Stagefright - Mojo Magazine, June 1994

Andy Partridge confronts his life-long enemy: Stagefright

Everything frightened me as a child, especially nameless dreads and unspeakable horrors. Our loo was upstairs and I would risk a broken neck by jumping down 10 stairs because I knew I'd be reduced to some sort of primal death dust if I didn't get to the bottom of the stairs before it stopped flushing.

I fretted over a novelty record called Who Put The Lightie Out?, about a little man who lived inside the fridge and put the light out when you shut the door. The thought of little people inhabiting domestic appliances was terrifying.

The fact that these dreads were illogical didn't make them any less scary, and there are a couple of things which I can now relate directly to me developing stagefright.

I was bullied because I was a weedy, artistic type. My reaction was that I refused to do things if I felt people were pressuring me. For example, I was a good runner but I hated the gym teacher. I could win races, but when county sports came up I'd deliberately lose because I knew that teacher would get the glory and the silver cup. I liked to win, but not for his benefit.

The real Sword Of Damocles, though, was reading in public at school assembly. I've seen it reduce huge rugby playing head-boy junior macho warriors to jelly. The teachers deliberately told you in advance, to give you two months of Chinese torture.

I cant' recall which particular bit of surrealistic onomatopoeia from The Bible I had to read, but I do remember shaking in my shoes. The French mistress, who found my blabbering, stammering and quivering profoundly funny, was sniggering behind me on the stage, which made it feel a million times worse.

I was fine if I was in control because, soon after, I starred in a school play - The Scarlet Pimpernel. I even wrote and performed comedy sketches which I felt totally confident about, because I wanted to do it, and I got to hang around with half-dressed girls in the changing rooms. I just couldn't tolerate anything inflicted on me against my will.

My dream was to be a Beatle-Monkee-Rolling Stone. My father kept a shop-spoiled Dutch acoustic guitar behind the settee. I'd come home in my duffel coat and shorts from seeing A Hard Days Night, and pull this guitar out and stand in front of the mirror and try to make my legs go like John or George's. Lennon looked like somebody had just stolen his horse, and George did a little dance where he'd knock his legs away from himself.

I used to take the guitar to school before I could actually play it and just hang it around my neck. I'd try to play the intro to Day Tripper, or the opening riff to Pleasant Valley Sunday, which I still haven't quite mastered and girl would come and touch it. It was like my wooden phallus and they were queuing up to stroke it. It was a fishing rod for girls.

At college, in 1969, I auditioned for an R&B group called Stray Blues. I lasted three gigs. At the final one, in a ballroom connected to McIlroy's department store in Swindon, I more my Morse's catalogue foam-backed fake leather fringed jacket. It was the nearest Buffalo Springfield ever got to Swindon. The skinheads in the audience threw so many bottles and coins at us that I hid behind the Marshall stack until we got pulled off.

At XTC's first major London gig, at the Rainbow supporting Blondie in 1977, I was so wound up I actually pissed myself onstage, but my guitar was slung so low the audience couldn't see. After a couple of years with XTC I started performing on automatic. I could play the set really well, but all the time I'd be thinking about buying a new sofa, or something equally mundane. It was like self-preservation against the high intensity of punk gigs. We'd be playing Merthyr Tydfil and all these kids in bin-liners would start gobbing, a blinding storm of spittle for an hour, and no amount of pleading made them stop.

But you could feed off their energy. You felt you could levitate in front of them. You could fuck the whole audience and still have enough energy for their parents and the goldfish too. Patti Smith claimed she would come in her drawers onstage, and Noddy Holder used to say he would shoot his lot if a gig was going well, but it didn't affect me that way.

During the gig I'd be so amped up with adrenaline and loud music that everything was in slow motion. I could watch each gob of spit coming over, spinning in it's orbit, and I'd think, Oh here comes a bit, it'll hit me in about half an hour. We'd come offstage with what looked like scoops of mashed potato all over our guitars, but it was gob, some with little hard red centres. I always felt there was plenty of time to avoid it, but a huge one hit the harmonica once just when I had to suck in a bit of air. It went through the harmonica and straight down my throat.

