XTC 'unfur' to the Hermit of Mink Hollow? Maybe in Q1 they were, with all those disparaging remarks about raccoon shit, but I can't see that Todd Rundgren's production has done them any drastic harm. Indeed it's barely touched them. Skylarking is essence of XTC, grown-up and still playing pop in territory somewhere between The Beatles and Squeeze. Plangent guitar sounds recall Revolver (1966), vocal harmonies have a salt-and-Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) tang, daily lives stories come from Up The Junction or, in XTC's case, out in the country - wherever ordinary people are doing the nation's dirty work and trying to break the mould, get out of the trap.

In fact, an XTC album is just like life, isn't it? Remember grannie's sweet jar on the sideboard and your multi-coloured tea-cosy and feel guilty about not being nicer to her, then afraid because you're going to die some day too (Dying)? Bask in Summers Cauldron, a sound as shimmery as a heat-haze. Celebrate a wedding - in the light of the divorce statistics (Big Day). That's it. Just when you think XTC are all heart to the point of sentimentality, they bite.

Q Rating:

Reviewed By: Phil Sutcliffe

[Thanks to Christopher Marrinan]

Mark Ellen interviews Andy Partridge about the making of Skylarking.

XTC get a cool reception from the hermit of Mink Hollow

“We were holed up in this shack, laughingly called a Guest House, at the bottom of his garden. Like the place The Beverly Hillbillies used to live in before they made any money — fir trees, raccoon shit, moths the size of Ram Trucks, people shooting moose and barbecueing them. And he never asked us in! Not in two months. Not even for a game of darts, or shove 'apenny, or shove quarter or whatever it is they play in Mink Hollow. . .”

XTC at their most generous call it “a working relationship”. Todd Rundgren's not saying anything.

It happened thus: Todd, former lead singer with Utopia — a man given to leapirig into his audience to collect their autographs — had professed a great admiration for the inscrutable quartet from Swindon. On hearing this, their record company very sensibly jumped at the chance of employing a producer that could launch XTC's stubbornly unsellable pop songs into the lucrative American market.

Andy Partridge has a slightly more colourful view. “We are to Virgin,” he announces, “what the ravens are to The Tower Of London: nobody knows what good we do but if we weren't there it just wouldn't be right somehow. It's still a singles-dominated market and, in Virgin's eyes, I think we took over the Henry Cow mantle — ‘At last we've found someone who can wear it! It fits, Sire, it fits! Quick, put on the Slapp Happy plimsolls!’ We used to joke about those bands but now I think we've assumed their position.”

So XTC were despatched to Todd's studio, unsurprisingly, located in Woodstock, New York State, to record the new LP, Skylarking. Beer and skittles, they were soon to find, were a not a high priority.

“The man's a recluse, a total recluse. Two months Wouldn't even have us in to watch telly.”

Was he any more approachable in the studio?

“Everything had to be done his way. He wouldn't do any songs with political overtones. We had a song called Terrorism and he said, No we don't want anything to do with that. We had a song called Obscene Procession which was about starvation and stuff; nothing to do with that, thanks. We had one, my favourite, called Gangway! Electric Guitar Is Coming Through, but that rustles the leaves a bit in Mink Hollow, apparently. He chose all the ones about ‘personal relationships’ — the shagging songs. He wouldn't do anything broader.”

Did he cost a lot?

“Let me see: there was one figure, two, three, then a comma. . .”

[Thanks to CobWebTheatre]

XTC came to prominence in 1978 by bumming a ride aboard the New Wave express, but even as techno-punks pogoing awkwardly out of step at the art school hop, on their hectic first album White Music they displayed the idiosyncratic smarts that have sustained a distinguished career on the sidelines of English rock.

The spluttering incoherence of Andy Partridge's vocals on This Is Pop and the spikey nervous energy typified by scattergun songs like Science Friction had given way to a more measured approach by the time of 1980's Black Sea, but their penchant for convoluted arrangements somehow bundled into oddly-shaped pop packages remained intact, and now provided minor hits in Sgt. Rock and Towers Of London.

But the lurking suspicion that here was a group inclined to be too clever for their own good was confirmed in 1983 by Mummer, their least successful release, and an album that paraded moments of inconsequential pastoral whimsy, like Colin Moulding's Wonderland, together with performances of irritating pomposity as on Great Fire.

These, the last three albums from XTC's catalogue to be released on CD, come complete with additional songs culled from B-sides and EPs (16 extra tracks in all) and, given Partridge's appallingly daft diction, indispensable lyric sheets.

