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Interview Podcast

MP3: Does any of this really hold any romantic feeling anymore, like doing press or having people review or provide critique of your work? Andy Partridge: Actually, sometimes it can be very therapeutic, especially if they push the right buttons and ask the right questions I guess. Right. Not always what they want to hear or not always where they want to go but sometimes like I put the phone down thinking, "Ahh, great!" You know, it's like free psychiatry. So, yeah, it is therapeutic because it gives you an opportunity to voice probably what you were just sort of kicking around in your head every day. Yeah, and I try not to, you know, I try and be kind to people, not slagging them off too much [yawn]--excuse me, I slept very poorly last night, and I also still have a hangover. You must forgive me. I just had too much fun, you know. Sometimes when you go out and you want a beer and then you want another one and you think, "Hey, I'll have another." And then another, and you come back and you think, "Yeah, I'll get some in." Before you know it, it's very late and you're kind of, you know, chewing your own shoes and sobbing pathetically in the dark. And then the next day it's like, "Oh, for Christ sakes, don't bring any food near me." But yes, I'm a little delicate right now. Well, I will try to avoid asking anything that would upset you. Yeah, handle me with kid gloves. Yeah. I did an interview the other day with a gentleman named Graham Coxon. Oh, he of Blur, yes. Of Blur. And then it hit me, this morning, actually, on the train that you were at some point involved with the recording of Modern Life Is Rubbish. Yeah. Or "our second album is rubbish," as I used to facetiously call it. Yes, I was asked by them to produce because they wanted the XTC effect. So I got together with them, and the drummer--I can't remember his name--ginger-haired fellow, anyway, begged me not to use computers or drum machines or anything like their regular producer Stephen Street did. He said, "Please, you must let me play. I hate it when they program it all and I don't get to play on our records." I said, "OK, I'll let you play." And you know, we cut--I can't remember how many songs, three songs.

It was tricky because Graham would not turn up half the time. He'd just call in very drunk or they'd, you know, like Damon Albarn would say, "Well, let's put some lovely classical piano on there." So then I'm saying, "Are you sure?" "Oh, yeah, I really want it." So we put some tinkly piano all over it, and then the next day he wouldn't come in and Graham would come in that day and say, "Oh, get rid of that piano. Wipe it out. I want to put big loud raucous guitar on it." And then he'd put big loud raucous guitar on it, and then he wouldn't come in the next day. Then Damon would come back in and say, "Oh, get rid of that guitar. I hate it. Where's my piano gone?" It was tricky because they were kind of--you could see that if they weren't careful they were going to fall to pieces, you know.

And of course, I let the drummer play and then the fellow from the record company came down for playback and they got him very stoned indeed, and he was loving it, and he was calling me the new George Martin and then how it was--they were the Beatles and I was George Martin. This was the best thing that could happen to them. Then the next day when he'd sobered up he called in and said, "Oh, this is all s***. And why did you let the drummer drum? He can't drum. You should have programmed it into a machine." And I said, "Well, look, he begged me not to, and I thought he should play, and I thought it just sounded like a band." And eventually, they dropped me because it sounded too much like XTC. Which is the sound that they wanted. Which is why they hired me, yeah. I'm sorry to hear that, although it is a funny tale. It's, you know, and I never got my expenses out of Food Records either. Well, 300 pounds and a penny, a bizarre amount. That's why I remember it. Never even got my expenses. What is your initial reaction, or what would it have been, or what was it, when someone says to you, "We want an XTC sound"? Well, I wouldn't do that these days. I mean, I guess I was sort of facetious enough to think, "Oh, well, I can--I'll just do what I do and it might come out a bit like that." But I wouldn't do that now. I mean, I don't actually like producing people now because I think it's more about being a social worker than anything to do with music. You know, especially with bands, you know, you have drummers who aren't any good or whatever, and then the lead guitarist is just telling you, "Don't let the drummer play." Or "Could we get someone else in to drum?" And they're fighting about it. I'm [either], "Come on, calm down." And then the base player who insists on singing the backing vocals has got an awful voice and, you know, you got to--but the keyboard player wants him to sing but the singer doesn't want him to sing. And then, oh, it's all about egos and trying not to, you know, you walk in too many eggshells and things. So I don't like that side of it. It's not enough to do with music. So I tend to turn down all production offers I get these days. Do you receive a steady stream of offers? I used to, but I think people have been put off by me saying no continuously. Oh, I see. I mean, I've been asked to do all sorts of things. I got asked to do a James album while they were still hanging on together. Yeah. All