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ummer 1983. XTC are sprinkling some studio fairy dust onto their next single ‘Wonderland’ in London’s Air Studios and Andy Partridge, the band’s primary songwriter and head chatterbox, is caught off guard. “I was in the isolation booth and I looked up to see George Martin at the mixing desk. He’d brought in with some RAF device to get sub-bass out of the synthesiser. I’m looking up ‘Fuck me, there’s George Martin. Ooh! I’m a Beatle!”. Under the glare of the Fifth Beatle, Andy wrote ‘Train Running Low on Soul Coal’, a breathless and deeply personal At 29, Andy felt past it as a musician and heading for the scrapheap. The song would form the emotional centre of the next XTC album, an album that would be forged in the heat of the rockiest period in the band’s career.
From signing with Virgin in 1977, XTC hardly stopped for breath. The band fired off four albums before the end of 1980, scored top 20 hits with ‘Making Plans for Nigel’, ‘Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)’ and ‘Senses Working Overtime’ and toured the world with the Police. By 1982, they had began to amass a fanbase in North America, where their hometown of Swindon sounded deliciously English, and had made the top five in the UK for the first time with their fifth LP, English Settlement, a peacock-rich double album that took their fidgety pop widescreen. Things began to unravel, though, after Partridge stopped taking the Valium pills he’d been prescibed since adolescence. A mishap with a cameraman resulted in an apparent ban from Top of the Pops, a blow to XTC the singles band, and Partridge experienced panic attacks and memory loss over the band’s gruelling touring schedule. “I found an old tour iternary of the States and there’s one day off in the whole tour,” says Andy “I wanted off this gravy train where we didn’t get any of the gravy”. The band’s first US tour as a headline act, scheduled for April 1982, was cancelled after one concert in San Diego; XTC would not tour again. "We took it for what it was,” remembers Colin. “The thing is, it was something Andy couldn't do and I don't think he could stand that. He would rather have it be portrayed as something he didn't want to do. People didn’t really understand mental illness in them days, not that they do a great deal now.” Andy’s guilt was assuaged on his return to England after the band’s final show. “Colin and I were snowed in at Chicago airport and he said to me ‘Look, I’m really glad you said we’re coming off the road because if you hadn’t have said it, I would’ve said it.”
Free from tour buses and hockey stadiums, Andy now envisioned XTC as “the kind of people who would have written music in the 18th century”; meticulous composers working out of public view. “I liked the anonymity of it,” he says. “We were almost the Residents!”. The first fruit from the new approach was 1983’s Mummer, a quilt of songs that feel more like musings from a sanatorium than the work of a rock band. ‘Love on a Farmboy’s Wages’ sees Andy liken his lot as a musician to the life of a farmer, while Colin’s ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’, about the war dead, was the first of his many meditations on mortality. The band had moved away from the jerky pop they’d made a trademark, with tracks like Mellotron-slathered epic ‘Deliver Us from the Elements’ and the raga-inspired ‘Beating of Hearts’ lighting a way forward. The album’s recording was sticky, however; drummer Terry Chambers left early in the sessions (Andy: “I’d stopped Terry’s fun, visiting the bars of the world ‘cos he was our in-house John Bonham”) and Virgin were unhappy with the material, forcing the band to record two new tracks and remix four others. “They wanted blood after English Settlement,” says Colin, “Mummer was a complete debacle. Jeremy Lascelles put us through an awful lot of torment to try and find a hit. There didn’t seem to be an obvious single but with our records there never is!” Mummer sank in the UK and US; Andy feels Virgin all but withdrew support for the album after its two advance singles flopped. “It was like ‘if they’re not going to tour, we’re not going to promote it’. It was pretty much rock bottom.”.
XTC could’ve dropped their tools there and then. Some fans thought they had. The last track on Mummer, ‘Funk Pop a Roll’, is a tirade against the pop industry with all the makings of a bitter bon voyage; Andy even signs off with a goofy “bye bye!” at the end. Luckily for us, the band doubled down. The next album would be more abrasive, more unorthodox, more Swindon. “I didn't think it was possible that the band could carry on and be respected by the record company and the fans if they didn't tour,” says Colin. “I was wrong. We survived and we prospered... ...I think we made being parochial a virtue”. Before recording their next album, XTC were filmed in Swindon for Channel 4’s Play at Home series, whose title fit the band’s status quo perfectly.
“Failure was fantastic for us.” pronounces Andy “It was ‘okay, if the bastards don’t like this one, the next one’s going to be world-beating!’” To produce their next waxwork, the band hooked up with David Lord, a classically-trained composer based in Bath whose grand Crescent Studios had been built on BBC jingle royalties and Avon speciality records. Lord had produced local boys the Korgis, Peter Gabriel and Tears for Fears, and Bath had the facilities and scenery XTC needed if they were to recover from the failure of Mummer. Oh, and the easy commute. “We drove from Swindon every day. Dave and I took it in turns.” says Colin “We’d live on takeouts”.
who’d recorded concert parties“I had a desire to recreate a little bit of Swindon,” explains Andy. “When I was a little kid, I used to walk with my granny past the big walls of the Great Western and hear all this crashing and clanging coming from inside and I thought ‘what are they doing in there?’. Some of those sounds stayed with me.” Andy sought to create a “beautifully screwed-up" sound world. “I wanted it to sound mechanical and violent. We’d had Pete Phipps on Mummer “The Mellotron at the start of All You Pretty Girls. It was sent through a palm-sized speaker, put it at the bottom of a metal waste bin and put a kitchen roll tube over the microphone. I think Joe Meek would’ve approved.”
‘Washaway’ “I was donking on this cronky old piano at home.” he says “I didn’t really take it that seriously, but the others said we should do it, so Dave took the bones of my piece and we worked it up.”
