Xtc - Unpopular Pop

Those who have never visited Swindon, in the English county of Wiltshire, can live knowing they haven't missed anything particularly interesting. Once an industrial hub, it's known today as one of England's ugliest and most culturally barren towns, to the point that its most famous local attraction is a hideous, monumentally sized roundabout, nicknamed the magic roundabout.
How this place gave birth to and served as the base for a creative, long-running art-pop band like Xtc is a mystery*. All the band's members grew up in Swindon, and despite the cultural aridity that defines the town, they seem to have retained a strong attachment to their hometown throughout their career. The pop language these provincial lads created would become one of the most sophisticated of the new wave era, bringing them to the brink of worldwide fame; a string of misfortunes, however, would force them to remain underdogs, denying them the fame and fortune they deserved. Today they're among the most highly regarded bands by critics and fellow musicians alike, yet still largely ignored by the mass audience. A wide range of artists have cited Xtc as an influence or covered their songs, including Blur, Primus, Shonen Knife, John Frusciante, Tricky and Marillion.

The story of Xtc begins in the mid-Seventies, when bassist Colin Moulding and drummer Terry Chambers decide to form a band with their friend Andy Partridge (vocals and guitar). What emerges is an awkward glam rock outfit, Stark Park, later renamed Helium Kidz. The band's intent was to sing about the modernity of the time - radio, TV, telecommunications - but according to Partridge, already the group's leader, there was little that was actually modern about their artistic output. If anything, their sound was that of a stale pub-rock band with tired, lumbering rock riffs. With the arrival of keyboardist Barry Andrews in 1976, however, things start to change for the better: the band changes its name, becoming Xtc, and the modernity they were aiming for begins to take shape in a style never heard before.
Still without a record deal, the four send a demo and a poster from one of their London shows to John Peel, who attends the gig and books them for four sessions. After the radio appearance, record labels scramble to sign Xtc, who until then had been blithely ignored. Virgin wins out, and the band stays with them until the late Nineties.

White Music (1978) is the band's debut studio album. Raw and in some ways hampered by a production tied to late-Seventies rock, it nonetheless boasts some of their finest melodies. The songwriting stands out as among the most creative of its time: a fizzy concentrate of crooked rhythms, sticky choruses, and witty lyrics shot through with an end-of-century sense of paranoia. The hysterics of Talking Heads, Bill Nelson and Devo crystallize into a kind of circus punk-rock with a taste for the absurd and the farcical.
Onto the classics: "Statue Of Liberty", an instant knockout chorus with a verse carried by a vaguely ska off-beat. It's a song with mock-erotic, morbid undertones, since it's dedicated to the Statue of Liberty (the building itself, not what it represents), an object of desire as if it were a flesh-and-blood woman. The frustration of an impossible relationship reaches unusual heights of fetishism in lines like "A little jealous of the ships with whom you flirt" and "In my fantasy I sail beneath your skirt", which got the song banned on some radio stations.
"This Is Pop" is a pub-rock shard in the style of early Joe Jackson, but with unsettling tribal toms and constant stop-starts that break up its flow. "New Town Animal" is a frantic, barely two-minute burst of Cockney Rebel-style glam rock.
Also notable is the dada-esque cover of the Hendrix version of "All Along The Watchtower". It could easily pass for a cover of Dylan's version, so unrecognizable is it (originally, the band had planned to cover a completely different song, the Rolling Stones' "Citadel"). Drawing on his dub and reggae listening, Partridge sets about dismantling the melody and rhythmic structure. The guitar, the defining instrument of the original, is dropped entirely: in its place, a quiet electric organ holds the chords, with occasional harmonica outbursts and a tightly syncopated bassline. The rock jamming of Hendrix's classic is sedated, and Partridge launches into a stuttering, uncoordinated delivery bordering on rap, chopping up or stretching out the words until the narrative content of the lyrics becomes unintelligible. It sounds like a (successful) sneer from four arrogant intellectuals seemingly saying "See how we can turn your rock classic inside out?". The track was recorded live in the studio and showcases drummer Terry Chambers' skill and the band's taste for unusual, unpredictable rhythms - the ending is memorable, with the rhythm loosening up and Andrews' electronics going off the rails.
The album is held in high regard by a niche of fans, though it's somewhat limited by its production choices, capturing a band not yet fully aware of its own capabilities.

Marked by colder, more boxed-in sounds, Go2 (also 1978) explores some of the paths laid out by the debut album, refining the formula but sacrificing some of its naivety and fun. The guitar's more new wave, metallic tone suits the sci-fi, "devolved" sound (the ever-present Ufo-like keyboard squiggles), but the songs aren't quite as catchy or irresistible.
Still, "Meccanik Dancing" stands out, an amphetamine-fueled, danceable robot-rock anthem, as does the crooked, repetitive pattern of "Battery Brides", the album's hidden gem and a kind of update of Sixties psychedelia for the age of Gary Numan and Ultravox's hissing synths. The song's full title is "Battery Brides (Andy Paints Brian)", where Andy is clearly Partridge and Brian is Eno, who had turned down the band's request to produce the album.
But it's the "meta" cover art and the conceptual packaging design that make history here: white text on a black background explaining the purpose of every part of the LP's packaging.

