XTC

I’ve often referred to the 80s as a musical wasteland of slick, overproduced crapola and premature-ejaculation rock, but that was before I dove into XTC’s catalog. I now have a more positive take: “The 80s were pretty much a wasteland except for XTC.”

When I began my exploration, I had only heard one of their songs: “Dear God.” I loved the song when I heard it in my teens but I was locked into post-punk and Britpop so I didn’t bother to investigate further. Twenty-odd years later I heard one of their songs in a nightclub in San Sebastian and felt an overwhelming urge to learn more.

The experience of discovering what to me was a new band was thoroughly enjoyable. XTC had a most unusual trajectory, and though I disagree with Andy Partridge’s belief that each album was better than the one before, when you step back and look at what they accomplished, the brilliance of their best songs—marked by ingenious chord patterns, superb lyrics and beautifully-crafted melodies that stick in your head for days on end—makes you forgive and forget the misses.

When Andy was on his game, he wrote more than his fair share of great songs and should be included in any discussion of the era’s great songwriters. Over time, he moved on from his “seal bark” vocals in the earlier recordings and became an excellent singer—all the more impressive because his melodies and lyrical patterns became more complex. Try to sing “Mayor of Simpleton” and you’ll find out quickly that if you don’t take your breaths at exactly the right points you’ll completely blow the vocal. Andy’s vocals on Nonsuch reveal a command of different styles and are consistently outstanding.

Colin Moulding was already one helluva bass player during their early years and never forgot the importance of the bassist-drummer connection. While he was less prolific than Andy, he also wrote some gems, and it was Colin’s “Making Room for Nigel” that inspired Andy to reorient XTC’s trajectory from pseudo-punk to music with more complex melodies and rhythms. Dave Gregory was the jack-of-all-trades, a highly skilled musician who made massive contributions with his arrangement and multi-instrumental talents. The decision to stop touring and become a studio band led to the departure of rock-solid Terry Chambers, but XTC managed to successfully record with a series of different drummers, including the always-excellent Dave Mattacks on Nonsuch.

You never knew what to expect from XTC and for the most part, their work exceeded your expectations.

*****

I wrote reviews for eight of the twelve studio albums. My rationale for skipping the two punk albums and the Apple Venus pair can be found below.

Full Reviews

The Punk Albums: White Music and Go 2

XTC’s big break involved a combination of timing and record company ignorance. The band had created some buzz in the early days of the punk revolution and because much of their early material consisted of short songs drenched in distortion and played at breakneck speed, they started drawing attention from the big labels in a desperate search for punk rockers. As Andy recalled in the documentary This Is Pop, “By the time XTC got signed up in ’77—and who didn’t get signed up in ’77? It was like a disease. Record companies were so scared of missing the boat.”

Upon closer examination, speed and rawness were the only features XTC had in common with the Sex Pistols or the Clash. They violated the 3-minute limit several times on their two punk albums (including the worst cover of “All Along the Watchtower” in music history), refused to limit their compositions to three or four chords, paid scant attention to politics and social unrest, and violated punk norms by hiring a keyboardist whose few compositions were closer to disco than punk. Their most punky statement came in the form of the anti-capitalist cover for Go 2. XTC was never really a punk band, but the misperception provided them with a pathway into the music business.

The two albums made a minor dent in the charts but none of their singles charted. A few of the songs are mildly interesting but the lyrics are generally weak and the compositions are a bit sloppy. In my opinion, XTC didn’t become XTC until they fired the keyboardist and replaced him with Dave Gregory on Drums and Wires. 

The Apple Venus Albums

After my first run-through with the Apple Venus albums, I had a hard time finding the words to describe the listening experience. Oddly enough, I found les mots justes in an Andy Partridge composition: “Catherine wheeled and senses frazzled.”

That was a massive improvement over my original reaction: “What the fuck?”