Slapp Happy’s Peter Blegvad recruited Andy and Colin to work on his first solo album, The Naked Shakespeare. There, the two met David Lord at his Crescent Studios in Bath, whose clientele included Tears for Fears, Peter Gabriel and the Korgis. Forget George Martin – David Lord had turned the Beatles down, or at least that’s what Andy believed. “David was a very competent musician himself from the classical school. He knew his onions.” Pete Phipps
“All You Pretty Girls”, a booming sea shanty with a winning chorus, a splash of friggin' in the riggin’ and - surely - all the makings of a megahit in the era of Nik Kershaw and Big Country. “I had fantasies about being a sailor because my dad was one, but i just don’t take orders very well” “I was lazily dicking around with some Hendrix and it sounded like a sea shanty! The tom-toms sound like sailors banging metallic crockery on deck
David Lord, whose Crescent Studios in Bath and enticing fee
If anyone was expecting another pastoral album opener ‘Wake Up’ should jolts them awake with a stop-start guitar intro that Andy compared to ‘two arguing Jack Russells’. “I had a recurring dream at the time about being first on the scene of an accident. The guitars are like an alarm going off before you're faced with somebody prostrate on the ground bleeding and you're expected to do something” David Lord took Colin’s demo and blew it up, with a choir annexed to the relatively straightforward song. “It just got bigger and bigger. He took it to the Albert Hall and back” Lord’s
Colin’s two songwriting contributions are characteristically ruminant; if The Big Express is towering metal structure, Colin is the disconcerted everyman who lives in it. Album opener ‘Wake Up’ springs into action with a stop-start guitar intro that Andy compared to ‘two arguing Jack Russells’. “I had a recurring dream at the time about being first on the scene of an accident.” says Colin “The guitars are like an alarm going off before you're faced with somebody prostrate on the ground bleeding and you're expected to do something” David Lord took Colin’s demo and blew it up, with a choir annexed to the relatively straightforward song. “It just got bigger and bigger. He took it to the Albert Hall and back” Lord’s hand is less evident on ‘I Remember the Sun’, a nostalgic remembrance of “pavements roasting... ..burning the soles of your feet” that makes an unexpected diversion into jazz pop territory. “My demo was more a shuffle. It didn’t go the full hog, but Pete Phipps has got this great jazz feel.”
“I started writing more about the minutiae of life," he says, “Death is the elephant in everyone's room. I used to read quite a bit of Betjeman and Larkin”
‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’, a jaunty promenade through Swindon laced with “a dash of Kinks and a smattering of A Teenage Opera”. It’s the closest thing XTC have to a ‘Penny Lane’, but the images in the lyrics are all genuine snapshots from life in Wiltshire’s “bloated village”, says Andy; “It’s very Swindon. ‘Drink my Oxo up and get away’, that’s the milkman. The ‘brand new catalogue nylon nightie’, that’s the sort of shit my mother used to wear. The ‘shiny grey-black snake of bikes’, that’s the Great Western workers at clocking-off time.”
“If you weren’t doing anything, you could look ‘round Bath. I mean, what’s not to like about that?”
“I think when technology comes along, you use it”
“I think when you have the history that we have together, you're always in contact, although we don't socialise and we never did, even when we were raging at our height as a band.”
“No, I don't think he was a George Martin-type figure. He wasn't particularly dictatorial. Andy certainly had a big say in how the record was going to go being the majority of his songs.” (AP Quote about his lot as a songwriter / XTC’s position with virgin)
XTC had borrowed from antiquity before - the Uffington White Horse famously adorns the sleeve of English Settlement, while Mummer was named for traditional folk plays of the British Isles (“Just country folks doing their own show... just like us” Partridge explained in 1984) - but they’d never dug up their own backyard like this. The Big Express is their ____
Reviewing “This World Over” for Smash Hits, famously scathing Morrissey was on the money - “XTC have stepped back from music industry machinations and are making better records”
Mummer was fraught with like reflected and was rejected by Virgin.
Flecked
His contempt for performance stretched to music videos
And a stint on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show as Agony Andy (his advice to a schoolkid excused from sex education? “Buy yourself a bike shed, that's the way I did it”).
Dispensing characteristically
All You Pretty Girls – Music video reported to have cost £30,000.
Seagulls – mellotron from melody maker ad, peacock-rich, demo very complete – band involvement? Train Running Low – acoustic version, breathless, regurgitating
XTC posed with Lode star 4003 for the inner sleeve and for the promo shots it was 2301 Dean Goods
Closer “Train Running Low on Soul Coal”, perhaps The Big Express’s most defining track, all tangled metal. Over an oppressive Beefheart-riding-a-caboose backing, Partridge . Dense
But it might be trumped by an earlier version; in Play at Home, Andy and Dave can be seen performing a breathless acoustic version of the song on the stage of Swindon’s Town Gardens Bowl, an art deco amphitheatre that resembles a dinky Hollywood Bowl. Their audience? Two people sitting on the grass. It’s an image that sums up not just The Big Express, but XTC as a whole; the little pop group that could making a din in their hometown for anyone who’ll listen. “The Big Express was the last of our English career,” reflects Colin. “Had we gone on to make another record that sold in equal proportions, I think Virgin would have pulled the plug. Maybe Todd Rundgren saved our career! There's a statement for you.”. The image of XTC as perpetual underdogs is beginning to look a little quaint; the and their lavish reissue packages, the most recent of which was Steven Wilson’s 5.1 remix of The Big Express, are major events. “When we made The Big Express, we couldn’t get arrested.” says Colin “We’ve never been cool, put it that way, but interest has exploded in the last ten to fifteen years. A lot of young people have cottoned on to what we did.” “The sick thing is we are more recognised now.” Andy says, “Somebody has painted two XTC murals in Swindon! I’m just happy new people are finding the music. We wanna jump the generations! Old people, middle aged people, fetuses!” Andy, Colin and Dave have never left Swindon. Could a reunion ever happen? “Well, I was 30 feet away from Colin the other day when I was in the Co-op.” says Andy. Small town.
