Andy Partridge - Interview by Pat Gilbert, from Record Collector magazine No 209, January 1997

It's 1993. You're sitting in the front room of your modest Edwardian terrace in Swindon, Wiltshire, and the vibes are, to say the very least, a trifle saturnine. And it's not just because your record company has withdrawn your band's first single for several years, convinced it'll bomb. Or that your wife has done a runner, taking her share of your worryingly meagre savings with her. It's not even that a punctured ear-drum has left you with the prospect of permanent deafness.

No, the thing that really gnaws at your guts is the feeling you've been systematically ripped-off by the music industry for the best part of two decades. There's the realisation that your record contract has brought you few dividends; and the stinging memory of an 'unfortunate' late 70s deal which left you with little to show for five years' relentless touring.

Then there's the matter of re-signing your contract in the late 80s, on the same less-than-bountiful terms, simply to generate enough cash to pay off a £400,000 lawyers bill, run up while trying to sort out your band's desperate financial imbroglio.

You should, by rights, be thoroughly pissed off. But you're not, because you're Andy Partridge of former new wave heroes XTC, and you're an exceedingly philosophical kind of chap. "I can't be bitter about these things," says the singer in whirring West Country brogue, and scrubbing at his close-cropped widows peak. "Or else that pissy, tobacco-stained bitterness of the past would spoil your vision of the future." He laughs. "Wouldn't it?"

It's 1996, and we're sitting in that same front room in Swindon's fashionable Old Town. The mood is a bit like the decor: deep green and rustic and reassuringly arty. On the floor of the upstairs toilet - full of fancy cakes of soap and other resolutely middle-class accoutrements - is a neatly folded copy of "The Sunday Times". Downstairs, the back room is dominated by a reconditioned Aga to complete that authentic country kitchen effect. Partridge, now 43, reappears from this haven with a box of individually wrapped amaretti biscuits, through which he proceeds to munch his way contentedly.

It's the kind of cosy domestic set-up you'd expect from a man whose band spent the 80s creating a handful of curiously engaging and very English psychedelic pop albums, like "Skylarking" and "Oranges And Lemons". Selling poorly here, these minor gems were regarded in the States as a charming refinement of XTC's quirky calling cards, "Making Plans For Nigel", "Sgt. Rock" and "Senses Working Overtime", and the resulting sales managed to keep the band from penury. Yet Partridge's refusal to perform live after a nervous breakdown in 1982 meant that Virgin, their record company, found it increasingly hard to capitalise on the band's American success.

Ultimately, relations between the parties soured, and in 1993, after the single "Wrapped In Grey" was withdrawn, Partridge and fellow travellers Dave Gregory and Colin Moulding - who wrote several of the band's biggest hits - decided to withhold their musical services indefinitely.

But the skies of discontent are finally clearing. A couple of months ago Partridge and co.'s 'strike action' paid off, and they were released from their Virgin contract an astonishing 19 years after they first signed to Branson's flagship company. Their recent hiatus has afforded them the time and space to stockpile almost two albums' worth of material, and there's already a clutch of new deals on the table, including one from Britain's largest and most successful independent.

Then there's "Fossil Fuel", a two-CD singles compilation ,marking the end of their troubled Virgin tenure, which came out in October. Book-ended by the frenetic punk of "Science Friction" and the ill-fated "Wrapped In Grey", it's a remarkable account of a career that has oscillated between the sublime folk pageantry of "Ten Feet Tall" and "Mayor Of Simpleton", and oafish indulgences like "Wait Till Your Boat Goes Down" and "Dear God". Essentially, though, it's incontrovertible evidence that XTC have been a vital component in the development of left-field British pop in the last 20 years - a fact underlined by their obvious influence on bands like Blur and Elastica.

Sitting, in his front room, acoustic guitar propped up against the stylishly worn red leather sofa, the man who was addicted to valium as a schoolboy unwraps another fragrant biccy, and takes a bite into another huge anecdote. Now sufficiently recovered from his ear infection to make music painlessly (at least in the physical sense), he comes across as a bullishly affable bloke, blessed with rapacious intelligence and a bucolic, West Country wit. The old prostrate trouble maybe giving him gyp ("It's because I used to be a heavy drinker," he sighs), but there's no denying that Partridge is back.

Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for the Mayor Of Simpleton...

