ummer 1983. XTC are sprinkling some studio fairy dust onto their next single ‘Wonderland’ in London’s Air Studios and Andy Partridge, the band’s primary songwriter and head chatterbox, is caught off guard. “I was in the isolation booth and I looked up to see George Martin at the mixing desk. He’d brought in with some RAF device to get sub-bass out of the synthesiser. I’m looking up ‘Fuck me, there’s George Martin. Ooh! I’m a Beatle!”. Under the glare of the Fifth Beatle, Andy wrote ‘Train Running Low on Soul Coal’, a breathless and deeply personal At 29, Andy felt past it as a musician and heading for the scrapheap. The song would form the emotional centre of the next XTC album, an album that would be forged in the heat of the rockiest period in the band’s career.
From signing with Virgin in 1977, XTC hardly stopped for breath. The band fired off four albums before the end of 1980, scored top 20 hits with ‘Making Plans for Nigel’, ‘Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)’ and ‘Senses Working Overtime’ and toured the world with the Police. By 1982, they had began to amass a fanbase in North America, where their hometown of Swindon sounded deliciously English, and had made the top five in the UK for the first time with their fifth LP, English Settlement, a peacock-rich double album that took their fidgety pop widescreen. Things began to unravel, though, after Partridge stopped taking the Valium pills he’d been prescibed since adolescence. A mishap with a cameraman resulted in an apparent ban from Top of the Pops, a blow to XTC the singles band, and Partridge experienced panic attacks and memory loss over the band’s gruelling touring schedule. “I found an old tour iternary of the States and there’s one day off in the whole tour,” says Andy “I wanted off this gravy train where we didn’t get any of the gravy”. The band’s first US tour as a headline act, scheduled for April 1982, was cancelled after one concert in San Diego; XTC would not tour again. "We took it for what it was,” remembers Colin. “The thing is, it was something Andy couldn't do and I don't think he could stand that. He would rather have it be portrayed as something he didn't want to do. People didn’t really understand mental illness in them days, not that they do a great deal now.” Andy’s guilt was assuaged on his return to England after the band’s final show. “Colin and I were snowed in at Chicago airport and he said to me ‘Look, I’m really glad you said we’re coming off the road because if you hadn’t have said it, I would’ve said it.”
Free from tour buses and hockey stadiums, Andy now envisioned XTC as “the kind of people who would have written music in the 18th century”; meticulous composers working out of public view. “I liked the anonymity of it,” he says. “We were almost the Residents!”. The first fruit from the new approach was 1983’s Mummer, a quilt of songs that feel more like musings from a sanatorium than the work of a rock band. ‘Love on a Farmboy’s Wages’ sees Andy liken his lot as a musician to the life of a farmer, while Colin’s ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’, about the war dead, was the first of his many meditations on mortality. The band had moved away from the jerky pop they’d made a trademark, with tracks like Mellotron-slathered epic ‘Deliver Us from the Elements’ and the raga-inspired ‘Beating of Hearts’ lighting a way forward. The album’s recording was sticky, however; drummer Terry Chambers left early in the sessions (Andy: “I’d stopped Terry’s fun, visiting the bars of the world ‘cos he was our in-house John Bonham”) and Virgin were unhappy with the material, forcing the band to record two new tracks and remix four others. “They wanted blood after English Settlement,” says Colin, “Mummer was a complete debacle. Jeremy Lascelles put us through an awful lot of torment to try and find a hit. There didn’t seem to be an obvious single but with our records there never is!” Mummer sank in the UK and US; Andy feels Virgin all but withdrew support for the album after its two advance singles flopped. “It was like ‘if they’re not going to tour, we’re not going to promote it’. It was pretty much rock bottom.”.
