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SCRIPTS
ARTICLES
INTERVIEWS Andy Partridge/XTC |
Andy Partridge of XTC: The Wasp Star Interview
TapeOp #19 Sept/Oct 2000
I saw XTC live on Nov. 23, 1980, at the Masonic Temple Auditorium, Detroit, MI, USA opening for The Police. The only problem with the show was that I had no idea who XTC was. I remember a visually jarring slide show (or was it film?), Dave Gregory walking over to play keyboards once or twice, and two rabid fans begging us for our front row seats just to see the opener (the seats weren’t ours to give but we let them have them anyway.) This was my first concert. My folks had dropped us off and had dinner downtown while we endured and basked in the raw rock experience that was the Police in those days. My dad asked how the opener was and I said, "They were allright." Twelve months later, thanks to a late night, Sunday only, new-music program called "Radios in Motion," airing on the legendary WWWW radio station out of Detroit, I had become a huge fan of XTC. A couple years after that, I was lamenting that XTC had stopped touring when I realized that I had seen my heroes live and didn’t even know it! This is were I’d cash in my time travel tokens in a second. All that aside, I’ve remained a fan all these years, bought everything I could, scrounged a few bootlegs and evangelized their greatness to all who would listen (why do we force our likes onto other people?). Like many fans, I was very excited when "Apple Venus" was released in February 1999. Despite several years of record company battles and personal crisis, they had delivered another outstanding album. But I surely can’t be trusted to be objective. Now in May 2000, they’ve released their follow up (really volume two) to "Apple Venus," "Wasp Star." Where "Apple Venus" was orchestral and sweet, "Wasp Star" is guitar-driven and compelling. With parts of both albums being partially recorded at their home studio, I thought it’d be interesting to hear about their process.
So this record ("Wasp Star") was done at home? It was actually done in our own studio. Volume 1 was done in a mixture of all sorts of places. It was done in kind of a converted stable that Haydn Bendall had, then we did some in Abbey road and finished it off in Colin’s living room. And this one … I think that we realized that recording in Colin’s living room had great results. You know, as long as you have nice quality gear, you can just about work anywhere. So having decided that, it was just a case of "Well, look at that big double garage out there that you don’t use. It’s just full of junk. And look at the room next to it that you just store coal in. Why don’t we get converting. So this is the first album that we’ve recorded in our own studio, which was Colin’s double garage. That’s great. What kind of gear do you have in there? We have a Radar. A Radar? (Laughs) Do you know Radar? No, I don’t. Oh, you don’t know Radar. Well, it’s hard-disk recording, 24 track. Oh, okay. I thought you were making a joke. (Laughs) So we can detect people coming up the drive there. Well, you were saying earlier about recording at Colin’s house and being afraid someone would come in the front door. I think we’ve got over a lot of problems like that now because it’s kind of a dedicated studio space. It’s not actually his house. Before he had to give over the front half of his house, and we had a mixing desk and some bits and pieces in one room and a mic stand in another room or in his hallway. But this time, we had a dedicated space to do it in. It’s a great luxury. It’s better than throwing a thousand pounds a day at somebody else’s studio. And you can work in your jammies. Exactly. You can sit there in your slippers picking your nose. It’s a luxury not to have a clock on the wall that’s going "100 pounds, 200 pounds, 300 pounds, 400 pounds." It seems like the record is a simpler record. I knew you were recording at home so I was thinking we might have another "The Big Express" on our hands, as far as a lot of stuff in the production. No, we wanted to make a more stripped sort of record. So there’s a lot of single guitar rather than two-part guitar stuff. What happens is people say. "Oh, that’s nice stereo guitar." But, actually, a lot of the tracks where you think there is one guitar, it’s an electric guitar with a microphone on the solid body, so you have just the sound of the strings coming out. Then you take a DI and treat that and that becomes the other channel, so you have a wide, schizophrenic sound. In one channel, you have this very thin, ultra-present sound, which you can’t get down pick-ups, and that becomes, say, the left channel, for example. And over on the right channel, you have a kind of fuzzy, deep, electrified sound, which is the