Album opener “Wake Up”, with its ping-pong guitar intro, boldly announces
XTC as perpetual underdogs
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HUW THOMAS
2024 marks 40 years of since Swindon’s steam punks XTC released THE BIG EXPRESS. HUW THOMAS chats to ANDY PARTRIDGE and COLIN MOULDING about the noisiest album of their career.
Air Studios, Oxford Street, London, Summer 1983. XTC’s lead songwriter and head chatterbox Andy Partridge is hunkering down in a vocal booth at the mixing session for the band’s next single ‘Wonderland’, but something breaks his concentration. “I looked up and there’s George Martin sat at the mixing desk with Steve Nye, our producer. He’s fiddling around with a device, all Hammerite metal, looks real RAF, to get some sub-bass in the mix and I’m looking up and thinking ‘Fuck me, I’m a Beatle!”. Under the officer class glare of the Fifth Beatle, Partridge sketched out ‘Train Running Low on Soul Coal’, a feverish account of burnout and hopelessness; off the road and approaching thirty, he believed XTC were heading for the scrapheap.
The band had hardly stopped for breath. Since signing with Virgin in 1977, XTC had fired off five albums of fidgety guitar pop, scored top 20 hits with ‘Making Plans for Nigel’, ‘Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)’ and ‘Senses Working Overtime’ and started to amass a fanbase in North America, where their hometown of Swindon sounded deliciously English. However, things began to unravel after Partridge stopped taking the Valium pills he’d been prescribed since adolescence. He began experienced panic attacks and memory loss over the band’s gruelling touring schedule. “I found an old tour itinerary of the States and there’s one day off in the whole tour,” says Andy. “I wanted off this gravy train where we didn’t get any of the gravy”. The band’s first US tour as a headline act, scheduled for April 1982, was cancelled after one concert in San Diego; XTC would not tour again. Still, the train kept a-rollin’. "We took it for what it was,” remembers Colin Moulding, singer-songwriter and bassist. “I didn't think it was possible that the band could carry on and be respected by the record company and the fans if they didn't tour. I was wrong. We survived and we prospered.” Andy’s guilt was assuaged as the band left for England. “Colin and I were snowed in at Chicago airport and he said to me ‘Look, I’m really glad you said we’re coming off the road because if you hadn’t have said it, I would’ve said it.”
Free from tour buses and hockey stadiums and recuperating in Swindon, Andy now envisioned XTC as meticulous composers working out of public view. “I liked the anonymity of it,” he says. “We were almost the Residents!” The first fruit from the new approach was 1983’s Mummer, a quilt of songs that feel more like musings from a sanatorium than the work of a rock band. ‘Love on a Farmboy’s Wages’ sees Andy liken his lot as a musician to the life of a farmer, while Colin’s ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’, about the war dead, was the first of his many meditations on mortality. XTC had gone pastoral, though the album’s recording was hardly rolling hills; drummer Terry Chambers left early in the sessions (Andy: “I’d stopped Terry’s fun, visiting the bars of the world as our in-house John Bonham.”) and Virgin were unhappy with the material, forcing the band to record two new tracks and remix four others. “They wanted blood after English Settlement,” says Colin. “Mummer was a complete debacle. Jeremy Lascelles put us through an awful lot of torment to try and find a hit. There didn’t seem to be an obvious single but with our records there never is!” Mummer sank in the UK and US; Andy feels Virgin all but withdrew support for the album after its two advance singles flopped. “It was like ‘if they’re not going to tour, we’re not going to promote it’. It was pretty much rock bottom.” XTC could’ve dropped their tools there and then. Some fans thought they had. Instead, they doubled down. The next album would be more unorthodox, more abrasive, more Swindon. “Swindon is a unique part of the country no one wants to come from, but we don’t mind being parochial,” says Colin. “We’ve made it a virtue.” Before starting work on the new album, XTC were filmed in their hometown for Channel 4’s Play at Home series, whose title fit the band’s status quo perfectly. In the film, they can be seen commenting on an unusual mural on the side of a house in Prospect Place. Painted by Ken White, it features representations of some of Swindon’s most famous sons – Diana Dors, Desmond Morris and, between Rick Davies of Supertramp and Justin Hayward, the members of XTC past and present. This symbol of the band’s esteem in their hometown is no longer there.
To produce their new album, the band chose David Lord, a composer based in Bath whose Crescent Studios had been built on BBC jingle royalties and Avon speciality records. Lord had produced local boys the Korgis, Peter Gabriel and Tears for Fears, and Bath had the facilities and scenery Andy, Colin and guitarist Dave Gregory needed if they were to recover from the failure of Mummer. Oh, and the easy commute. “We drove from Swindon every day. Dave and I took it in turns,” says Colin. “We’d live on takeouts.” The band were intrigued by a tall tale about Lord turning down orchestrating ‘She’s Leaving Home’ (Lord maintains he was invited to be part of a cheering crowd for Sgt. Pepper, but was unable to make the recording). “He was a very competent musician himself from the classical school,” says Colin. “He knew his onions.” Andy, writing furiously about brutality – bullying, dodgy management, nuclear destruction – wanted the new album to clang with industry; “It was a desire to recreate a little bit of Swindon. When I was a little kid, I used to walk with my granny past the big walls of the Great Western and hear all this crashing and booming coming from inside and I thought ‘what are they doing in there?’. Some of those sounds stayed with me.”
