The Amplifier Interview
When XTC dropped their gorgeous Apple Venus Volume 1 on
us in the spring of 1999, it sent fans scurrying in several directions. Many,
like me, were utterly delighted with its heavily orchestrated textures,
cerebral songs and melancholic, heart-tugging hues. Wasp Star, subtitled
Apple Venus Volume 2, sports a light-hearted sheen and frequently bursts
into happy and uplifting territory. I grinned big when it loudly announced
itself with fuzzy guitars, wondrously stacked harmonies and those signature XTC
counter melodies. Although some longtime XTC fans appear somewhat dazed that
the record isn't as dense and complex as much of the band's catalogue, it
serves as a great flipside to AV1.
After a seven-year recording hiatus, receiving two great albums
from such a revered band within a year's time was a delight. The only thing
that could possibly top that XTC experience would be the animated interview
Andy Partridge granted me from his Swindon, U.K., home. The man is funny. He's
also very open with his emotions. Despite having already been on the phone
most of the day in what he called “interview hell,” Andy talked at
length about his current lot in life. He was excited to plug Wasp Star,
but apparently just as happy to field the many questions any XTC fan would have
for the band at this juncture in their 25-year career.
Amplifier: I've always found you to be such a distinct
individual, and there are prices to pay for being so authentically yourself
— musically and otherwise. What is it about your spirit that has kept you
so true to yourself?
Andy Partridge: Whoa, that's a gigantic question. Let's
see if we can chisel away some of that. Well, I've come to the realization
recently that what's been good for me is to have not been successful. That's
been a real help. That's really kept me hungry musically. It's kept me
creative. It's kept me wanting to try different things, and not being backed
into the blind alley of commercial success which has ruined so many people. Not
being successful has been a great boon.
Funny how hindsight always serves to reinforce that.
Yeah. Stuff starts clicking into place and I can see that, Of
course the reason I wanted to try that was because I didn't get backed into
that. I know it sounds perverse, but I think truthfully, not being successful
has helped enormously. It's allowed me to live a life certainly unencumbered by
masses of money. I don't have to dig myself out of dollar bills to get out
around the shops. I have a normal life except I don't get on my pushbike and go
to the factory everyday. Otherwise, everything else is completely the same as a
fellow that would do that.
Getting two records within a year from XTC is like getting one of
Wonka's Everlasting Gobstoppers.
(Hearty laugh) Yeah, Wonka's Everlasting Suppositories! Ummm,
Thank you! I think that's a compliment.
Oh yes. It's been such a treat after the seven-year hiatus.
If you imagine Apple Venus as the double CD it should have
been, that we were planning for it to be — if you imagine this disc now
— you futzed around with the package and then you realized it was one of
those fold out double discs. And there's another disc in the back. You've just
discovered the other disc that was hidden under the tray.
And happily so . . . but like I said about an
Everlasting Gobstopper, sometimes it takes an XTC album several weeks to
completely hit me. And sometimes even a year later, it's still unraveling
itself to me.
Well, I don't think there's as much on this one to unravel. I
know there isn't, just because we recorded the stuff that went into it, but
that was a conscious effort — to limit the palette a little. There's
hopefully stuff you'll still be able to get into in a while. It won't be such
a thick layer cake as AV1. I didn't want to get as multi-stratted as
that. I wanted this one to be more immediate and to show our more bubblegum
side — or whatever you want to call it.
I put it on, and right away I'm saying, “Yup. I got that
rush of XTC.” What makes it XTC to you after all these years?
The desire to write better songs than any of my musical heroes.
It's really a sickness. A mental illness. I have to feel somewhere inside of me
I've written better songs than Lennon/McCartney or Brian Wilson or Ray Davies
or Burt Bacharach. I have to feel that I'm on the way towards writing songs
that are at least as good as some of theirs. I don't think I'm near that yet.
That is still part of the perpetual motion of the whole thing. If I feel I have
achieved that, I will probably self-destruct. I'll probably end up getting a
job as a window cleaner or whatever, because there will be nothing left to do
— you know — when you get to the top of the mountain, the only way
is down. Unless you ascend to heaven and I don't think that's gonna be on the
roster. It's this sick desire to better all the people who force-fed me so much
magic when I was a kid.
What was the vibe during the recording process of Wasp
Star?
It was pretty up. In fact, this album had the least problems that
any of us have ever had making a record. I can't think of one thing that was
serious enough to make us sort of down about anything. The power kept blowing.
That was about the only problem we had until we got that fixed. Otherwise, it
was just really up and very energetic. It was the first record made in our own
studio, so that was a good feeling too. A place of our own to work in. Nick
Davis (the producer) is very fast and Nick is a very up personality, so he was
really bubbling a lot of the session. And I think because we'd had such good
critical reviews (on AV1) — we never sold very many — that I
think we were in a really good, up state about making Wasp Star. So it
was a very positive experience. Nobody was quitting the band. Nobody was saying
they couldn't finish the project. Nobody was saying they were dying of
‘blah-blah-blah.’