What went wrong with the Virgin Deal?

We were kids, we just wanted to make a noise, and get paid £25 a week for doing it. That was what the deal was. Come the late 80s, we needed a lot of money to fight our former manager in the courts, so Virgin said look, we'll give you £400,000 to pay these court bills, if you'll re-sign on the old conditions. We had no other way to pay off the accountants' bill and the lawyers. They had us over a barrel.

You didn't make much money then?

We spent the first 18 years in debt, which is crazy. I used to read about The Who spending their first 11 years in debt, and thinking, that must be because they smashed up all that gear. But they probably had a crap deal as well. If one of our albums cost £250,000 to make, it would have to be paid back from the fraction of a penny royalties we made for the sale of each record. And we still wouldn't own the master tapes.

What was it that brought matters to a head?

In 1992, Virgin accidentally let "Wrapped In Grey" slip out as a single, printed up 2,000 copies, but got cold feet and withdrew it. So I thought, this is the final straw. They were murdering our singles in the crib! So I said, that's it, we're not going to make any more recordings, unless you make our deal more sensible or you let us go so we can make some money from somewhere. So it was tools down, brother...

It seems amazing that this still happens to bands 40 years into pop history. You tend to associate these things with the 60s and 70s.

Yeah. Most people don't know how the record industry is run. It's extremely corrupt, the whole thing about getting stuff played on air - it used to be sex, drugs and money bribes. Now it's money bribes, drugs and sex. That's just the radio angle. The record companies, they just want to sign up bands who'll make them some quick money and then disappear two years later and not ask any questions because they're back on the building site. When they're carrying a hod of bricks, they're not thinking, what about that money we paid to so-and-so.

You walk past people in the street and they say, "Ooh, you don't dress like a millionaire, do you?" They have absolutely no concept of how the whole thing works.

Did the action against your former manager ever get to court?

No. It got to the stage where it was settled out of court. We'd borrowed a fortune and we really couldn't afford to take it any further. But at least we got rid of him. The only problem then was the rather over-zealous, under-active record company. I don't think Virgin ever really put the machine behind us. They never used to know what to do with us. We never sat in the little ghettos they had set out mentally.

Was it an A&R problem?

One of them got everything shockingly wrong. He was the one who suggested we should sound like ZZ Top. We we're the longest running band on the label. It was smelling of Mike Oldfield when we inherited the title. Andy McClusky (of OMD) has got it now.

Why do you think they held onto you?

I used to joke that we were a tax loss. We weren't, but that's what I used to say. When they were taken over by EMI, they got rid of hundreds of bands. The night of the long loons. Most people think we've split up. We never used to appear in those coffee-table rock books. But now we're starting to. But we've been doing our British Leyland bit, with our Chad Valley junior miners kit. We'll have to grow out hair in a more Scargillian manner. I'll have some of Colin's (Moulding) overflow.

Once you'd stopped touring, your first drummer, Terry Chambers, quickly left. Was that a big wrench on you?

Terry never had any artistic say. He was just a labourer who played drums. If you had a couple of weeks off to write an albums, he'd go off and get a job on a building site. I don't think he was one of life's natural musicians. You had to programme him. He used to play the most upside-down things, and once they'd gone in, he'd never forget them.

Was he an unrescontructed Swindon man?

He's lived in Australia since 1983, because he got an Australian barmaid pregnant. I was there at the conception! The lights from the car they were in woke me up! He imported her to Swindon, but she was all sun, sea, sand and surf and here is was drizzling and they were living on this really grey council estate. She was depressed and wanted to move back to Australia. So there was pressure on him to go. He had this really strong Swindon accent: the "Troggs Tapes" were us in the studio. You really couldn't tell the difference.

He came back to England in 1991 to visit his mum and dad and he had a very thick Australian accent, but within a week he was back to (adopts Worzel-like West Country accent), "You fucking arrrrseholes! Ohh-aah! Fuck me, Reg!" There was no friction with Terry. He went while we were rehearsing. He put his drums sticks down and said, "Right, I'll see you lads. I'm off." No explanation or anything. His cymbal was still ringing and his sticks were rolling around the snare.

Barry Andrews, your original keyboardist, left in 1979 and later worked with Robert Fripp in the League Of Gentlemen. What happened there?