Thinking I must be missing something, I read several reviews from the so-called professionals, the gist of which was nicely summarized on the Apple Venus 1 Wikipedia page:

“In comparing the album to the group’s earlier work, Pitchfork’s Zach Hooker said:” Apple Venus finds them picking up pretty much where they left off. Or maybe even a little bit before they left off.” Stylistically, he regarded the album as a midpoint between Oranges and Lemons and Skylarking and “a little nest-egg of excellent songs.” Rolling Stone‘s Barry Walters wrote that the LP “packs the wit and nerve that made their rock snap but does it with brass, acoustic guitars, violins, woodwinds and minimal percussion . . . instead of evoking the Sixties, Partridge and Moulding suggest a timeless pastoral past rich with melody and subtlety.” Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic noted: “Although there are similarities with the pastoral Skylarking or parts of Nonsuch, there is really no comparable record in XTC’s canon, given its sustained mood, experimentalism, and glimpses of confession … [Apple Venus] easily ranks as one of XTC’s greatest works.”

As is usually the case with the paid professionals, there isn’t much there there. Superficial comparisons, no serious analysis of the music or lyrics—just poorly-supported opinions. Still baffled by my “meh” reaction to the two albums, I launched a deeper search and found a marvelous, well-written piece with solid backing for the writer’s opinions. Here’s how J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader summarized the Apple Venus offerings:

Gregory wanted XTC’s comeback effort to be a masterpiece; culled from seven years’ worth of material, it should have been. According to Song Stories, he, Moulding, and Bendall all favored a single album, but Partridge won out, and 23 songs were spread over two 50-minute discs. (Three, in fact–between volumes one and two, TVT released Homespun, which took to its logical conclusion the band’s penchant for releasing their home recordings by reconstructing the entire first volume in demo form.) Partridge was wrong: both volumes have their high points, and winnowed down to a 45-minute unit Apple Venus might hold its own against English Settlement or Skylarking. But Partridge has never shown any talent for editing himself, and, aside from Rundgren, no one else has been up to the task.

I think J.R. was exceptionally generous in his assessment. I think both albums are bloody awful, largely due to Andy Partridge’s overbearing dominance and his desperate need to be recognized as an “artiste,” which led to many a tantrum during the recording process. 

The first thing that frazzled my ears was the amateurish orchestration, which I sensed was clearly a half-assed patch job. John Morrish of The Independent picked up on the sloppiness as well:

Partridge once wrote his songs by stamping his foot and strumming into a mono cassette. Now he makes digital demos in his shed, then replicates them in his producer’s computer. For the orchestral Apple Venus, the budget allowed a day of recording at Abbey Road, where a 40-piece band played arrangements written by Mike “Wombles” Batt. But the human string players could not match the mathematical precision of “River of Orchids”, as programmed by Partridge and producer Haydn Bendall. Nor could the woodwinds cope with the computerised ostinato in “Greenman”, another fine example of Partridge’s armchair paganism. The orchestra became a glorified sample, cut and pasted together to achieve the “Vaughan Williams with a hard-on” sound required.

Worse still, the guy doing the patching never finished the job because he had other commitments.

The lyrics are consistently weak and occasionally offensive. The “paganist” songs pale in comparison to Jethro Tull’s Songs from the Wood and any Steeleye Span album. Colin’s voice is shot and his compositions are forgettable. The arrangements are overwrought and often overloaded, burying some nice melodies. Dave Gregory fled the scene for many reasons, succinctly summarized in a Mojo piece on chalkhills.org:

Dave: “He had the nerve to sit in that control room and tell everyone, ‘You bastards are sabotaging my career.’ It was couched in such offensive terms. He was being a cunt, frankly. Haydn (producer) nearly went home. Prairie (drummer) felt really terrible, he’d been working really hard and had his nose rubbed in the dirt. After that, we weren’t allowed to play; nothing was up to standard. It was getting like a neurosis with him and I was losing my temper.”

The crowning blow was a comment Andy made to John Morrish: “XTC, he says, is no longer a band. ‘It’s more of a brand.'” I found it shocking and disturbing that the guy who Dave once described as someone who had “never been motivated by money” would use a marketing term to describe his music.

In my opinion, XTC ceased to exist when Dave Gregory left the band and the far superior Nonsuch should be marked as XTC’s final album. Despite the sour ending, XTC is one of my favorite bands—and I made some room for them on my “Desert Island Disks.”