Glitter Band alumnus Pete Phipps, who’d replaced Terry Chambers on Mummer, returned to the drum stool for the sessions to provide the “mechanical and violent” percussion Andy was looking for. Phipps had a newfangled gadget to contend with, however, as the band enlisted the snapping turtle sound of the LinnDrum, as heard on the Human League’s Dare, Heaven 17’s The Luxury Gap and the incidental music for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. “I think when technology comes along, you use it” says Colin of the drum machine that became a controversial part of the album’s legend. Andy is unrepentant: “It’s mostly real drums on that album, but we would have never found those Great Western sounds, the hissing steam crunch snare, with a conventional drum kit.” Andy is quick to point out that ‘Reign of Blows’, a cacophonous rocker about the routine horrors of warfare, does not feature the drum machine; “That's real drums processed to sound like hell. I wanted it to sound oppressive. We were accidentally inventing a whole new genre of music yet to come! I read a review of it online somewhere saying ‘I don’t like it because it’s just a LinnDrum.’. No it fucking isn’t, it’s Pete Phipps!”
For other tracks, the band raided the Crescent Studio cupboards. Andy says ‘Shake You Donkey Up’, a sort of Beefheart-does-feminism track that plunks XTC in cowpunk country, features “whatever we could find in the kitchen. I think there’s a tea tray, maybe a biscuit tin, some saucepans”. Ship-shape singalong ‘All You Pretty Girls’ opens with a Mellotron “sent through a palm-sized speaker, put it at the bottom of a metal waste bin and put a kitchen roll tube over the microphone,” says Andy. “I think Joe Meek would’ve approved.” The lyric of ‘All You Pretty Girls’ reflects the life Andy imagined for himself as a child: “I was lazily dicking around with some Hendrix and it sounded like a sea shanty! I still had fantasies about being a sailor because my dad was one. I was either going to be that or a policeman. Perverse really, imagine me as a copper or a sailor! I just don’t take orders well.”
Though Andy and Colin agree that David Lord wasn’t a George Martin figure, he did encourage the band to fill their new songs with ear candy. “I think he drove Colin and Dave potty with his precision.” says Andy. "He wanted things just right, which I don’t mind, you take as long as you need, but it was ‘let’s try this little xylophone out! Whaddya think Andy?’ Speaking to Neville Farmer in 1998, Dave Gregory recounted “We spent forever programming. I remember a whole afternoon spent trying to find the right hi-hat sound. It was stupid and the album lacks energy because of it!” For Colin’s two-chord wonder ‘Wake Up’, Lord took a relatively straightforward demo and got the builders in, annexing a choir and strings. “It just got bigger and bigger,” says Colin. “He lent his theatrical and classic mind to the arrangement and took it to the Albert Hall and back.” ‘Wake Up’ was chosen as the album opener thanks in no small part to the ping-pong guitar intro Andy compared to “two arguing Jack Russells”, and was inspired by a recurring dream Colin had about being first on the scene of an accident: “The guitars are like an alarm going off before you're faced with somebody prostrate on the ground bleeding and you're expected to do something.”
Andy’s ‘Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her’ was composed on the band’s Mellotron, picked up in South Wales after they saw a Melody Maker ad by some hippies. Its lyric, inspired by Andy’s feelings for Erica Wexler, on a where the crashing waves and seagulls seem to taunt our narrator. Simultaneously jaunty and discordant, ‘Seagulls’ is so removed from XTC’s usual sound it features a Euphonium solo. “It was one of the few times Dave and I ever argued in the studio,’ recounts Andy. “We’re both English gents and we like to get on with everyone, you know? He didn’t like some of the chords, some of the rubs going on and he was very upset. I put my cloven hoof down and said ‘no, it’s got to be like this.’ We could have done it Dave’s way but I think it took a little of the mystery away.” The final version of ‘Seagulls’ closely resembles Andy’s home demo, marking a change in XTC’s way of working: “Before English Settlement, we would knock it up in a rehearsal studio, but when Colin and I got four track cassette machines, we could plot out what we were hearing. As the years went by, the demos got more and more complex and Dave, Colin and whoever was drumming had less to do. I mean, sometimes they'd still come up with stuff that Colin and I couldn't envisage. That's the last percentage of magic that happens in the studio. Great ideas didn't stop.” I
Colin’s two songwriting contributions are characteristically ruminant; if The Big Express is a towering metal structure, Colin is the disconcerted everyman who lives in it. “I started writing more about the minutiae of life," he says. “Death is the elephant in everyone's room. I used to read quite a bit of Betjeman and Larkin.” His ‘I Remember the Sun’ is a nostalgic remembrance of “pavements roasting... ..burning the soles of your feet” that makes an unexpected diversion into jazz pop territory. “My demo was more a shuffle. It didn’t go the full hog, but Pete Phipps has got this great jazz feel.”
‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’, a jaunty promenade through Swindon laced with “a dash of Kinks and a smattering of A Teenage Opera”. It’s the closest thing XTC have to a ‘Penny Lane’, but the images in the lyrics are all genuine snapshots from life in Wiltshire’s “bloated village”, says Andy; “It’s very Swindon. ‘Drink my Oxo up and get away’, that’s the milkman. The ‘brand new catalogue nylon nightie’, that’s the sort of shit my mother used to wear. The ‘shiny grey-black snake of bikes’, that’s the Great Western workers at clocking-off time.” Digging up your backyard isn’t always so jolly; “I Bought Myself a Liarbird” is an acrid swipe at Ian Reid, the ex-army Swindon nightclub owner who’d managed XTC and whose mismanagement of the band’s finances was discovered after they came off the road.
“two fingers on the right hand and one finger on the left hand”
“It’s literally a Swindon concept album, the nearest we’ve ever been to a concept album.”
“It’s an outlier, but it was great fun to do.
“It’s a theme that’s run all the way through my career, really.. Misogyny and, how shall I say, just ignoring women to death.”
fret about nuclear war today. What do you think I'm going to do, catch it?”
Andy’s desire to “recreate a little bit of Swindon” resulted in a “beautifully screwed-up" sound world, all tangled metal and .