In retrospect there is often less to XTC's complex music than at first meets the ear. Despite all their high-wire antics, they have always managed to sling up the safety-net of a good chorus and, paradoxically, this simple, traditional facility may yet prove to be their greatest achievement.

Q Rating:
White Music
Black Sea
Mummer

Reviewed By: David Sinclair

[Thanks to Christopher Marrinan]

Follow-ups to one-off bright ideas are usually disasters - the consequence of using all your best shots first time and not knowing when to leave well alone. It's a pleasant surprise, therefore, to find that this LP - the follow-up to the 25 O'Clock 6-track mini-LP of 1985 and Andy Partridge of XTC's obsession with having missed being a child of the '60s - is actually a considerable improvement on the original. (The CD version, incidentally, will contain both albums - under the title Chips From The Chocolate Fireball.) Much less self-conscious and over the top than its predecessor (though sharing the same producer in John Leckie), this actually consists of 11 bright, energetic pop songs - good enough to stand on their own and generally executed with more life, invention and direction than the past couple of pastoral XTC albums. It's almost as if this new fantasy game is more like Andy Partridge's old self.

Musically the material - to which bassist Colin Moulding also contributes a couple of his recognisably more straightforward songs - is a more refined mixture of affectionate parody and the sincerest form of imitation of late '60s experimental pop, principally British but also American. (Its inspirations include Pink Floyd, Keith West, The Byrds and Moby Grape). Both the stylistic borrowings and the use of '60s effects like phasing and mellotrons are used with subtlety and restraint, and the remodelled result is correspondingly more acceptable and enjoyable, with the ersatz and contrived no longer dominant.

Partridge still hasn't got it quite right and there are odd slips into a kind of sub-Alice In Wonderland whimsical nonsense. Nevertheless this is 90 per cent good stuff and there's even a potential hit single in the pub-piano anti-war singalong You're A Good Man Albert Brown. The best of contemporary '60s pop - this one could run and run.

Ian Cranna

No, XTC haven't re-formed, they never actually broke up. After releasing Skylarking three years ago Andy Partridge and his faithful cohorts Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory took another pseudonymous step sideways to record a second album as the The Dukes Of Stratosphear. Wacky '60s psychedelia has always been a discernible glint in Andy Partridge's eye and with the The Dukes of Stratosphear he pursued it to the point of whimsical silliness and beyond.

So, having thoroughly demo-ed the idea (and incidentally generated more sales than he did with some of XTC's later output), Andy Partridge is back with a new, considerably improved XTC product: a 15-track CD length album (or vinyl double) of psychedelic pop pastiche, but pastiche so powerfully drawn we ought really to call it a tribute. There's no mistaking to whom this lively compliment is directed either since it's been carried through all the way to the Yellow Submarine-style cartoon on the sleeve. Oranges And Lemons is obsessed with The Beatles, or more precisely Paul McCartney, circa 1967-8.

The various horn arrangements, and particularly the one on President Kill Again, are the most strikingly Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band quotation. The rolling, upbeat melody of The Loving has an unmistakably Paul McCartney-esque feel too, and a lyric which Andy Partridge himself has called All You Need Is Love in another form. The album's nursery rhyme title, surrealist nonsense ditties such as Poor Skeleton Steps Out and the opener, Garden Of Earthly Delight, all reinforce the tone of madcap naivety which was such a marked feature of British psychedelia in general and The Beatles in particular.

That said, there's an imaginative energy about Oranges And Lemons which rescues it from the straitjacket of being charmingly retro. This is partly down to a voracious musical appetite which finds XTC helping themselves to South African choral stylings on Hold Me Daddy, and dropping in and out of jazz, reggae, hard rock and so on. But the album's great strength is a simpler one-the songs. The single Mayor Of Simpleton for instance may carry echoes of So You Wanna Be A Rock'n'Roll Star by The Byrds, but that's not where it gets its quivering freshness or why it sounds so extraordinarily full of itself.

Exuberantly catchy but densely layered and mercifully free of that whiff of self-conscious art school cleverness which has blighted XTC in the past, these songs are thrilling before you catch their sophistication. It may be under the influence of many things but the finest hour celebrated here belongs finally and firmly to XTC.

Q Rating:

Reviewed By: Robert Sandall

[Thanks to Christopher Marrinan]

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 may, 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 audio possibilities of a 4-track home recording studio, but to the shelf-loads of toy soldiers which take up most of the walls. What is now recognisable as 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 or 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 I either had to smash it into bits, pass them down the ladder, get the equipment up here and write the album, or carry on war-gaming and there'd be no album."

