The X-Factor - Guitar Magazine, January 1986 - By Bruce Pollock

"We call it Billy Bolts or Billy Bolt Upright. I just sort of sit up and become this person Billy Bolt. You lust get into the process of thinking and sending your brain out to search, getting those tendrils going everywhere. You find a piece of string and you think, this is a really good piece of string and you're pulling and pulling - God, there's something on the end of this - and I can't turn my head off from doing this at night, and there I am, I'm awake and I'm yelling like I'm being murdered. and I'm facing the wardrobe and it's four a.m. and I don't know what I'm doing."

The archetype English preppy down to his rubber soles, Andy Partridge is as unique a musical and lyrical voice as XTC is a band, on the cutting edge of the forces that drive the universes within, both psychic and psychedelic. Over the course of a decade and nearly a dozen albums, the changes upon changes that define his career. the ineffable Partridge touch, one part grouse the other part dove, has gradually brought XTC into a hallowed geologic region occupied only by two other such hermetically sealed stalactites of the rock iconosphere.

"We usually get either the Beatles thing. or if not it's the Steely Dan thing." Andy acknowledged, "which I think is much too high praise, 'cause basically they sound much more melodically and rhythmically together than we'll ever be. Comparisons are always flattering, but in a way it makes it scarier, 'cause you know the next thing you write has got to live up to it, so it's best not to think about it.

With a mind as hyperactive as his own, Partridge covets no extraneous stimuli. "I always have a terrible dilemma that the last song I wrote is going to be the last song ever and it gets worse every time." he stated. "ft always resolves itself, but I feel like I must worry about it. If I don't worry about it, it's not going to resolve itself."

And yet. if his experiences making Skylarking can serve as an example. Partridge is a veritable songmaking exemplar of prolificness. "What happened was that we actually wrote about three albums," he said. "We did a load of stuff and if was more orchestral feeling with more sort of countryside textures. We literally look an album's worth of demos to the record company in England and they said, 'Well, this isn't the album we want from you. We want something that's going to sell big.' What do we do now? So we started writing again. But that sort of telling off obviously must have affected us, because I thought, I'll perk it up and try something different. and a load of songs came that were harder sounding; they were more beefy, more stripped down, A&B sort of stuff. We figured this is what they want. So we took if to them and, 'Oh, I don't know. These songs aren't quite as good as the early songs, do you want to try again?' So we go away and write another load of songs, not with anything in mind, just more songs. So we ended up with a choice of 35 songs, and we used some early stuff, very little from the middle, and some stuff from later on. We gave it all to our producer, Todd Rundgren, and he rounded up elements that sort of connected with other elements and the way that they felt right together is the way that they came out. And it means that a lot of your personal favorite tunes get left out and if means that you don't necessarily agree with where those songs should be on the album. But I generally agree that the songs do flow very nicely into each other and he did his homework."

Part of that homework, of course, is the by now legendary subtraction and then addition of "Dear God," from the American edition of the album. When this catchy ditty of raving agnosticism found a cuff audience as the b-side of an English single, the powers that be in the US realised they had their ticket to the big bucks after all - and they'd thrown it away. They hastened to amend this stunning faux pas, and XTC suffered their biggest hit to date. But for Partridge success has not changed his creative process alt that much.

"To write you have to kind of tune the head in to receive this stuff from some-where, because you can't be receiving it if you're managing the band, if you're doing interviews, if you're doing the artwork or whatever. You have to kind of tune in the head and empty it of all the other stuff. We've only recently finished another Dukes of Stratosphere record, so by the time I finish talking in England about "Dear God," there'll be some more Dukes talking. Then I shall have an empty period where I can tune this receiver in and start getting things out of the atmosphere. But it's not like I can plan it. At times I can write a song a day, but sometimes I can go for months without anything, absolutely nothing comes up. I have to just click into a writing mode. Songs come, but if I don't run home and sing them into my answering machine quick, they go. There's tunes that come just as you're falling asleep. A few times it's happened where I'm dozing off and I get into that incredibly relaxed state and a whole song will just pop out-melody, great lyric line and I think, 'Oh, I'll write it down in a little while.' but I never do. They're the best thing you've ever heard and then you go to sleep. And you've just dreamt 'Hey Jude' or something.

"We try not to give ourselves really specific deadlines, but you begin to see one on the horizon, like some big distant city, and that increases the anxiety. A sure sign of desperation is when you just turn on a drum machine and play anything. Sometimes, just by the brute banality of it, you might kick down a door that you thought was never going to open, and suddenly you'll see something in there. You hit a chord and you think, I'm just going to keep squeezing and squeezing this chord, and you just play it for hours and hours and the drum machine is bashing away. and then suddenly you'll slip with your fingers and make a mistake, or you'll think, This is so banal, it's a battleship. Battleship! It sounds like a battleship! Some stupid thought will blow the thing wide open. But usually the case is. you get tuned in and this stuff explodes, takes you over. You play too late into the night and your dinner's going cold downstairs. Then it gets like the air changes or something, and you're breathing a sort of different atmosphere somehow. It's like you really have tuned in and the first program's come in and suddenly you feel wonderfully receptive to a load of stuff, things that wouldn't have meant anything a couple of weeks before suddenly all come crowding in real quick."

It's at times like these, all channels open and the air electric, that Partridge's wife will bring him down to reality. "She tells me off for drumming." he said. "Like we'll have friends over in the evening and I'll sit there drumming. I've got this sound in my head and I don't realise I'm playing; it's leaking through my mask. So she'll say, Oh, stop drumming! Five minutes later I'm back to drumming again." In the daylight hours she's one of his severest critics, "I used to do a lot of lyrics at night when everyone had gone to bed. But most of Skylarking was done in the afternoon. You get up and crouch over your poor studio and sing the songs really quietly so as not to upset the neighbours. Sometimes I'd come up with something really exciting and I'd start tingling. so I'd run downstairs and force it on my wife. She's very coot and my worst critic, my stabiliser. Her opinion is usually, It's not commercial enough, or, I don't like the bit about the porpoises."