John Peel would help boost the album's popularity by playing some tracks from the remix record Go+. He played them, however, at the wrong speed, making them longer and giving them a slowed-down, cavernous sound. Partridge later admitted he wasn't sure whether this was a mistake, and that the legendary DJ probably preferred them this way regardless. From that period comes the single "Are You Receiving Me?", an explosive power-pop track about alienation and the failure to communicate between people. One of their classics, and one of the few songs in their catalogue made for singing at the top of your lungs.

Despite the album's entry into the top 30, Barry Andrews leaves the band shortly after recording, and the survivors immediately start looking for a replacement. After passing on several keyboardists (including a certain Thomas Dolby), the band decides to bring in a second guitarist instead, opting for old friend Dave Gregory, who could play both guitar and keyboards. His psychedelic, strongly Sixties-indebted style would irreversibly change the band's trajectory, but upon joining he chooses to keep a low profile, adapting to the quirky style left by the previous keyboardist and to the increasingly sharp pens of Partridge and Moulding, who were growing ever more dismissive of what they saw as the ABCs of stale rock songwriting.

After touring the United States, Japan and Australia, the band returns to the studio, this time with Steve Lillywhite, the star post-punk producer (Ultravox!, U2, Siouxsie & Banshees, Peter Gabriel, Psychedelic Furs among others).
The result of these sessions is their mature masterwork, Drums And Wires, built on a guitar style that was utterly unprecedented at the time, with a lean tone stripped of the heavier distortions; the album is also marked by a rhythmic agility unknown to most of their contemporaries. Partridge's eccentric harmonies and frenetic strumming meet the versatility of lead guitarist Gregory, equally capable of jingle-jangle arpeggios, shrieking squeals, and derailing solos reminiscent of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. It's also the album on which Moulding grows in importance as second vocalist and gifted songwriter, presenting himself as a more psychedelic, less unhinged counterpart to Partridge; his basslines, now circus-like, now sinister and sinuous, ought to be studied by every pop-rock composer. Lillywhite behind the desk does the rest, cleanly splitting the sound between ringing guitars and percussive, tribal drums.
And it's precisely the shamanic pounding of the drums that steals the show on "Making Plans For Nigel", the band's first track to sketch out a bitter, polemical social portrait, dare I say a Kinks-like one. Moulding wrote it and sings the main vocal line. The lyrics, a critique of the education and indoctrination of British youth, took the song into the charts (one of Xtc's very few hits). The dance beat and whirling riffs of "Helicopter" anticipate by at least two decades the frenzied, danceable indie-rock wave of the 2000s; its shouted chorus is among the stickiest and most unforgettable of their career.
The choral folk of "Ten Feet Tall", with a whiff of West Coast psychedelia, is among the band's finest creations. Placed in the middle of the tracklist, it calms the album's spasmodic rhythms, though melancholy lurks around the corner. An electric version exists, released as a single on the American market, all sharp edges, ramshackle guitars and more classically wave-ish tones. And who could sit still through the volcanic drumming of "Real by Reel"? Once again the lyrics about the paranoia of being spied on are compelling, and almost prophetic if you think of the hacking scandals that later hit first News of the World and then the Anglo-American intelligence services.
The surprises don't end with the muffled, off-kilter sounds of "Day In Day Out" and the polyrhythms of its coda and that of "When You're Near Me I Have Difficulty". "Millions", a martial, Orientalist-tinged anthem, is built with a creativity rarely heard before (the drum pattern on the chorus is incredible), and drags itself along, dishing out harmonics and crooked, funky guitar scratches - Partridge's intention was to write a song evoking Maoist China, one of his youthful obsessions.
"Complicated Game" is a deafening, unexpected closer. An improvised stammer from Partridge over a handful of looping chords. The arrangement builds until it goes completely off the rails, coiling in on itself and leaving the final minutes to the singer's ragged voice, attacking the last syllables of the lyrics as it drowns in its own echo.

For many, though not everyone, Drums And Wires would exert a constant influence without ever upending the scene. Witty and stimulating, the band's music fully earns its place among the finest examples of English guitar pop-rock straddling the Seventies and Eighties, alongside contemporary works by artists like Split Enz, Squeeze, Joe Jackson and New Musik. Just listen to side A of the Police's "Synchronicity" to realize how essential a reference point Drums And Wires is for fully understanding early-Eighties new wave (Sting and Andy Partridge were also friends, incidentally).
The period's singles left off the album are devastating. Chief among them "Life Begins At The Hop", built on a looping riff and graced by Afro-Jamaican guitars, irresistible handclapping, and a rhythm that leans closer to dance music than rock. Initially reluctant to sing (the shy Partridge did everything he could to talk him into it), Moulding sounds perfectly at ease here, at the very peak of his inspiration.