Colin remembers Lord as not “particularly dictatorial”, noting “Andy certainly had a big say in how the record was going to go.” this
Mellotron
ENDS HERE ONLY SHIT AFTER THIS
"Dave went to an Atmos playback of The Big Express in London. He sent some very complimentary emails after that, you know, saying how it had come up in his estimations. Time wounds all heals, as they say.”
“People think I've cut them out over the years but I haven't. They were totally essential. Everything they did. XTC would not have sounded a fraction like it did if it wasn't for Dave, Colin and Terry”
“It was a nice little studio and if you weren’t doing anything, you could look ‘round Bath. I mean, what’s not to like about that?”
“I think when you have the history that we have together, you're always in contact, although we don't socialise and we never did, even when we were raging at our height as a band.”
Reviewing “This World Over” for Smash Hits, famously scathing Morrissey was on the money - “XTC have stepped back from music industry machinations and are making better records”
Flecked
XTC posed with Lode star 4003 for the inner sleeve and for the promo shots it was 2301 Dean Goods
“Train Running Low on Soul Coal”, the first song written for The Big Express way back in that vocal booth, may be the album’s most defining track, all tangled metal.
But it might be trumped by an earlier version; in Play at Home, Andy and Dave can be seen performing an acoustic version of the song on the stage of Swindon’s Town Gardens Bowl, an art deco amphitheatre that resembles a dinky Hollywood Bowl. Their audience? Two kids sitting on the grass. It’s an image that sums up not just The Big Express, but XTC as a whole; the little pop group that could making a din in their hometown for anyone who’ll listen.
The Big Express was, sadly, another commercial failure for XTC. ‘All You Pretty Girls’, the lead single, tanked despite a £33,000 music video. Andy Partridge And a stint on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show as Agony Andy (his advice to a schoolkid excused from sex education? “Buy yourself a bike shed, that's the way I did it”).
had a video “You’re always disappointed when your kids don’t go out into the world and make a big success of themselves and it's the same for your singles or your albums, but failure was fantastic for the band in the long run.” pronounces Andy “It was ‘okay, if the bastards don’t like this one, the next one’s going to be world-beating!’” XTC definitively hoisted their psych flag for their next project, a mini-LP as the fictitious Dukes of Stratosphear rumoured to have sold better than The Big Express. Geffen, the band’s US label, nudged the band in the direction of Todd Rundgren for their next mainline album; Skylarking would be all but disowned by both XTC and Rundgren by its completion, but it was a commercial breakthrough for the band in the States and remains a critical high spot. “The Big Express was the last of our English career,” reflects Colin. “Had we gone on to make another record that sold in equal proportions, I think Virgin would have pulled the plug. Maybe Todd Rundgren saved our career! There's a statement for you.”
Dave took the Mellotron with him when he left XTC in 1999 (“our carriage clock to Dave, ‘here, have a Mellotron to put on the mantelpiece’” says Andy)
The image of XTC as perpetual underdogs is beginning to look a little quaint; Terry Chambers currently tours the back catalogue in EXTC and .
The latest in the band’s lavish reissue series was an expanded version of The Big Express containing new mixes by Steven Wilson; listening sessions in London and Los Angeles were attended by Wilson, Dave Gregory and hundreds of fans. There are even two new public murals dedicated to XTC in Swindon. “When we made The Big Express, we couldn’t get arrested,” says Colin. “We’ve never been cool, put it that way, but interest has exploded in the last ten to fifteen years. A lot of young people have cottoned on to what we did.” Andy agrees: “The sick thing is we are more recognised now. I’m just happy new people are finding the music. We wanna jump the generations! Old people, middle aged people, fetuses!” Andy, Colin and Dave have never left Swindon. Could a reunion ever happen? “Well, I was 30 feet away from Colin the other day when I was in the Co-op.” says Andy. Small town.
“People think I've cut them out over the years but I haven't. They were totally essential. Everything they did.”
n tour in 1980, Colin told Rolling Stone there was a “basic hatred” for the band in their hometown; if The Big Express is an olive branch, it’s the finest ever plucked
Washaway (b-side to “All You Pretty Girls” 7”)
“I was donking on this cronky old piano at home.” he says “I didn’t really take it that seriously, but the others said we should do it, so Dave took the bones of my piece and we worked it up.”
Work (demo)
“We used to chuck all the songs in a hat and hopefully everyone else would say, hey, that’s good. Usually it would be the producer, several people from the record label and the others in the band. It was a democratic process, damnit! Some nice songs fell between the cracks.”
Now We All Dead (It Doesn’t Matter) [demo]
A with a similar theme “Quite simple rock and roll chords really. We No, I can't remember it seriously. I'd have to sit with a demo and that's what I was doing. Yeah, it was it was another fatalistic okay when we're all dead none of this fussing and fighting will matter. None of none of the silly things that hang us up about each other down on earth will will matter if we're all dead.
I envisaged the angels on Bath Abbey, you've got the two ladders with angels going up. I was imagining angels getting halfway up and resting on a cloud and saying to eachother ‘well it doesn’t matter now we’re dead, none of this fussing and fighting’. It would be nice to realise that while we’re alive, wouldn’t it?”
Red Brick Dream (B-side)
XTC’s most blatant tribute to Swindon, a shimmering acoustic piece, was hidden on the 12” single of “All You Pretty Girls”. Andy: “This wasn’t officially recorded for the album, it was recorded for a TV documentary about Swindon, but to me, this is the very spinal column of The Big Express. Nobody said ‘yeah, that’s got to go on the album’ and I thought ‘oh shit, that’s the thread holding all the bits of cloth together to make the suit’. It’s a shame. It was my observations about my grandfather working at the Great Western.”
“It just got bigger and bigger. He took it to the Albert Hall and back!” - Colin
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HUW THOMAS
2024 marks 40 years of since Swindon’s steam punks XTC released THE BIG EXPRESS. HUW THOMAS chats to ANDY PARTRIDGE and COLIN MOULDING about the noisiest album of their career.
