Game Bird - Star Interview from an unknown Hi-Fi/Recording magazine,
circa 1987

Front man and guitarist with the quirky English pop band XTC, Andy Partridge has plenty to say about the foibles of the music business.

Deep in the heart of Swindon live three remarkable people. They are responsible for some of the most interesting pop Britain has produced in the last decade. But do they live like idols, secluded in fortified castles. No. They don't even wear sunglasses.

Indeed, the foremost member of this band lives in a semi-detached, terraced house, with wife and kid. The house is littered with the debris of redecorating, with baby's nappies and playthings scattered by child and Charlie, the dog.

Andy Partridge, for it is he - frontman/singer/songwriter for XTC - sits amid the confusion juggling the morning mail in one hand, and a hot cup of tea in the other.

Mr Partridge is not the most prepossessing of rock music's heroes. He doesn't enjoy being photographed, saying that he ends up looking like a cross between Herbert Lom and a child molester. But he's open and friendly in conversation, and startlingly unimpressed by himself. When asked why XTC refuse to play live, he said: 'I never thought we were very good live. We played live for five years solid. I thought it was long enough.'

So, nowadays he sees himself as more of a songwriter than a performer. He began writing early in his career. 'I started literally the week I picked up the guitar,' he said, laughing. 'I had always been a snotty youngster, who didn't like playing other peoples songs. And rather than admit that other people's stuff was too difficult to learn, started immediately writing my own, which was infinitely more simple. I'd play three or four notes - "bum, bum, bum" - and call it a song'

He soon progressed, however. His musical inspiration was a curious mixture of avant garde jazz and the squeaky clean pop of the Monkees."

'I thought the Monkees were great, because my hair was not too dissimilar to Peter Tork's, and I had a shirt just like his. The girls at school liked him, so I thought if I pretended to be one of the Monkees they would like me."

So, just like Peter Tork, Andy got himself a guitar. But what he played with that guitar wasn't exactly Daydream Believer. He was strongly influenced by a friend, who Andy describes as 'something of a Beatnik.'

'Between bouts of leaving home and coming back two days later, he would buy all these records - avant garde jazz from Sweden, Denmark or New York. He used to ask to loan all my pop records, and he would forcibly loan me his jazzy things, like Albert Ayler, Han Bennink or Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. I hated it at first, but really got into it after a while.' In fact, Andy had to get into it. His Beatnik friend sold all Andy's pop records, so Andy was allowed to keep his, as a form of compensation.

This indiscriminate mixing of music had a strange effect on the young Swindonian. 'I went through a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde thing of wanting to be a Monkee , but wanting my band to sound like the Sun Ra Arkestra. Not being a very good player, it was quite and easy thing to imitate what all these avant garde players were doing. My stuff sounded similar: they were making a row, and so was I - it was an easy passport to fortune.'

He shakes his head ruefully: 'It was a very split upbringing - one part of me wanting to be Danny Kaye and the other wanting to go and chant on a hillside in Tibet.'

Happily, the young Partridge avoided any severe psychological damage, and managed to harness these conflicting musical forces into XTC's precursor, the Helium Kids.

The Helium Kids comprised those very adolescents who were later to become XTC (though they were spottier in those days).

Their music was heavily influenced by American '60s garage bands. Andy describes the scene as just like the rock spoof movie, Spinal Tap. 'We'd get very drunk and stagger on stage in our stack heels and make up and make a lot of noise.

'But by about 1975 we were really sick of that kind of thing. I decided to shake-up the band, sharpen our objectives. What did we like doing? We liked three minute songs in a pop format, and we liked to experiment within that format, producing three minute chunks of experimental pop music. So we started to write all our songs in that short, sharp format.

'Then we all had out hair cut very shirt, and I forced the band to wear black, baggy boiler suits, which I painted with white Chinese characters. We ended up looking like space mechanics.' Thus XTC were born.

Of course, when punk happened in London, around 1977, the 'new' music echoed exactly what XTC has already started doing. XTC's success with punk and 'new music' fans was rapid. A following was established, and their first five albums, White Music, Go To (sic), Go Plus (sic), Drums And Wires and Black Sea, revealed Andy's witty way with a lyric, the band's irreverent sense of humour and a refreshing energetic sound.

Since then, XTC's music has changed a lot, Andy agreed: 'To be honest, if, in '77, someone had played me Skylarking (their last album), I would have said - God, what's that? Hippie music?'

One of the most notable changes has been the introduction of a 'folky' element - acoustic arrangements and simple, melodic tunes. Apparently, the development was not inspired by a sudden fascination with Morris dancing or Steeleye Span. According to Andy, it was simply that he bought an acoustic guitar, and liked the sound.

