Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like XTC. Nobody, that is, except the countless hundreds of thousands who find the British beat foursome’s relentless archness...a bit much.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Andy Partridge, who composes the songs that Colin Moulding doesn’t, to encourage his chums to renounce the quirkiness, as American critics insist on putting it, that has traditionally been their stock in trade. It seems, you see, that our Andy’s quirkiness is congenital. “I was always the class jester at school, and then always the joker at college,-” the.sallow, plumpish, bespectacled, and hugely amiable singer/guitarist reveals in a West Hollywood hotel’s laundry room, where he’s washing a load of clothes that no self-respecting New Romantic would polish shoes with. “I’m no practical joker, but I’ve always been known for what I believe is called acidic wit.”

He removes his extremely boring clothing from the dryer, saunters back to his extraordinary un-lived-in-looking room on the third floor, and lets fly an anecdote meant to provide a sense of his wryness. “When I was painting signs for a department store, I had a mate, another signpainter, who was phobic about this white substance he’d once found on the towels in the gents’ after the store butcher had wiped his hands on them. He was convinced that the whole store was infested with tjiis cosmic chicken fat, to the point

where he refused to walk on carpeted areas in the store, or to cross a road he’d seen one of the store’s vans driving on. He thought that exposure to this stuff had ruined his eyesight. He was forever tapping me on the shoulder and shouting, ‘Andy, look—the building over there’s gone one-dimensional!'

“Eventually he had a bit of a breakdown, poor fellow, and admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital. When I heard, 1 sent him a Napoleon hat. In a very dirty package.

“1 don’t think he was amused. ”

He titters with delight at the recollection of his droll deed and proclaims, “Wit is my favorite sport. I adore verbal jousting. But it’s funny—even though I like to think of myself as having a way with words, I seem constantly to be writing songs about what . you might call speech frustration, like “No Language In Our Lungs” on the Black Sea LP.

“I suppose that might have something to do with the fact that I never read an actual book until I was 15. Before then I was phobic about massed print—terrified of anything more than a few pages thick. But then a friend of mine who played the saxophone and was a bit of a guru to me because of his immaculately odd taste made me read this book he’d got from New York—William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. I was able to do it because it wasn’t like an ordinary book at all. You could start reading it anywhere and read it in either direction and it still made sense—or at least as much sense as you wanted it to. That led me to Genet. Then, because of my natural love for comic books, I suppose, I began reading science fiction, but that disappointed me. Now all I read is factual things, like encyclopedias, and this...” He wears a sheepish smirk as he fishes a paperback edition of one of the David Wallechinsky anthologies of lists out of his compulsively orderly suitcaseHis interrogator winces palpably. Partridge proffers no succor, through, but drones merrily on about his own fascinating quirky self.

“This is the messiest my room has ever been on tour,” he says, gritting his chompers a bit as he surveys his extraordinary un-lived-in-looking home away from home. “That’s why I love encyclopedias,” he announces, proving himself a master of the non sequitur, and then explains, “You see, I love the idea of lots of information being gathered in one place. That’s why I never move anything out of my suitcase. All my washing implements, all my bits of paper, everything stays in it, so when ever I peed anything, I know invariably that it’s in this one place.”

He reaches into his suitcase once more, this time lovingly extricating a black Victorian frock coat. Hours hence he will wear it on stage at the Hollywood Paladium, but for now he’s content to note that in this, the age of the New Romantics, “XTC don’t dress like anything really, and neither do our fans, who range from 12-year-olds to middle-aged people. We don’t get many really slummy types, nor any of the really fashionable types either. Which quite suits us actually, ’cause we hate the rock ’n’ roll sort of lifestyle.”

His interrogator suspects that now—what with clothes being the topic at hand—might be a propitious moment to try to find out why Andy and Colin and Dave and Terry saw fit to pose for Black Sea’s cover in the quintessential^ unlikely drag of deep sea divers of yesteryear. (If you liked that sentence, just wait ’til you read this one!) “I’ll tell you why,” Andy says, and then does. “Because diving outfits are quite possibly the most ludicrous ever devised by men for other men to wear. And yet there’s something very noble about the men who wear them—brave men who go down into the North Sea or beneath the Thames to repair the old wooden gears in London Bridge. After the clean, modern look of the Drums and Wires sleeve, I wanted something that was cluttered and dark and Victorian, so we posed in that old diving gear in a sort of stiff, formal group arrangement.

“When we took the photograph, the LP wasn’t even called Black Sea yet. That title didn’t come to us until we were well into recording, when we were working on all the bleak, pessimistic stuff.” Although it’s difficult to think of this eternally chipper-sounding crew as capable of bleak pessimism, or even blithe pessimism, Partridge points out that “Paper and Iron” and “Living Through Another Cuba” are both decidedly despairing ditties. “The first is all about the vicious circle working class people are trapped in. You know you’re being trodden on by your bosses, so you don’t want to work. But if you don’t work, you can’t provide for your family, and you lose your self-respect. And ‘Cuba’ might be sung in a funny way, but what it’s all about is England’s being a useless little island that will just be powerless if a nuclear war breaks out.”

The sea turns out to have powerful resonances for our Andy. He suspects that his father’s usually being off at it during his boyhood may have had much to do with the fact that “I was forever locking Mummy in the cupboard or attacking her with knives.”

If you haven’t heard XTC’s smash hits such as “Making Plans for Nigel,” “Life Begins at the Hop,” or the infinitely Kinkish “Respectable Street,” and you’re nearer an art museum than a phonograph, Andy suggests that you go have a look at the paintings of Miro. “He puts very simple, almost childish shapes together in beautiful ways,” Andy notes, “and I think that’s very similar in its way to what we do. We’re not brilliant musicians, and don’t claim to be. Our songs are made up of very simple parts, parts that would be pretty boring is you listened to them out of context. But then we put them together as intricately as a clock, and they come alive. ”

Is Miro generally perceived as quirky?