In the end, he explains, the dichotomy resolved itself creatively. "If the songs weren't going right I'd go over and paint up 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 us 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 tunesmiths 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 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 naivety 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 promptly cancelled, as were all the American dates, after Partridge fell victim to a debilitating crime 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' families. And I used to think, 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 on 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 been suing to free itself from its old management, a complicated court action which has cost Partridge all of his £30,000 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 till 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. "They probably think it's a bit double-decker, a bit 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 such property on the market, behind such gilt-edged stock as Bruce Springsteen and Queen. Now, 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 crafting 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 over my head. They were busy going on about riots, police brutality, Vietnam and heavy drugs. In England we had this 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 feel really upset that England's given us the cold shoulder," he adds wistfully.

He blames the music press for ever 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 and then people go, Oh he was pretty good, and start buying it on re-issued CDs. 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 throats and make them gag on our magnificence like some sort 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 PAs, 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 quartzy 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 yer pockets out, lads! I don't want to be anyone's hero. I'm an aging Puck, not some Hollywood showbiz god. Are you feeling hungry? Let's go downstairs and have some sarnies."

[Thanks to David "Smudgeboy" Smith]

You'd read about it. You'd dreamed about it. Your mother said you shouldn't do it 'til you were a bit older. But that one unforgettable night, you threw caution to the wind and surrendered -- trembling -- to that overpowering, primitive desire. . . to see your first rock concert. We asked Q's readers: how was it for you?

XTC -- Barnstaple Chequers Club -- 1978

It was in January/February 1978. After one blow-out (they'd ostensibly gone down with the flu) XTC's prestigious UK tour was about to reach Barnstaple Chequers Club.

XTC were hardly premier division stuff but when you're a wide-eyed 16-year-old living in the country, anyone who's appeared on the cover of a music paper acquires a Jacksonesque aura overnight. Barnstaple Chequers may as well have been Wembley that day.

I remember going to WH Smith's, flicking through the X section of the LPs and finding a copy of White Music. As I stared at the band's picture on the cover it scarcely seemed possible that I would be seeing them in person in just a few hours. No-one else in Barnstaple seemed quite as excited at the prospect as me.

Paul Carpenter and I were heading the queue by the time the Chequers doors opened at 7.30. There was no sign of XTC by 9pm so I approached the house DJ to ask him when they would be coming on. He didn't know but assured me that they had already soundchecked. I wasn't sure what he meant but concealed my ignorance.

A group of anti-punks from outside town were causing aggro amongst the crowd. One bloody-lipped victim of the battle was screaming hysterically at his misguided assailants. XTC weren't “punk”, he assured them, they were “power pop”. In those days the difference seemed cavernous. I was thankful the rain had returned my carefully spiked hair to its naturally curly state. XTC finally made it on stage around 11. It was then that my nightly vigils at the John Peel show really paid off. I recognised almost everything they played.

Sadly by 11.30 (as agreed) my dad was waiting outside to take us home. As I opened the car door he moaned something about XTC being so loud they could be heard halfway across Devon.

Chris Twomey, Long Island, New York.

If EMI's takeover of the Virgin label results in the culling of the company's roster, it will be interesting to see where that leaves XTC. No group has remained on the label so long without finding a commercial niche, although 1989's Oranges And Lemons enjoyed some success in the States thanks to Dear God, a track the British label saw fit to omit, and no group more exemplifies the seam of English eccentricity on which Virgin was built. Produced, although you wouldn't know it, by Gus Dudgeon, Nonsuch contains 17 dense, melodic, intelligent and occasionally irritating pop songs, most of them from the pen of Andy Partridge. Colin Moulding's contributions are fewer and sparer, more inclined to know where to stop than major productions like Partridge's furious Rushdie affair anthem Books Are Burning. The level of XTC's invention is evidenced by the arrangements of the guitars and the layers of backing vocals but there's a tendency to underscore the lyrical message of tunes like Wardance which is tiresome.

Q Rating:

Reviewed By: David Hepworth

[Thanks to Christopher Marrinan]

There's never been an XTC live album before, of course, because in 1982, Andy Partridge's stomach ulcer forced a prudent surrender to stage fright and permanent withdrawal to the studio. Happily, this 1980 recording from Radio 1 is an evocative snapshot. Apart from early favourites, This Is Pop and Making Plans For Nigel, there are seven tracks from the then just-released Black Sea: sharp satires Respectable Street and Generals And Majors, patented Partridge acute-angle love songs Burning With Optimism's Flames and Love At First Sight, and the ground-breaking Towers Of London-which presaged the new wave folk of English Settlement and beyond. It seems a totally confident performance, with all fear set aside as the clangour of Partridge and Dave Gregory's guitars provides a rowdy contrast to the verbal depths and intricacies.