Funnily enough he left a message on the answerphone the other day. He's seen "Fossil Fuel" advertised and wondered if he was entitled to any royalties. But at the time he left we were still £200,000 in debt, then there were the video budgets, and that's not counting all the money we spent trying to get rid of our manager. We were in such debt that unless it sells millions we can't pay him anything. I think he's an extremely intelligent bloke, but he resented his intelligence. He wanted to be a sort of yobby, street character, and you could see it pulling him apart. He'd do everything he could to yob out. It was a real tear; he was smart academically, top of the class and wanted to do everything he could to be one of the lads. You get a glimpse of that with Damon Albarn. Barry phoned Colin and told him he's given up on music and he's now doing metalwork. Perhaps we could pay his royalties in brass rod.

Do you think he saw himself primarily as a musician?

Yeah. Some sort of Ninja or, I hate the phrase, agent provocateur. He liked to stir things up musically. His style of playing was very idiosyncratic. It was like the Spotniks meet Johnny and the Hurricanes after you've just drunk Toilet Duck, or something. Really wrong, retro space-age. But he needed permission to play like that. When he started he very Jon Lord and conservative. Then we said, you can play what you like.

Talking of Damon Albarn, Blur, and indeed Elastica, have acknowledged XTC's influence on them.

Yeah, Blur are one of the few English bands that have given us respect. Nearly every American band going has. The Crash Test Dummies are the greatest PR people we've never paid. We know we're not seen as a cool band. We're on the black hole of cool. In the music papers it's like, "Here's Ice T, and he's a paid up member of the XTC fan club. Ha, ha!" Do you know what I mean?! Really childish attempts at humour. "XTC = uncool, Ice T = cool. Cool, uncool = humour. Ha, ha, ha!" Fuck right fucking off. It's horrible to see it.

But people tend to mention XTC and Wire in the same breath...

Yeah, but Wire were different. They had no humour. When we first came out people thought we we're a comedy group, like a cross between the Jetsons and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. That wasn't the case, but we never denied the humour in what we did. If a song needed some humorous connotation, we let it come through. If it was miserable, let it be miserable. Let the emotions play in it. Wire would rather chew of their own limbs than crack a smile. People though - and people are really stupid with a capital "S" - so they thought, Wire are serious musicians and XTC are jokers. Wire come from the London area, while XTC are from Wiltshire. So Wire are obviously serious, and XTC are crap.

You had a bash at producing some tracks on Blur's "Modern Life Is Rubbish", didn't you?

Yes, you mean on "Our Second Album Is Rubbish". Yes. I quite enjoyed it, but most of the problems I had were with the record company, Food. I seemed to get on OK with Blur - in fact, I saw a lot of early XTC in them in the studio. The way they interacted. Alex was Colin and Damon was Barry Andrews. I was probably Graham and Terry was Dave. They got me in because they liked what we did and wanted to sound like us subconsciously. But I made them sound like us and they didn't like it. The record company didn't like it because they wanted me to record the drums mechanically, but Dave begged my to let him play on them.

The songs weren't very good, it was the difficult second album. Dave Balfe was Mr. Dance Remix, so he wanted drum machines. I let Dave drum and he didn't like it. He said, the rhythms aren't sexy. I said, yeah, but Dave's not sexy. He's a fucking labourer and he goes thump-whack. But hats off to them. They've got immensely better.

Why did you agree to work with them?

I did that out of a mixture of being broke and the vanity of a band like that asking me. It wasn't the worst production mistake. That was The Mission. The best ones you do are the ones you do for the love of it, the worst ones you do for money. I found Wayne Hussey an extremely unpleasant little wanker, I'm afraid. he had this cartoon ability to be unpleasant. he was unpleasant on tap. I enjoyed doing the Lilac Time, "Love For All". I enjoyed Martin Newell's songs, but there was no budget, I did it in my studio in the garden shed.

But I'm pleased for Blur, and I'm glad they've got the guts, against a scum-storm of anti-cool, to say they like us.

Come, come...

Americans think we're immensely cool and charming. In the same way they think double-decker buses and Marmite are cool.

XTC were always interesting rhythmically. I'm thinking of "Respectable Street", "Senses Working Overtime"...