I was beginning to worry about how people attribute almost mystical powers to stars. I've met people who've called their baby XTC. Others turn up in jumpers which are the covers of XTC albums. They come from America to stand outside my house and have my friends take pictures. These people have got it wrong, because I know I'm just an ordinary human being, and nobody is worthy of that level of attention.

Even so, actual stagefright didn't start until I began to sense that we touring endlessly and not seeing the benefit of it. The money from five years of live shows seemed to evaporate. It was eaten up by all sorts of expenses. We were living on £25 a week each, which, I later realised, was coming out of my songwriting advances for each album. We'd do a 10-week tour of America, playing to two or three thousand people a night, but we'd come home and there'd be no money.

It may seem incredible but we were kept so busy we were permanently off balance. There was never a chance to sit down and talk about it sensibly. On tour, you wake up to the doorbell buzzing. You've got 10 minutes to get some food down your neck because the van's waiting to take you to Hull. You make up three hour's sleep in the van, and lunch is a packet of peanuts when you stop at a service station for a pee. You arrive in Hull and do interviews with the college magazine and the local Gazette. You do the soundcheck, grab a bag of chips, do the show, get a kebab and go to bed in the hotel. Tomorrow, Dundee.

It began to really depress me. I'd go down the pub and people would say they'd just seen me on Top Of The Pops. They see you on television and assume you're rich, but I was going home to two rooms down by Swindon railway station shunting yard. The bedroom was damp, with so much mould on the wall, I slept in the kitchen with my feet in a sleeping bag in the oven.

Around the start of the '80s, my subconscious began to kick in and protect me. It was saying, "You'd have to be stupid to go onstage tonight. You'll lose five pound in sweat and knacker yourself and when you come offstage you'll get two bottles of beer and eight bars of soap." For some unfathomable reason the soap was specified in our rider, "for band use".

Before the gigs I started getting stomach cramps. My body would go stiff. I'd be laid on a hotel bed unable to work my legs and arms. If I moved I'd be dry-retching over the toilet. There was nothing in there because I wasn't eating. My body was saying: "You don't want to go anywhere. Why kill yourself for business people who don't give two fucks and a rolling ring doughnut whether you live or die, so long as they get their money?"

Meanwhile, I'd got married. I wanted a family and I couldn't go on living in all these odd places, so I went to the bank, got a £17,000 mortgage and bought a house. During the English Settlement tour, in 1982, I felt increasingly that I was not in control of my life. Everybody else was getting the benefit while we did all the work. It was like the games master getting the silver cup all over again.

Ironically, the crunch came at Le Palais during what was actually a very worthwhile gig. It was a major prestige show, a sell-out broadcast live of radio and TV, but it was near the end of the tour and I totally disconnected from reality.

The audience was chanting and the whole place was in uproar. When we hit the stage the place went crazy, and I remember playing the opening of Respectable Street and thinking, I don't feel well. I can't sing. I'll just keep playing the intro. I could feel the others looking at me, wondering why the hell I wasn't singing. I was dizzy. I thought I was dying. My stomach hurt, my legs were giving way, me head was throbbing, the audience was going to kill me with affection. It was like the dam had burst. I pulled off the guitar and just ran. The band played the intro a while longer, then they stopped and walked off, and the audience was none too pleased. And this was going out live on radio and TV.

Backstage, they thought it was heart attack. I was laid out on the floor of the changing room, crying me eyes out, clutching my stomach. Our manager was pacing up and down, and suddenly the room filled with two dozen firemen. It was totally surreal, like a Monty Python nightmare. The traffic was bad, so they had to get the fire brigade to clear a way for the ambulance.

The French record company wanted to reschedule the gig for the next night, so they forbade me to leave town. I had to beg our tour manager on my hands and knees to get me a flight out of Paris that night.