Nothing is worse than a run-of-the-mill pub band
(Andy Partridge)

So far we've talked about records, but the band was first and foremost at the peak of its live activity, with a packed calendar of dates and commitments. Partridge would say: "The band had become a kind of commando unit, a task force capable of going anywhere on the planet: the songs were written on the fly, rehearsed in dressing rooms and recorded for our toughest album yet." He's referring to Black Sea, the record that in 1980 exported Xtc to the United States (it broke into the top 50 and spawned five singles) and ushered in their most intense and stressful touring period.
Partridge, hyperbolic as ever, calls it a faithful reproduction of their live shows of the period: raw, powerful and tight. The record does indeed contain their heaviest material, but the skill with which it's written and assembled betrays an attention to detail that has little or nothing raw about it. With Lillywhite steady behind the console, the band forges a metallic, pachydermic, resonant sound. Drums And Wires teemed with guitars as sharp and cutting as knives; Black Sea, by contrast, brings to mind hammers striking anvils, with its saturated guitars and a bass that, more swollen than ever, fills every gap. Terry Chambers' drums, too, go beyond post-punk timbres and become more imposing and threatening, straying into territory close to the nascent world music scene. And amid this orgy of metallic sounds, synths played by Partridge occasionally surface, colouring the sound and rounding out the harmonies.

The lead single would be the opening track, "Respectable Street". The song is a scathing critique of the English middle class, namely the classic middle-aged gentlefolk obsessed with status and appearances; the lyrics gain their bite from being written from their very point of view, which strips bare their hypocrisy and double standards. Partridge wrote it in his flat in Swindon, drawing on his own real-life, stuck-up neighbours. For once it wasn't the record industry holding the band back, but the media: the BBC refused to air a track containing sexually controversial words. Partridge accepted the compromise and altered the lyrics: "contraception" became "child prevention", "abortion" became "absorption", "sex position" became "proposition"; the song still wasn't played, however, apparently because it contained references to the "Sony" brand.
In the album version, the song opens with a piano refrain filtered through a vintage patina, with the crackle of vinyl emphasised. Only at the thirty-second mark does one of the most inventive riffs of all time kick in: one guitar keeps time with the drums (skipping a beat), while the other, higher-pitched, weaves between the kick and snare hits, giving the verses a circular, locomotive-like motion.
The second single (and second track on the record), "Generals And Majors", would prove more successful. It's a song with a martial flavour, its guitars caricaturing a marching military band. The video was shot in the castle of Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, who has fun appearing in a few scenes as a mad military officer.
The record's crowning achievement is the ease with which Xtc blend British invasion melodies, tribal rhythms and metallic guitars. "Towers Of London" is a kind of Kinks-esque midtempo ballad, with guitars standing in for the expansive instrumentation of late-60s recordings. The lyrics too, dwelling on the shadows of Victorian London, nod to Ray Davies, recalling the workers and builders who contributed to that era of great works and discoveries, sometimes paying with their lives. A curious detail: the sound of the hammer striking the anvil was achieved by hitting a fire extinguisher with a microphone stand.
And while "Sgt. Rock (Is Going To Help Me)" updates the Beatles for the 80s, "Paper And Iron (Notes And Coins)" once again shines a light on the hard lives of working men. The lyrics probably refer to the crisis of British heavy industry, taking on the persona of a worker who'd rather keep his head down and pocket his meagre wage; the references to the Church and the crown (the lion and the unicorn, symbols of the United Kingdom's royal standard) cast a medieval shadow over the lyrics, which effectively draw an analogy between the conditions of present-day workers and the world of sharecropping. Musically it's probably the heaviest track Xtc ever recorded, with a mechanical gait marked by a 6/8 rhythm that seems to mimic factory noise.
The alternation of light and shadow offers one possible key to reading the record: the danceable "Living Through Another Cuba" is deceptive, with its infectious Afro-Caribbean rhythm, but it's the fear of the Cold War and the atomic bomb that lingers. That same tribal pulse of percussion finds its fullest expression in "Travels In Nihilon", a dystopian bacchanal (the title is taken from Alan Sillitoe's science-fiction novel) shot through with poisonous streams of sinister voices and unsettling guitar improvisation. It falls to Moulding to balance out the record's alchemy with its lightest, most danceable track, "Love At First Sight", enriched by the band's usual gorgeous rhythmic interplay. It was released as a single in Canada in a sped-up version.

Black Sea is to Xtc what "Sound Affects", released the same year, is to the Jam: two dark records, both preceded by a classic from their respective catalogues, both devoted to digging up the past instances of British pop and giving them a new, sharper-edged, uncompromising shape. Both albums also keep one eye on social issues; it's partly for this reason that you can trace the influence of Black Sea on Blur's britpop period and on a certain strand of Anglo-Scottish indie-rock of the early 2000s.

