XTC

Hoping to ride their momentum, they recorded their next album, Oranges and Lemons, in California, doing some of the tracking at the legendary Ocean Way Studios where numerous LA legends recorded – including British favorite, The Beach Boys, who had recently inspired Partridge with their intricate and unusual vocal harmonies. For whatever reason, Brits tend to favor the Beach Boys and Americans tend to favor the Beatles, but they hold roughly the same cultural spot in each country. Oranges and Lemons is a wonderful album, with several standout songs. It doesn’t feel as much of a focused work as Skylarking does, but no other XTC album does, so that’s hardly a complaint. The West Coast vibe can be clearly heard throughout, with an enormously spacious sound, a relaxed feel and lots of subtle psychedelic tricks (sound effects, backwards guitar solos and the like). The album also produced their biggest American hit, Partridge’s winning Mayor of Simpleton (he always did like a good pun). The album covers lots of ground, from the gleefully sardonic President Kill to the gorgeous, elegiac album closer Chalkhills and Children, which summed up in its title two of the maturing Andy Partridge’s most important concerns, his blighted hometown of Swindon (surrounded by chalkhills), and his newly found domestic joy of being a father.

Oranges and Lemons was sort of a piecemeal affair for me. There are several songs that I think are great, but also stretches that never grabbed me. The same was not true of their follow-up, the beautiful Nonsuch, named after a castle King Henry VIII leveled a village to build. Nonsuch is great all the way through, from the barn-burning opener Peter Pumpkinhead to the sadly reflective closer Books Are Burning. There are great songs about the love of children (Holly Up on Poppy) and the humiliation of cuckoldry (Dear Madame Barnum), which Partridge would soon find out about first hand, as his marriage was about to disintegrate. Moulding presents a few slightly preachy tracks, like The Smartest Monkey and War Dance, that are still musically interesting. My Bird Performs, Then She Appeared, Wrapped in Grey, the album is packed full of winners.

After Nonsuch, relations between XTC and Virgin, which were never great to begin with, fell apart completely. XTC had been on the label longer than any other band, outlasting even its founder, Richard Branson. They asked for a more equitable deal and were refused.

There was also a legendary project that Partridge had up his sleeve to tip his hat to another small ‘60s musical genre, the unashamedly cheerful, tooth-rottingly sweet pop music appropriately called bubblegum. His idea was to record an albums worth of faux bubblegum music and present it as a long lost collection of forgotten artists – each track would be by a different band, and all the songs would be about sex. Although the conceit is great, and fans of XTC’s foray as The Dukes of Stratosphear salivated at the idea, Virgin rejected it out of hand. As far as they were concerned, XTC wasn’t making enough money under their own name, why should the label get behind their obscure tribute to an arcane music that didn’t even acknowledge who did it?

Frustrated, XTC asked to be released from their contract. Virgin refused and so the band went on strike. Since any demos they’d send in would become the intellectual property of the label, they officially stopped writing and recording. But only officially, because you can’t keep musicians like Partridge and Moulding from writing material, but they holed up in their respective garden sheds and prepared to out-wait Virgin. Guitarist Dave Gregory picked up some session work to keep his fingers limber, but XTC had ceased being a going concern. Virgin waited for them to send them some new material and XTC waited for Virgin to give up. And waited and waited. It took over five years before Virgin finally relented and released the band from its contract.

After such a long wait, they had an enormous backlog of material (although, officially, they wrote and recorded those 50-60 demos during the weekend after their contract was torn up – prolific sods!). Andy and Colin had been settling comfortably into middle age and their music reflected that. Colin’s new songs had a down-at-the-pub, almost easy listening feel. Andy had been getting much more interested in orchestral arrangements, and spent hours in his studio working out different accompaniments. There was enough material to do a double album – at least – and the band started discussing doing one album of orchestral music and one of more traditional rock-oriented music. This new direction wasn’t suiting Dave Gregory particularly well. He wasn’t ready to sink gracefully into middle age. He wanted to keep up his guitar chops and there were becoming fewer opportunities to do that within the band. Plus, now that Andy was working on more orchestral arrangements on his own, he didn’t need Dave’s input as much. Dave argued about the direction the band was taking and, annoyed, Andy and Colin asked him to leave the sessions for a few days. He turned in his resignation the next morning, and a partnership that had lasted almost 20 years came to a quiet end.

Andy and Colin continued, and, seven years after Nonsuch, released two albums worth of material on their new label. Apple Venus, the first to hit the stores, was another giant step forward in the band’s development. The music is largely lush and orchestral, even experimentally classical, such as on the opening track, River of Orchids, with its swirling, interconnected string and woodwind lines. Most of the songs are Andy’s, and most of those deal with the rituals and pageantry of the English countryside and nature. There are a few smaller songs – Moulding’s two entries are somewhat charming but seem out of place, and Andy’s two guitar based songs – I’d Like That, an infectiously giddy love song, and Your Dictionary, a deliciously brutal hate song – are some of the best and most pointed songs he’s written. But overall the album is large and ambitious, pulling in the entire orchestra several times, most notably on the Vaughn-Williamsian Green Man.

Their follow-up release, Wasp Star, subtitled Apple Venus part 2, is less ambitious, and focuses on more traditional song structures and rock palettes. If this was the only album in their arsenal, Dave Gregory might have stuck it out, but Partridge and Moulding clearly have bigger fish to fry.

The band, such as it is, has been pretty quiet in the years since the release of Wasp Star, focusing on clearing out their attics. They released a highly anticipated box set of demos and out-takes called Coat of Many Cupboards with detailed notes that fans could pore over for years. And they started working on an even deeper collection of leftovers, called Fuzzy Warbles, that may run to eight or ten discs when all is said and done. They may be leftovers but, as one critic said, the songs these guys throw out are worth more than most bands’ entire careers. While sifting through material for the Fuzzy Warbles series (available only through mail), Colin pulled out, leaving Andy to release the set under his own name, something he had always been hesitant to do, knowing full well the balancing power of the rest of the band. But with Colin out of the project, that may signal the end of XTC, although, who knows, after being on strike for seven years before coming back with the triumphant one-two punch of Apple Venus and Wasp Star, you can never really count them out. It would be a shame if there were no new XTC recordings to look forward to, but it would be hard to be too upset. After all, they have recorded and released one of the strongest, most original, most provocative, sophisticated, humorous, and exciting bodies of work imaginable. XTC is easily one of the greatest bands of all times. After all, even my stepfather likes them.