While previously they had always written in a straight rock style, easy to reproduce live, Andy suddenly thought, 'Damn it, why should we have this restriction?" So, XTC proceeded to go multicoloured.

This happened around the time of English Settlement, their sixth album. Since then there has been a lot of experimenting, but of the melodic kind, rather than the disjointed, electric thrash of their former days.

In changing their style from electric to acoustic, XTC unfortunately lost some of their former fans. They've kept a fairly low profile, until the aforementioned Skylarking, which is currently taking root in the American charts. This Stateside success is probably due to the album's sweeter, rounder sound, promoted by American producer Todd Rundgren. The marriage of band with producer was not an entirely happy one, however.

Andy said, with an ironic grin : 'Skylarking is the only album where we totally surrendered - I say totally, but I fought tooth and nail to gain control of it - totally surrendered to another outside producer.'

'Todd's a very unusual person to work with," Andy continued. 'He has this deserved reputation for being a bit of a hermit. I just don't think her gets on with other people.'

Despite these difficulties, Andy agreed that the album sounds good, although his attitude to sound quality is general is rather 'grass roots': 'I am an advocate of clean reproduction generally, but I actually prefer fuzzy old tape for a lot of things.

'I can see how CD suits orchestral dynamics, but I sort of like to hear things on the medium they were made for. Like, I think singles sound brilliant on Dansettes. You put them on anything else and they don't sound right. I think pop music suits the fuzzy analogue compression - so you get that kind of pumping sound.'

Andy claims that he doesn't listen to much music anyway, although he loves listening to records from the mid-sixties. He even confessed to buying the Sergeant Pepper CD.

'I'm fanatical about listening to music of that period on one half of the stereo,' he said. 'If you turn the balance either all to the left or the right you can hear all sorts of wonderful things. Like the backing vocals to Paperback Writer being from Freres Jacques. You can hear all the things they couldn't remove from the master - on All You Need Is Love, for example, the string section is talking, discussing the arrangement.'

This love of the weird and wonderful world of the sixties of shared by both other band members, Dave Gregory and Colin Moulding. Together the three have an alter-ego, the Dukes Of Stratosphear, who achieved remarkable success with their first sixties-inspired album 25 O'clock. 'We made it made it for £4000, which is nothing', said Andy. "You shouldn't be able to make a record for $4000. We did, and it sold 50 or 60,000 copies. It shouldn't have sold five. I mean, there was no promotion, and it was a retrogressive style of music. It was just us wanting to say thank you to all the sixties bands that inspired us. And people really liked it.

'I don't know if they know it's us or not. Some people obviously didn't know it was us, 'cos we got fan mail to The Dukes Of Stratosphear arriving, asking, "Do they plan to tour?", and so on'

The Dukes have, in fact, just made another album - Psonic Psunspot - which should be out in August. It's a delightful, tongue-in-cheek, psychedelic pastiche of The Byrds, The Small faces, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney in psychedelic mode. It displays a mean talent for mimicry, even down to the arrangements. But the songs are pretty good in their own right.

In this era of sophisticated studio techniques and mechanical wizardry, Andy still feels strongly about the value of a good song. He puts it simply: 'It's like the expression "you can't polish muck"' (local Swindon dialect, perhaps). 'If it's muck to start with, no amount of buffing will put a shine on it. The song has to be a little gem in the first place.'

As you would expect, Andy isn't impressed with the current music scene. He said, 'I would have thought that by now it's time for the wheel to come found again. It's time for some absolutely new - that is, old - form of music.

'It would be nice to have ferocious virtuosity make an appearance. I always ache for that violent, wonderful virtuosity of be-bop music. It was a totally radical form of playing but within an acceptable structure. Really good examples of be-bop just make your eyes bong open - it's so good and it was made by very young people.

'It would be nice if that happened now - if younger people could find a musical style they could be brilliant in. I'm not saying that it should be jazz, or mainstream even. Be-bop was never the popular mode of music. It's like the innovative stuff coming shortly to your screens won't be popular in a big way, but it will be needed.'

And here Andy drifted off in comic fantasy: 'It would be nice to see some sort of wonderfully innovative cello player - gangs of 16-year old girls with cellos. Or groups of young men with accordions and bagpipes making extraordinary and unheard-of music.'

Methinks Mr Partridge is something of a visionary - or a man with an extraordinary imagination at least. He certainly seems to have the music industry sussed out. 'There's plenty of scope for innovation', he remarked. 'It's just that the music industry is bigger and more controlled than it's ever been before. They have very strict rules on what can get through. If they can market it then they get behind it in a big way. If they're puzzled by something and can't quite work out how to market it', he paused for a knowing smirk, 'then it's probably wonderful music."

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