I'm not really a musician, I'm more just a man with ideas who happened to end up with a guitar in his hands
(Andy Partridge)

So far we've talked about angular sounds and dry guitars. Pinning down Xtc's guitar tone in clear terms, though, is no easy task. As already mentioned, the alchemy of early Xtc guitars is the product of the more "classicist" David Gregory's craftsmanship combined with Andy Partridge's visionary pen—but what exactly was original about the latter? First of all, Partridge, despite having no formal training, was already a seasoned guitarist with ten years' experience by the time of the band's debut. He knows rock music encyclopedically and loves to play it, but at least with Xtc he chooses not to fall in line with the leading names of his own record collection. Nothing is worse than a run-of-the-mill pub band, he says in an interview available on YouTube, in which he scorches the blues foundations that less original rock guitarists cling to. Making a "wrong" note work, playing the note that "doesn't belong", dropping in a chord that clashes within a progression—these are the devices he uses when writing or building harmonies. And the rhythm and tone? Picture rapidly, jerkily shaking a tin can with a piece of metal inside. A rusty, resonant tone, then, with a sudden attack, aimed at sketching rhythmic figures rather than filling space. Partridge himself explains the concept when he mentions one of his sources of inspiration: Ollie Halsall, guitarist of the ill-fated proto-prog band Patto. Patto released three albums in the early 1970s, unripe works mired in that swamp at the borders of prog, hard rock and psychedelia. Genuinely ugly music, lacking the technical skill and epic sweep of prog, still bogged down in jam-band territory. And yet Halsall's nervy, cold touch, his sparing use of notes and his rejection of the blues scale lit something up in a young Partridge, who says: "I heard a song called 'The Man', which is slow and empty [...] I loved its agonising holes. There were holes in the rhythm of that song [...]. [Halsall] made the guitar sound more like Albert Ayler or John Coltrane, more like some kind of fluid pianist." Listening to Patto with these words in mind, it's impossible not to recognise that taste for the percussiveness of a few, carefully chosen notes, as well as the rejection of sustained notes and blues' loose-limbed swagger, with its bends. On top of that, though, you have to factor in everything that happened in the nearly ten years separating the two bands: the reggae and ska revival, punk, but also and above all the sharp, dry sound of the British invasion groups (which reached the wave generation via the many mod-revival bands big and small). As for the intricate harmonies and unusual chord changes, the best description comes from Partridge himself, when he says "Please don't ask me the names of the chords [I play], I just don't know them. It's not unusual for me not to know the names of chords, or even the scales of the songs. I'm not really a musician, I'm more just a man with ideas who happened to end up with a guitar in his hands."

The band's intensive live schedule led Partridge, worn out by the routine of life on the road between one show and the next, to rediscover the acoustic guitar and record an album utterly different from anything they'd done before—one intended to be densely arranged and impossible to reproduce live. Besides rediscovering his inspiration and exploring the timbres of acoustic instruments, English Settlement rediscovers rural England, starting with the cover art, which depicts in stylised graphics the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric figure carved into a chalk hillside a few miles from Swindon. Production duties went to Hugh Padgham, already Lillywhite's sound engineer and assistant, and credited with the characteristic compressed, typically eighties drum sound (the gated drum) devised by Phil Collins. Thanks to his touch, Terry Chambers' drumming—at its creative peak here—is pushed to the fore and surprises with some of the most unusual constructions in pop-rock. The record opens with a one-two punch from Colin Moulding, set against enriched instrumentation: folk guitars, thundering drums, synthesizers, fretless bass and effects-filtered backing vocals are just some of the elements of "Runaways". "Ball And Chain", an invective against the demolition of historic buildings and reckless development, recycles the ska-pop formula of Madness, giving it a choral, epic sweep. It's the first track on which Dave Gregory plays the electric 12-string, a pillar of the record and a connecting thread with late-60s psychedelic rock. "English Roundabout", a key track on the record, is also Moulding's work—a Caribbean-flavoured reworking of Yes's "Long Distance Runaround", masterfully built on a 5/4 time signature. The song is clearly inspired by Swindon's Magic Roundabout, infamous as the archetype of the ugliness typical of English urban development. Folk and world-music influences are plentiful among Partridge's songs, from the Spanish gait of "Yacht Dance" to the pastoral opening of "Senses Working Overtime", which then blossoms into irresistible psych-pop (it would be their best-ever placing on the UK singles chart), by way of the Jamaica of "Down In The Cockpit". Once again Partridge's social satire hits its mark, this time on "No Thugs In Our House", whose lyrics are structured like a little play. Partridge takes on the roles, in turn, of narrator, policeman and the parents of a skinhead. The parents, middle-class, refuse to accept that their son is suspected of committing acts of violence against Asian immigrants—such is their arrogance. "Fly On The Wall" conjures up the spectres of espionage and government surveillance.