Back home, we hadn't been in the house long and neighbours were inviting us round to meet them, but I couldn't face it. I couldn't even leave the house. If I touched the bolt on the garden gate, even to go down the shops, I'd want to throw up. I felt as if people would be expecting something fantastic out of me.

The negative, misinformed press reaction didn't help. I wanted to tell them what was really going on, but I didn't actually know the truth. I was having tests for ulcers, barium meals, X-rays, psychotherapy...what was it?

The next English tour was postponed while I consulted a psychiatrist. I also when to a hypnotist, which is what I believe Robbie Robertson of The band did in similar circumstances. The hypnotist could take me through the run up to a gig and I'd start crying, feeling the pain again, although I was perfectly safe on a couch in a lovely cottage. he tried to relax me and assured me that nobody wanted to hurt me, but he didn't address the fact that I felt I'd lost control of my life and career.

This thing that should have been joyous, to be in a pop group and make music, the thing I'd wanted since I was a child, had gone horribly sour. I sat in my garden most of the summer, still writing songs but thinking of myself as a rock 'n' roll casualty.

To my horror, I discovered we were committed to a massive American tour. I only survived one gig, in San Diego. I did the whole show in utter terror and it was our last. We cancelled the tour. I wasn't worried about losing money because I never saw any to start with, so it just didn't enter the question.

I suspect that every case of stagefright is different. I suspect a lot of Brian Wilson's problems with performing live stemmed from his drug problems. I've had guys from the American record company offer me coke before gigs, and they can never understand why I don't want it. The reason is that whether I'm great or atrocious onstage, it has to be me. It has to be real.

I've read that stagefright, the level of fear that was being generated by huge audiences and the expectations people had of them, was a major factor in The Beatles stopping touring. They were all throwing up before gigs, which is a classic sign. Some of John Lydon's people recently told me they had terrible problems at a TV chat show because he kept vomiting. They had to carry a bucket round for him.

Around the time of the Oranges And Lemons album I still couldn't face a major tour, so I hit on the idea of playing small acoustic gigs for radio and TV. For one of the MTV things, we turned up and there was an audience of 200. I hadn't known about it. I was very doubtful but, in the event, I was fine because I was in control. I didn't feel I was doing it for anyone else. I didn't feel trapped. That state of mind is vital.

The one beneficial side-effect to all of this is that our albums got a lot better when we stopped playing live. Once the pressure was gone, I could concentrate on songwriting and arranging. We became Technicolor where before we'd just been monochrome.

I recently got up onstage at the Bottom Line in New York with Aimee Mann's band, because Dave Gregory from XTC was touring with her. He asked me to get up because she was doing a Duke Of Stratosfear number and had wanted me to sing it. Initially I said no then I thought, Well, why not? I had two days of diarrhoea before the show, I was so wound up. I tried to make it really low-key. I wandered onstage in my street clothes, including my hat, and did the number. There were lots of photographs being taken and dozens of people backstage, because word had got round.

My only reservation now is that I'm not so sure if getting up onstage can be dignified for a 40-year-old like me. I know John Lee Hooker does it at twice my age, but I associate the kind of music we do, perhaps wrongly, with being 18 to 25.

With me, it was only performing live that gave me problems. being in the studio is easy. I've just completed an album, Through The Hill, with Harold Budd. I didn't sleep too well the day before we started, but that was just perfectly normal nerves.

With XTC everything is rehearsed and arranged before we go in, but with Harold we had no idea what we would do. We went in with just a couple of tiny melodic fragments. We didn't even decide what key we'd play in. He'd sit at his keyboard, I'd sit at mine and we'd start. We'd play for a while, and when we thought we had something interesting we'd roll the tape back, listen to it and try to do it again. It was scary, but pleasantly scary.

Now I'm working on the next XTC album, and I feel as if I could go onstage because I'm in control again. Our business side is sorted out, and I don't let people bully me any more into doing things I don't want to. The group isn't being pressured into anything. We're three individuals who will take as long as we need to do what we want. We've all woken up.

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