XTC could’ve dropped their tools there and then. Some fans thought they had. The last track on Mummer, ‘Funk Pop a Roll’, is a tirade against the pop industry with all the makings of a bitter bon voyage; Andy even signs off with a goofy “bye bye!” at the end. Luckily for us, the band doubled down. The next album would be more abrasive, more unorthodox, more Swindon. “I didn't think it was possible that the band could carry on and be respected by the record company and the fans if they didn't tour,” says Colin. “I was wrong. We survived and we prospered... ...I think we made being parochial a virtue”. Before recording their next album, XTC were filmed in Swindon for Channel 4’s Play at Home series, whose title fit the band’s status quo perfectly.
“Failure was fantastic for us.” pronounces Andy “It was ‘okay, if the bastards don’t like this one, the next one’s going to be world-beating!’” To produce their next waxwork, the band hooked up with David Lord, a classically-trained composer based in Bath whose grand Crescent Studios had been built on BBC jingle royalties and Avon speciality records. Lord had produced local boys the Korgis, Peter Gabriel and Tears for Fears, and Bath had the facilities and scenery XTC needed if they were to recover from the failure of Mummer. Oh, and the easy commute. “We drove from Swindon every day. Dave and I took it in turns.” says Colin “We’d live on takeouts”.
who’d recorded concert parties“I had a desire to recreate a little bit of Swindon,” explains Andy. “When I was a little kid, I used to walk with my granny past the big walls of the Great Western and hear all this crashing and clanging coming from inside and I thought ‘what are they doing in there?’. Some of those sounds stayed with me.” Andy sought to create a “beautifully screwed-up" sound world. “I wanted it to sound mechanical and violent. We’d had Pete Phipps on Mummer “The Mellotron at the start of All You Pretty Girls. It was sent through a palm-sized speaker, put it at the bottom of a metal waste bin and put a kitchen roll tube over the microphone. I think Joe Meek would’ve approved.”
‘Washaway’ “I was donking on this cronky old piano at home.” he says “I didn’t really take it that seriously, but the others said we should do it, so Dave took the bones of my piece and we worked it up.”
Slapp Happy’s Peter Blegvad recruited Andy and Colin to work on his first solo album, The Naked Shakespeare. There, the two met David Lord at his Crescent Studios in Bath, whose clientele included Tears for Fears, Peter Gabriel and the Korgis. Forget George Martin – David Lord had turned the Beatles down, or at least that’s what Andy believed. “David was a very competent musician himself from the classical school. He knew his onions.” Pete Phipps
“All You Pretty Girls”, a booming sea shanty with a winning chorus, a splash of friggin' in the riggin’ and - surely - all the makings of a megahit in the era of Nik Kershaw and Big Country. “I had fantasies about being a sailor because my dad was one, but i just don’t take orders very well” “I was lazily dicking around with some Hendrix and it sounded like a sea shanty! The tom-toms sound like sailors banging metallic crockery on deck
David Lord, whose Crescent Studios in Bath and enticing fee
If anyone was expecting another pastoral album opener ‘Wake Up’ should jolts them awake with a stop-start guitar intro that Andy compared to ‘two arguing Jack Russells’. “I had a recurring dream at the time about being first on the scene of an accident. The guitars are like an alarm going off before you're faced with somebody prostrate on the ground bleeding and you're expected to do something” David Lord took Colin’s demo and blew it up, with a choir annexed to the relatively straightforward song. “It just got bigger and bigger. He took it to the Albert Hall and back” Lord’s
Colin’s two songwriting contributions are characteristically ruminant; if The Big Express is towering metal structure, Colin is the disconcerted everyman who lives in it. Album opener ‘Wake Up’ springs into action with a stop-start guitar intro that Andy compared to ‘two arguing Jack Russells’. “I had a recurring dream at the time about being first on the scene of an accident.” says Colin “The guitars are like an alarm going off before you're faced with somebody prostrate on the ground bleeding and you're expected to do something” David Lord took Colin’s demo and blew it up, with a choir annexed to the relatively straightforward song. “It just got bigger and bigger. He took it to the Albert Hall and back” Lord’s hand is less evident on ‘I Remember the Sun’, a nostalgic remembrance of “pavements roasting... ..burning the soles of your feet” that makes an unexpected diversion into jazz pop territory. “My demo was more a shuffle. It didn’t go the full hog, but Pete Phipps has got this great jazz feel.”