Despite the complicated arrangements and baroque production, the band takes the album on tour successfully—but something cracks. On 18 March 1982, at Le Palais in Paris, Partridge walks off stage during the opening song of the set. A nervous breakdown hits him after the show at the California Theatre in San Diego, leaving him with permanent stage fright that would effectively keep the band from performing live from then on. The breakdown was triggered by Partridge's wife, who, right before the gig, decided to throw away the stash of Valium her husband relied on to avoid being crushed by tour-induced stress. The resulting panic attack was enough to keep the singer and guitarist away from any stage, save for a couple of television and radio appearances. To make matters worse, due to a dreadful contract, the band earned next to nothing from this gruelling run of live shows, which is why the group's leader decided to call it quits on touring.

Deprived of the chance to go on tour, Xtc make a virtue of necessity and decide to become a studio band, shunning the classic album-tour-album cycle; Partridge buys a house in Swindon and starts writing non-stop again. This new arrangement doesn't sit well with Terry Chambers, though, who leaves the group in 1983 since, not being a songwriter, he receives no royalties. The band chooses not to replace him, instead bringing in session players as needed or using a drum machine. The group was in the middle of recording Mummer, the follow-up to English Settlement.

Mummer is a bold, uneven work that shies away from the conventions of rock (even the less orthodox ones of new wave). The record's title pays tribute to the Mummers Plays, popular carnival-style performances typical of medieval Britain. Partridge's songs dig even deeper into English folklore, while Moulding reaches out a hand to 80s new pop. Despite the abundance of ideas, the record would get little promotion and achieve no success. The band's aim is to craft a multifaceted pop work that stamps the Xtc mark onto a whole range of styles. "Funk Pop A Roll" vents a few grievances, with its scathing invective against chart pop and the record industry, set to syncopated rhythms and crackling soul-funk horns. The summery soul of "Wonderland" (with a whiff of Style Council) and "In Loving Memory Of A Name", again by Moulding, embrace the sophisti-pop of the day; "Beating of Hearts" and "Deliver Us From The Elements" have their own take on Peter Gabriel's world music. The record's flaw lies in its excessive heterogeneity: many tracks were written separately by the two songwriters in their respective homes, and the album's high points are, not coincidentally, the songs that find common ground in a pastoral folk tinged with psychedelia. "Great Fire" moves from a lopsided waltz into an unexpected, vaguely late-period-Beatles-esque progression. "Me And The Wind" carries a heavy prog-folk legacy, somewhere between Pentangle and Henry Cow. "Love On A Farmboy's Wages", one of the finest acoustic tracks of their career, paints a placid bucolic scene with an impressionistic touch, breaking the calm with sudden bursts of speed. The lyrics' polemical streak is never far away... The record came out in the US in 1984 through Geffen, who would distribute their releases in America from then on.

If Mummer is the sound of the English countryside, then The Big Express, its 1984 follow-up, is the city. A rusty, industrial city wrapped in a decadent fog. The shift in sound is sharp: electric guitars return in force, but stripped of distortion and strictly rhythmic (worth noting, too, is the heavy use of E major tuning); the drum machine crops up more than once, and the keyboards, where present, mark a return to a typically new-wave sound. It's an evolution not unlike that of Julian Cope's soul-tinged, glossy late-80s phase. The record, which many read as a concept album about the decline of Swindon, is hugely ambitious and anything but commercial. A favourite of Partridge's, it would instead be a commercial flop, not helped by the fact that the band hadn't performed live for two years by that point, save for the odd mimed radio performance.

The Big Express is a hotbed of ideas that, for the first time in Xtc's career, overwhelm the songs themselves. It's Partridge's tracks that suffer the most, less sharply focused than those of his more efficient, if less prolific, bandmate. "Wake Up" (Moulding) harks back to the rhythmic glories of Drums & Wires, with a syncopated verse and a brilliant two-guitar polyrhythm hammering out the beat. The final stroke of genius is the drums skipping a beat on every bar. "This World Over" (Partridge), an unusually conventional ballad by the band's standards, stands as one of the decade's finest slow songs. "I Remember The Sun" (Moulding) sports a jazzy, lopsided gait reminiscent of bands like Working Week. "Shake Your Donkey Up" (Partridge) is Xtc's take on rockabilly/western. The band decides to buy a Mellotron to enrich their arrangements. Given the instrument's size, they decide to entrust it to Partridge, the only one with a spare bedroom at home. "Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her, Kiss Her" would be the first song the singer wrote with keyboard rather than guitar in mind. A self-taught musician, he's by his own admission clumsy on keys, and to remember the song's key he thinks to draw on paper the position of his fingers on the keys, so as to recall the track's opening chord. Lyrics and music communicate in perfect harmony, sketching a grey portrait of an English coastal town, enriched by all sorts of homemade samples.