sorts of people. I can't remember. I just said no to all of them. It's too much like being a social worker and not enough about music. Right. Was that something that you avoided while in XTC, seeking external production, or...? No...I haven't done any production for, oh God, how many years? Can't quite remember, about five years, something like that. I've been doing cowriting. People ask me to cowrite. That's occasionally rewarding, but a lot of the time it's not rewarding because you're actually forced together with people who can't write, and you find yourself being hampered because their greedy managers insist they be part of the writing process so they can take away half of the publishing royalties. And you're hampered with somebody who can't write and their ego is up there and thinking they're just fantastic, and yet they've never written a song before. Do you see what I mean? So they're interested in siphoning off of your mystique or whatever? Yeah, well, what it is, is that managers and agents and so on have learned not to buy songs anymore. One time they would just buy a song. You know, they would ring up Bacharach and David and say, "Have you got a song that goes, you know, is kind of lighthearted?" Or "Can you write a song on this theme?" Or can da, da, da, da, and you know, you would get a tailor-made song and the artist would perform it. But these days all these bands' managers and artists' managers are very savvy and they think, "Well, that's where all the money is in writing the songs, so, so I can get my hands on more money, I'll get my artist and I'll insist that he cowrite all the material." So you find yourself getting hampered with people who can't write. It's, it's just awful. Occasionally it's good because you're cowriting with people who can write like, for example, Robyn Hitchcock or Charlotte Hatherley or--oh, God, I've just forgotten his name--short piano-playing fellow... Elton John? [laughs] No. No, he's, you know, I would have said Queen Mother in a wig...no, oh God, what's his name? Oh, come on, where's my brain today? It's all that booze. Oh, it'll come to me in a minute if I don't think about it-- Jamie Cullum. Oh, Jamie Cullum, was it? Yeah, yeah, he was good. He's a great player. I mean when you get great players and people who can write, it's a pleasure. But then, you know, EMI will send you idiots who can't write, and it's painful. And I try not to do those these days.- I am curious about your take on a lot of modern music, specifically because there seems to be this huge resurgence of a sort of retro sound, something that XTC perfected or Wire, or even early Fall or something like that. There's this huge interest in '70s British music. Yeah, don't you think that's a bit creepy? I do. I mean, I find it a bit to be like necrophilia. Yeah exactly. Dead boring. But, I mean, there's definitely, like you don't have to re-create the wheel... I think it shows a lack of imagination, personally. I mean, it's one thing to do a style of music for fun, like a sort of fancy dress situation like The Dukes of Stratosphear. You know, that was a great piece of fun. That was just--we wanted to do like a fancy dress record, you know, where you pretend you're the great unheard-of psychedelic band from 1967, and you get to use all the clichés and all the--you know, it was just a great piece of fun. But people seem to be building a career on sounding like carbon copies of bands from 1979, and it does show an incredible lack of imagination. I don't think anybody is...I don't think anybody is taking music onwards where it should have gone. They seem to be content to raid their parents' record collections, and it just seems a little, a little safe to me. I agree and even a lot of experimental music that I hear really doesn't...it sounds like modern interpretations of say Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, things like that, you know. Yeah. I think there are new ways of making music. It's just that people are showing huge lack of imagination on how it should be done. Interesting. So people, not unlike the human mind, people may be underusing the digital technology that they have before them? Always. I think digital technology has made making records or making recordings so much easier. I mean, you can get pretty damn good quality recordings now for, you know, with home equipment, with stuff that you could put in your back room. And why do you want to run to your parents' record collection and pretend you're a band from 1979? I find this kind of troubling. Why would you not want to look to push the boundaries further in new ways of making music, new chord work and new ways of juxtaposing lyrics or song construction, or different ways of looking at melody and things, different instrumentation. Why two guitars, bass and drums? Or one guitar, bass, drums, and a keyboard? You know, why not have some homemade instruments or make your own instruments or have four violins, three fuzz boxes, and a drummer who plays a cardboard box? I mean, it shows incredible lack of imagination that people seem content to recycle 1979. Do you think it's the musicians themselves who have the lack of imagination, or do you think it's the musicians' fear that the general listening audience lacks imagination? I think it's a bit of both actually. Right. I think there's a sort of a pandering to the expected mixed with a lack of adventure and a sort of a tameness and "good boy" behavior. I mean, we need some musical "bad boy" behavior. We need people making music that has people over 25 running screaming from the room, "Oh, what a ghastly noise!" We need people to be making music that you just go, "Wow, that's not music at all. I've never heard anything like that in my life." We need that more than ever. Have you heard Wolf Eyes? No. Do they sound interesting? Well, they fit your description of a band sending a roomful of people running. I would recommend that maybe you listen to Wolf Eyes, because I and some people say that they are the future of music, very abrasive and difficult to wrap your head around as opposed to the standardized format that everyone has become so used to...coming to a show, standing in front of the audience clapping their hands and, you know, pissing on themselves because the singer looked at them or what have you. Yeah. Or if it was 1977, pissing on the singer would have been de rigueur actually. Did you run into that sort of audience? Oh, everywhere we played in 1977 it was a blinding scum storm of spit, and it was just unbearably awful. You know, you felt like you were Scott of the Antarctic there. If I had to turn around and see not a drum riser but a team of huskies... You used to come offstage looking like a snowman, you know, totally covered in phlegm, and ah, yiye! It was truly disgusting. Can you maybe provide a little context about that? It was just something, some newspapers reported the punks like spitting and we were seen to have short hair and play noisy music quite fast, so therefore, we were branded as punks. Therefore, the audience got it into their heads, virtually every audience we played to in '77, that it was great and the band really loved you to spit on them, which, of course, is completely the opposite. You don't want to be playing there in a snowstorm of the inside of people's lungs, you know, flying at you. I remember doing our dub dismantling of "All Along the Watchtower" one night and, you know, the adrenalin is very high when you're onstage and the audience do seem to be moving in slow motion, and I saw one kid spit and this thing came sort of flying and turning towards me like a space station. And I thought, "Oh, no, it's going to hit my harmonica," which it did. And a lot of the playing of a blues harmonica is sucking, and I sucked and this thing went through the harmonica into my mouth." Ya how wa! I don't know how you're going to spell ya how wa. It's like yahova, but ya how wa wa. Oh, yeah, and you just come offstage literally looking like a snowman. You'd have to scrape your guitar and, ah, just unbearable. And this went on for about a year, you know. Did you at the time consider your music to be, you know, part of what was labeled as punk rock? No. I think I was a bit too arrogant for that. I saw it more as like pop music or where pop music should be headed. And I hated the fake politics of punk. It was fake politics. They were all talking politics. They were talking out of their asses. They didn't know what they were talking about. And it was, you know, all these sort of upper-class kids pretending to have London accents and, you know, Cockney accents, and this awful kind of almost cultural revolution thing where you weren't allowed to be a good player. You know, if you knew more than three chords you were overqualified, and therefore you couldn't be any good. That was such a, sort of a Red Army kind of Orwellian sort of stupidity to it. I hated all that. You know, we were just as good as we were. We detested the thing of being required to be stupid to be accepted, or apparently stupid to be accepted. You know, I'm a reasonably intelligent fellow, and I wouldn't downplay my intelligence to some sort of acting trick to fool people into I was somehow more "street," if you see what I mean. I dislike that...you weren't allowed to be able to be a good player. Just because of the blind worship of amateurish playing? Or? No, it was like I say, it was almost like a cultural revolution thing, you know, the cultural revolution. They'd take teachers and they'd work them to death in the fields and then they'd take farmers and stick them in front of a classroom and tell them to teach. Neither had done either job, but it was a disaster. And if you were an intellectual you were humiliated or beaten, or killed. It was the same when punk happened. If you were intelligent that was considered to be weirdly, like I say, almost Orwellian, kind of, that was wrong. Peace comes from a permanent state of war. It was that sort of thinking. You couldn't be good at your instrument. You couldn't write a song that had more than three chords in it. You were expected to have a London, inner-London, inner-city Cockney accent. And I dislike that intensely. And all your songs were supposed to be about politics in some way. That was insane. I mean, for god's sake, we had much better working-class credentials than the class did. I felt very disappointed by it when it happened. There are two bands that played around the same time as XTC in the early days, and I just want to say their names and get your reaction. First would be the Homosexuals. I don't know them. Oh, OK. Do you mean as a social class or the band? A band actually. No. Don't know them. OK. And the second would be Swell Maps. Oh, Jesus. Heard some Swell Maps a long time ago. Can't even remember what they sound like now. Interesting. OK. Why? Were you in both those bands? No! I don't know--that's a really bizarre choice of bands to fling at