Toys In The Attic - Q Magazine, 1989

XTC's Andy Partridge is from that eccentric, uniquely English school of songwriters that brought you Ray Davies and Vivian Stanshall. His problem has been his refusal to conform. And his fear of live performance. And his heart-breaking financial crises. And, well, life really... Robert Sandall offers tea and sympathy.

It is apparent, long before he gets round to telling the one about the interestingly large verruca he dug out of his foot with the pin of a Blue Peter badge he won as runner-up in a competition to design a Dalek-zapping robot, that Andy Partridge is a seriously, studiously retrospective fellow.

There are many more Beano and Topper annuals on the living room bookcase than can be explained by the existence of his two small children. And while others mat, at the age of 35, have discarded and forgotten sets of bubblegum cards celebrating Flags Of The World or, more luridly, the miscellaneous horrors of the last world war, Partridge, you soon discover, has had them mounted and framed. They're on the wall next to the bookcase.

Signs of adult occupancy are in fact a bit sparse. His wife Marianne has done her best to introduce a more grown-up stripped-pineish theme to the fittings. But this modest Edwardian semi in the suburban sprawl of Swindon, Berks, still looks from the inside more like a triple decker nursery than the permanent HQ of that thinking person's pop group XTC. The band whose cleverness and experience of higher education earned them the "art school" tag seem a lot more school than art.

Up in the attic for instance where the new album Oranges And Lemons was written and demoed, the conversation drifts naturally not towards the wonderful possibilities of a 4-track home recording studio, but to the shelf-load of toy-soldier which take up most of the walls. What is now the floor was, until recently, covered by an enormous board on which Partridge and bass player Colin Moulding re-enacted European battles of the early 18th century. "That was a really nice table," Partridge muses sadly, without cuteness of affectation, a pronounced West Country burr rounding and stretching his vowels. "I had it all green with rivers painted on and stuff. It got to the point where either I had to bits, pass them down the ladder, get the equipment up here and write the album, or carry on wargaming and there'd be no album."

In the end, he explains, resolved itself creatively. "If the songs weren't going right I'd go over and paint a regiment until my eyes hurt and my back ached. That would usually get the melody going." He passes round examples: tiny, delicately pigmented lead figures from the XT range, designed to his specification and named after the group by the manufacturers. "They wrote back to me saying, Are you who we think you are? They're going to do the conquest of Mexico for me next."

This tie-up seems more than just convenient and coincidental, it fingers some of the obsessive, whimsical and - let's be frank - childish characteristics that link Partridge and XTC with an identifiable constituency of English cultural life: the miniaturist tendency. It's a strain whose pop branch has produced parochial observers like Ray Davies, professional oddities like Vivian Stanshall and cheery tunesmith like Paul McCartney and to which Partridge energetically affiliates himself. "You know what every foreigner's idea of the English is? Three things: they collect something, they've got rotten teeth and they're gay. Well, I've got two of the three credentials. England is all I know about. I can't write mid-Atlantic airport lounge music. I can't talk about my hot babe with her leather and whip, or meeting my cocaine dealer. I like to write about what's going on around the town. I can't get into all that U2 new guitar prophet stuff, wind streaming through my hair on the top of the mountain top. It's horrendously Magnificent 7! I'm much more into the anti-herd thing. That's very English."

Sadly, it hasn't, in Partridge's case, proved spectacularly popular with the English record-buying public for some time now. XTC peaked here in 1982 when Senses Working Overtime just made the Top 10 and the album English Settlement grazed the Top 5. Then however, after five years of non-stop touring, Partridge suddenly chose to do the eccentric thing and gave up live performance altogether. Why?

"Stage fright," he replies with cheerful frankness. "The fear of having to be fantastic. I always thought we were rubbish live. It was just kick and rush. Plug in, turn up the amp to number 11 for an hour and a half, then run off. And as the gigs got bigger, I started to get stage fright. I used to like playing in pubs where there'd be a couple of hundred people and a few pints next to your guitar. I liked the naiveté and amateurism of it. But of course you can't go back to that."

On the English Settlement world tour, he blacked out on stage in Paris. The British leg was cancelled, as were all the American dates, after Partridge fell victim to a debilitating crise nerveuse before the opening concert at the Hollywood Palladium. "I just couldn't get off the bed to go to the soundcheck. I felt like I was dying. It took me an hour to walk the 100 yards from the hotel up the road to meet the band. I really thought I was cracking up. And I remember after I came home, sitting in the garden that summer strumming the guitar and thinking, Is this my lot? Dribbling away into the soundhole of my acoustic? I couldn't even leave to go to the pub. If I so much as touched the knob of the front door I'd have to rush to the toilet. I'd be gagging."

With the help of a hypnotist he got over it, but to Partridge this episode suggested more than just the fall-out of being a highly-strung "creative type". It was far too close to home. His mother had been institutionalised for three months when he was 13 and drifted in and out of mental hospitals ever since. "Yeah, I suppose you could say she was pretty loopy," he recalls, pausing also to recall the Action Man frogman, complete with wetsuit, he got given "as a sort of reward" the day his mother was taken away. "She used to give all my toys away to what she called 'needy' kids. And I used to thing, Who are these 'needy' kids who've got my bloody toys? Then later, to stop me playing the electric guitar she used to turn off all the power and sit downstairs in the dark."

