Wherever XTC may nowadays roam, the continuing saga of the Blur vs. Oasis rivalry must surely afford them a disagreeable sense of deja vu. Once cocks of the walk, the boys of Blur - it would seem to have been internationally decreed - are now "too clever by half", "too tricky-arsed for their own good" and, what's worst, "swots". In the late-'70s and for most of the '80s, such accusations were routinely doled out to XTC.
An itchy little sci-fi four-piece that evolved over a decade into a tangerine-tinged psychedelic folk-pop trio, XTC came under the IQ measurers' microscope from the very beginning. "It isn't that we're particularly clever," their first drummer Terry Chambers insisted to one music paper in the early-'80s. "It's just that everyone else is so thick."
He was probably being asked to justify some wild piece of infra-psyche exploration such as Travels In Nihilon (from 1980's Black Sea album), or, conversely, a shipmatey white reggae song like Wait Till Your Boat Goes Down, the yo-ho-ho labyrinths of which spelled commercial suicide for XTC after the Top 20 hit Making Plans For Nigel. Musical and lyrical over-reachers in the age of "Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov", XTC hung out with braniacs like Talking Heads, released polymorphic double albums, got into folk, tripped out on late-'60s acid whimsy, talked dewey-eyedly of steam locomotives and medieval English theatre and built up one of the more admirable back catalogues in recent British rock.
Their album releases are cause for loud celebration (only two in the last decade; the most recent, Nonsuch, was in 1992). No longer signed to Virgin, they are currently seeking a deal and demo-ing new material for an early '97 release. Notoriously, they haven't played a gig since April 1982, when Andy Partridge, their mole-like leader, suffered a nervous breakdown in Los Angeles brought on by chronic stage fright.
Of the current gang of English bands, only Blur have admitted any debt to them (although such Britpop tributes have hardly done much for the sales of Wire), and XTC appear to have slipped into a strange, distant middle age. Photographs from the early '90s show two men with long hair, togged out in colourful Regency refinery (bassist Colin Moulding and guitar / keyboards player Dave Gregory), looking like rock'n'roll lairds of neighbouring Scottish islands, while Partridge has the balding, pudgy look of a big rosy baby. They are not pop stars by any orthodox reckoning.
Fossil Fuel : The XTC Singles Collection - the third such compilation since 1982 - is a two-CD set containing 31 examples of their 45-rpm action from 1977 to 1992. It is not quite a Best Of, since some of their best work (Travels In Nihilon, Rocket From A Bottle, Yacht Dance, Ballet For A Rainy Day) were not singles. But is a particularly catholic and rewarding body of work for a Greatest Hits. Could Andy Partridge really have imagined that Wake Up (from 1984) - with it's Trout Mask Replica guitar sounds and its avast-there-me-hearties glee-club outro - would tempt more than three or four people into their local Our Price?
(Simon's note: David seems to have got a bit confused between Colin's "Wake Up" and Andy's "All You Pretty Girls" here.)
XTC began in Swindon in 1975, sounding like Roxy Music's Editions Of You on a diet of cheap white powder. Rising from the ashes of the Helium Kidz, a Wiltshire imitation of The New York Dolls, they drew a speedy crowd with their fiendishly fidgety songs, and signed to Virgin Records in 1977.
The first of the two discs begins with the first four singles fron '77-'78 (Science Friction, Statue Of Liberty, This Is Pop? and Are You Receiving Me?). These were anxious bursts of artful pop-punk, with lashings of white noise from organist Barry Andrews. The lyrics were delivered by Partridge in a panicky, my-brain-hurts squawk. Statue Of Liberty (with it's vivid tag line: "Impaled on your hair") sounds exceptionally good today.
Two albums of equally edgy thinking (White Music and Go2) were released in 1978, before Barry Andrews left in early '79, unhappy about having his songs rejected by Partridge. Bassist Colin Moulding has always played the songwriting sidekick: two or three songs on each album (which he'd sing), to Partridge's 11 or 12. XTC is Partridge's band if it is anyone's. But it was Moulding who wrote and sang their fifth single, Life Begins At The Hop (which introduced Andrews' replacement, Dave Gregory) and their sixth, Making Plans For Nigel - from the boomingly infectious Drums And Wires LP - which gave XTC a number 17 in hit in the autumn of 1979.
