XTC

I knew this guy Rob at Interlochen. He was in my photography class, and we became friendly during those long hours in the darkroom. I had no eye whatsoever, very occasionally stumbling across a good picture by pure chance, and he was in much the same situation, struggling to figure out the nebulous concepts of composition and printing. Then something happened to him over spring break, and he came back with a couple of rolls of film in which it seemed that every picture was phenomenal. He had blossomed, and produced one stunning print after another. It was Rob who turned me on to wonders of Jerry Uelsmann, who would become my favorite photographer after I saw a show of his and got to hear him speak in Chicago a few years later.

About the same time that Rob developed his eye, he also developed a brutal sense of humor. He was a master at cutting people to the quick, exposing their foibles and ridiculing them in a really vicious (but hysterically funny) way. You never wanted to get into an argument with him because he’d verbally eviscerate you – usually in front of a crowd of people. I saw him bring somebody to tears more than once with his cruelly sharp tongue. Because we had been friendly, I was largely spared his abuse, but I usually gave him wide berth and tried not to attract attention, knowing my fragile ego couldn’t withstand his full frontal attack.

One day, while passing in the lobby of the dorm, he stopped to chat with me. Like many people in those days, I sported a large number of small buttons promoting certain bands on my jacket. These were buttons I had bought because I liked the logos (and because buttons were cool), not because I particularly favored the bands. It was quite shallow of me, I knew, and I had hoped to never get questioned about them too closely. Rob glanced at my jacket and noticed an XTC button, featuring the cover of their Drums and Wires album.

“Oh, you like XTC?” he asked, suspiciously. Busted!

“I like the button.” I answered, honestly. “It’s cheaper than buying the records.”

Rob laughed, satisfied with my somewhat cynical answer, and let it go at that.

Each year, at Honor’s Convocation, one visual artist was given the highest award in the department, the President’s Award, and a piece of their art was purchased for Interlochen’s permanent collection. Rob won that year – more for his body of work than any single piece – and many of us took great pleasure in noticing that the piece they purchased and put on display was a photographic series of Rob pissing into one of the public urinals on campus. It was so perfectly Rob.

But my favorite art piece of his was a secret one that only a few people noticed. Each dorm was divided into four “halls”, and one night, the campus photographer came by the dorm to take pictures of the assembled halls for the yearbook. Everybody assembled in the basement lobby and took turns gathering with their hallmates for the photos. That summer, while looking through my yearbook, I noticed that Rob had managed to work his way into each photograph, and in each one, he was rubbing one eye. As there were something like 50 people in each hall, nobody noticed that he kept gathering with each group, and his repeated gesture is so subtle that I’m sure very few people ever discovered it. But I did and thought it was absolutely brilliant.

Meanwhile, about the time we were taking our hall pictures, Andy Partridge was pissing against a tree somewhere in Massachusetts. XTC was on a brutal touring schedule, and, due to their enthusiasm to get signed, had made a typical young band mistake and got completely screwed on their deal. So, while they were pulling in the same kinds of crowds as The Police, they were given an absolutely miserly per diem and barely saw any money for their album sales. They were hoofing around the country in a broken-down van, scurrying from one gig to another, holed up in anonymous motels, eating the worst food America had to offer. Knee-deep in snow, under a leaden sky, Partridge suddenly lost himself. He didn’t know where he was or who he was or why he was, and he collapsed back in the van, sobbing uncontrollably. Touring was taking a deadly toll on the engine that ran XTC. The other members of the band were handling it a little better, ranging from Dave Gregory and Colin Moulding’s acceptance of their fate to drummer Terry Chamber’s absolute love of the road and its excuse to party his way around the globe. But Andy couldn’t take it any more.

