XTC's Andy Partridge is one of the great English songwriters of the past 30 years, excluded from the pantheon due to chronic stage fright, bad management and the band's Swindon accents. We should treasure him — but enough to spend £60 on a nine-CD set of more than 100 of his home demos? Tentatively, yes. Although Fuzzy Warbles' sheen sometimes highlights a lack of real-time punch, this beautifully packaged box encompasses almost every genre of post-war popular song, woven seamlessly via his whimsically psychedelic, bitingly bittersweet sensibility. “Andy, what are you doing in the shed?” “Creating another overlooked baroque pop masterpiece, dear.” Four stars

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Culture

Pop: Get on Down: XTC

Ten reasons to stop bemoaning their lack of chart success and simply celebrate the fact that Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding have written some of the most sublime (and influential) British pop of the past 30 years. If any doubt remains, the four-CD Apple Box (released on October 31), which includes the albums Apple Venus Volume 1 and Wasp Star, should silence it.

1 Church of Women A fertility-rite tour de force from Wasp Star.

2 Chalkhills and Children Partridge's most beautiful song and self-aware lyric.

3 Senses Working Overtime John the Baptist to the Futureheads et al.

4 Vanishing Girl As the Dukes of Stratosphear, a Moulding miracle of flawless West Coast pop.

5 Cross Wires Anticipating Bloc Party, Swindon's finest announce themselves to the world in jerky, stop-start spasms.

6 The Disappointed “All congregate at my house,” sighed Partridge, knowingly, in 1992.

7 Making Plans for Nigel Another name heads for the litter bin of naffness.

8 Here Comes President Kill Again A Bush in the White House, war in the offing: 1989's history would repeat itself.

9 Easter Theatre A string-laden opus of death and rebirth.

10 Mayor of Simpleton Love triumphs over qualifications in this mid-period gem.

A good decade ago, when the British public still used phone boxes, receiving one's information digitally meant watching Ceefax, and compact discs were still seen as the cutting-edge of human ingenuity, the humble cassette was often a central part of the mating ritual. The chain of events went something like this: boy meets girl, boy seeks to impress girl by talking about his passionate love of music — and, some time around the third date, boy makes girl a compilation tape, in an endearing nerdy attempt to hammer home his desirability.

The technique is perfectly described in — why, of course — Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. “To me,” says Rob Gordon, the book's eternally fretful hero, “making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again.” Mere paragraphs later, upon meeting his life-defining girlfriend Laura, everything goes a bit soft-focus, and love begins to emerge from the box of a C90. “I produced it from my jacket pocket when she came over to me,” he recalls, “and we went on from there. It was a good beginning.”

As a sometime cassette enthusiast, I instantly recognised the scenario, and allowed myself a retrospective wince: if the ex-girlfriend who received a handful of cassettes sprinkled with the work of those Mancunian avant-gardists the Fall is reading this, I'll take this opportunity to both apologise, and marvel at the fact that our relationship actually went anywhere.

In the modern age, of course, all this has been rendered a whole lot easier by the onward march of technology. The music industry is worrying itself to death about such skulduggery — but with the aid of a PC, home-made CDs can be quickly compiled, and then binned, and then compiled all over again, until the acme of seductive magic has been attained.

For those whose devotion is reflected in a sizeable budget, meanwhile, there is the new mini iPod, a gadget that is available — only from the USA, pending a worldwide launch in April — in lurve-drenched pink. Thrillingly, it can be 1) Stuffed with thousands of love songs, and 2) Engraved with a two-line message of no more than 46 characters (which unfortunately rules out much beyond “I love you baby/ Don't mean maybe”).

And of course, over-arching all this is the web-mediated availability — official and unofficial — of millions upon millions of songs. But what to actually choose? Any fool could surely dispense a list of wonderful compositions aimed squarely at the heart: the Beach Boys' God Only Knows, John Lennon's In My Life, Cliff Richard's 1976 smash Miss You Nights — but in a world where a love of the obvious is often as romantically appealing as flatulence, it probably pays to pick selections that speak a slightly less soppy language.