Air Studios, Oxford Street, London, Summer 1983. XTC’s lead songwriter and head chatterbox Andy Partridge is hunkering down in a vocal booth at the mixing session for the band’s next single ‘Wonderland’, but something breaks his concentration. “I looked up and there’s George Martin sat at the mixing desk with Steve Nye, our producer. He’s fiddling around with a device, all Hammerite metal, looks real RAF, to get some sub-bass in the mix and I’m looking up and thinking ‘Fuck me, I’m a Beatle!”. Under the officer class glare of the Fifth Beatle, Partridge sketched out ‘Train Running Low on Soul Coal’, a feverish account of burnout and hopelessness; off the road and approaching thirty, he believed XTC were heading for the scrapheap.
The band had hardly stopped for breath. Since signing with Virgin in 1977, XTC had fired off five albums of fidgety guitar pop and scored top 20 hits with ‘Making Plans for Nigel’, ‘Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)’ and ‘Senses Working Overtime’. They’d even started to amass a fanbase in North America, where their hometown of Swindon sounded deliciously English. However, things began to unravel after Andy Partridge stopped taking the Valium pills he’d been prescribed since adolescence. He began experienced panic attacks and memory loss over the band’s gruelling touring schedule. “I found an old tour itinerary of the States and there’s one day off in the whole tour,” says Andy. “I wanted off this gravy train where we didn’t get any of the gravy”. The band’s first US tour as a headline act, scheduled for April 1982, was cancelled after one concert in San Diego; XTC would not tour again. Still, the train kept a-rollin’. "We took it for what it was,” remembers Colin Moulding, singer-songwriter and bassist. “I didn't think it was possible that the band could carry on and be respected by the record company and the fans if they didn't tour. I was wrong. We survived and we prospered.” Andy’s guilt was assuaged as the band left for England. “Colin and I were snowed in at Chicago airport and he said to me ‘Look, I’m really glad you said we’re coming off the road because if you hadn’t have said it, I would’ve said it.”
Free from tour buses and hockey stadiums and recuperating in Swindon, Andy now envisioned XTC as meticulous composers working out of public view. “I liked the anonymity of it,” he says. “We were almost the Residents!” The first fruit from the new approach was 1983’s Mummer, a quilt of songs that feel more like musings from a sanatorium than the work of a rock band. ‘Love on a Farmboy’s Wages’ sees Andy liken his lot as a musician to the life of a farmer, while Colin’s ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’, about the war dead, was the first of his many meditations on mortality. The bands new XTC had gone pastoral, though the album’s recording was hardly rolling hills; drummer Terry Chambers left early in the sessions (Andy: “I’d stopped Terry’s fun, visiting the bars of the world as our in-house John Bonham.”) and Virgin were unhappy with the material, forcing the band to record two new tracks and remix four others. “They wanted blood after English Settlement,” says Colin. “Mummer was a complete debacle. Jeremy Lascelles put us through an awful lot of torment to try and find a hit. There didn’t seem to be an obvious single, but with our records, there never is!” Mummer sank in the UK and US; Andy feels Virgin all but withdrew support for the album after its two advance singles flopped. “It was like ‘if they’re not going to tour, we’re not going to promote it’. It was pretty much rock bottom.”
XTC could’ve dropped their tools there and then. Some fans thought they had. Instead, they doubled down. The next album would be more unorthodox, more abrasive, more Swindon. “Swindon is a unique part of the country no one wants to come from, but we don’t mind being parochial,” says Colin. “We’ve made it a virtue.” Before starting work on the new album, XTC were filmed in their hometown for Channel 4’s Play at Home series, whose title fit the band’s status quo perfectly. In the film, they can be seen commenting on an unusual mural on the side of a house in Prospect Place. Painted by Ken White, it features representations of some of Swindon’s most famous sons – Diana Dors, Desmond Morris and, between Rick Davies of Supertramp and Justin Hayward, the members of XTC past and present. This symbol of the band’s esteem in their hometown is no longer there.
To produce their new album, the band chose David Lord, a Bath University lecturer and composer who had produced local boys the Korgis, Peter Gabriel and Tears for Fears. Lord’s Crescent Recording Studio in Bath, built on BBC jingle royalties and Avon speciality records, had the facilities and scenery Andy, Colin and guitarist Dave Gregory needed if they were to recover from the failure of Mummer. Oh, and the easy commute. “We drove from Swindon every day. Dave and I took it in turns,” says Colin. “We’d live on takeouts.” The band were intrigued by a tall tale about Lord turning down orchestrating ‘She’s Leaving Home’ (Lord maintains he was invited to be part of a cheering crowd for Sgt. Pepper, but was unable to make the recording). “He was a very competent musician himself from the classical school,” says Colin. “He knew his onions.” Andy, writing furiously about brutality – bullying, dodgy management, nuclear destruction – wanted the new album to clang with industry: “It was a desire to recreate a little bit of Swindon. When I was a little kid, I used to walk with my granny past the big walls of the Great Western and hear all this crashing and booming coming from inside and I thought ‘what are they doing in there?’. Some of those sounds stayed with me.”
Glitter Band alumnus Pete Phipps, who had replaced Terry Chambers on Mummer, returned to the drum stool for the sessions to provide the “mechanical and violent” percussion Andy was looking for. Phipps had a newfangled gadget to contend with, however, as the band enlisted the caterpillar track sound of the LinnDrum, as on the Human League’s Dare, Heaven 17’s The Luxury Gap and the incidental music for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. “I think when technology comes along, you use it” says Colin of the drum machine that became a controversial part of the album’s legend. Andy is unrepentant: “It’s mostly real drums on that album, but we would have never found those Great Western sounds, the hissing steam crunch snare, with a conventional drum kit.” Andy is quick to point out that ‘Reign of Blows’, a cacophonous rocker about the routine horrors of warfare, does not feature the drum machine: “That's real drums processed to sound like hell. I wanted it to sound oppressive. We were accidentally inventing a whole new genre of music yet to come! I read a review of it online somewhere saying ‘I don’t like it because it’s just a LinnDrum.’. No it fucking isn’t, it’s Pete Phipps!”