Q Rating:

Reviewed By: Phil Sutcliffe

[Thanks to Christopher Marrinan]

The involvement of the word “definitive” in the title implies that XTC have attracted numerous biographers in the past and that finally the band are about to be dealt some justice. The problem is that most rock biographies deal with commercial success, how to get it and how to deal with it, and commercial success is something XTC have had only the briefest acquaintance with.

Since the beginning of 1982, when Andy Partridge walked out on an American tour and they turned their back on touring, XTC have had a odd relationship with the music business, selling records in quantities respectable enough for a young band breaking through college radio but insufficiently exposed to attract new fans.

Twomey's acount of the band's golden age in the late '70's when they coat-tailed punk despite their birth certificates and musical predilections is worth a skim but as soon as we arrive at the mid-'80's, it's largely the same recurring story of “any ideas for producers?”.

One is left admiring Partridge's single-mindedness but sympathising with his long-suffering colleagues, stuck at home when they could be out making some noise.

by David Hepworth

[Thanks to Steve Levenstein]

Chosen by the band themselves, these 16 tracks (plus spoof John Peel intro by the irrepressible Andy Partridge) span 12 years, from 1977's angular, pent-up energy of White Music (with Barry Andrews's piping organ) through to the more studied and acoustic Oranges And Lemons in 1988. Despite not featuring any of their hits-only No Thugs In Our House was even a single-and neglecting perhaps their most commercial LP Black Sea entirely, this is a joyously accessible collection of melody and invention. There are no new songs or dramatic reworkings, but some great renditions, particularly Jason And The Argonauts (from English Settlement) and a mighty Roads Girdle The Globe (from Drums & Wires), plus some deserved limelight for that Colin Moulding B-side, Dance Band. The four-songs-in-three-hours format of BBC sessions means that the songs are direct and no frills, a reminder of what a great live band XTC were too.

Q Rating:

Reviewed By: Ian Cranna

[Thanks to Christopher Marrinan]

If English pop eccentric and Californian ambient composer seems an unlikely combination, then Andy Partridge's dub and psychedelic experiments and recent pastoral direction should provide a clue. Surprisingly, it's Harold Budd who emerges the dominant character, his spacious, almost motionless creations of piano and organ sounds (replete with murmur and sustain) forming much of the framework. Andy Partridge's contributions (though equally spartan) seem more like deliberate and decorative responses, with their own tensions, rhythms and snatches of pop melody, and played on delicate acoustic guitar, wobbly early synthesizer or percussion. The result is 16 mood pieces (instrumental apart from two brief voiceovers of poetic imagery from Harold Budd) bearing titles like Mantle Of Peacock Bones or Bearded Aphrodite - an enchanting and emotive work of complementing contrasts, with the odd sample of distant church bells or more exotic chimes helping to form an integrated whole.

Ian Cranna

Andy Partridge: “I was staying with my girlfriend in New York and I asked her for something to read in the toilet and I just grabbed this off the shelf and I was in there for hours. This is a concrete block-sized book. Apparently, it took Barbara Walker 20 years to gather this information, and I was shocked at how male-dominated religion and society has stolen or milked from women: firstly, their power in society but also their myths, secrets and rights. It's a great Christian-bashing book which is wonderful for me. It's also a great soup of etymology which pleases me to no end. For instance, from the some root as ‘cunt’ came country, kin and kind, and also the words cunning, kenning and ken, meaning insight. and it tells you that the word ‘twat’ was once ignorantly used by poet Robert Browning. But finally, like anything that's good, it really is impossible to describe.”

[Thanks to Andisheh Nouraee]

Tribute albums - don't you just hate'em? This effort would have made some sense had the contributors include more famous XTC-devotees such as Blur, but the followings of Space Hog and The Verve Pipe are unlikely to add much to Andy Partridge's bank account. The bands certainly haven't added anything to his artistic reputation: half these songs are grunge-lite, with the quirky, intelligent Englishness of the originals almost entirely estinguished. The only tracks of any note are Sarah McLachlan's melodramatic Tori-telling of Dear God and Ruben Blades's execrable version of The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul, which sounds like a cross between John Coltrane and Barry Manilow. Oh, and a crystal-clear, harmony-drenched recording of an old B-side, The Good Things, by someone called Terry & The Lovemen. It's XTC in (thin) disguise and it's the only possible reason for wanting to buy this.