Besides, after a couple of glasses of wine, I'll usually dispense the opinion that once Elvis had released Love Me Tender, the straightforward love song's Platonic ideal had been reached. In the wake of that milestone, the best love-based songs tended to ooze a slightly more sophisticated take on human relationships — most notably, to often embody that strange quirk whereby the most romantic music tends to be based on those moments when relationships break into cracks.

So, the following list aims to set off on a romantic stroll away from the beaten track. It contains songs about love (both reciprocated and unrequited), and unbridled lust, and heartbreak, and adultery, and much more besides. There is nothing in it by such romantic titans as Céline Dion, Peter Andre, the Rolling Stones, Barry White, Rod Stewart or Coldplay — but I'm confident that most of its content could be used to advance the progress of most promising affairs.

I would, however, issue the warning that the odd item — Outkast's rather unreconstructed God, for example — should be used very carefully indeed. Declarations of flaming desire are one thing; references to one's ideal partner having a “big old ass” will usually prove to be quite another . . .

1 Glen Campbell: Wichita Lineman (1968)
2 The Velvet Underground: Pale Blue Eyes (1969)
3 The White Stripes: I Want to be the Boy to Warm Your Mother's Heart (2003)
4 Koko Taylor: What kind of Man is This?(1964)
5 Diana Ross and the Supremes: Back in My Arms Again (1965)
6 Bob Dylan: I Believe in You (1979)
7 George Jones: A Good Year for the Roses (1976)
8 Billy Bragg: The Saturday Boy (1984)
9 Randy Newman: Guilty (1974)
10 The Smiths: There is a Light that Never Goes Out (1986)
11 Badly Drawn Boy: You Were Right (2002)
12 The Beatles: I Will (1968)
13 Nirvana: Heart-Shaped Box (1993)
14 Outkast: God/Happy Valentine's Day (2003)
15 Aimee Mann: Save Me (1999)
16 St Etienne: Only Love Can Break Your Heart (1990)
17 The Handsome Family: Weightless Again (1997)

18 XTC: Love on a Farmboy's Wages (1983)

Andy Partridge's Swindonian band were famed for their very English pastoralism — as exemplified by this marvellous musical marriage proposal, seemingly set in the same world as Constable's Haywain. “Flask of wine on my feather bedding/ We will drink and prepare for wedding/Soon my darling.”

19 The Pogues: Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah (1988)
20 Dolly Parton: Here You Come Again (1977)

XTC
A Coat of Many Cupboards
(Virgin)

JUST THE way that a box set should be, XTC's four-CD effort is brimming with alternative — but still pleasurable — versions of their greatest hits (Generals & Majors, Making Plans for Nigel) and bits. Forty-one (out of 60) tracks have been taken from the demo/rehearsal (and live) cupboards, plumbed from the 1978-89 period that delivered their first ten albums. It is a good way to unwrap numerous layers of a band (Swindon's finest to boot) which exemplified idiosyncratic, erudite New Wave pop, and progressed to a folkier, but no less involving, sound. A rich testament to one of British pop's most endearing bands. Martin Aston (Rating: 3/5)

XTC
Coat of Many Cupboards
Virgin XTCBOX1

A WELL-RESEARCHED box set decodes its subject, illuminating trends and signature sounds, deepening our affection for music that perhaps seemed all too familiar. But Coat of Many Cupboards makes XTC appear even more confusing than they are. What has been going on in their Swindon fastness these past 25 years? How can four CDs full of outtakes, demos and live tracks explain a career that stretches from the agitated, scratchy angst of Science Friction, via the sublime hit singles Making Plans for Nigel and Senses Working Overtime, to the Carnaby Street acid-pop of Brainiac's Daughter? XTC are unboxable. Who are they, and what do they want from us? Though Coat of Many Cupboards prompts a fond nostalgia, the albums XTC have made since escaping Virgin Records suggest that their best work may still be ahead of them.

[column 2]

XTC Homegrown
(Idea)
One they prepared earlier

This week's albums remind me of that wonderful moment in This is Spinal Tap when the manager explains that the group's audience is not so much in decline as becoming 'more selective'.