me, actually. Well, I ask because for someone like myself, who came of age in the mid-'80s and had to rediscover punk rock music, and a lot of British music that was coming over before my day of purchasing records, you know, I think the generic story. And you end up, say, purchasing some Sex Pistols albums or some Buzzcocks, or what have you, and you don't really dig beneath the surface. And then in my adult life I found these two wonderful bands, one called the Homosexuals, the other Swell Maps. Nikki Sudden from Swell Maps specifically. And you begin to realize that there were a lot of people who were creating absolutely gorgeous pop, punk, psychedelic music, and the reason I bring it up is because they were probably pushed so far into the back because of this attitude that you describe. This hatred for anything experimental in an intellectual capacity. Yeah, you weren't allowed to be smart. That was the biggest insult that was flung at us continuously, was that we were "Clever! Clever!" Isn't that twice as good as being clever? I think it was, I mean, in 1977, or 1976, when we were struggling to get a record deal, I saw the band as making a kind of--I've been thinking about this lately--I wanted the band to sound something like Johnny & The Hurricanes had been squeezed into the future. And there was. I wanted to make kind of fairground music. But I wanted to use the idea of some dead future that never happens to burn, and to make that the fuel. How best to describe this? Yeah, I sort of wanted to see the band as something between Johnny & The Hurricanes and Captain Beefheart. I mean, I was mentally excited by hearing Trout Mask Replica when I was younger. To me that sounded like music from a hundred years in the future and made music into something else--they'd made it sculptural. They were treating music much more sculpturally, and I was so excited by that, and I wanted to kind of run with a strand of that and a strand with this weird sort of kitsch sci-fi from the 1950s. This future that was really never going to be and by the 1970s obviously wasn't, you know. It was a long-dead idea of some past future, if you see what I mean.

Much like here we are 2006, and as a schoolboy I thought, "2006! Wow! We're all going to be wearing silver clothes and eating tablets for dinner and going around with our personal jetpacks and living in bubbles, you know. But really in England it's still the 1950s but with computers. But in 1976, for example, I would have liked XTC to have taken a strand from Trout Mask Replica and a strand from Johnny & The Hurricanes, that weird, dead, nonexistent idea of the future and somehow use that as a fuel to sort of set fire to that and create our own little heat. But I had Johnny & The Hurricanes in my head a lot. There was something about the fairground. The sort of music you would hear in fairgrounds. Why is it that we always, we always envision our future as a great escape away from ourselves, our home planet? Well, I think that's where we're going. I think this earth is the crib and if we can hold it together long enough we get to look in our backyard, which is going to be the rest of our solar system. And then we get to move to the equivalent of--we get to do the equivalent of going abroad, which is other solar systems. And so on. But right now we haven't left the crib. We're still in the crib. Do you think humanity has a chance of pulling it together? Well, I don't know. We've covered the crib in s***, honestly. If we go anywhere else we're going to leave some pretty messy footprints. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Like, are we going to put McDonald's on Mars. Oh, I can see that being a definite! Seriously. Immensely popular I would imagine. By the time we get to Mars and by the time other people are wanting to go to Mars, McDonald's, if they're still in existence, will probably be selling something else, you know. It'll probably be like crack cocaine flavored drinks or whatever, in a tube. I can't wait! Now, you said that you've been kind of thinking a lot about these ideas about XTC, and I don't want to presume that there was any sort of manifesto, when you began in 1972... Well, there sort of was. I mean, there was always, when we approached each album, I had a kind of a mental manifesto whether I spoke to the others about it or not. I kind of had a palette, a color palette in mind and a taste for approaching each record. Do you--as you went back and collected material for the Fuzzy Warbles collection and specifically this sort of uber-release that's just come out, do you feel that you achieved what you wanted? Well, with the Fuzzy Warbles, serious, it's all accidental because none of the recordings...well, actually a couple of the recordings, but virtually all of the recordings were not intended to be heard by the public. They were intended for... Right. You said that you wanted to beat people to the punch and get this material out. Oh, yeah, certainly beating the bootleggers. That was paramount in kind of doing the whole thing. But for a rabid XTC fan, right, who's going to go back and listen, each one is going to derive their own individual personal experience from listening to these and gain some sort of fulfillment as a fan of... Don't try and do it all in one sitting. Right! It's like that thing that, you know, never eat anything bigger than your head. Well, at least not without maybe a handful of psychedelics or something. Right. That could seriously unhinge you I think.