Sam Taylor

[Thanks to Giancarlo Cairella]

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? [Ed. 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.")

Reviewed by: David Cavanagh

All original work is acknowledged as being the copyright of the originator.
[Thanks to Simon Sleightholm]

Their last album to date and the one no-one remembers. Nonsuch (named, aptly, after a vanished Elizabethan palace) is very much malt XTC, a fine blend of all their various styles matured to an extraordinary refinement. So no hits then, but 17 excellent songs, a couple of their best singles ("The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead", covered by Crash Test Dummies, and the lovely "The Disappointed") and a brilliant sense of three men living in Swindon making music very much for themselves. "Dear Madam Barnum" finds Andy Partridge lyrical and polite in his pissed-offness while "Holly Up On Poppy" proves that you can write songs about your children and not look a total gurning jackass and "Crocodile" reminds the listener that this is the same XTC who made Drums and Wires. Nonsuch was made in 1992; perhaps now that half a decade has now elapsed, they might make a new album?

David Quantick (reviewer)

[Thanks to Christopher Marrinan]

Radio work by new wavers who were a huge influence on everybody. All right, on Blur. Before vocalist Andy Partridge's stage fright became so physically debilitating that the band were forced to give up live performance, XTC were circuit regulars whose angular, experimental sound translated well to performance, largely because they mixed their jerky tin insect rhythms with top beat tunes and harmonies. This epic 4CD compilation collects concert material from Radio One with sessions material from "David" Kid Jensen, John Peel and other shows of the new-waved-up late-'70s. The real pleasure here is just how good XTC were live, Partridge's guitar sounding 10 times as jagged and brutal as it seemed at the time, and how well these songs sound now, in a climate where everyone seems to have assimilated at least something of that jerky, Beatley, Eno-meets-Merseybeat sound. This box - essential to anyone for whom this period meant astonishing invention and discovering potential - not only makes an almost forgotten band come over fresher than an unlicked stamp but also contains the most accurate recorded parody of John Peel.

David Quantick

Copyright EMAP Consumer Magazines Ltd 1998

First of two 1999 comeback sets from the Swindon cult, finally dumped by Virgin.
XTC inspire such reverence from acolytes that it may be worth pointing out what has always bothered the unconvinced, viz. a certain cosy trickiness as displayed here on I'd Like That and Fruit Nut, with their prattle of toasting forks and sheds. Forget those and this is a fairly joyous first album since 1992, full of queer and enjoyable songs such as Knights In Shining Karma. Greenman, admittedly, does have the whiff of contrived psychedelia about it. Nonetheless, it's what a better Kula Shaker might sound like. All things considered, this is splendid; the band continuing their Beatles-esque mission to imbue pop with intelligence. Oasis should get Partridge and Moulding to produce their next album: the results would be awesome.

Stuart Maconie

[Thanks to Mark Rushton]

McCartney tribute album in the works

An 18-track Paul McCartney tribute album boasting an impressive selection of artists is due for release later this year. Launch.com reports that the as-yet-untitled long player will feature renditions of McCartney's solo output from Brian Wilson (a version of Dear John) Squeeze (Junior's Farm) and Foo Fighters (Jet). XTC team up with John Cleese for a version of Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey while Robyn Hitchcock is to duet with Mary Hopkins on Goodbye, the song that McCartney wrote for Hopkins in 1969.

The track listing to date is as follows:

Owsley Band on the Run
Foo Fighters Jet
Neil Finn - tbc
XTC (with John Cleese) - Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
Ben Folds Five - Listen To What The Man Said
Fountains Of Wayne - Baby's Request
Squeeze - Junior's Farm
Brian Wilson with the Wondermints - Dear Boy
Barenaked Ladies - Junk
Matthew Sweet - Every Night
The Merrymakers - No More Lonely Nights
Sloan - Waterfalls
John Faye Power Trip - Coming Up or World Tonight
They Might Be Giants - Ram On
The Interpreters - Maybe I'm Amazed
Echo & The Bunnymen - My Love
Robyn Hitchcock & Mary Hopkins - Goodbye
World Party - Teddy Boy

Longterm students of XTC's brittle whimsy will already have savoured fleeting moments of what threatened to be a 'pastoral' period. Skylarking goes the whole hog, marvellously articulating the boyish innocence and earthy medieval flavour of a bygone, uniquely English, rural life through a set of angular, eternally inventive songs that faintly recall the muzzy psychedlia of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour (and produced by Todd Rundgren). Daft, pioneering, warmly recommended.

© Copyright EMAP Digital Limited 2000.