No mind games from a producer?
No, not at all. I can't think of an album that had less
problems. Maybe White Music, when we were so näive that nobody
would have foreseen any problems, even if they had come up and bitten our arms
off. This one was really a pain-free birth.
Did you enjoy handling all of the guitars?
It did scare me a bit to start with, because I thought, “Oh
God. I can't be lazy now, and I can't pass the fiddly bits onto Dave Gregory.
He's not here.” So I did put off playing all the fiddly bits 'til right
at the end of the album. I thought, “Oh, how am I going to get into
this?” But I enjoyed it and I think I did a pretty reasonable job.
I agree. Very fun, playful and spicy.
Like a good Indian meal with helium balloons attached. It was a
little scary because I bucked my responsibility over the years and handed
anything tricky over to Dave. I'd say, “Can you a play solo of this sort
of character over here, or can you find a part that's like arpeggios or
whatever?” I'd invariably end up doing the simpler stuff. There's two
ways to go; either I get really brave about it and get fancier and fancier, or
I just write songs with no tricky bits in from now on.
“I'm the Man Who Murdered Love” was the song that
caught me the most on first listen.
That's the one I think TVT are looking at going to radio with
first. I would have preferred “Stupidly Happy” personally, but
fine, if radio stations say they like it, then they can play whatever they
like.
I know that you had to tack on “Wasp Star” because
radio stations weren't responding to strings.
We got hardly any radio play for Apple Venus 1, so we
thought about calling the new record “Fire Work” as a main title
with Apple Venus 2 as the subtitle. Then in conversation with TVT they
said, “Look, just our early warning thing here — radio stations
didn't play Volume 1, so calling the same thing Volume 2 you're
just gonna make them say ‘omigod more strings!’ and just pass over
it without even hearing it.” I'm convinced if our music gets on the radio
people somewhere will like it. But the battle is getting it on the radio. So it
was something we were going to do in any case. We were going to call it
“Fire Work”, but I thought, no, it'd be nicer if we had a title
that tied in with the whole Apple Venus thing. So Wasp Star is
the Aztec phrase for Venus. People, I've heard, have been talking about it on
the internet already. I'm not online, so I can't see that, but I've heard
they're sorta mulling it over — ‘Why are we talking about White
Anglo Saxon Protestants Star?’ It's nothing to do with that.
One thing that came to me when I first listened to
Homespun, I liked the stripped down versions. It was startling to hear
just you, your guitar and a cassette deck, humming the first melody. Do you
ever suspect that you might release a totally naked, artistic expression like
that someday?
No, because to me the magic of making a record is — and
this comes from what I found fascinating on the radio as a kid — making
records that you couldn't figure out how they did it. And it may have been
something simple like a load of reverb or a sped up voice or something twisted
backwards or some sound squeezed through a tube. The way that you mold and
shape sounds takes it into a different area, but it's not just one person and
an instrument. And I love that. You make that alchemical jump to making
something where, the best of times, people can't quite figure out what it is.
For me, a lot of my favorite records have got that element to it. As a kid I
was raised on a lot of novelty records like “Beep Beep” by the
Playmates or “Martian Hop” by the Rondells or “Purple People
Eater”, because that's all you could get on the radio. Or light
entertainment where there'd be somebody in his orchestra playing stuff. And a
lot of that I think was the template for Apple Venus 1. You couldn't
get rock 'n' roll radio. Pop radio didn't exist in England until 1967. The
best thing was really those novelty records. I loved not knowing how they made
that stuff. The first time I heard “Strawberry Fields Forever” I
did not know how you could make that sound. And that desire to make that
magic, that studio magic, has stayed with me and never left me. Although, I
find records by other people very brave — when they strip it down to one
or two things. For me I'd rather be the backroom person who squeezes and
shapes and squishes the sound into a different element.
What do you find more enjoyable — the actual writing phase
when you're putting pen to paper or when you're spinning tape for demos?
I suppose the finding of the song in the first place is
irreplaceable, because that's when ‘radio out there’ comes in.
You're tuned to nothing and you've got white noise and then suddenly something
in your head plays a song and you think, ‘omigod, where did that come
from?’ Then you try to explain it out in musical form. That's really
thrilling on a real lizard brain level. Some light goes off deep in your skull
and you go, ‘Whoa! There's a song there!’ But there's a different
thrill when you're demoing. You're trying to make the stage set. For the
actor to say these things. And the stage has to reflect what they're saying
and it has to make the right atmosphere for the listener to have this play.