I was meant to be a drummer. My dad was a drummer and he used to leave his kit in my bedroom. I always think about the rhythm before the melody, where the rhythm of the voice falls. A guitar is easier to carry to school. I did that for years before I could even play it. I'd put it in the corner of the classroom and the teachers would indulge me, for some strange reason. It was a great magnet, girls would come up and stroke it, like a wooden pony or something.

Chris Twomey's XTC biography, 'Chalkhills And Children', made you out to be a little sod a school. Is that fair?

Ummm... I was an only child, and when I was young I was a real brat. I terrorised my mother. I used to pay other kids in school in chocolate and biscuits to do things for me. A wheeler-dealer with confectionery. Later on, I was your classic quiet kid, with a Brian Jones hair-do, the last one to be picked for the football team. A weirdo. I coped with any brutality with humour. I became one of the two class jokers. I was the more wordy one - the one who did puns and impressions. I was good at art, so I'd always be getting into terrible trouble for doing cartoons and caricatures of the teachers. "Draw Mr. So-And-So!" So I'd draw this grotesque think in chalk on the pavement, then turn round to see all the kids gone and Mr. So-And-So glowering over me. My cred went up with my son when I told him I got caned a few times. I became the classic nerdy quiet kid. The one with the suede jacket and the guitar, while everyone else was into football.

Did you ever consider a career outside music?

Not after I saw 'A Hard Days Night'. That was the greatest job promo film ever. Running down the road with loads of girls chasing you. Much better than when they took you round the prefabricated door factory. Complete saddoes who'd left school the year before saying, "You don't wanna come here, mate". That was like hell, only with lots of doors. I had this parent-pleasing thing that I was going to be a commercial artist. I went to college in Swindon, I did that for a little while. They bent the rules and let me in at 15. "You have a precocious talent, Andy!"

Was this around the time of your first band, Stray Blues?

Yes. My idea of a three-chord trick was with the wrong three chords - A, D and G, rather than A, D and E. It was very primitive. Frightening too. You'd do these gigs where you'd get threatened because you were so shockingly crap. We did this great gig at McKilroys's Ballroom which had a soul crowd - suedeheads and skinheads. We had long hair. We got through two numbers. They were throwing coins at us. I hid behind the Marshall stack I borrowed. Our singer had a ginger beard and sang in a mock Ian Anderson style. That was Dave Cantner, who was also in the Helium Kidz, and who we sacked because his heart wasn't in it. It was heartbreaking to have to do that to one of your childhood mates, but we had to.

When you started playing in London you had a lot of early interest from Jonathan Kings' U.K. label...

Jonathan King likes to waffle on now. "I knew Andy before he could even write saawngs!". I can't do the voice, but you know that horrible boorish manner he's got. We went to him with a demo tape and he quite liked it. He said we weren't quite ready. But he makes out that having been in the presence of the mountain that is Jonathan King somehow enabled me to write songs.

You also recorded at Decca's West Hampstead studios in 1975 as the Helium Kidz. That must have been quite a thrill, what with the Beatles connection.

It was out of its time, though. It must have sounded like rowdy pop music to the engineers. Short, succinct, noisy pop songs. But there was nothing in the British charts that was anything like that. But they must have been lured by something, because several of those labels did give us demo sessions. They never knew what it was; but we weren't ready. It's like its own little universe. A lot of it is a distillation of what I am. As you can see, I'm quite an ordinary looking character. But I think music has to have something interesting about it. It has to have an energy, a lyrical excitement or a surprise excitement. I try to delight myself with lyrical play. I like word games.

Tell me about your interest in psychedelia...

I didn't like American psychedelia unless it was trying to imitate British stuff, like "get Me To The World On Time" and "I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night" (by the Electric Prunes). But I liked the Small Faces and the Kinks when they strayed into psychedelia. Or groups like Tomorrow. I liked it short and succinct. I liked the Stones when they did "Their Satanic Majesties" because they got it so wrong, but it's really great. It's really charming. I love that record. Apparently they despise it.

American psych was too political, and let's face it, too crappy. I didn't like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother. I liked Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd. Pop songs with one or more of those three excitements. They caught me at a vulnerable time...'Yellow Submarine' is still one of my favourite films. Lemsip for the soul. It really cheers me up.

Did you know about the late 60s Salisbury psych band, the Knave, who did a song called "The Mayor Of Simpleton Hall"? Is that where "The Mayor Of Simpleton" comes from?

