How do your early vocal efforts sound to you today?
I sounded like, you know, Buddy Holly on helium, as some critic said...a wounded sealion, er, in a blender. Some horrible bark that was probably great for cutting through crapply PA's live, but when you get it in a studio in front of a decent microphone it sounded horribly forced.
What's the story behind the toy soldiers? Are you into war games?
I
actually had a phase where I'd do very complicated wargames,
but they sort of get bogged down in kind of the realism of,
you know, how do we supply the biscuits and gravy for 50,000
men, you know, and it's all this sort of stuff. It just gets
bogged down in boring realism, and then I eventually worked
my way back to H.G. Wells who used to crawl around on the
lawn in his cricket trousers with Jerome K. Jerome firing toy
cannons, knocking each other's figures over with matchsticks.
And I 
thought, "That's the way to do it!" So
I'm much more interested in that kind of thing these days.
Coz' you see, you only spent a tiny little dot of your life
as a kid, and I can't see why you can't cling on to the
delights of childhood.
Are any particular genres of music a favorite of yours?
Kids' music fascinates me because the best music on English radio at one time...people say, "Wow, the fifties and early sixties, rock 'n' roll!"... no it wasn't, not it England. Not on English radio. The best things on English radio, the only things that were of any interest were children's songs or novelty songs, songs that had sped up voices, bizarre instruments, unusual things happening, a comedy record... stuff like that, or like the Goons, Peter Sellers or Charlie Drake, you know, these novelty records with unusual arrangements, unusual sounds. They were interesting, whereas the rest of it was just brain death, kind of, oh, real, the real sort of Alma Cogan sicky, cloying kind of... the worst aspect of your parents' music. Whereas the good stuff is the stuff with the wierd noises in.
What did your parents think of your musical interests?
If I
was going to do something to upset my parents, brilliant! The
reason I struggled and struggled with an electric guitar was
probably the fact that my mother turned the electricity off
whenever I plugged the amplifier in. That was a great spur to
wanting to do something, just to know that you can be
rebelling and pleasing yourself at the same time. And, you
know, my daughter knows that I like music so she probably
won't go into music.
What prompted you to write the Skylarking track "Dear God?" And what sort of response did you get to that song?
Basically is there really a God or not?
And I firmly come down on the not side, but that was just a
last poker in the fire of the whole God thing. I think a lot
of people heard it the wrong way, they heard me slagging off
Christianity, which wasn't the intention. The intention was
just to makw them think about what they're believing in and
why they believe in that sort of thing, and to try and
highlight it with a paradox of writing a letter to God
questioning his existence. That was the whole paradox of it,
was talking to God and saying that "you don't
exist". But people, a lot of people, didn't get that,
maybe that... I missed the mark there. 
I did get a lot of
hate mail from "Dear God", people saying I was
going to fry in hell, blah, blah... And I got hate mail for
other things as well. This white supremacist from Tennessee
wrote about the song "Knuckle Down" on English
Settlement, saying how on earth could I promote love between
the races, didn't I realise that the white race was
disappearing? The closing line of the letter was, "The
reason I'm not putting my name and address is you going to
send one of your negro friends from Brixton down here to rape
me and my entire family."
Does your writing ever surprise you?
There are times when I didn't know why I was writing this song, but felt compelled to write it. And I wrote a song which... it'll be the last batch of material I wrote... a song called "Always Winter, Never Christmas" which was a perfect description of my marriage. And when I wrote it I didn't realise that, but a couple of months afterwards I thought "Oh Christ, this is me! This is really me saying this, you know, and meaning this." And that is kind of the crunchy delight of songwriting, is you don't know why you're compelled to write things but you can write them and you can be pulling something out of your subconcious that you wouldn't pull out of your concious. You wouldn't pull it out of the front of your head 'coz it would be too painful, but you pull it out of the back not knowing what it's about, and then you can see later... "Oh, my goodness, I know what that's about now." There's more than a dozen songs in our career that are "bad relationship" songs, with myself and the woman that is my ex-wife, that I didn't realise that when I was writing them, but I can see plain as day now.
Tell us a little about your sources of inspiration...
I used to find pictorial things very musical. At one time I found Miro's paintings amazingly musical, felt like sometimes I wanted to play an instrument that was inspired or reflecting what Miro was doing with... with paint. I know that sounds really stupid, but I used to honestly believe at one time that I could make music that would, some way, compliment what he did with paint. And naive art I find very inspirational, that... in some stupid way, I can't even explain this... I find it musical. It is pictorial, but I find it musical and I would... trying to find a way to shove it down the fibres to get it from Art-lamd to Music-land. It's impossible to describe but I find all that kind of... bad art, or what most people consider as bad art... really kind of inspiring musically. It's a bit of a strange thing to say I know.
How has your experience been with XTC and rock videos?
I just think our videos are kind of either clumsy or wrongly comical, for the wrong reasons, ot they're like a bad haircut, they're not what you asked for. And you get stuck with it for a long time afterwards, you know. You go in there and you... "I want my hair like Mick Jagger's" and they shave it all off, you know. "Wait! You said you knew what Mick Jagger looked like!", "Yeah. he was great in the King and I", as the old gag goes. Well, that's our videos. You spend thirty thousand, forty thousand pounds, fifty thousand pounds and you turn up to the shoot and it's, "This is all wrong." I remember the video for "The Disappointed", we turned up for tyhe shoot and I'd spent days and days going though with the director how it should look. Basically I wanted to work on bringing the wrong perspectives of siege paintings from medieval times. You know the sort of thing where the castle tower would come up and then the person would just be like a huge head coming out and looking over because the perspective's all wrong. I wanted to do the whole film in the wrong perspective, but using the medieval siege and making it all look flat like it was all flat painted theatrical looking things. I turned up to the set and it was totally wrong, but I tried to protest and say, "Wait, this is wrong," and they're saying, "Look, please shut up a minute we've got a video to make here." But, you know, "But I'M paying for it!". "Just shut up!"