This unhappy state of affairs was both palliated and compounded by the tranquillisers automatically prescribed by doctors and which he remained dependent for 11 years until he was 24.

"I never really questioned what it was for. It was like doing me teeth. And of course pills were a big thing in the '60s. I'd take me dinner money to school and next to it I'd have a twist of paper with me valium. Come home and there'd be me mum taking her purple hearts... The woman who is now my wife got me off them when XTC was in Los Angeles on our first world tour. I came back drunk to the hotel one night and she'd flushed all these bottles down the toilet and I just thought, Aargh! What am I gonna do? I was really upset. So I flushed all her make-up down the toilet, tore up all her free tickets to Disneyland, smashed the room about, and a couple of weeks later I felt OK. I didn't need them any more."

There may have been times more recently when he felt tempted. For the last four years XTC has being suing to free itself from it's old management, a complicated court action which has cost Partridge all of his £31,000 life savings and an additional £250,000 borrowed against future royalties from the band's label, Virgin. "We were well fleeced. Hung up by the ankles and all the loose change shaken out of our pockets. We toured solidly from 1977 to 1982. You name it, we played there. Twice. From Bonefuck, Wyoming to Gallbladder, New South Wales, and on £25 so-called wages a week. Losing money all the time. Or so we believed. All we ever saw were a few dodgy pieces of paper with sums on. Then we got an estimated VAT bill for £300,000. We'd always thought we wouldn't get ripped off and we'd been stitched up. Beautifully."

Uncharacteristically, we've touched on a lot of negativity here and you're talking to one of life's annoying optimists. You know, that Second World War spirit: "We'll Stick It Out!" And soon he's happily off doing one of the things he does best: funny accents.

He is mainly happy, and with good reason, on account of XTC's new record. The last one, Skylarking, produced by Todd Rundgren, quietly bombed here but sold 250,000 copies in the States, where XTC have become, like that other illustrious acronymic outfit REM, a major college attraction. "The probably think it's a bit double-decker, abut cuppa tea, a bit HP sauce." The engine of this commercial recovery was a larky psychedelic experiment which saw XTC masquerading for two albums as The Dukes Of Stratosphear and which put Partridge firmly back in touch with his late '60s adolescent musical roots. The last Dukes album outsold Skylarking over here. Only three years after their American label Geffen tried to give the band away (unsuccessfully), their song catalogue was recently rated the fourth most desirable on the market, behind such gilt-edged stock as Bruce Springsteen and Queen. Not, to his mild discomfort, he encounters American fans camped out on pilgrimages at the end of his street.

"There was definitely a feeling that people were waiting for this album. It's a lot more chromy, noisy, fluorescent and outgoing than the others we've done recently. We were very touchy about Skylarking; there was a lot of wrist slapping going on, like, 'Oh no, that's the Dukes. But we've completely mutated into them now. Oranges And Lemons is all about the compact craftings of the psychedelic single. Dedicated to all the bands who made my schooldays so very purple. Keith West. Very early Syd Barrett Pink Floyd stuff like Scarecrow. Small Faces' Itchycoo Park and The Universal. The Stones' We Love You. All of Satanic Majesties, The Beatles around 1967 and '68."

A very English selection.

"Well yeah. A lot of that American pop-rock was just too damn political for me. It went right over my head. They were bust going on about riots, police brutality, Vietnam and heavy drugs. In England we had the Alice In Wonderland psychedelic tea party. It was all wandering around in a mauve fog next to some bird in a maxi-dress, talking backwards. More magical. Less brutal than that American social realistic thing. I fell really upset that England's given us the cold shoulder," he adds wistfully. He blames the music press for even nailing XTC to the cross of punk. "It's like being cast out by your own family. And I don't want to be one of those types who dies then and people go, Oh he was pretty good, and start buying it on re-issued CD's. That's bollocks. I would like to sell. I need some cash. The most expensive thing I own is that keyboard which cost a thousand quid. I've got 300 quid in the bank and that isn't funny when you've got two kids. I don't own this house.

"But you see at the same time I don't want to ram our stuff down people's throat and make them gag on our magnificence like some kind of porno star. I want them to discover this vastly ornate musical penis that we have and do with it what they will."

Partridge is by now firmly in an upbeat, mixed metaphorical mood. "Our music is a very private sensation. It's got nothing to do with PA's, which is why I'll never play live again. It's like a world in miniature within this little box. The confines of a three or four-minute song with verse, chorus middle eight, short solos, that's our canvas. And I like the idea of people opening up that little box and seeing several unusual objects inside - a shrivelled-up piece of fruit, a quartz crystal, a damaged toy soldier, a drawing on a folded up piece of paper."

This sounds rather like the contents of one of those old jamboree bags. Or even the contents of a small boy's pocket.

"Exactly! That's what I'm into. It's turn your pockets out, lads! I don't want to be anyone's hero. I'm an ageing Puck, not some Hollywood showbiz god. Are you feeling hungry? Let's go downstairs and have some sarnies."

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