In much the same way, you invariably hear bands of a certain vintage describing the loss of their recording contract with a big, multinational company (who are capable of selling albums by the millions all around the world) as a step towards 'regaining control' of their affairs, both business and artistic. After all, who wants a huge cash advance and a massive marketing machine working on your behalf, when you can go back to selling your albums out of the back of a van perhaps, or by mail order via the Internet? Many of the most revered acts from the 1980s have regained control of their music in recent times and now find themselves courting a significantly more selective audience. Julian Cope, Mike Scott (currently leading a revamped line-up of the Waterboys), Guy Chadwick (of the House of Love) and the ill-fated Kevin Rowland (of Dexys Midnight Runners) are a few that come to mind.

. . .

The profits may be relatively modest, but at least if you own your record company you can release whatever the hell you want, an idea which has clearly taken a firm grip on the imaginations of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, the remaining partners in XTC, and now proprietors of their own Idea label. Not for the first time, the duo have hit on the wheeze of compiling an album of demo recordings, and Homegrown comprises early versions of the songs which were released in completed form on last year's Wasp Star album.

Given that this procedure is roughly the equivalent of me submitting for publication the various rough notes and doodles which went into the writing of this article, you have to wonder at the sheer chutzpah involved. After all, this isn't Elvis Presley or the Beatles we're talking about, but XTC, a band who may enjoy national treasure status but these days would count themselves lucky to sell 20,000 copies of a 'proper' album in this country.

Sounding at times like lost fragments of old Beatles songs and at others like a fully completed Keith Richards album, it is a collection that is likely to be of limited interest to even the most hardcore XTC completist.

And it doesn't get any more selective than that.

XTC claim they would be quite content if they were never interviewed, never photographed and never filmed again. It is not perhaps the most sensible approach for a (still) working rock band, and definitely not the most auspicious of beginnings to a transatlantic phone interview. But you can't really blame the group for feeling aggrieved, not to say fatalistic.

It is 23 years since the band, from Swindon, Wiltshire, were signed up by Virgin Records and squeezed awkwardly - and never entirely convincingly - onto the punk bandwagon (they knew too many chords). Since then, the lead singer, Andy Partridge, and bassist, Colin Moulding, have seen enough false dawns to know better than to expect much more than critical indifference or jaded approval.

That their new album, Wasp Star: Apple Venus Volume 2, is one of the greatest they've produced will no doubt be a source of quiet satisfaction to its creators, and to the small, rather troglodytic army of true believers who've stuck with them through good times and bad. XTC last troubled the singles charts in 1982 with Senses Working Overtime, another of those jaunty, slightly infuriating singalonga songs that Partridge occasionally managed to insinuate onto the playlists and into the more spongelike recesses of your brain. At the time, the band were on a commercial and creative roll: their previous album, Black Sea, had kept the record company happy by spawning three hit singles - Generals and Majors, Towers of London and Sgt Rock - and only Partridge's panic attacks during the subsequent American tour, brought on by acute stage fright, gave any cause for concern.

What happened over the ensuing decade was the familiar mix of crossed wires, hubris and naivety that characterises the relationship between the music industry and the pop musician. Speaking about the episode now from a New York hotel room, the 46-year-old Partridge can afford to laugh about it, though rich seams of bitterness and unresolved anger are easy both to locate and to arouse.

Unwilling to tour, and thus unable to promote his records, the singer's dealings with Virgin became increasingly strained, verging at times on the surreal. "At various stages they'd ask us to do things with our sound so they could make more money from us. First it was the Police, then Simple Minds got flung in briefly. But then suddenly it was, 'We want you to sound like ZZ Top - guitars are coming back in, and we know you can do guitars.'"

The band's characteristic reaction was to go in the opposite direction, so that the traces of bucolic, folk-infused psychedelia detectable in their early work now received full, madcap prominence. It ran riot over 1986's Skylarking, for which Virgin had roped in Todd Rundgren as producer in the hope that the American could somehow magic a hit out of what it saw as increasingly unpromising material.

Rundgren's response was to go native, to Virgin's despair, but in the process he captured the abiding and unmistakable Englishness of XTC's work, which to fans is as powerful and acute a chronicle of our national pastimes and peculiarities as anything by the Beatles, the Who or the Kinks.