The setting is incredibly important. And if you get the setting wrong, you're
going to spoil what the actor is singing about or what's going on with the
words, so it has to be hand in glove with that.
In the liner notes to Homespun I admire how you and Colin
admit to tinkering with other artists' songs and then somehow, boom, that goes
to yours. Were there any moments like that on Wasp Star?
Yeah, “Stupidly Happy.” I was in a very happy frame
of mind, but I sat down with a drum machine — I really like the idiotic
drumbeat that underpins “Jumping Jack Flash.” The bass drum is sort
of in the wrong place for the riff. If you listen to the drums, they're kind
of a bit spazzy. I programmed this drum beat and I'm leaping around with my
guitar around my shoulder going, ‘Yeah! Let me play some fake Keith
here!’ And suddenly this riff fell out and I thought, “My Christ!
This is a great song I've found!” It was the oil, the Ex-Lax I needed to
get that song through. I didn't even know a song was there. So that sorta
thing happens all the time. But I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not stealing
anything. I'm doing what any other person does who tinkers around with musical
instruments. In no way on earth do we ever sit down and try to make something
sound like anyone else on purpose. I know of bands that have done that. If
somebody said to me, ‘Oh, you're rewriting ba-da-da-da-da,’ I'd
drop it like a hot brick, because I wouldn't want anybody to think I was
stealing something of somebody else's. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes you
can sit and work on a song for hours and you'll see somebody and you'll say,
‘Hey, I've got this great new song coming. What do you think of this? I
think it's great!’ And they go, ‘Ohhh, that's “Hey
Jude!”’ Aw shit!!! It is!!! And you haven't realized it. You've
been so wrapped up in finding a lyric you haven't noticed that you've
inadvertently stumbled upon “Hey Jude” subconsciously, or whatever
it is.
The Fuzzy Warbles boxed set — is that still coming
along?
I'd like it to, but we may have a few legal problems with Virgin.
To let us out of the deal, they insisted we supply them with a boxed set. And
the majority of that is going to be stuff that is already available, so I can't
think of who in the hell wants to buy it. But they do want some demos. The
first time we said we may have some demos they said, ‘Good, you give them
to us and we'll have them for perpetuity, thank you.’ And I said,
‘No. You don't. I'm not handing anything over to you if you won't let
me have it back.’ Then they came back again and said, ‘Well, we'll
lease them back to you.’ And I said, ‘No, you don't. I can't find
any demos if you're going to lease my own demo recordings back to me. So I can
find them if you'll let me have them back after you've used them.’ And so
we're hemming and hawing about this at the moment. I hope Virgin will not get
obstructive, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Phew, I don't know how many
albums worth of demos we'd like to put out on a budget price label. Fifty
percent on any given disc will be stuff that never got released.
What kinds of gems can fans look forward to on that?
A lot of the songs that we did I would've liked to have done, but
for some reason I was outvoted. There was one for Oranges & Lemons
called “This is the End,” which I think I just hit the nail on the
head by saying that just because a relationship has ended that it doesn't mean
that's the end of everything. It might feel like that for five minutes, 10
minutes, 10 hours, 10 days, whatever. But it's not. Shit is what you grow
flowers with, and if you feel like shit now, then just try and use it to grow
something new. I encapsulated it in this cyclical, trudging song that just
kept seemingly raised up and up. Nobody else liked it, so that one just got
binned and we just have a little four-track cassette demo. There was also a
song for Wasp Star that I would've liked to have done which was
“Bumper Cars.” It was a part fantasy about a traveling salesman and
part autobiographical about when I used to sell paint to people. It all gets
mixed in with the idea of being in a traffic jam. Stuck. Not being able to
get anywhere and you being bumper-to-bumper with the cars in front, and also
the thing about it being a fun fair where you get to enact life out.
“The air guns crack, my boss is back.” I mean I did really want to
beat the shit out of my boss when I was selling paint. It was all a fun fair
as life metaphor. That was one of the lines, “It's a fun fair
life.” But for some reason, Haydn Bendall didn't like it, Dave Gregory
— when he was in the band — didn't like it, Colin didn't think it
was worth doing and so I sorta said, ‘Well, OK. Maybe we'll do something
else.’ So, there's all sorts of stuff tucked away. If we can get this
project up and running, 50 percent of any of these volumes — and I don't
know how many there are going to be — four, six, I don't know — 50
percent of those will be stuff that won't have been heard before.
Will there be any discarded Dukes stuff on it?
No, some of the bubblegum demos are still around, but the only
Dukes stuff we've got are really primitive demos of the songs we recorded.
Have you and Colin talked about any other future alter ego?