For other tracks, the band raided the Crescent cupboards. Andy says ‘Shake You Donkey Up’, a sort of Beefheart-does-feminism track that stations XTC in cowpunk country, features “whatever we could find in the kitchen. I think there’s a tea tray, maybe a biscuit tin, some saucepans”. For ship-shape singalong ‘All You Pretty Girls’, the album’s most infectious track, Andy programmed the LinnDrum to sound like “sailors banging metallic crockery on deck”. Andy wrote the song after “lazily dicking around with some Hendrix” and discovering a chord pattern that sounded like a sea shanty: “I still had fantasies about being a sailor because my dad was one. I was either going to be that or a policeman. Perverse really, imagine me as a copper or a sailor! I just don’t take orders well.” A Mellotron, bought off some South Wales hippies for use on Mummer, features on the track. “It was sent through a palm-sized speaker, put it at the bottom of a metal waste bin and put a kitchen roll tube over the microphone,” says Andy. “I think Joe Meek would’ve approved.”
Though Andy and Colin agree that David Lord wasn’t a George Martin figure, he did encourage the band to fill their new songs with ear candy. “I think he drove Colin and Dave potty with his precision.” says Andy. "He wanted things just right, which I don’t mind, you take as long as you need, but it was ‘let’s try this little xylophone out! Whaddya think Andy?’ Speaking to Neville Farmer in 1998, Dave Gregory recounted “We spent forever programming. I remember a whole afternoon spent trying to find the right hi-hat sound. It was stupid and the album lacks energy because of it.” ‘Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her’ was virtually complete even before the band arrived at Crescent; Andy composed the rainy, anxious love song on the band’s Mellotron using “two fingers on the right hand and one finger on the left hand”, and his demo left little room for improvisation: “Before English Settlement, we would knock it up in a rehearsal studio, but when Colin and I got four track cassette machines, we could plot out what we were hearing. As the years went by, the demos got more and more complex and Dave, Colin and whoever was drumming had less to do. I mean, sometimes they'd still come up with stuff that Colin and I couldn't envisage. That's the last percentage of magic that happens in the studio.” Simultaneously jaunty and discordant, ‘Seagulls’ is so removed from XTC’s usual sound it features a Euphonium solo. “It was one of the few times Dave and I ever argued in the studio,’ recounts Andy. “We’re both English gents and we like to get on with everyone, you know? He didn’t like some of the chords, some of the rubs going on and he was very upset. I put my cloven hoof down and said ‘no, it’s got to be like this.’ We could have done it Dave’s way but I think it took a little of the mystery away.”
The heart of The Big Express must be ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’, a jaunty promenade through Swindon that Andy laced with “a dash of Kinks and a smattering of A Teenage Opera”. It’s the closest thing XTC have to a ‘Penny Lane’ but the images in the lyrics are all genuine snapshots from life in Wiltshire’s “bloated village”, says Andy: “It’s very Swindon. ‘Drink my Oxo up and get away’, that’s the milkman. The ‘brand new catalogue nylon nightie’, that’s the sort of shit my mother used to wear. The ‘shiny grey-black snake of bikes’, that’s the Great Western workers at clocking-off time.” ‘Smalltown’ was decorated with thickets of overdubs in the studio. When the band wanted brass samples, David Lord’s contacts came in handy; a bleary-eyed Curt Smith, knee-deep in sessions for Songs from the Big Chair, arrived at Crescent with an E-mu Emulator and some floppy discs to save the day.
Digging up your backyard isn’t always so jolly; ‘I Bought Myself a Liarbird’ is an acrid swipe at Ian Reid, the ex-army Swindon nightclub owner who’d managed XTC and whose mismanagement of the band’s finances was discovered after they came off the road.
‘This World Over’
“I was on the show and I was dicking around, as is my wont. I think somebody said at the end of the show ‘that was really funny, Andy. You should have a regular spot’
“What would happen is I would go up every week on the train and on the way up there, on the backs of a couple of postcards, I’d write pretend questions from pretend listeners with pretend answers. After a while the questions became real but originally they were made-up. It was just like a comedy slot. I've got a cassette of all my appearances somewhere.
Colin’s two songwriting contributions are characteristically ruminant; if The Big Express is a towering metal structure, Colin is the disconcerted everyman who lives in it. “I started writing more about the minutiae of life," he says. The gorgeous ‘I Remember the Sun’ is a nostalgic remembrance of “pavements roasting... ..burning the soles of your feet” that makes an unexpected diversion into jazz pop territory. “My demo was more a shuffle,” says Colin. “It didn’t go the full hog, but Pete Phipps has got this great jazz feel.” The two-chord wonder ‘Wake Up’ was inspired by a recurring dream about being first on the scene of an accident: “The guitars are like an alarm going off before you're faced with somebody prostrate on the ground bleeding and you're expected to do something.” Colin’s original demo was relatively straightforward, but David Lord got the builders in, annexing a choir and strings. “It just got bigger and bigger,” says Colin. “He lent his theatrical and classic mind to the arrangement and took it to the Albert Hall and back.” ‘Wake Up’ was chosen as the album opener thanks in no small part to the ping-pong guitar intro Andy compared to “two arguing Jack Russells”.
“It’s literally a Swindon concept album, the nearest we’ve ever been to a concept album.”
“It’s an outlier, but it was great fun to do.
“It’s a theme that’s run all the way through my career, really.. Misogyny and, how shall I say, just ignoring women to death.”
fret about nuclear war today. What do you think I'm going to do, catch it?”