“I started writing more about the minutiae of life," he says, “Death is the elephant in everyone's room. I used to read quite a bit of Betjeman and Larkin”
‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’, a jaunty promenade through Swindon laced with “a dash of Kinks and a smattering of A Teenage Opera”. It’s the closest thing XTC have to a ‘Penny Lane’, but the images in the lyrics are all genuine snapshots from life in Wiltshire’s “bloated village”, says Andy; “It’s very Swindon. ‘Drink my Oxo up and get away’, that’s the milkman. The ‘brand new catalogue nylon nightie’, that’s the sort of shit my mother used to wear. The ‘shiny grey-black snake of bikes’, that’s the Great Western workers at clocking-off time.”
“If you weren’t doing anything, you could look ‘round Bath. I mean, what’s not to like about that?”
“I think when technology comes along, you use it”
“I think when you have the history that we have together, you're always in contact, although we don't socialise and we never did, even when we were raging at our height as a band.”
“No, I don't think he was a George Martin-type figure. He wasn't particularly dictatorial. Andy certainly had a big say in how the record was going to go being the majority of his songs.” (AP Quote about his lot as a songwriter / XTC’s position with virgin)
XTC had borrowed from antiquity before - the Uffington White Horse famously adorns the sleeve of English Settlement, while Mummer was named for traditional folk plays of the British Isles (“Just country folks doing their own show... just like us” Partridge explained in 1984) - but they’d never dug up their own backyard like this. The Big Express is their ____
Reviewing “This World Over” for Smash Hits, famously scathing Morrissey was on the money - “XTC have stepped back from music industry machinations and are making better records”
Mummer was fraught with like reflected and was rejected by Virgin.
Flecked
His contempt for performance stretched to music videos
And a stint on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show as Agony Andy (his advice to a schoolkid excused from sex education? “Buy yourself a bike shed, that's the way I did it”).
Dispensing characteristically
All You Pretty Girls – Music video reported to have cost £30,000.
Seagulls – mellotron from melody maker ad, peacock-rich, demo very complete – band involvement? Train Running Low – acoustic version, breathless, regurgitating
XTC posed with Lode star 4003 for the inner sleeve and for the promo shots it was 2301 Dean Goods
Closer “Train Running Low on Soul Coal”, perhaps The Big Express’s most defining track, all tangled metal. Over an oppressive Beefheart-riding-a-caboose backing, Partridge . Dense
But it might be trumped by an earlier version; in Play at Home, Andy and Dave can be seen performing a breathless acoustic version of the song on the stage of Swindon’s Town Gardens Bowl, an art deco amphitheatre that resembles a dinky Hollywood Bowl. Their audience? Two people sitting on the grass. It’s an image that sums up not just The Big Express, but XTC as a whole; the little pop group that could making a din in their hometown for anyone who’ll listen. “The Big Express was the last of our English career,” reflects Colin. “Had we gone on to make another record that sold in equal proportions, I think Virgin would have pulled the plug. Maybe Todd Rundgren saved our career! There's a statement for you.”. The image of XTC as perpetual underdogs is beginning to look a little quaint; the and their lavish reissue packages, the most recent of which was Steven Wilson’s 5.1 remix of The Big Express, are major events. “When we made The Big Express, we couldn’t get arrested.” says Colin “We’ve never been cool, put it that way, but interest has exploded in the last ten to fifteen years. A lot of young people have cottoned on to what we did.” “The sick thing is we are more recognised now.” Andy says, “Somebody has painted two XTC murals in Swindon! I’m just happy new people are finding the music. We wanna jump the generations! Old people, middle aged people, fetuses!” Andy, Colin and Dave have never left Swindon. Could a reunion ever happen? “Well, I was 30 feet away from Colin the other day when I was in the Co-op.” says Andy. Small town.
Album opener “Wake Up”, with its ping-pong guitar intro, boldly announces
XTC as perpetual underdogs