No. Someone told me about that around 1990. After we'd done ours, of course. I vaguely remember someone pointing that out to me.

Maybe it was subliminal...

Maybe. Those things do go in. I remember writing some stuff for "James And The Giant Peach" a few years back. One of the things I came up with really quickly was a wonderful melody which someone pointed out was a song by Spanky And Our Gang, a big hit in the States in the late 60s. They sent me a tape and it was exactly the same thing. So maybe I'd heard that as a kid and it sank in. I've never ripped off anything consciously, except with The Dukes Of Stratosphear (XTC's psychedelic alter-ego, who recorded two albums in the 80s). There is a sequence of chords in "Books Are Burning" that are also from "I get Around", but no one would ever know.

Did you like the Beach Boys?

Not at the time. I thought they were five astronaut would-bes with stripey shirts who did good singles. It wasn't until 1986 that I heard "Smiley Smile" in Dave Gregory's car. I thought it was amazing. I remembered them fluffing "When I Grow Up To Be A Man" on 'Ready Steady Go'. I knew the Kinks had albums but I didn't buy them because I didn't have the money, and also because some of it I heard was absolutely ghastly.

What about the Kink's cliched "quintessential Englishness" that XTC also had - the music hall element of "Mr. Pleasant" and so on?

That vaudevillian thing? Yes, they got that directly from their parent's in that sort of music. We probably got it from them. The music that got played in our house was dross like the "Light Programme," plus a few jazz LPs. Oscar Peterson or Charlie Parker. I later got into avant-garde music like Sun-Ra, Albert Ayler.

Do you worry about your future?

No. I'm a bit irresponsible like that. I haven't got much money in the bank. I make an average wage. A lot of people round here make a lot more money than I do. Some years are good, some are awful. I suppose because I'm not starving it doesn't worry me so much. I still have dreams, I'd like to be a label and all the bands on it. I'd love that. And art thing. I liked records for being an art object - the sleeve the whole thing.

The much-talked about touring psychosis that precipitated you "mini nervous breakdown" in 1982... how did you allow it to get that far?

We'd been touring constantly for five years. It was the conflict between the inner me and the outer me. The outer me still wanted to be a pop start, still wanted to be a Monkee-Beatle-Rolling Stone. I'd been put through a lot of touring which was really crushing, physically and mentally. We were doing it every day in obscure places in the world. You'd wake up in the morning and try and guess where you were. It was the Holiday Inn, obviously, but where? You'd ring down to reception and they'd say, New Zealand, and you'd think, yeah, of course.

You're saying that with a certain amount of humour... surely it wasn't funny then?

No. That fact that everything looks the same is one of the more jocular elements to the touring. That's the light angle. They heavy angle was that it was starting to wreck me. I was obviously dissatisfied, and I remember writing "English Settlement", thinking, this doesn't have to go on the road. I want this to stop. We never made a penny from touring. You'd be playing away on auto-pilot, and you'd be three songs in and you'd think, "Where's all the money?" There's 15,000 people, they're all paying x dollars a head, where's it all going?

So what happened?

I remember saying to the lads, I really don't want to tour this record, and they'd say, you'll be OK, go and have a sandwich. They you'd think, they're right, silly me. Then you'd start dreading it again. Then they'd say, you alright. You ill? And I'd say, No, no, no. Then I found myself being more physically ill. Pains in my stomach, panic attacks on stage. You think you're going to die, and there's thousands of people looking at you. Your head's spinning and you heart's going and it's very frightening. I thought, stop this. Stop worrying. Stop worrying that you're living in two rooms next to the shunting yard.

My subconscious was saying stop this. He doesn't want to be a pop star any more. I though I was cracking up. I thought, it's me Peter Green and Syd Barrett all dribbling into the f-holes in our guitars in the same clinic. Brian Wilson's coming around to form a super group. I'm fine now, I was just stuck on this treadmill that wasn't me.

Colin Moulding strikes me as a sensitive being. Didn't he realise what was happening, or wasn't he affected?

He shut off in a different way. He went a bit girl-crazy on the road, which was no fun for his wife. He returned from tour once with a rather gorgeous Australian fan with him. I had an ashtray with "Greetings from Sydney" and a boomerang and he had this gorgeous girl. "Meet my souvenir from Australia, dear." Whamm! I saw the guitar go over his head. It was the one he used to write his songs on. The pressure got to us in different ways. We weren't drug takers or anything. I used to drink a lot. It was a way of numbing yourself. I had these mini-breakdowns in America. (pauses) Do you like these biscuits, he said, sounding like Robert Morley.