That's something I'm eternally fascinated with. I love the idea
that nobody knows who you are. You don't have any history and you don't have
any expectations connected with that history. Sometime in the future I'd like
to do this lucky bag music where you buy a cheaply printed, recycled, colored
paperback that's stapled up and inside it is a single-sized CD with one track
on it and there's a couple of cheap sweets and a plastic novelty toy. And you
don't know what the music is on it. Hopefully it's inexpensive enough to buy
that it doesn't matter if you've already got it. You can swap it with a friend
or just bin it. It would be a piece of music that I would make, but you
wouldn't know it was me. But I suppose now I've given the game away. You
might know it was me. There would X amount of these discs, variations of these
lucky bag kind of things out there. I like that idea.
After 25 years, which is a heckuva run for any band, what do you
and Colin keep finding you bring to each other and to the band?
He still writes songs occasionally that I wish I'd written. Damn
his eyes! Like “Bungalow.” I thought that was beautiful and it was
a sentiment that is exactly in tune with where I'm from and where my parents
are from. We lived two streets away from each other most of our life. And we
went to the same school without knowing each other, or he knew of me because I
was a year older than him. I didn't know of him because older kids didn't find
out about younger kids — they just beat them up. As teenagers and in our
early 20s we were always in the same bands together. But when he brought up
“Bungalow” I thought, ‘God, this is achingly
beautiful.’ This is a sentiment that I can completely tune in with. This
is what my parents always wanted out of life; a little bungalow to retire to,
preferably by the sea. Just the way he put the chord changes and the melody,
it was so plaintive. I find myself wishing I'd written his better material.
There are a couple of things of his I don't like, but the majority of it I
think is good. Hopefully the majority of what I do he likes, and that some of
the stuff that I do — which probably pisses him off a bit — but he
knows that there's something in me that has to do this song. Or he can
understand what the sentiment's about even if he doesn't like the music or
whatever. I think we're relatively in tune although we're very different
people.
The two albums that we have now in Apple Venus 1 and 2
— you had seven to eight years to come up with the songs for those. I'm
curious if the process for the next record has already been started —
songwriting-wise or project-wise.
No. Not at all. The last couple of years has really been
recording these and promoting these. We've had our heads into getting the
recording contracts that we wanted or that we could get, then getting into
recording it and promoting it. It's now a case where we will have quite a few
months of promoting this. This is just the thin end of the wedge now. This is
the tip of the iceberg really, promotion-wise. That's going to go on for some
months and then I have a completely empty notebook in front of me, which is
thrilling and frightening because where do we go? You have to kind of get in
tune with yourself again. What do I want to write about that I haven't written
about before? How do I not repeat myself? How do I go into an area where I
could make an ass out of myself because I haven't been there before? You know
you have to sort of get in contact with the deepest part of your personality
again. And that sometimes is a little tricky because you had all that stuff on
hold. Well, the last thing I wrote was about '97. So that's been on hold
since then because of record deals, recording albums, promoting albums. So
when this is out of the way it'll be a case of looking at that blank canvas and
thinking, ‘What mark do I want to make?’ I don't know. So that's
thrilling. I'm a little blind at the moment.
I'm grateful that you're with two record labels that will let you
explore whatever vision you and Colin choose.
Apart from the Fuzzy Warbles set we haven't come up with
any alter ago stuff, but it's something we may get a chance to do when this is
out of the way. I'd certainly like to look into it some way. We have labels
that I say are very sympathetic. I think TVT were a little upset by
Homespun, because they thought it muddied the waters regarding people
who stock record shops where they would get confused thinking it was the next
volume or whatever. But generally, everyone's been very supportive, which is a
good thing as opposed to Virgin, who were just eminently confused by any
suggestion that I made. Just looked stumped every time. ‘What? You
want to make a record that's like a lot of old bubblegum tracks on a label that
used to exist?’ I'd say, ‘Yeah. It's gotta sound like
1970-71.’ Virgin: ‘So I get it. We find a bunch of kids and we
dress them up in. . .’ Andy: ‘No, no, no no!’
Virgin: ‘So how are you going to promote this on the TV?’ Andy:
‘Well you're not going to promote this on the TV. It's going to be a
historical document.’ Virgin: ‘So, I see, it's going to say
XTC.’ Andy: ‘No, no, no, no. It's not going to say XTC. It's a
sampler of the Zither label and we're gonna be all the bands. There are going
to be 12 different bands. 12 different tracks.’ They just couldn't get
it. They couldn't see how it would make a fortune for them. And of course, it
wouldn't. Because it was just a foible that we wanted to do. A musical feast
of fun.
You guys have been releasing such consistent quality music for us
for 25 years, so I'm speaking for fans. Thank you for sending all this stuff
out all these years.
Well thank you. I hope you'll stick with us for the next 25.
Because I really want to be a cantankerous old git making really cantankerous
music.