Andy’s desire to “recreate a little bit of Swindon” resulted in a “beautifully screwed-up" sound world, all tangled metal and .
Colin remembers Lord as not “particularly dictatorial”, noting “Andy certainly had a big say in how the record was going to go.” this
Mellotron
ENDS HERE ONLY SHIT AFTER THIS
"Dave went to an Atmos playback of The Big Express in London. He sent some very complimentary emails after that, you know, saying how it had come up in his estimations. Time wounds all heals, as they say.”
“People think I've cut them out over the years but I haven't. They were totally essential. Everything they did. XTC would not have sounded a fraction like it did if it wasn't for Dave, Colin and Terry”
“It was a nice little studio and if you weren’t doing anything, you could look ‘round Bath. I mean, what’s not to like about that?”
“I think when you have the history that we have together, you're always in contact, although we don't socialise and we never did, even when we were raging at our height as a band.”
Reviewing “This World Over” for Smash Hits, famously scathing Morrissey was on the money - “XTC have stepped back from music industry machinations and are making better records”
Flecked
XTC posed with Lode star 4003 for the inner sleeve and for the promo shots it was 2301 Dean Goods
“Train Running Low on Soul Coal”, the first song written for The Big Express way back in that vocal booth, may be the album’s most defining track, all tangled metal.
But it might be trumped by an earlier version; in Play at Home, Andy and Dave can be seen performing an acoustic version of the song on the stage of Swindon’s Town Gardens Bowl, an art deco amphitheatre that resembles a dinky Hollywood Bowl. Their audience? Two kids sitting on the grass. It’s an image that sums up not just The Big Express, but XTC as a whole; the little pop group that could making a din in their hometown for anyone who’ll listen.
The Big Express was, sadly, another commercial failure for XTC. ‘All You Pretty Girls’, the lead single, tanked despite a £33,000 music video. Andy Partridge And a stint on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show as Agony Andy (his advice to a schoolkid excused from sex education? “Buy yourself a bike shed, that's the way I did it”).
had a video “You’re always disappointed when your kids don’t go out into the world and make a big success of themselves and it's the same for your singles or your albums, but failure was fantastic for the band in the long run.” pronounces Andy “It was ‘okay, if the bastards don’t like this one, the next one’s going to be world-beating!’” XTC definitively hoisted their psych flag for their next project, a mini-LP as the fictitious Dukes of Stratosphear rumoured to have sold better than The Big Express. Geffen, the band’s US label, nudged the band in the direction of Todd Rundgren for their next mainline album; Skylarking would be all but disowned by both XTC and Rundgren by its completion, but it was a commercial breakthrough for the band in the States and remains a critical high spot. “The Big Express was the last of our English career,” reflects Colin. “Had we gone on to make another record that sold in equal proportions, I think Virgin would have pulled the plug. Maybe Todd Rundgren saved our career! There's a statement for you.”
Dave took the Mellotron with him when he left XTC in 1999 (“our carriage clock to Dave, ‘here, have a Mellotron to put on the mantelpiece’” says Andy)
The image of XTC as perpetual underdogs is beginning to look a little quaint; Terry Chambers currently tours the back catalogue in EXTC and .
The latest in the band’s lavish reissue series was an expanded version of The Big Express containing new mixes by Steven Wilson; listening sessions in London and Los Angeles were attended by Wilson, Dave Gregory and hundreds of fans. There are even two new public murals dedicated to XTC in Swindon. “When we made The Big Express, we couldn’t get arrested,” says Colin. “We’ve never been cool, put it that way, but interest has exploded in the last ten to fifteen years. A lot of young people have cottoned on to what we did.” Andy agrees: “The sick thing is we are more recognised now. I’m just happy new people are finding the music. We wanna jump the generations! Old people, middle aged people, fetuses!” Andy, Colin and Dave have never left Swindon. Could a reunion ever happen? “Well, I was 30 feet away from Colin the other day when I was in the Co-op.” says Andy. Small town.
“People think I've cut them out over the years but I haven't. They were totally essential. Everything they did.”
n tour in 1980, Colin told Rolling Stone there was a “basic hatred” for the band in their hometown; if The Big Express is an olive branch, it’s the finest ever plucked
Washaway (b-side to “All You Pretty Girls” 7”)
“I was donking on this cronky old piano at home.” he says “I didn’t really take it that seriously, but the others said we should do it, so Dave took the bones of my piece and we worked it up.”
Work (demo)
“We used to chuck all the songs in a hat and hopefully everyone else would say, hey, that’s good. Usually it would be the producer, several people from the record label and the others in the band. It was a democratic process, damnit! Some nice songs fell between the cracks.”
Now We All Dead (It Doesn’t Matter) [demo]
A with a similar theme “Quite simple rock and roll chords really. We No, I can't remember it seriously. I'd have to sit with a demo and that's what I was doing. Yeah, it was it was another fatalistic okay when we're all dead none of this fussing and fighting will matter. None of none of the silly things that hang us up about each other down on earth will will matter if we're all dead.
I envisaged the angels on Bath Abbey, you've got the two ladders with angels going up. I was imagining angels getting halfway up and resting on a cloud and saying to eachother ‘well it doesn’t matter now we’re dead, none of this fussing and fighting’. It would be nice to realise that while we’re alive, wouldn’t it?”
Red Brick Dream (B-side)
XTC’s most blatant tribute to Swindon, a shimmering acoustic piece, was hidden on the 12” single of “All You Pretty Girls”. Andy: “This wasn’t officially recorded for the album, it was recorded for a TV documentary about Swindon, but to me, this is the very spinal column of The Big Express. Nobody said ‘yeah, that’s got to go on the album’ and I thought ‘oh shit, that’s the thread holding all the bits of cloth together to make the suit’. It’s a shame. It was my observations about my grandfather working at the Great Western.”