Senses Working Overtime, by Brett Milano, Pulse, March 1992
Contributed by Simon Knight

XTC makes yet another great album, feuds with yet another producer and still refuses to tour.

It's a lovely Easter morning in Swindon, England, and Andy Partridge is hung over. "I didn't intend to get drunk last night; the wine just slipped down my throat," he says laughing, via trans-Atlantic phone. "I was just sitting there and it jumped right out of the glass at me." So goes the idea of XTC as a band of hermits living a million miles away from any trace of rock'n'roll. Sure, its members live in country homes with their families; and true, they'd hate to call themselves rock stars. But by all accounts, XTC -- singer/guitarist, singer/bassist Colin Moulding, guitarist/keyboardist Dave Gregory -- is having a blast.

It's been a full decade since XTC took the unusual step of swearing off live gigs (due to musical frustration and Partridge's stage fright), against protests from its record label and a good many of its fans. The group's American break-through seemed within reach at the time, with the superb double album English Settlement having just been released. Making matters worse, drummer Terry Chambers jumped ship after the decision; XTC hasn't had a regular drummer since. At the time the band didn't seem likely to last another year, much less 10.

Yet the move hasn't seemed to hurt XTC a bit. Maybe it isn't a megastar act yet, but its cult following is large and fanatical, and its critical standing is impeccable. Whenever anybody wants to level high praise at some upstart pop band, they'll invariably get compared to XTC. ("That's true, it's our turn for that. I think it was Squeeze for a while," Partridge says.) And the acclaim is bound to grow with the release of XTC's first new album in three years, Nonsuch (Geffen / Virgin).

On some levels, Nonsuch is a vintage XTC album -- the usual trademarks of finely crafted melodies, wry humour, intense love songs and angry commentaries are all here, and there a few throwbacks to earlier efforts: "Humble Daisy" recalls the pastoral calms of Mummer, while "The Ugly Underneath" is jarring enough to fit comfortably on The Big Express. In other ways, however, it's a very different record for XTC. For one thing, the usual guitar-band sound is played own, with fuller orchestration and with Partridge and Gregory often switching to keyboards. For another, the songs aren't as immediate as usual. Save for "Dear Madam Barnum" (The album's token 60's style pop tune) almost nothing kicks in right away. It's only after a few close listens that the charm of "Omnibus," the rock kick of "Crocodile," and the outright beauty of "That Wave" and "Humble Daisy" become evident.

"Everyone we've talked to has brought that up," Partridge says. "Some have even said they didn't like it the first time through. I just hope that doesn't preclude people from having the patience to absorb it. Part of the reason is that it's a much simpler record than Oranges and Lemons [XTC's last album and biggest American hit]. We kept the arrangements more basic. It's also that these songs are more labyrinthine, more maze-like. You just have to wander around in them a little more."

The songs on Nonsuch push XTC's intensity level a few notches further than usual. The topical songs -- Partridge's "Books Are Burning" and "The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead"; Moulding's "War Dance" -- are among the band's most pointed, while the more personal songs reveal XTC as hard-core romantics. On "Wrapped In Grey," Partridge pulls off a convincing idealist's anthem, with the chorus "Awaken you dreamers... don't let the loveless ones sell you a world wrapped in grey."

"The annoying thing about me is, I really believe what those songs are saying. That's my armour, if you will. I do believe that you need to let your emotions out; you need to start appreciating the world in all it's contents. There's too many death admirers around for me, so `Wrapped In Grey' is a life song." "That Wave" equates falling in love with getting swept away by the ocean, and leaves Partridge to reveal one similarity of his life with Brian Wilson's: They're both afraid of water. "When I was young I literally got knocked unconscious by a wave. I remember coming to on the beach, with people pounding on my chest. Since then I've been totally scared shitless by water. `That Wave' is about that kind of sensation; where fear is so intense it turns into delight."

