, I couldn't stop laughing! One thing I noticed was that the best tracks weren't usually the singles, which were these little titbits we added to the albums to make sure that someone would notice them.

RC: Do you think the process of going back over your past had any influence on Dave Gregory leaving the band?

AP: No, I don't think so. Dave was rather resentful about the book. He described it as "a work of vanity" on out part, which I can understand, because it was obviously orientated towards Colin and myself as the songwriters. But he had every opportunity to contribute as much as he liked to the story, and I think in the end he only talked to Neville for 30 minutes or an hour, wheareas Colin and I did weeks of interviews.

RC: The book is fairly open about the difficulties between you and Dave.

AP: To be honest, I always found him an excessively moody person, much of which was a chemical thing because of his illness, his diabetes. So he could infect you positively or negatively - he could fill you with enthusiasm, or bring you down to the point that his unhappiness would permeate everything. From that point of view, it's made it easier since he left.

RC: The new album and the BBC retrospective are coming out here through Idea, your own label. Do you have any plans to turn that into a full-scale record company?

AP: Not at all. We don't have any money. People are already giving me demos, and I'm saying "Look, you're wasting your time, we can't afford to make our own records, let alone anyone else's." But having your own label seems to have a strange effect on the rest of the business. Suddenly you get taken a lot more seriously by distributors and all the rest of the businessmen.

RC: The question you're probably most bored with answering: do you have any plans to tour?

AP: And the answer people are most bored with hearing: no. It doesn't interest me anymore. It has nothing to do with what I do, which is to write songs and make records.

RC: What about the radio session route?

AP: Well, we more or less inveted that in the 80s, and then suddenly everyone was going 'unplugged'. So we've already done that. But I suppose we might get forced into doing it again.

RC: Any last words of wisdom for our readers?

AP: Just one question: why do so many people at record fairs smell like wet digestive biscuits?

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