What sorts of experiences led you to decide to stop playing live?
You're somewhere in Wyoming and you're trying to get your pants clean and find something to eat, what's nagging at the back of your mind is, "I'm killing myself here and someone else is taking all the reward," or, "I wish I wasn't killing myself, I wish I could work doing such-and-such in music, or I would like more time to spend on... you know, not just a couple of weeks to scribble out an album quickly. I mean, literally albums were getting written on backs of old bills or... the worst thing ever written on was toilet paper from truckstops. You know, 'coz you'd...let's stop here I've got an idea you know, and you'd go in and you'd tear off a load of toilet paper from the truckstop and then get back on the van or the bus or whatever, and jot down all these things.
What did you feel about punk in the 70s, and was XTC a part of that movement?
I love the energy of punk, but then there's a lot of fakeness involved which used to make me laugh endlessly. All the negativity and the kind of destruction sort of angle that I found so fake, but I did like the energy - I couldn't see why... a lot of them had energy, and then to fix on the negative side... I thought energy was sort of neutral, I preferred it when it had positive connotations but a lot of punks just kind of carting negativity, which I found very comical. I knew those people weren't like that, if you see what I mean. You know they... they don't mean all that "Smash It Up" stuff, they're just not like that. A lot of people thought we were a comedy band when we started because we'd have fun and we'd smile. The humour wasn't suppressed in the music, whereas most other band would rather chew of their own limbs than be seen as having any humour, you know. "The Serious Young Man" doesn't want to be... he wants to be taken seriously so therefore he goes towards this kind of grimacing fakeness, and you just know they'e not like that; they're like you, they like a few drinks, they like to have fun.
So what do you think were XTC’s musical strengths in the early years?
I mean I haven't really listened to it for a long time, and I don't know if I could have the correct judgement 'coz I was trapped inside the goldfish bowl, but at the time I thought we were being amazingly modern and were doing things with instruments that were, maybe naively, that we were doing a few different things with instruments.
Some of the later XTC songs sound influenced by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys - are you a fan?
I
loved all the Beach Boys singles, I had them as a kid and it
was like... "Good Vibrations", which for years I
thought went twice the speed 'coz I actually had it on tape.
I had a little... one of tbose tape records which are the
size of small shoe-box with the tiny reels on the top, and
I'd taped if off the radio and immediately put new batteries
in it, so it was ["speeded up" voice] "I'm
picking up good vibrations, she's giving me the
excitations..." and for years I thought it went like
that, you know. I had all the singles, but I didn't know
about their albums until 1986 and then heard Smiley Smile and
within a year or two I'd bought most of their records.
Do you feel cynical about the music business these days, after your long strike against Virgin Records?
You know, I've got a raw lump of brass cynicism but now they've really got the thing shining, you know. You can see your face in the cynicism now. It's just a process of continual growing and dying at the same time, you know, you're growing because of the knowledge, but you're dying because of this sort of naive life in you is being chiselled out by knowing the bascially criminal activities of the record industry. I don't think there's any kind of industry that works like it.
In the wake of the dismantling of your 20-year recording contract, what advice do you have for a young band starting out?
I think the record industry is very vampire-like and survives on this desperation of young kids to be doing music and... because they want to impress the world, you know, and sleep with it. They're feeding on that energy. There's almost nothing you can say to any young band, because a young band is a gang. They just want to drink the world dry, you know, and, "Lock up your dughters, 'coz here we come. We wanna make a row, we wanna upset your parents and we wanna drink your drink." And that's the best way it's going to be, and so there's no way of saying anything to them sensibly like, "Do you realise that these people loaned you this money, and they're going to take this, this and this away from you and you'll never own that and you'll never..." They don't want to know that, they just want to know where's the beer that they think is free.
How do you feel now about the early recordings of XTC?
The stuff on "White Music" is very primitive, but you should have heard the 400 or so song that were thrown away before then. Boy, were they bad. It's kind of embarrassing because you're not that person any more, but you are to a lot of people because they either have specific nostalgic memories of when they heard that album, or they've come to that album lately and they like it and maybe it's a new think for them. But for me it's like spotty teenage photographs, you know, your there with a bad haircut and bad flares and spots, and someone is bringing these phtographs out and saying, "Wow! I really like this!" And you're saying, "For Christ's sake, I'm not like that any more", you know.
On Religion, Creation and Philosophy.
I always like to suprise myself, working on the principle that if I can still suprise myself it keeps me fresh. And it keeps me delighted and hopefully it'll have the same effect other people. I don't make music for other people now, I think when we started I was... had half a year for... "Oh my God, what are people thinking about this?" But I really don't care now.
One good thing as you grow older, it's a good thing not to become selfish personally with your attitude to the world. It's a good thing to become selfish artistically because it makes your art more pungent... art with a capital F.
I'm
fascinated by what humans believe, I think that when you take
people from all around the world and look at what they
believe in it's all a ludicrous as the next person's, but the
fact is that they all have to believe in something. It's
human nature.
I doesn't matter what you belive in, whether the world is going around on the back of a giant turtle, or the person who is going to save you was nailed to a cross in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Whatever the religion...
They're all as crazy, as illogical and as daft as the other, the constant thread is that humans do believe in them and are constantly finding new ways of making up or interpreting them. Any individual religion, I think, is as dumpy as the next