Then there's "Omnibus," a philosophical statement disguised as a novelty song. "One writer said it was `a deft poke at boneheaded sexual politics,' but there's nothing further from the truth. It's a song in adoration of women of all shapes and sizes, and the fact that we should be climbing on each other and having fun with each other. It was written for someone I know, who's scared stiff of women at my age. It's kind of an invitation song, to get out there and try those flavours out."

"War Dance" seemed perfectly timed as a response to the Gulf War, but Moulding actually wrote it in the early '80s. "That song has an interesting little history. Colin wrote it in 1983 about the Falklands, but the music just didn't work. Then we were rehearsing for this album, and there's suddenly a war on the TV. So he rewrote the music and said, `That's it; we're going to have to do this song now,' `Books Are Burning' came out of two incidents -- seeing Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses getting burnt in London, and hearing that the Christian far right in America was burning C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. I thought `Come on - when you start burning books, people are next."

The relative lack of guitars may give a clue as to where XTC is going. "I think `Omnibus' and `Rook' are the two songs that show something we'd like to explore further. But I'm really just a slave to what the songs demand. Most songs come out with their own atmosphere and you have to listen to them, else the songs would sit in the corner having little tantrums. In this case, some of them demanded a piano rather than a guitar. On `Omnibus' I added an acoustic guitar in the midsection out of sheer good nature, just so Dave could play on it."

The path to an XTC album seldom runs smooth. The Mummer album, for example, was delayed for nearly a year and nearly canned altogether because the band's A&R man at Virgin U.K. didn't hear a single; these days it's considered one of XTC's peak albums. But that's nothing compared to what happened with Nonsuch. Imagine how you'd feel if you were XTC, world-class songwriting band, and your label told you that almost none of the 32 songs you'd just written were any good. That's precisely what happened when Partridge and Moulding brought the Nonsuch demos to Virgin, and it's why the album took so long to appear.

"It was the same fellow that rejected Mummer -- the A&R man, or the Um and Aargh Man, as we like to call him. We had just finished promoting Oranges and Lemons, time was on our hands and the songs started pouring out. So we submitted the first batch, and there were many days of silence. I finally called up and said, `Any thoughts on the songs?' And he said `No, I don't like them. I like one ["The Ugly Underneath"] and I like half of another ["That Wave"]. I think you've got to start again.' And I'd considered these songs among the best I'd ever written, so I was a mixture of furious and dumbfounded. Eventually we got up to 32 songs, many arguments later, and he was still saying, "Unless you want to deliver 12 Top-10 singles, you'll never make an album."

Finally, XTC's nemesis got hired away by another label. "That same week the head of Virgin rang us up and said, `When are we going to hear demos for the new album?' I told him, `Just go to the office next door; the guy there has had them for the past year-and-a-half.' Two hours later he called back and said, "This is brilliant; you've got to start recording right away.' So a lot of the songs on the album are the very same ones we submitted in the first place. When we got the songs recorded, my first reaction was, `Christ, I never thought we'd get this finished.'"

So the album was finished a week later, right? Wrong. The next step was finding a producer, an issue that's given XTC plenty of headaches in the past. On Skylarking the band worked with Todd Rundgren, and though the results were brilliant, there were no small amounts of personality clashes. For Oranges and Lemons, XTC worked in Los Angeles with Paul Fox; the band liked Fox but hated LA. The original plan for Nonsuch was to reunite heavyweight producers Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham. Both had worked with XTC in the late '70s / early '80s; Lillywhite produced Drums and Wires and Black Sea with Padgham engineering, the Padgham took over on English Settlement. And both had moved on to bigger commercial success -- Lillywhite with U2, Talking Heads and the Rolling Stones; Padgham with the Police and Genesis.

