February 25–March 4, 1999

music

The Agonies of XTC

After a seven year "strike," the British cult favorite returns with Apple Venus Volume 1.

By Michael Pelusi

		And Then There Were Two: Moulding and Partridge.

For some bands, seven years is a career. For XTC, the past seven years have been an aggravating "strike." When it began, in 1992, the British band was a well-established cult favorite, having recorded 15 years of music that careened among quirky new wave, jagged Beatles-esque pop, dense art rock and pastoral English folk. In the late '80s, they had made inroads toward gaining a mainstream American audience. Their last three albums, Skylarking (1986), Oranges & Lemons (1989) and Nonsuch (1992) were college radio favorites yielding the hits "Dear God," "The Mayor of Simpleton" and "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead."

Nevertheless, their label, Virgin (Geffen in the States), was unwilling to renegotiate XTC's long-outdated contract, signed in the late '70s when the band was still an unproven commodity. The label was also unwilling to set the band free. Unfortunately, the group couldn't tour, either, because Andy Partridge suffers from incurable stage fright, which was set off by a 1982 onstage nervous breakdown. So the band simply went on strike. (In the meantime, Partridge lived off royalties from old albums and money from collaborating with other artists.)

Partridge says it was a frustrating time, but the frustration also fueled his creativity.

"[It was like] there was acid being thrown on me, but rather than dissolve me, I just felt it was giving my battery more voltage," explains Partridge, 45, on the phone from England. He kept busy "storing up these songs and having this religious fervor thinking 'God, this is the best stuff we've ever written, and there's no way on earth anyone's gonna get to hear it.'"

In 1997, Virgin finally let them go. The band formed their own label, Idea, with various distribution deals around the globe and then set out to record the best of the 40-some songs Partridge and bassist Colin Moulding had amassed.

However, XTC faced another hurdle when, last spring, halfway through recording, lead guitarist and keyboardist Dave Gregory handed in his pink slip after 18 years of service.

According to Partridge, Gregory was perturbed by the lack of room for his input on an album dominated by orchestral arrangements.

"I came very quickly to the opinion that it was all about some weird musical Monopoly where he tried to gain as many little green hotels for himself ego-wise," Partridge says. "For him, it was about how much he was on each song."

The split hasn't exactly been amicable, either: "[Gregory] says I'm a bully, he says I'm conceited. My answers to these things are quite simple: I was the only one with any fire in my belly; I carried him for 20 years. I wrote the songs."

Gregory's departure reduced XTC to the core of Partridge and Moulding, the only remaining original members from this combo formed in the wake of punk rock in the small railway town of Swindon—located about 80 miles outside of London—where Partridge, Moulding and Gregory all still reside.

That seminal new-wave Brit-pop band that had their first UK hits with two 1979 Moulding compositions, "Life Begins at the Hop" and "Making Plans for Nigel," might find little in common with today's XTC.

On Apple Venus Volume 1 (Idea/TVT), the band has shifted its sound from tart guitar interplay and synthesizer stabs to lush orchestral arrangements accompanied by sparse acoustic guitar. The album opener, "River of Orchids," combines pizzicato strings and trumpet blasts, with Partridge calling for the extinction of the automobile: "The grass is always greener when it bursts up through concrete/Push your car from the road." It sounds like a cross between Philip Glass and Paul McCartney. Most of the material was written between '92 and '94, when Partridge had a hankering for symphonic arrangements.

The album segues from "I'd Like That"—a celebration of newfound love filled with acoustic guitars and infectious thigh-slaps to a glorious celebration of the life cycle, "Easter Theatre,"—the chorus of which Partridge had conceived in 1986 and then promptly forgot. As Partridge explains, during the writing sessions for Apple Venus, he came up with a chord progression that "sounded like earth, or something grubby or grimy. And because the pattern ascended… I thought, 'Ooh, this is something pushing up earth.'… And then I got up to the last chord change in the verse, and I moved one more finger and it made it sound so amazingly tense. I thought, 'Where the hell do I go now?' And all of a sudden, this ball bearing rolled around from the subconscious, it'd been in there for seven years, and it suddenly just went click into a little spot. I remembered I'd forgotten—or I'd forgotten I remembered."

Whether waxing nostalgic about childhood crushes on the sublime "Harvest Festival" or venting vitriol about his recent divorce on "Your Dictionary," ("F-U-C-K/Is that how you spell friend?"), Partridge's songs on Apple Venus Volume 1 display his unerring talent for creating songs that, even at their most knotty and complex, contain gorgeous pop hooks.

"I like the idea of getting inside people's heads quickly and then something explodes… and they realize something about the content of the song that takes them a long while to recover from."

Though the band has been absent from popular consciousness for a good part of the '90s, Apple Venus comes at a relatively high profile time for the reclusive band, having been preceded by the boxed set Transistor Blast, which compiles BBC performances from the '70s and '80s, and a revealing book, XTC: Song Stories.

Next on the duo's agenda is, naturally, Apple Venus Volume 2, due out by the end of the year and comprising the more recent, more traditionally XTC, electric songs written during the latter half of the strike. (Gregory's presence may be missed more in that context.)

While Partridge, 45, can still get his ire up now and then, whether the topic is his divorce, old record labels, embittered ex-bandmates or record reviews (regarding one British review which compared "Easter Theatre" to Blur: "Whoa, get your history in order here, fellow. That's like saying Richard III is a bit like Peter Sellers."), he remains optimistic about XTC's future.

"[With] Volume 2… we haven't recorded it but we know what we're going to record. And the one after that is exciting because I haven't got the faintest idea where the hell we're going, so it's a real mystery trip."