Forgotten Bands part three – XTC
By MNJ
| Posted in Writer's Block
Few bands have been more ignored or treated with such cruel indifference by the music buying public as XTC. Although existing for the best part of 25 years and producing a sizeable catalogue of music over that time, their record sales have been relatively poor. This situation hasn’t been helped by their refusal to tour and a lengthy and a damaging dispute with their record company later in their career.
The original members – singer and chief songwriter Andy Partridge, bassist Colin Moulding, drummer Terry Chambers and keyboard player Barry Andrews – were all from Swindon. They produced two albums in the late seventies – This is Pop and Go 2 – which, although full of bright ideas, contained rather too many nods to Captain Beefheart, and the use of dissonant chords and angular melodies minimised their chances of having any widespread appeal. They merged into the post-punk world of do-it-yourself bands, making underproduced records which seemed more contrived to shock rather than enchant. With their third album Drums and Wires, the noisy keyboards were ditched, the songwriting talent began to emerge and the production improved. Intelligent lyrics and strong melodies started to give Andy Partridge a strong profile as a potential writer of classic pop. Fellow Swindonian Dave Gregory had been recruited for the record, adding a much more straightforward guitar sound to the band.
Black Sea – released in 1980 – was the album that contained the first singles that made any impact. ‘Generals and Majors’ (written by Moulding), and ‘Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)’ were minor hits and with a steadily building touring schedule, XTC started to make some serious headway. It was at this point that I became hooked on the band. Actually it was more than that; the Black Sea album sparked an infatuation with XTC and Partridge’s songs that continues to this day. In 1982, after two years of exhausting touring, Andy Partridge suffered a panic attack halfway through the opening number of a gig in Paris and couldn’t continue. That was the end of XTC as a live band and they never played in public again. However, just as the Beatles had discovered when they stopped playing live in 1966, XTC found it was time to stop worrying about whether the music they were making could be reproduced on stage and explore some new ground.
Some brilliant new songs emerged from the shed in Partridge’s back garden in Swindon. English Settlement was a double album which contained perhaps XTC’s most well known song ‘Senses Working Overtime’, but the lyrical themes continued to baffle all but the most dedicated of fans. Perhaps their most commercially unsuccessful album – Mummer, released in 1983 – is one of my absolute all-time-favourite albums and contains some of Partridge’s best work in my opinion. The Big Express, Skylarking, Oranges and Lemons and Nonsuch albums that saw the band through to the early nineties revealed Andy Partridge to be one of the most prolific and inventive songwriters of his generation. While most writers enjoy a creative peak early on in their career and then slowly dry up, Andy Partridge just got better and better. The album Apple Venus – which came out in the year 2000 and was recorded for the most part with orchestral arrangements - contained some stunningly brilliant songs like ‘Harvest Festival’ and ‘Easter Theatre’.
One more album followed – Wasp Star – after which it emerged that Colin Moulding’s interest in music was waning. Gregory had left during Apple Venus, so XTC as a collective music making entity was all but finished. Andy Partridge has since released 10 albums of demos and rarites called Fuzzy Warbles but not much has been heard of him recently.
There are a couple of good books about XTC which tell the whole story in great detail. In the history of bands, theirs isn’t that unusual really – incompetent and fraudulant management, disinterested record companies and moments of sheer bad luck. What is unusual is that such an incredible catalog of songs isn’t celebrated other than amongst long-time fans and die-hard XTC nuts. However, Andy Partridge must take some of the blame – he has continually refused to compromise his ideas or write songs solely for commercial purposes – but as he says, it’s for this very reason that that his fans love him and XTC.
Tags: andy partridge, colin moulding, dave gregory, senses working overtime, xtc