"Steve Lillywhite's always said he got a lot of work because of our records; he said David Byrne and U2 had come to him because of it. So that was the plan; get the old boys back together and show how we've all changed. But he made us wait four months before starting, and never took time out to come to rehearsals. Then the days we were supposed to start recording, he took a two-week holiday in the Caribbean. So I said, `Hmm, somebody's not taking us seriously here.' Most of the other producers we talked to were just too greedy. John Paul Jones [yes, the ex-Zeppelin bassist] wanted $100,000 and a four-percent royalty. And Steve Lipson wanted to rewrite all the lyrics. He said things like, `What's a 16-year-old girl putting on makeup to go out for an evening going to make of something like "Rook, Rook, gaze in your brook"?'"

At least one good thing happened during this mixed-up period: The band met up with Dave Mattacks, the Fairport Convention member and session ace who's considered one of England's best drummers. "It was a happy piece of accident. We were rehearsing at Colin's place; things weren't clicking at all and we knew it was time to get a drummer. Then Dave Gregory's brother Ian went to a Fairport gig, and in the program they had asked Dave Mattacks if there was anyone he hadn't played with yet that he'd like to. He answered, `Joni Mitchell and XTC.' So I put on a blonde wig and big teeth and told him I was Joni Mitchell, but he saw through the disguise right away."

It was Mattacks who suggested that Gus Dudgeon (best known for doing nearly all of Elton John's hits) might want to produced XTC. "By then I was so desperate to get the album started that I rang him up. When I told a few friends about it, their reaction was, `You've got to be crazy,'" Turns out they were right. "In my mind, he was pretty dreadful. We just fought too much. The good thing was that he's very precise about vocals. But he made some classic mistakes, and his attitude was always `You should do as you're told, boys. Elton John never did it this way.' At least when we worked with Todd Rundgren, we always knew there was a good musical mind behind the massive Todd ego. But I'd say that this album got done despite Gus Dudgeon being there."

Now the band has that three-year recording silence to make up for. Due for midsummer release is a home-demo version of all 17 songs on the new album, to be called either Somesuch or Nearsuch. "I'm getting my kids to draw the cover. I think more bands should do that type of thing." Also tentatively planned is a mini-album including some songs that were written for Nonsuch but not used. "If i had my way, we would have recorded all 32 songs and all the fragments as well, but it was hard enough talking the label into another double album. [In the U.K., Nonsuch was released as a double-vinyl LP. In America it's XTC's longest CD / Cassette.] I do think we have songs that are better than the ones that went on, but these got chosen by democratic three-way vote." And Partridge swears it won't be another three years before the next proper XTC album rolls round.

Another possibility is a sequel to the Dukes of Stratosphear, XTC's psychedelic alter-egos who recorded the affectionate '60s sendups 25 O'Clock and Psonic Psunspot. While the Dukes themselves won't be back (Partridge says that joke has run its course), they may be reborn as a bubblegum band. "That's an idea that Dave Gregory keeps pumping me with. I played him this bubblegum song I'd written called `Candy Mine' and he said, `Wouldn't it be great to do a whole album of this, turning ourselves into the Lemon Dukes?' I've got a few other ideas as well. I'd like to do an album of ultra-crass modernism as high art, but maybe Sigue Sigue Sputnik beat me to it. We shouldn't do a heavy metal album though; that area's been so well tapped [pun intended]."

One thing XTC fans won't be seeing is -- you guessed it -- a tour. Partridge's retreat from the road has already been well documented; to make a long story short, he'd long been grappling with stage fright, and it finally came to a head early in the English Settlement tour. ("The room started spinning around at 78 rpms. I had a real attack of the Brian Wilsons," he said later). But the band did relent and hit the road two years ago after Oranges and Lemons was released, but on a limited basis: First it played acoustic sets at radio stations throughout the country, then played "King for a Day" live on Late Night with David Letterman.

"The daft thing about not touring is that it's put this incredible aura of mystery on us, but that's totally in people's minds," says Partridge. "It comes from people's great appreciation's of the songs, and the fact that we're such an uncommon animal. But we're not special individuals, we have no great personal magic. I don't mind at all that people appreciate the songs, but at this age, I find it hard to have adulation from anyone."

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