Frustrated by their lack of success, Xtc retreat into their own rooms, overflowing with psychedelic-music LPs, which they decide to pay tribute to with a side project. The undertaking, though closer to parody than a full-time venture, is nothing short of brilliant: rather than reviving 60s psychedelia by updating it with the sounds of the day, Xtc take on the guise of a fictional, long-forgotten 60s band, the Dukes of Stratosphear. The Dukes are in fact Partridge, Moulding and Gregory under pseudonyms (Sir John Johns, The Red Curtain and Lord Cornelius Plum respectively, plus Dave Gregory's brother Owen, here playing drums as E.I.E.I. Owen), and their music is 1960s garage-pop produced as though it were 1967—thanks to the wizardry of John Leckie, who masterfully resurrects the sounds of the era. Pretending not to be in on the joke, we get to enjoy having in our hands the material of a band contemporary with the Beatles, the Zombies and Small Faces, whose songs, though written with archaeological and playful intent, have nothing to envy in their guiding lights whenever our heroes nail the choruses.

Chips From The Chocolate Fireball is the definitive collection of their two works released under the Dukes of Stratosphear name, the mini-album 25 O'Clock (released as an April Fools' joke in 1985) and the LP Psonic Psunspot, opened by the gorgeous "Vanishing Girl", written by Colin Moulding (pardon, The Red Curtain).

Did you make mankind after we made you?
("Dear God")

Having reached a crucial point in their career as a pop trio, Xtc recorded their most celebrated album in Woodstock, with Todd Rundgren producing.
Skylarking (Geffen, 1986) is a monument to Sixties baroque pop, stripped of any rock impulse and conceived as a psychedelic flow of ornate pop fragments that interlock like a brightly coloured mosaic.
The sessions with Rundgren were extremely tense: Partridge clashed with him from the start and left the studio disappointed with the record's sonic texture. Nevertheless, the album is a treasure trove of original ideas and inspired touches, with Dave Gregory as the deus ex machina of the work – the arrangements and some of the orchestrations are his.
The band also had to accept another compromise with Virgin: the artwork depicting a female pubis was rejected. It would become the cover of the 2010 reissue, remastered with corrected polarity for a less thin, crisper low-end sound.
"Grass" sounds like an even more naive version of the "satanic" Stones, with Moulding playing a drug-free Brian Jones. It's Partridge, though, who wrote almost all the songs: his are the masterpieces "1000 Umbrellas", a waltz for strings, acoustic guitar and voice alone, and the retro-sci-fi pop of "Another Satellite". The latter is a kind of venomous love ballad "in reverse": Partridge, married to his first wife at the time, is trying to push away an admirer who's tempting him with her unwanted attentions; the analogy with "another satellite" goes hand in hand with the hazy sounds of a treated guitar, a psychedelic bass and a robotic drum machine. For those interested in the singer's personal affairs, the "satellite" is Erica Wexler, a performer and former partner of Roy Lichtenstein; despite the singer's efforts, she would go on to become his partner after his divorce, even though she obviously hadn't appreciated the lyrics at the time. "Earn Enough For Us", the only track on the record close to guitar rock, is a shimmering jangle-pop number that sheds light on the lives of working-class families.
The album changes skin with every track, showing incredible maturity (startling when you think of how their debut sounded less than a decade earlier), a craftsmanship few can match, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop. In 1986 Xtc released their own "Pet Sounds" and established themselves as undisputed songwriting geniuses, second to no composer from the golden age of baroque pop.

Skylarking is mostly remembered as the album containing "Dear God", Xtc's most famous song, even though it's not the one with the best chart positions and even though it was initially left off the LP's running order. "Dear God" is yet another commercially poor decision by Xtc: underrated by the band themselves, it was conceived as the B-side of the single "Grass", until word reached them that many college radio DJs in the States were playing it far more often than the A-side.
The knockout melody is indeed worthy of the best Sixties pop classics and has nothing to envy in a "Ruby Tuesday" or a "Yesterday". Partridge's acoustic guitar takes less thorny paths than usual, while Gregory's task is to nail a psychedelic arpeggio that gives it momentum and to paint the orchestrations with his Mellotron (in the final version they would be recorded by a real orchestra).
What makes the song memorable is the lyric. "Dear God" is a prayer to God, in which Partridge asks for help while also urging an awareness of the ills afflicting humanity. Amid the litany of things people are forced to face every day, Partridge slips in jabs at God, the Bible and the Christian faith. Lines like "There's lots of quotes of you in this book. Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look" sound even more caustic set against the song's catchy melody. What seems like an all-too-banal tirade against religion is, on closer inspection, actually the outpouring of a modern man torn between the need to believe in God and the obvious inadequacy of Christian religion's paradoxes and symbolism ("Did you make mankind after we made you?"). Partridge candidly admitted: "I tried to wrestle with the paradox of God and with the last flickers of dying faith that had remained in the furthest corners of my brain since I was a child. I confess this song failed to crystallise all my thoughts on the subject in under four minutes. Men's faith is too big a beast to be knocked out in such a short time."
A couple of touches make the whole thing perfectly digestible and ward off the risk of making the song heavier than reading the Bible itself: 1) the rhythm guitar hook that hints at a sort of bass line on the sixth string, giving the track a bouncy gait; 2) the choice to have the first verse and the final line (after the song's intense, almost screamed closing crescendo) sung by a little girl, the daughter of a friend of Rundgren's.

