THE AGONY OF BEING XTC

THE AGONY OF BEING XTC

Walter Wasacz

While Andy Partridge searches through his travel bag to show me books he has purchased at a sale in New York, it gives me precious few moments to think through the history of XTC, a group tagged with labels that range from “difficult” to “cute” to “coy” but who are actually in the vanguard of making a new pop. ;:

Ready? From Swindon, England, which is 80 miles due west of London, home of both Justin Hayward and Desmond Morris, XTC began in about 1973 as the Helium Kids, had long hair, considered themselved part of the glam underground and drove away the Swindon locals “by the hundreds” when they played live.

Then, through the years, the image changed. There were the white boiler suits with black belts—“Sound familiar?” inserted Partridge at this point—in 1976, and the name changed to XTC. And at this time, rising ingloriously to the east, punk emerged to cleanse, distort and renew, and the little group from Swindon was swept along for the passionate ride (In fact: “We had our 1977 in 1973,” he said).

XTC was then signed to Virgin and, as they prepared their first album, White Music, the line-up appeared thus: Partridge: guitar-vocals; Colin Moulding: bass-vocals; Terry Chambers: drums; and Barry Andrews: keyboards.

Andrew remained through Go 2 but soon came a collision in direction and he left, replaced by guitarist Dave Gregory who, like the rest of the group—and unlike Andrews, a Londoner—is from Swindon.

"

I'd love to call an album 'the domlhance of fact.'

—Andy Partridge

"

“The Book Of Key Facts,” says Partridge, leaning into his bag. “Stalking The Wild Pendulum and The History Of Walt Disney. Ooooh, it’s so great. There is something so strong about facts. I’d love to call an album ‘the dominance of fact’.”

The third XTC album, Drutns and Wires—their first released in the U.S.— shows a definition of style that bears out Partridge’s recent fascination with fact. He had earlier described his writing style on White Music as a “.. .sort of cut-up soup of fantasy meets very, very personal experience” and Go 2 as “mostly observational.”

' Now the new album shows Partridge’s methods maturing toward a point of convergence. Fantasy remains an integral part (“Outside World,” “Helicopter”), but something else has also emerged: a graphic welding of style with substance; the songs are extraordinarily real. Do you see what 5 I’m getting at, Partridge?

-5 “I’ll sum it up in one word: atmosphere. If

5 we don’t get the atmosphere of the songv § we’ve failed. We say ‘Look, want this to sound gloomy and depressing, and want sort of an empty, alone feeling.’ We usually go into describing an atmosphere then let people play what they want to play with that in mind.

i’d seen a program on piping music to plants,to encourage them to grow; and the sort of thing that plants respond to are flute music or flute tone.. .1 don’t know what the technical range is, but it’s sort of mellow, smooth wave ‘whoooooh [imitates this tone],’ and they can actually make the plants grow a third as fast by playing this music, Bach and things like that with fluty tones.

“So that’s just one thing I keep in mind for, “Life In The Greenhouse (from Go 2).” I told Barry to play the organ as if he were playing to plants and the drums were intended to be like a heartbeat. That’s the sort of thing we’re after.”

And achieved, with amazing success. Singularly most striking, both because of the terrifying vision it. contains, and its departure from the XTC standard, is the new album’s Complicated Game. The vocal is a nearly inaudible hush at song’s beginning, then builds carefully as the lyric suggests ho control, that it does not matter what you do “...someone else will come along and move it. ” The climax is veritably holocaustal, Partridge’s voice bending in ultimate terror, a howl echoing in final desperation.

“I couldn’t speak for two days after we did that,” tells Partridge. “I wanted to give it a real armageddon rumble to it, wanted it to get a bit frightening. But I was a bit scared in bringing it up because I thought people would say ‘that’s just too over the top, you can’t do that. ’

“I wanted it to start off a bit. ..urn... night-, mary , the voice going in my ear ‘where’s that whisper coming from?’ And I end up just like a huge tidal wave, ahhhhhh!”

When I mention to Partridge that I had already seen XTC live, he says “Great, so many people that I talk to have never seen us. ” Then I show him my notes for the show two weeks previous in Ann Arbor. He reads, in part: “The extensive introduction TURN TO PAGE 61 to ‘Battery Brides” sounded very nice and the pressure it built, the anticipation it generated, was incredible. ‘Start singing you bastards!’ I was thinking. It also holds up'well when placed side by side with the new songs—it is spatial, yet lean, much can be inserted by the imagination of the listener.”

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The Ann Arbor gig was a support spot for the Police. Partridge here spins one of the bitterest of ironies: “...when they were absolutely an unknown quantity completely, they used to come see us at these London gigs. Then Sting saying to me in Ann Arbor, ‘You used to influence me the way you sang.’ I said, ‘Bloody hell, shut up, man, you don’t know what you’re saying!”

Later that night, XTC played their first Detroit gig, a sell-out, stand-up, vibrating crowd showed up at Bookie’s Club 870 and, despite some sound difficulty—on “Complicated Game” a guitar amp refused—it was an electric performance, “Roads Girdle The Globe,” “Meccanik Dancing” and “Battery Brides” again sticking out as gems in my mind.

After the show, Partridge was standing backstage with a towel around his neck. He waS reading the William Burroughs interview with Jimmy Page I had xeroxed for him. I was hoping, secretly, that he would be interested in the section where Burroughs mentioned his cut-up technique because even that is a foundation for this new pop.