Back in England, working on songs for the next album, Andy subconsciously started subverting the band’s ability to perform. He’d bought a new acoustic guitar and was taking great pleasure in writing for it, and not worrying about how the songs would be performed in concert. He thought how pleasant it would be to not have to worry about that anymore, and just work on writing songs and recording them. For as much as he hated the road, he adored the studio, and was feeling that’s where his true musical home was. The songs that grew out of that writing session were wholly different from anything the band had done before and, emboldened by his new guitar, he produced more than enough material for a double album. Some of the songs were thrown away to make room for Colin’s contributions, and the album that resulted was the landmark double-disc English Settlement. And, despite his best efforts, Partridge had written the biggest song of the band’s career, and their only (UK) top ten hit, the joyful Senses Working Overtime. An ode to the sheer joy of living, Senses Working Overtime was a completely anachronistic song for the times, with its almost plainsong verses, tiny acoustic guitar plunks and its frank admission of the wonderment and satisfaction of just being alive. It shouldn’t have been a hit – not in those nihilistic times, not from such a bitterly sarcastic band – but it was so joyful and catchy that it immediately raced up the charts, sealing the bands fate. They were going to have to tour it.

English Settlement was widely hailed as one of the best albums of the year, its more acoustic nature flying in the face of what was thought could be popular and marking a major turning point for the band. They were moving into a more pastoral phase, willing to pursue whatever moods and muses inspired them. It was the album that broke them to the world at large. The buzz was so big that even I had to succumb to it. I had heard a track from it called It’s Nearly Africa on the wonderful soundtrack to the World of Music Arts and Dance festival that Peter Gabriel organized to expose different culture’s arts to each other. It was the combination of this festival (and album) and Brian Eno’s work with David Byrne and Talking Heads that really kick-started the interest in African music many Western musicians developed in the ‘80s. I loved It’s Nearly Africa and decided it was worth listening to the buzz and finally finding out what this XTC was all about. I bought the album (the American version trimmed enough songs from it to make it a more appealingly affordable single album), and rushed it on to my turntable.

And hated it.

I just could not get my ears around the songs. The sonic palette was unfamiliar. The lyrics were dense and difficult to understand. The songwriting was prickly and had very few traditional hooks. I just could not make heads or tails of it. But I loved It’s Nearly Africa, so I stuck with it. And I was swept up into the joyous rapture of Senses Working Overtime as well. And, now that you mention it, No Thugs in Our House was pretty terrific, with its thrashing acoustic guitars offset by the weird carnival atmosphere of the middle section, unspooling a morality tale about racism and violence and the blindness of parents and the perversion of justice. And All of a Sudden with its great line “life’s like a jigsaw, you get the straight bits, but there’s something missing in the middle” started growing on me until I eventually realized what a great album it truly was. However, I must confess that it took me literally years to reach that conclusion. This is a pattern that would continue for virtually every XTC album. I’d buy it. I’d listen to it. I’d hate it. I’d listen to it some more. I’d warm up to it a bit. I’d listen to it some more. I’d totally love it.

English Settlement was so well received that they had no choice but to tour it, and their first few gigs were met with wild enthusiasm. This was it. After years of slogging the back roads and sleeping in the van, they were finally getting their due, they were going to become stars. But Andy didn’t want to do it and felt torn between not wanting to disappoint the fans and his bandmates and wanting to just go crawl into a hole somewhere and sleep for a year. He tried to buck up and continue, but his body started rebelling, and he collapsed on stage and had to cancel parts of the tour. They tried to continue with the American leg of the tour, opening in San Diego and continuing up to LA, but he just couldn’t do it any more. He had severe stomach pains and panic attacks and could no longer go up on stage. The tour was cancelled and the band fled home. The fall-out was bad, with promoters threatening lawsuits and the band’s gear stuck in LA with them unable to pay to get it back and Andy locked in his house, terrified to even open the front door. Shortly after this, during sessions for the next album, Terry Chambers quit, turning XTC into a threesome with no permanent drummer. Dave and Colin figured it was just a phase and, after they’d had fun playing Sgt. Pepper, they’d go back on the road. But it wasn’t meant to be. XTC had played its last gig, and their shooting star which was on the verge of exploding fizzled and sputtered and fell back to earth.