DI part of it treated. Then you blend them together, and you can sort of put your head inside a four-dimensional guitar sound. Did you have any trouble with time alignment on that thing? No, because it’s all happening as is. The DI is pretty instantaneous. By the time it comes down the mic, it’s the same time it takes to come down the DI. So I don’t think we were changing phase or anything like that. You guys recorded guitars like that first with the song "Beating of Hearts." Yeah, that’s right. That was also weird tuning on that one. That was every string tuned to the note of E. But yeah, we mess around with guitars a little bit. There’s a really great variety of guitar tones on this record, and I was wondering if you have a bevy of amps at your disposal or… No, I’m afraid it’s a bevy of Pod, it’s a brace of Pod we have at our disposal. Uh, it’s probably the Pod then going out through my little Sessionette 70, which is a pretty crappy Solid State amp. Or through Colin's bass equipment. Sometimes, if we want it with a little extra deep poke, we put it through his Gallien-Krueger bass setup. But it’s usually Pod and, as I say, a lot of the guitar tones have this mic’d up-close, dead sound in there as well for ultra-presence. But yeah, I think we have to thank Pod for a lot of those tones. It’s highly recommended. I think everyone whose tried one out has bought one. We also put a lot of stuff in the mix through it as well. A lot of drums went through it. Any keyboard things we probably put through it. Vocals went through it, guitars all went through it, bass went through it—you name it, it was going in there. "Stupidly Happy," the devil voice is singing through the Pod. Plus, we used a little bit of Pod on some of the mixes to give it just a very little bit of very smooth tube-y distortion on some of the vocals. "I’m the Man Who Murdered Love" I think had a little bit of that. So Pod, I think, is one of those beautiful things that you can just about flatter anything when you use it. So the whole CD was tracked to disc. Yeah, we recorded everything to Radar and we planned to use two Radars in the mix. So we started recording on Nick's, filled up what we needed to fill up, sometimes we only used one. But as we got near the maximum of the 24-track Radar, we said "Well, we’re going to get one of our own in any case," so we bought one of our own second-hand. Just ran the two of these together, giving us 48 tracks. Is this a stand-alone or do you need a computer. It’s all self-dedicated. It’s excellent quality, and in practice, it works like a tape machine so you really don’t have to read the manual. You can sit at it and away you go. Do you know what the recording resolution on that is? Sheesh. No. You’re going to have to look that up. That’s out of my depth there. It sounds great. I was wondering if it was tape or not, because this morning I was doing a shuffle with "Nonsuch," "Apple Venus" and "Wasp Star," trying to see how well they went together, and the sound quality is different, but it’s all very contemporary feeling. Yeah, it is different. A lot of that has to do with the engineering, as well. I mean, "Nonsuch" is possibly—it’s a bit of a toss up between that and "Oranges and Lemons"—the best engineered record we ever had. That was Barry Hammond at Chipping Norton Studios. Unfortunately, he doesn’t engineer anymore. He gave it all up for computer. And this one is Nick Davis who—god, this sounds terribly insulting, but it’s not meant to be—but I don’t think he’s as good an engineer as Barry, but he’s certainly a fantastic mixer, so … it’s got a different sound. It’s a harder, more wasp-y sound, damn it. So did you do any of the engineering? How involved are you in the whole recording process? Pretty total. For example, mostly it will be Nick, but occasionally we brought in Alan Douglas, who’s a well-known engineer in England, to do things like the drum tracks. He also did the string quartet and oboe on "The Wheel and The Maypole." So that’s a real horn on that? Oh yeah, that’s Kate St. John playing oboe. And it’s a string quartet tracked up twice, I think, so it’s an eight-piece thing, two violins, viola and cello. But most of the engineering was Nick. A little bit was by Alan Douglas, a few bits and pieces were left over from the original sketching out sessions with Haydn Bendall, and a couple of bits were recorded by Barry Hammond. I think Barry was responsible for recording most of "My Brown Guitar," because we initially started a whole lot of these songs in one session because it was supposed to be a double album. But we just ran out of time and money and had to divide it up into two discs. So imagine it as a double album with a year between finding the other disc at the back of the package. That was part of the