The pressure for the follow-up album was high, but the double LP Oranges & Lemons would become their bestseller, cementing the band's success in what would prove to be the markets most receptive to their music: the United States and Japan.
Brazenly psychedelic from the cover art onward (the same artist behind the "Yellow Submarine" sleeve), Oranges & Lemons marks a return to a more rock-oriented sound, with all the usual exceptions Xtc had accustomed us to.
Proof of their American success came with the chart positions of the singles "The Mayor Of Simpleton" and "King For A Day", which climbed the alternative charts, helped along by heavy rotation of their respective videos on MTV.
Once again an Xtc album stands as the antithesis of its predecessor: just as Skylarking was muted and pastel-toned ("paisley-hued", as Partridge put it, referring to the paisley scene), Oranges & Lemons is dazzling and saturated. Contributing to the blend is Californian drummer Pat Mastelotto, perfectly at ease amid the trio's eccentric rhythms, which once again become organic and powerful as they were in the Terry Chambers days.

Compared to the English neo-psychedelia of the time, Oranges & Lemons sounds decidedly more grown-up, the product of veteran musicians fully aware of their own abilities, yet the manic rhythm of "Garden Of Earthly Delights" isn't all that different from certain excesses of the Madchester sound. The album is a child of the era it was released in and doesn't sound as fresh as their albums from the start of the decade, but its pop-rock soul makes it undoubtedly more universal and approachable, with songs whose direct lyrics let the average listener identify far more easily than with the brainier compositions of their previous albums. "Mayor Of Simpleton" is in fact the most shamelessly sentimental thing they'd recorded up to that point and is, quite possibly, their single greatest song: an unconditional love song written as the confession of an ordinary man of average intelligence who has nothing else to offer but his boundless affection. The square rhythm and the interlocking instrumentation make it a lightning-quick power-pop hit with gorgeous backing vocals and guitars that have never sounded so punchy. "Scarecrow People" is another high point, even if its environmentalist lyric is a touch too naive. And what to say of "King For A Day", a Moulding ballad with velvety tones and brimming with meticulous arrangement touches; it's certainly among the band's masterpieces, and one of the few post-1982 Xtc songs with memorable live performances on record (one episode on the David Letterman Show, with the house band contributing). The album's last masterpiece is the psychedelic flight of "Chalkhills and Children", clouded by a faint soul vein.

With the start of the new decade, luck seemed to abandon the band: Partridge was left by his wife, and in 1992 the band released an album that cemented their success in the American alternative music world but strained the already shaky relationship between Xtc and Virgin. Written mostly on piano, Nonsuch tries to sound more traditional and stripped-down than its over-arranged predecessor, but aside from the energetic opener "The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead", the hits are missing. The sound, in particular, feels too watered-down, closer to the mainstream soft rock productions of the era than to what you'd expect from a band with a back catalogue of revolutionary records. The best songs are all Moulding's, from the pastoral "My Bird Performs" to the polemical "War Dance", which flaunts his indifference toward the forced patriotism that resurfaced during the Gulf War. Partridge, for his part, contributes the vividly colourful "Omnibus", but his genius mostly gets lost in slow tracks lacking in hooks.

Following Virgin's unilateral decision not to release the single "Wrapped In Grey", Xtc decided to go on strike, until in 1998 the label dissolved their recording contract. Over the course of those six years, Xtc were unable to produce anything under their own name, bound as they were by the terms of their Virgin contract. Partridge, however, kept busy as a producer and collaborator for a variety of artists.
He worked with Blur during the recording sessions for their 1993 album "Modern Life Is Rubbish", and it was Albarn himself who wanted him as producer, to inject British elements into their sound. The sessions, however, were scrapped and the record was finished by Stephen Street. The versions produced by Partridge can be found online, and they reveal a low-key bass sound compared to the power of the final version, along with a freakier feel that's rather too indebted to the psychedelic Sixties.
Things went much better with his production of "The Greatest Living Englishman", the debut solo work by lo-fi whiz-kid Martin Newell, on which Partridge plays drums. Newell's jangly, pastoral songwriting (the mastermind behind DIY pop pioneers The Cleaners from Venus), combined with a crisper sound, make "The Greatest Living Englishman" the album Xtc failed to write in the Nineties.
He is also co-author of "Through The Hill", a 1994 album by ambient maestro Harold Budd.