Always a student of nuance and shading, Partridge is perhaps most concerned about certain of life's more tenuous balances: between man and nature, art and commerce, music and lyrics. "You have a lyric," he said, "the lyric says, What must I set this stage with, what scenery does this lyric want? And so you find the scenery from the instrument. Or you have the scenery and you think, What sort of actors should I have; what lines must they say? Things suggest other things A chord can mean a phenomenal amount; just one chord brings you a lot of pictures. You hit a chord and think, that chord is so foggy; if somebody could get fog and turn it into a chord. it's that chord. And it'll be like the tip of the iceberg for a song, and you'll work on this foggy chord and you'll think, fog, fog . . . and all these lyrics cascade out under fog, like some sort of school essay. You know, give me 500 words on fog. You try some other chords; no, that's not foggy, that's too rainy, that's too sunny. Oh, that's really foggy. How does it sound with the other one? Oh. not too bad. Maybe I'll use that as a middle. Then you kind of round up all the foggy chords and you build this set for yourself. What I used to do was find chords and then hit a note that seemed comfortable with it in no relation to the chord. But now I actually find myself singing notes in some way uniform with the chords. like the notes will ascend. The chord structure may go all over, but I'll find one line in the chord that will appear to be like an ascending line, or a line that appears to descend. You actually follow notes in the chord that have this kind of worm that floats through them, In some cases I'd like to be more melody dominated, but I find I'm highly rhythm dominated, I'm finding it very difficult to get out of being locked into a rhythm and to make the transcendent leap from rhythm to melody. I build lyrics still for their rhythm feel, or I'll get the lyrics I'm really happy with about a given subject and I'll insert a load of ifs and buts and stuff to give it rhythm.

"Sometimes I'll phone Greg up with a chord charge and say. Can you try these notes and tell me what they sound like on piano? And he has to lay the phone down and run away and I have to listen to it on piano and see if it's going to work or not, I like working with keyboards, Songs I've written on keyboards are much less predictable than the guitar things. I can play nearly anything on guitar The only thing I’ve found interesting with the guitar in the last five years is working with different tunings, ‘cause that’s thrown me off course. Its been like a different instrument and I can come up with exciting accidents. You play the easiest most banal shapes and with different tunings you get the most wonderful stuff. It gives you things you wouldn’t think of playing or trying out. On piano I’ve got no restrictions because I haven’t got any technical ability so the songs are all accidents

A father himself now, Partridge’s early songs were the stillborn accidents of his wild seedless youth "The first album White Music, was just snotty. naked baby photos," he recalled. "I don't know if I'd want to see them now. Don't get them out, mother I'm not like that any more. I get embarrassed by White Music now because I was really trying too hard to find a style in which to say these things. But the paradox was, at that point in time I had nothing to say. I was just writing lyrics and they never gave me any pictures other than the total thing of that sort of modern. loud. noisy guitar, bass, drums, organ mess. The chords were picked because they upset more than they were musically well crafted. After White Music I started to feet like I really wanted to get out cohesive ideas."

And after English Settlement, in the early 80's, Andy's well-documented bout with the sweats caused him to abandon the performing arena. "The venue I perform in now is usually Dave’s front room and it's usually on an acoustic guitar," he said. "And just as a panic it'll be Greggsy grab a strap or sit at the piano and do this for me and let’s see what it sounds like. To me a song doesn't grow in front of an audience?: if anything it gets stifled. You can’t do it justice when you’re thinking about your pants falling down or is your guitar strap lock on well enough, or are the monitors feeding back. It’s not a relaxed, creative environment. It’s at best a getting-by environment. You’re doing a performance and all these aspects crop up. You know, when someone is slinging a mud filled bra at you it’s not really conducive to ornamenting the song." Instead Partridge finds the get-off in the thing itself. "The release is getting the sleeve in your hand and taking out the disk. That's a great sensation. Usually while we're doing an album I take it home and I play it until I'm really sick of it and then I forget about it. Then the album comes out and I get excited again." As the years go by, and the albums multiply his chances for accidental pleasures increase dramatically. "I like to play records when I'm really drunk and my vanity completely disappears," he admitted. "The family goes to bed, and I get really drunk and get over the guilt of listening to my own stuff. I ram the headphones on and lay there on the floor with the empty cans rolling on the carpet and I go, Yeah, great; I'd forgotten about that. Like playing something like Drums and Wires or English Settlement and I'd forgotten the chord changes; I’d forgotten the lyrics, and right in the middle I go, Of course, Yeah."

And yet, as honest as he is, Partridge would not admit to entertaining the one maudlin thought that usually accompanies such sentimental binges of the artist in a world of commerce, the one goes; if I'm so good, how come I ain’t more famous? "Feedback is nice," is all he'll allow, "but it doesn't affect what I want to write about one iota. In fact if they say something one way. I'll want to go the other way to spite them"

So ornery is this Partridge that he’s even prepared to spit in the face of biggest success of his career "I think Dear God is a piece of dull music," he said. "It’s dull, it’s average. And I think it’s going to be come our ’(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ But any way someone can get into the band it doesn’t matter. It’s like, what’s a key? A key is a scraggy lump of metal, but it gets you through the door," he says, as aphoristic as Leonard Cohen, and not entirely tongue-in-cheek, " . . . to the riches beyond.'

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