After hypnotherapy for stress and depression, Andy spent a long time in the garden of his new house writing songs and poetry – some good stuff came out, but it wasn’t helping him. He simply couldn’t leave the house for feeling that everybody would be looking at him – he was seriously unhinged for a while.
More hypnotherapy helped as Andy slowly realised he wasn’t going to be the next Peter Green or Syd Barrett, but the financial mess of the cancelled tour meant Virgin had to bail them out – and new Virgin boss Jeremy Lascelles effectively owned them. Andy was also highly aware that the others had enjoyed touring – most notably Terry – and felt he owed them something.
There was only one solution – write another hit album. Andy had spent most of 1982 in his back garden barely operating at mumbling point, but the emotional turmoil had set the creative juices flowing again – just as the enforced break had thrown Colin into a writer’s block.
When, in 1983, the band entered the studio again Andy was enthusing about a new batch of songs he had written, which summed up what – in his opinion – life was all about. The new material was an even more radical leap into the pastoral, eschewing much of the traditional pop-song standard features. In particular, Andy wanted to get a rustic, tribal beat going – which didn’t include much in the way of ‘real’ drums.
Terry Chambers was not happy – he’d lost the opportunity to tour, his pregnant Australian girlfriend was homesick – and now, to cap it all, Andy wanted him to play bongos and timbales! One day, while working on the opening track, Terry could not get the drum pattern Andy wanted and tensions were rising.
In a moment, Terry put down his sticks, picked up his keys and fags and said, “I’m off then chaps, so err, see ya,” and he was gone, cymbals still swinging on their stands. Within six months, Terry Chambers had moved to Australia with his new wife and baby and quit music altogether. Once again, it’s nice to note that Terry has carved out a successful career in Australia – where his son Kai is now the resident musician in the family – and on his infrequent visits home, the old lads normally meet up for a drink or two.
Meanwhile, there were drums (of sorts) to be played and Pete Phipps, previously of (wait for it) The Glitter Band, deputised and proved to be a versatile and open-minded player, which was just what Andy needed.
However, a shock was waiting – the band were happy with the album, the remixes had gone well (a rarity with Partridge involved) and everything looked rosy. Then Virgin A&R man Jeremy Lascelles rejected it, telling the boys to go away and write another one!
| The band was crestfallen – and a plan was hatched.
They wrote one new song, changed the running order of the rest and took it back
to Lascelles. “Great,” said Lascelles, “I knew you could do it.” The album was
called Mummer (right) after the ‘Mummers’ (or mimers) who used to tour mediaeval
England with biblical and passion plays.
Mummer starts with another opening belter. Beating of Hearts is about the power of the human spirit – from the internal metronome that wakes you each morning, to the ability to outlast guns, tanks and bombers, your heart is the “loudest sound in this and every world you can think of.” |
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Love on a Farmboys Wages was inspired by Andy’s father, who, once leaving the Navy, got a job collecting milk churns. He would often take the young Andy with him during summer holidays and although this was as close to being a farmer as either Partridge would ever get, the image offered a romantic, Thomas Hardy angle for another song on the perils of poverty. It helped that snippets of the song were taken from his own life – especially the endless condescension of Marianne’s parents, who thought their little girl had married beneath herself.
Me And The Wind is about the bittersweet feeling at the end of a relationship. Many people subscribe to the theory that it was Andy writing about Terry’s departure – Andy insists he had no such thoughts in mind when he wrote it.
However, Andy was also aware that he had written a no-hit album (Love on a Farmboys Wages hit the dizzy heights of No. 50 and that was it) and penned what he thought was his retirement song to end the album with a resounding thud. Funk Pop A Roll lambasted the music industry (again) and in particular it’s habit of compartmentalising artists and forcing a formulaic ‘product’ on an unwitting public:
Funk pop a roll beats up my soul
Oozing like napalm from the speakers and grill of your radio
Into the mouths of babes
And across the backs of its willing slaves
Funk pop a roll consumes you whole
Gulping in your opium so copiously from a disco
Everything you eat is waste
But swallowing is easy when it has no taste
However, he was quick to acknowledge his own complicity in the last verse:
Funk pop a roll the only goal
The music business is a hammer to keep
You pegs in your holes
But please don't listen to me
I've already been poisoned by this industry
The album ends with Andy shouting a cheery “bye bye” on the song’s fade-out. He truly believed at the time it would be his last effort.
There is much debate among the XTC faithful as to whether Mummer is a weak link in the band's recorded history or a key ‘not so missing’ link between the old XTC and the new. There’s no doubt it polarises opinion amongst fans like no other (it’s the Marmite of the XTC canon). It’s fair to say XTC's sixth album is a little trickier to get into, but all the more rewarding for it.
Andy is in no doubt as to how he feels
about it: "Until early 1982, our work was like black-and-white TV. Mummer
was the first in full colour – bright sky blue."