reason that I threw those three records in at the same time, 'cause I think some of the variety that you’ve broken up between the two new discs is kind of on one disc with "Nonsuch." Yeah, see "Nonsuch" was a bit schizophrenic, and I think that if it has a fault it’s schizophrenia. Oh, I don’t think so. Really? Not at all. Oh, good man. Well, it also contains some of our better material, so I’m pleased with "Nonsuch" as far as songwriting goes. But I don’t know whether it suffers from its schizophrenia. I don’t know whether stuff like "Rook" and "Wrapped In Gray" and "Bungalow" sit well with things like "Ugly Underneath" and "Peter Pumpkin Head." Yeah, well I think "Bungalow," that one definitely sticks out a little bit, but I think if you go back through all your records there’s always the song or two like that, where people are going to be distracted by it. Like on "Mummer" … Probably the odd one on Mummer was "Funk Pop a Roll," which was sort of the first song that was written for "The Big Express," if you see what I mean. You could see where I wanted to go with that one. Yeah. I was thinking that I’ve listened to this music so much that I don’t question it anymore. If there is something that sticks out, after a while it’s just part of the record. You absorb it and take it as a whole. Right. I can’t think of an album, anybody’s album, that doesn’t have a stick-out track on it, whether you’re Captain Beefheart or Joni Mitchell or The Beatles. I mean, there’s always at least one track that doesn’t feel like it belongs with the bunch. And it’s usually the last tune. Hidden. (Laughter) It’s usually the George Harrison one. But no, there’s usually something that even on the kind of most joyfully banal records like "The Stooges Funhouse," I mean, "L.A. Blues" is just four minutes of feedback and screaming—it doesn’t even have a structure. On the new one then, what do you feel is the odd duck? Uh, hmm… You can change your opinion later. Probably—it’s either "Standing In For Joe," because I know—that’s cheating really—I know that it wasn’t written with this album in mind. That’s an older tune, right? It was actually written for the bubblegum project. Colin didn’t want to throw it away, and I can’t blame him 'cause I think it’s a good song. We just kind of did it in the way that it demanded to be done, without doing a bubblegum pastiche or anything. We just kind of did it. It’s either that or "The Wheel and The Maypole," but that’s cheating, really, cause it’s two songs that are glued together. Are you playing harmonica on "In Another Life"? It’s not me. It’s actually Colin. There’s a little story behind that. Colin did a demo of that, and I think he was playing two harmonicas, either two harmonicas at once or he dubbed one into the other one. He did it on a four-track cassette machine. He either lost or broke one of the harmonicas. It was like a cheap Chinese one. It was probably 99 pence. It probably had the name "Dung Collector for the Commune Harmonica" on it or whatever. It had this great rasping, wheezy, punctured sound, and he either busted or lost the thing, and we could not get that sound again when we went to do it for real. And we said, "Look, I don’t suppose there’s anyway we could take this cassette demo, take the harmonica off of it." And Nick did it, by putting it into Radar and chopping it up. I think we changed the tempo a little bit, but he just edited it so that it fit the track. And everything else was brand new, apart from the harmonica which was, I think, a combination of a blues vamper and this cheap Chinese harmonica, which was on a cassette demo. So since you’ve got the home studio, you’re probably not going to be demoing as much anymore. No, I will, 'cause that’s how I get to know a song, I have to. Really? I have to demo it because that’s how I get inside the song and can put it on and can wear it. I know my demos have been getting very polished over the years, but that’s the process of finding out what works. And I don’t think I can do it in front of a room full of people. I think I have to be on my own, making a lot of mistakes and making decisions that—it’s part of the writing process. I can’t leave demoing alone. It’s built into writing a song, I think. You discover what works or what doesn’t work in that stage of the song. So are their earlier versions of demos then … No, they probably get worked out on a mono cassette, you know, structurally, so it works with one guitar and me stamping my foot and yelling into a cassette machine. Then when it feels good like that, it then goes on to "Does this work on electric guitar? Should it be on piano? Should it be on acoustic guitar? If it’s on acoustic guitar, should it be on electric guitar? Or a keyboard or an organ sound? What should it be?" And