But Virgin was not impressed. Relations with the band dissolved still further, yet even when the group went on strike, the suits refused to release them from their contract. "In the end," says Partridge, "I think they let us go because they'd just got sick of us bad-mouthing them in the press and ringing them up and just begging, abjectly begging, 'Please let us out, we will never make any money for your label.'"

It took five years for Virgin to relent. When it did, XTC's pent-up creativity poured forth in the string-drenched, unstructured glory that was last year's Apple Venus Volume 1, released on the tiny Cooking Vinyl label. So how - and why - do the band still do it: two songwriters in their mid-forties, raising families in modest terraced houses in Swindon and sitting in their garden sheds to record quintessentially English songs about quintessentially English things? It's certainly not the money. "All the people I knew in my street have made more money than me," Partridge insists. "One is a computer salesman, another's an anaesthetist and one's a flight simulator, whatever that means. They'd all go, 'Aah, you're a big star now, when you gonna take us down the pub, you cheap bastard?' If only. And now I've found out that Virgin owns my songs till 70 years after my death. So even my kids don't benefit, not unless they live to some freakish Guinness Book of Records age."

It would be heartening to think that all this will change - that Radio 1 will playlist the glorious, once-heard-never-forgotten The Man Who Murdered Love; that other new songs on the album, such as the brazenly priapic My Brown Guitar, will propel Wasp Star into the charts and Partridge into his rightful place in the pantheon of great British songwriters. But don't bet on it. Partridge certainly isn't.

"Yes, there's still a little person in there who screams, 'What's wrong with you f***ers, why aren't you buying my record?' but it's very little now. In any case, liking XTC has always been the love that dares not speak its name."

The man who admits that as an adolescent he fantasised constantly about being a pop star is fluent on the venality of the record industry, and the increasing ghettoisation of music - "It's just their way of slicing the meat up finer and finer to sell to select markets. Soon it'll be, 'Oh yes, we only listen to ambient-garage-operabilly.' But all that will ever interest us is the music we make; that's our only connection with Mr & Mrs Musically Appreciative."

His gift for the scurrilous anecdote is in fine fettle. Apropos of nothing he embarks on a salacious tale about a former manager's cameo in a blue movie, with a rocking horse. And the story of what lies behind the devotional song Church of Women on Wasp Star is charmingly evocative and poignant. "I think if people have to have a religion, why not make it the worship of women?" he says, before recalling his own first carnal communion. "I was very frightened of women when I was a teenager. I lost my virginity late, with a girl who insisted on leaving the bedroom curtains open. There was this bloke mowing the lawn next door, and she kept saying, 'Keep your bum down or he'll see and tell me dad.' Which wasn't ideal."

Today, the composer who is responsible for some of the most perceptive and beautiful British songwriting of the past two decades remains as indefatigably chippy as ever. "We've always been patronised as yokels from Swindon: 'It's a joke town, therefore they must be a joke band, and now they're a joke band in their forties who are past it.'" Then, in the same breath, Partridge makes a typically self-deprecating remark that seems to sum up his inherently contradictory approach to his chosen career. "Mind you," he says, his Wiltshire burr lilting down the crackling phone line, "Swindon is what the word bypass was invented for."

After a seven-year enforced absence, once-edgy art-punks XTC produced an idyllic pastoral fantasia that makes the English countryside as magical and mystical as the pyramids.

Meanwhile, back in Swindon ...

Tied into a punitive contract with Virgin, XTC went on strike for six years. They downed tools - in their case, pastoral psychedelia, punchy, jungle-green pop and a pagan tilt at English mores - in 1993, and haven't released a note since. Their leader, the lugubrious Andy Partridge, retreated to his terraced house in Swindon, battled through an acrimonious divorce, built a studio in the shed at the end of his garden and started working on an album that he thought would never see the light of day.

"The more cack got thrown at us - the more the blinding scumstorm of negativity came our way - the more I wrote. The more acid gets poured on my motor, the more volts my battery has," Partridge says. He's balanced on the edge of his piano stool in his extraordinary parlour - the room is crammed with toy forts, wood-block etchings, dried herbs and naive pictures of huge fat farmyard pigs. It looks exactly as you'd expect the lead singer of XTC's home to look. He is, after all, one of the great British pop eccentrics.