 Moulding and Partridge, 1984 |
Express Delivery Andy Partridge had often bemoaned that their Swindonian origins made them the target of fashion bigots. He disliked the oft-made comparisons with Talking Heads – not because of the music, but because Talking Heads were the epitome of ‘New York cool’ and he wondered whether this had as much to do with their success as Swindon had with XTC’s lack of it. The next album showed a change of mood. Andy was already annoyed at the lack of success of Mummer, which he felt was down to Virgin’s apathy towards it and lack of promotion. This time he wasn’t going to back down, he was going to shout out his pride at being English – and more importantly, a yokel, as he thought Virgin saw him.
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The resulting 1984’s The Big Express took an eternity to record – getting through four producers and also witnessing the bands split with their manager. It was, if anything, a slight return to their rock roots – even if only via the pounding beats Pete Phipps layered over the songs. In his spare time, Andy spent much of the recording process in his attic – playing with his toy soldiers and dreaming about an idea for a spoof psychedelic band.
The Big Express once again should have been the mega-hit the band needed – but when you’re terminally unfashionable – well, you know the story. Eleven stunning tracks, with nary a dud in sight. For anyone who loves pop music, in its truest sense, here were tunes to kill for. If you ask me, The Beatles were rarely this good.
The Big Express starts with Wake Up, Colin’s three chord wonder – although no-one expected him to layer them on top of each other in this ode to his early days of marriage, when he and his missus were so often ‘at it’ he started to miss work through exhaustion!
Released as the first single, it obviously bombed, but Andy was, nevertheless, impressed: “Colin arrived on my doorstep one day with a grubby cassette in his mitts to announce ‘I've got a new song’. I was excited, so we went into my front room and put it on straight away. I fell in love with those twin chopping guitars, snapping across each other like a pair of quarrelsome Jack Russells. That ‘missing beat’ drum rhythm was great too. I love the competition, nothing makes me write faster than Colin appearing with a new tune, it's always inspirational.”
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The second single release, All You Pretty Girls, was Andy’s great lost sea-shanty. Hitting the dizzy lows of No. 55 in the charts, it was written as a deliberately rose-tinted view of what Andy’s father’s life in the navy might have been like if all the accepted rumours were true: Do
something for me, boys |
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As well as the single releases, The Big Express is choc-full of little gems, including The Everyday Story of Smalltown, an obvious reference to the sanctity of Swindonian life.
If
it's all the same to you, Mrs. Progress
Think I'll drink my Oxo up, and get away
It's not that you're repulsive to see
In your brand new catalogue nylon nightie
But you're too fast for little old me
Next you'll be telling me it's 1990
On a more sombre note, Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her was the first sign of the cracks in Andy’s marriage to Marianne. It was written with reference to an American backing singer he had met while recording Mummer – Erica Wexler – who made no secret of her affection for him. Although Andy had resisted her charms, by this time she was always in his thoughts – and always writing him letters, making Marianne all the more cold. It wasn’t the first song he would write about Erica – and it isn’t the last we see of her.
The penultimate track, I Remember The Sun is one of Moulding’s finest moments, striking the perfect nerve about the endless summers of childhood. Melting tarmac, burning chaff, distant days when the sun always shone. It’s too perfect . . . and all too true.
Around the time of the recording of The Big Express, relations between the band and their manager, Ian Reid, fell apart completely. Reid (“the G is silent,” Andy) was an ambitious ex-Army officer, who owned The Affair club in Swindon where XTC played many early gigs, and talked the young and naive band into signing him up as their manager, despite little previous experience. To his credit, Reid got XTC signed up amongst the burgeoning punk movement and, through his contacts, was able to keep them gigging constantly, when constant gigging was the thing to do to be noticed.
However, after the debacle of the cancelled US tour, Reid refused to contribute to covering any of the costs, which forced the band into renegotiating their already punitive deal with Virgin. The result was, that after seven decent-selling albums, a couple of hits and a loyal fan support, XTC were still paupers and Reid was a rich man.Furthermore, although English Settlement had made a healthy profit, the band also received a huge unpaid VAT bill for the time Ian Reid was in charge of their finances. On legal advice, XTC sued Reid – who immediately counter-sued for unpaid commission on royalties. As litigation ensued, Virgin were legally required to freeze royalty and advance payments and divert publishing income into a frozen deposit account.
Eventually, with the
case dragging on for years, XTC were forced to live on short term loans from
Virgin and PRS payments for airplay. Early in 1986, the band met with Virgin
for what was expected to be a routine album planning but, according to Andy,
"was more of a veiled threat that if we didn't listen to their advice and
sell more than 70,000 copies, we could find ourselves without a label."
The pressure was well and truly back on.
The only positive outcome was another track on The Big Express – I Bought Myself A Liarbird. A savage retort to the underhand tactics and – as Andy saw them – lies and broken promises of Reid, it was so damning that as part of the out-of-court settlement that eventually transpired between the band and their manager, none of the band are allowed to mention its existence, let alone perform it or allow the publishing of its lyrics. Of course, you could just buy the album . . .