There was no intention for people to really hear this stuff because it was only made for a couple of people at the record company or a producer or the other fellows in the band. They weren't made as things to entertain the public with. They were sketches of how something would go. And I admit as the years went on the sketches got more and more finished until they ended up virtually the finished product. But they weren't intended to be seen. So this big collection of like, 30 years' worth of sketches, was not intended for public consumption. I mean, I'm glad the public are consuming it and they seem to be really loving it. The boxed set is doing great guns in America. I'm very surprised and delighted. It'll probably bankrupt me because I have to pay for all these boxed sets to be constructed and filled! But you know, at least by the time any royalties come through, that may get me out of the edge of bankruptcy. But it seems that this mass of stuff, the people do seem to be a bit like me and enjoy eavesdropping on the building process. Does this release put a cap in some way on the history of XTC? Ooh! Inadvertently, yeah. So this is it? We'll never get anything else? Well, you mean more demos or? Sure. I mean, do you have another vault that you're secretly storing... Oh, yeah, I didn't use everything. Some things were so awful as to be...you know, and then I have, you know, dozens of cassettes laying around with just the most primitive few marks on them. They mean something to me, but probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone else. But you know, it's just a couple of chords that then would then go to grow to become a part of a song--do you see what I mean? What you're getting with this Fuzzy Warbles collector's album is at least stuff that is edible as opposed to just a few little marks or a few personal notes, you know, in musical or sound form. I still do it you know. I still have cassette machines laying around and if I get ideas I drag one out and mumble into it, you know, telling myself what the chords are and what the idea is and it's the way I like to capture things quickly. But I guess, as far as what you would call a look at all the XTC demos, yes, this inadvertently does form a mausoleum for that. I didn't intend it to, but I guess it does kind of, in a way, yeah. With a giant rocket on top. Yeah. Yeah, a really cheap one from some fairground ride! I want to ask you one more question, because I have to. All right, sure. We were talking about how sad both of us find this sort of necrophilia of going back and picking up sounds from the past. Or kind of pretending to be like that. Exactly. But you know, it's not unusual. I was thinking the other day--if you look at the sort of mid-'60s or early- to mid-'60s, there was a big thing in England. I don't know about America, but there was a big thing in England that, for some reason there were a lot of bands that kind of pretended to be bands from the 1920s. You had like, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the Temperance Seven, oh, God, I can't remember the names of them. There were about a half a dozen bands. The Whoopee band. Oh, a half-dozen of them. And they would actually dress that way and they would either cover old '20s material or write ersatz '20s material. And that was weird because we're talking about something from forty years previous. You know, now that you say it, I think it went all the way to the top, because I think about like, ah... Well, you look at the Beatles’ A Collection of Beatles Oldies album artwork. That was like a sort of fake Savoy kind of '20s-looking thing. Or just Paul McCartney’s complete obsession with Tin Pan Alley or vaudevillian music. Yeah, so it's kind of happened before in certain ways, but this whole thing where they're sort of dressing like it's '79, they're trying to sound that way--it's tough for me to get into because I did it in the first place and it...I don't want to go back to that place. Because I feel like it's a town I've left. I don't want to go back to that funny little town. It begs the question, as I'm sure you've been asked a lot, but in context it works here, you know, even Wire has gotten back together and they're out touring, you know, and recording... Yeah, that's dangerous, this getting-back-together thing. Unless you're actually making music better than where you left off. You know, the arc has to go upwards. If the arc's going downwards, what the f*** are you doing getting back together again? I see. Yeah, my assumption is that that is not something that you are interested in at all. No, I wouldn't be interested in... Well at the moment, Colin and I are not really getting on too great. Maybe there'll come a time when we do get on good. But, we haven't been getting on great the last year or so. Dave and I are getting on fantastic. I'm probably better friends with him now than when he was in the band actually. Maybe it's because he doesn't have to take orders anymore, that's what it is, from a contemporary. But I wish bands would not get back together and kind of do this thing of reliving their youth. It's not good. It's only good if they're actually making better music than they did when they split, and how many bands do you know that do that? Very few. I can't... Well, you can count them on the fingers of one boxing glove can't you? I can't think of any, actually. Well, I was trying to be nice. But. Well, again, thank you so much. All righty. What do you do now? Do you have to sit back and transcribe all this out? I do. Well, I don't envy you. But I get to hang on your every word! I still don't envy you! Right! OK, well look, maybe we can talk when Monstrance hits the public in the new year. Oh, definitely. I would love to. All righty. Well, we'll make a date. OK, then. All right. Cheers. Take care. OK, bye.