"Some people would chew off their limbs to have these songs," he continues, correctly. "But I'm left with this longing for betterment. I need to murder those who influenced me. There are some big ghosts I still can't get rid of." He takes a sip of his almond tea. "Ray Davies just will not get out of my house. I have to kill Ray. I have to bludgeon Brian Wilson to death. If not kill, I certainly have to squeeze Burt Bacharach by the nuts.

"McCartney, I want to reduce to soya mince; and Lennon - well, unfortunately, someone's already done the job for me with Lennon.

"Apparently," he says, twinkling over his specs, "there's a fellow on the Internet who claims I killed Lennon."

Having inspired a whole generation of Britpop artists - Blur, in particular, were up to their neck in debt to XTC during their Parklife days - Partridge and Co were finally released from their Virgin contract in 1995, and Apple Venus Volume 1, their first album in seven years, is out this week. And it's a stormer: XTC are still at least five years ahead of the pack.

The first track is as awesome as you'd imagine a song called River of Orchids should be: a world-sized bank of syncopated pizzicato violins, offset by Partridge's yelps and moans. Easter Theatre continues his obsession with birth and decay, and comes across like Vaughan Williams scoring the creation of a new world; while Greenman sounds like the last scene in a film set on another planet, where the jungle-creatures prepare a victory feast after the enemy has been blown to pieces with space lasers.

"Oh no! You accuse me of writing the Ewok National Anthem!" Partridge yelps, in obvious distress. "Please, no! I've had a lot of people accuse that track of being very Arabic; but it's very pagan, very English. There's a slight dromedary whiff about the percussion, admittedly; but it goes no further east than Norwich. And no Ewoks were involved."

Asked what kept him going through his self-enforced six-year lay off, Partridge comes back to his childhood heroes once again.

"I just want to outdo all these people who caused me to became trapped in this weird ideas world where all my ideas want to come out in music. It was never this way when I was a child. I didn't know whether I wanted to be an architect or a kite-maker or a bullet-biter or a painter; I just felt like an ideas person. But now I feel like I'm on these hot rails to Hades, where the orifice I've grown is a songwriting orifice that won't heal over."

Partridge was ten when the Beatles came along; and, as with every other member of his generation, his DNA was instantly altered. "I was there in my duffel coat and my shorts, thinking, 'Shall I scream? Girls scream. Some of the boys are screaming. Oh God, I don't know whether boys are supposed to scream at other boys or not.' " He settled for "grinding my knees together earnestly". He cultivated a Brian Wilson pudding-bowl haircut which, to preserve its geometry, he would cup in his hands as he slept.

"I just think everything to do with music is magic," he beams, twirling round and round on his piano stool. "And that was the awful thing about the whole Virgin strike. It wasn't so much the money. But it was the awful silence that got to me - that they'd stopped me from casting my spells on people. As long as I can be Merlin, I'm happy."

Apple Venus Volume 1 is out now on Cooking Vinyl

XTC. Apple Venus Volume 1. Cooking Vinyl CookCD172, £ 14.99.

IF YOU'RE wondering why you hadn't heard anything from Swindon's premier new wave combo, XTC, for seven years, it's because they've been on strike. Contractually imprisoned in a mathematically suspect negative equity by Virgin Records, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding simply downed tools until allowed to abscond to roots-rock indie Cooking Vinyl. Apple Venus Volume I nobly eschews the itchy angst of chart-toppers Making Plans for Nigel or Sergeant Rock in favour of the band's 1980s chamber pop experiments, plunging headlong into plangent string arrangements and baroque electro-acoustic ballads, and though Partridge's songs occasionally succumb to the nursery-rhyme whimsy that eternally infects British psychedelia, this is pop art craftsmanship to make Britpop's finest blush. Green Man relocates Led Zeppelin's Kashmir to an English pastoral idyll, and River of Orchids' breathtaking orchestration conjures Beach Boy Brian Wilson reborn in rural Wiltshire. In contrast to Blondie's creatively bankrupt reappearance, XTC won't be touring.

Partridge never recovered from the chronic stage fright of a 1981 US jaunt, and views live performance of studio creations disparagingly, but there's a generation of greying punks who'd love to stand in a darkened hall and cheer XTC on, just one more time. SL