The country now knew about them. And XTC were really starting to play. Terry Chambers was, along with Budgie of Siouxsie And The Banshees, the outstanding English drummer of the post-punk era (on Black Sea his playing would reverberate like John Bonham's), while Moulding could be a dizzily melodic bassist. Partridge and Gregory were likewise no thrashers, but febrile, off-centre guitarists.
When Partridge's Wait Till Your Boat Goes Down flopped as a single, Moulding delivered the smashing General And Majors. In spite of its modest Top 40 showing (Number 32), Generals And Majors will be many people's happiest and abiding memory of the group: a chiming guitar, a rising scale, a shucking hi-hat cymbal and the best whistling on a pop single since (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay. Generals And Majors was - and is - an adorable creation.
It was also a taster for Black Sea. A rich and diverse XTC landmark, Black Sea is one of two albums that could - at a pinch - be called classics. Its singles were as catchy as hell: Generals And Majors, Towers Of London, Sgt. Rock (Is Going To Help Me) and Respectable Street. All are included (and welcome) here, as is Love At First Sight, a Moulding album track.
Their other classic album, Skylarking (1986), is a willowy, beautiful song-cycle redolent of meadows and D. H. Lawrence, yet it is apparently disliked by the band for its Todd Rundgren production/mix. Only two of its songs (Grass and The Meeting Place) are included here. Pastoral and lovely, they sound unlike anything else on the two discs.
The problem was, by the time of Skylarking, the band's reputation was in complete disarray. From 1982-'86, only one single (Senses Working Overtime) out of nine entered the Top 50. Some of them didn't even make the 75. XTC's fall from grace is both hard and easy to explain. It's certainly easy to imagine how the Top 5 double-LP English Settlement (1982) might have put some people off: its four sides encompassed folk-rock, freeform jazz (Andy Partridge should not play saxophone), progressive rock, African and at least three other genres besides.
Mummer (1983) and The Big Express (1984) were unsatisfactory, irritating and - in places - tuneless. The six singles that Virgin selected to promote these albums proved a motley bunch of no-sellers. Terry Chambers was quick to spot trouble, leaving during a rehearsal and emigrating to Australia. XTC did not see him for nine years. (They hired Peter Phipps, ex-The Glitter Band; then Prairie Prince of The Tubes; then Dave Mattacks of Fairport Convention).
They were now having their album demos rejected by Virgin, who couldn't understand where the hits had gone. But now comes the part that is hard to explain. Because one of these mid-period singles, Great Fire (from Mummer) is phenomenal, absolutely tell-all-your-friends fantastic. It sounds like Strawberry Fields meeting Penny Lane halfway. It is a wittily pyromaniacal love song ("Your glance: a match on the tinderwood"), with dozens of Beatlesque musical references clanging away like bells and groaning away like cellos. Great Fire was released in April 1983. The Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles has no record of it. XTC would be a cult group thereafter.
The 14 songs that follow Great Fire on the second disc divide into three camps: the best bits of the 1983-'85 slump (which saw XTC have some extra-curricular fun with a psychedelic pastiche offshoot called The Dukes Of Stratosphear; neither of the albums is represented here). Secondly: good old Skylarking and its simultaneous American single Dear God, an actually rather cloying forerunner to Joan Osbourne's One Of Us. And thirdly: three songs each from Oranges And Lemons (1989) and Nonsuch (1992).
With these albums XTC entered a new phase of jangling adult rock. Partridge, always world-weary and mistrustful of conditioning, championed the little guy trying to make sense on insanity. Moudling wrote songs to smile to. The music was proudly immersed in '60s and '70s record collections, and possessed a warmth and a melodic zest that travelled back to Senses Working Overtime in 1982. Indeed over the long haul of Fossil Fuel : The XTC Singles Collection's helter-skelter itinerary, those are three qualities that resurface time and again: warmth, melody and zest. And cleverness, of course.
4 Stars ("Excellent. Definitely worth investigation.")
All original work is acknowledged as being the copyright of the originator.