Was it a conscious decision not to do any drugs?

I never did any drugs. For a mixture of reasons: I was scared because, as a kid, I was hooked on valium, which went on for 13 years. I took them as a kid because my mother was rather nutty. She got me on these valium. He's a bit upset, is he? Not doing too well at school? Stick him on valium. I ended up taking them for 13 years, until my girlfriend flushed them down a toilet on tour in Los Angeles. That's the only time I've ever smashed up a hotel room. I was intensely angry because my little support line had gone down the toilet. I came back from a heavy night's drinking... But also, and I'm not joking, I always thought that people who took drugs came across as such wankers! Nothing to do with creativity. You hear all the stories about the Beatles taking drugs, but you can't function. Mal would have to drive poor John home because he'd drop a tab of acid, sit there with his head in his hands feeling sick while his hands turned into lobsters! You can't be creative on drugs. All that bollocks about "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" being LSD. No it's not, it's LITSWD! That's Welsh lavatory cleaner. There's so much wankerdom tied up in drug taking. It turns people into cabbages. I did get into heavy drinking, though. I was a lot fatter.

But you do like "drug" music?

Ironically, yes. John Leckie (XTC producer)worked with the Pink Floyd and he said Syd Barrett would just sit there and dribble and you'd have to call the session off and go home. "Oh dear, Syd's taken some acid!". He'd turn the volume on his guitar off. The people in the control room would be thinking something was wrong because they couldn't hear his guitar and it would be Syd. He'd say, "I don't want to disturb anyone." Have you taken anything, Syd? "Er, yeah."

Where would you like to go next?

I'd like to have a band and produce the records and have complete control, like Kin Fowley. A complete svengali. I've got books full of group names. Like the Brighton Peers and the Sopwith Caramels. The music business would have to be the correct crassness. It wouldn't be like Boyzone, it would be more like 22nd Century Bubblegum. I'd have one of those drummers who could keep time, but get him to play stupidly. Very moronic.

Could be big! It's a kind of misconception that manufactured music is crap. Normally, it's quite good.

Yeah, I was a fan of the Monkees, I didn't care if someone else wrote the songs. I looked like Peter Tork at the time. I had the cord hipsters and the double-breasted shirt from my mum's catalogue. It got me a lot of "finger action" at the time. It never actually got me a shag.

Was the late '80s dance revolution a watershed for you? Could you ever assimilate modern mechanical break-beats or techno beats into XTC?

I've got the ability to do that. In 15 seconds I could put together something which would get to No. 5 in the charts. It makes me laugh, because it's so pathetic. It's anti what I love about music which us the song structure. The nature of it needing to be 20 minutes long - it's long past the attention span of the normal person. Even concertos are cut up into two or three minute segments.

Are you pleased with you career, as presented on "Fossil Fuel"?

Single compilations are like sweet shops. They're like all the desserts from lots of banquets scraped up and put in one place. I much prefer the stuff in the albums, with a few exceptions. "Senses Working Overtime" wasn't too bad. "Love On A Farmboy's Wages" wasn't too bad. "Wrapped In Grey" I'm quite proud of. "Sgt. Rock" I wish I'd never written.

Did you feel like that at the time?

You are on a fast-track to Hades. The band likes it and the record company's raving about it. You can't stop it. "Science Friction" is just ploddy, a snapshot of you with spots and a haircut like Dave Hill's. I did actually have a haircut like Dave Hill. I didn't realise it was a wig.

But some people put out singles that are terrible. R.E.M! "E-Bow The Letter" E-Bow Shite!. It's like the King's New Clothes. can I be the first one to stand up and say, "He's got no song!" They can't shit without it being held up as a holy relic. "E-Bow The Letter"! It's just sad college pretentious rambling. It's like when you're 16 and you want to be in an experimental band where you drone on and someone reads out a letter. It's not a fucking song! It gets my goat because we're an average group and they're an average group. It would appall m if anything we did was held up as Christ's foreskin.

I've heard Stipe wants to work with me, but the telephone call hasn't materialised.

And would you?

I'd tell him he'd have to work harder on the songs.

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