With their Virgin contract over, Xtc received back royalties that allowed them to record the follow-up to Nonsuch in complete independence at their own home studios – with the occasional trip to a professional studio such as Abbey Road. Tensions within the band would result in Dave Gregory's departure, who left the group in 1999 during the Apple Venus Volume 1 sessions. His reluctance to write the orchestral arrangements for Partridge and Moulding's songs irritated his bandmates, who decided to fire him and credit him as a session musician in the album's credits, rather than as a fully-fledged member.
Listening to the songs on Apple Venus, it's not hard to understand why the guitarist was sceptical about recording a predominantly acoustic, orchestral album. The words "acoustic" and "orchestral" shouldn't suggest some lavish production: the album is the lowest-key work Xtc had released up to that point, and its thin sonic texture is infinitely less multifaceted than what they'd recorded ten years earlier on the electric Oranges & Lemons. The material on the record was indeed worked out over the years from 1992 to 1999, but almost all the instrumental tracks were recorded within the span of a single day.
The feeling is that, despite the airy, velvety sound, the pair were no longer able to revolutionise anything with their songwriting, which doesn't hold up against the contemporary "baroque" works of Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips. It's hard to shake the feeling that the two, while exploring the compositional style of film scores and contemporary classical music, had by now become prisoners of their own style: the pursuit of surprise and dissonant chords no longer feels like a twist, but has become a pillar of the Xtc sound; meanwhile, the more relaxed, harmonically simpler moments lack bite.
None of this stops critics and fans from loving the record – for some it's their best – but aside from a couple of notable songs, I wouldn't recommend it, except perhaps to the most devoted fans of the most baroque orchestral indie-pop (I'm thinking of Louis Philippe and his projects).
The best moments are "Easter Theatre" and "The Green Man", wrapped in that pagan, bucolic air that characterised Skylarking, but with more emphasis on Celtic roots. The worst are the more intimate and banal ones like "The Dictionary", a chronicle of the end of Partridge's marriage dated 1993 – a nice idea for a lyric, but the music is the kind of plodding ballad you wouldn't expect from Xtc. Also interesting is "Knights In Shining Karma", with its curious progression for electric guitars alone, played fingerstyle.

It's an odd choice to make the second volume of Apple Venus a stripped-down guitar pop-rock record, considering that the lack of guitar had caused Dave Gregory's departure in the first place – the full title is Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2), released in 2000. While the first volume doesn't reach past glories but offers plenty of interesting harmonic constructions and lyrics, the second adds nothing to what the band had already done and actually sounds simplistic and modest. Lacking professional production, Partridge's guitars miss the metallic, biting tones that made them so distinctive in the early Eighties. "Playground" opens with ragged, arpeggiated power-pop chords, and despite a decent chorus it lacks fluidity between sections; the arrangement is too empty and awkwardly padded out with garish female backing vocals. "Stupidly Happy" relies entirely on a Stones-like riff and the monotonous beat of a cheap drum machine. In the author's intentions it should sound naive and joyful, but it simply comes off as tedious and uninspired, like some doodle dashed off out of boredom. A few tracks do actually broaden the harmonic palette, "Church Of Women" for instance, but the quality of the sounds, especially the guitar, falls well short of the mark and brings to mind the generic pub bands Partridge so despised.

Little was heard of Xtc in the 2000s, aside from the jangle-pop singles "Spiral" and "Say It" – pleasant enough but nothing new under the sun.
Partridge reconciled with Gregory (who would, however, never rejoin the band) and with Virgin, who agreed in 2002 to release a collection of demos and rarities from the singer's Xtc years, titled Fuzzy Warbles. Moulding, for reasons unknown to the public, didn't take it well, and from there it was a short step to his decision to leave the music business in 2006. We don't know exactly why; rumour has it it was down to Partridge's domineering personality, as well as the fact that it was Moulding who had to shoulder the legal side of their existence as an independent band free from record contracts. For years the two didn't speak, communicating only via email through their manager.
Today the two have reconciled, but without his former bandmate, Partridge doesn't feel he can keep writing music as Xtc, explaining that for many, the band should have ended with Gregory's departure, for others even with Chambers's, if not Andrews's!

Partridge currently lives in his home in Swindon, surrounded by his books and his collections of toy soldiers, and writes with and for other musicians, including Michael Kane. He contributes, alongside Peter Blegvad of Slap Happy, to a couple of albums that combine music and poetry. A guest appearance on the Irish band Pugwash's album "The Olympus Sound" would even see him play alongside Gregory again. He always has some project on the go with Robyn Hitchcock. Brian Wilson's management contacted him to arrange some kind of collaboration with the former Beach Boy, but Wilson failed to recognise him (or pretended not to) when they met.

For those interested in digging through the band's back catalogue in search of songs that never made it onto the official albums, there are the two collections of outtakes, rarities, B-sides and alternate versions, Coat Of Many Cupboards (a 4-CD box set) and Rag And Bone Buffet. Some B-sides are just as good as the singles, take "Blame The Weather" (the B-side of "Senses Working Overtime"), "Officer Blue" (B-side of "Respectable Street") or experimental instrumental tracks like "The Somnambulist", often included as bonus tracks on recent reissues of the albums. For anyone wanting to get into the band, meanwhile, there's nothing better than Fossil Fuel: The XTC Singles 1977-92, which covers the band's finest period.

* For the record, it should be noted that Swindon is also the birthplace of Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, who however were active elsewhere.

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