then you can start that process of finding out how to wear the song properly. But it’s got to work in idiot-form on a cassette machine for me first. That makes sense. But all the demos of yours that I’ve heard don’t sound much different to me from what’s on the record. No, well that’s the process. Finding out what works. Then when you’ve found out what works, you don’t have to go so much further when you get into a proper studio. But now we have a proper studio. I don’t know. It might change. It might make me lazier, I don’t know. I don’t want it to. I want to stay vigilant. But the demo process, I think, is very precious for almost psychiatrically understanding how the song should be. I see. So you’re not concerned with losing the demo charm? No. That’s its own world. It’s kind of trapped in that world. I don’t think too much when I’m doing the demos, it’s just lazy engineering and lots of sloppy playing. You get to know that, whatever, a fuzzy sound will work there, a keyboard will work there—whatever it takes—you get to know a trumpet is needed there. That’s the sort of thing you can suss out on your own time without other people sitting around playing with their thumbs. I think it’s a habit from being in expensive studios in the past. You know, I want to find out what works before I bring it along to everyone else. It’s economics. It will be interesting to see if the luxury changes the process. Mm-hmm. What’s in the works now? Do you have any ideas for the next project? I think the next project from us is going to be a lot of demos that were never released. You know, fans have got bootlegs of this stuff, and it sounds pretty awful by the time they get it. So, I thought it would be quite nice to let them have better-quality things, or slightly better-quality things. But as far as the next official recording, I honestly don’t know, which is frightening and exciting. It really is a blank sheet now, because "Apple Venus" and "Wasp Star" were a long time in writing, a long time in putting together. And, initially, it should have been a double album. But finance, and the speed of certain people and personality problems, contributed to not making it a double disc in the first place. I think this kind of rectifies it now. We’ve recorded the other disc that is part of the package. What are you going to be doing to support it, as they say? Well, for my part, it’s just going to be talking. But to be truthful, I’m finding it tricky to talk about this record because it’s just a bunch of songs. They have no deep inner significance. And it’s not like a comeback record or a record made on unusual instruments. It’s just a real solid, honest-to-goodness Sunday dinner. Well the last two records, since they were such a long time coming, seem like very solid XTC-type records, in the regard that they don’t have the pastoral setting of "English Settlement" or the hyped-up machinery of "Oranges and Lemons." They’re more just kind of like you guys, to me. Yeah, I know what you mean, but then again, I could certainly explain the atmosphere of any of the albums, and why the circumstances made any album have that certain atmosphere. For example, "English Settlement," to me, part of the charm of it was the fact that it felt sort of sprawling and unfinished. And that was the first time we’d worked without a producer as such. We just had Hugh Padgham—"No, record this, Hugh." So hardly any editing went on. It was also that we wanted to broaden the palette. And you can hear that. Acoustic instruments start creeping in, keyboards start creeping in… And the fretless bass … Yeah, and then the fact that I didn’t want to take the thing on the road kind of literally released me from having to make an album that could then be shoved in the faces of an audience and that it would sound similar to the record. You guys ended up performing some of that, though. Yeah, but I wasn’t happy with it, and it never sounded right. So, I can take any album and say why it sounded like it did. It’s not a mystery to me. The circumstances and the personalities involved at the time and the instrumental choice and whatever’s the flavor-of-the-minute instrument-wise. I mean stuff like "The Big Express," I wanted to make a noisy record. Most of the songs were written on open-E tuning so they have sort of a blues-y edge. We just bought ourselves a Linn Drum, so you can see this already starting to form a picture. It’s going to have a harder, blues-y edge, with a blues kind of tuning. There are mechanical drums for the first time. They’re tougher, simpler songs, but they’re done with a producer who had a thing for orchestral arranging. So, you throw all these ingredients in and that’s the sound of "The Big Express." I know that you’re legendary as a controller … I’m not too bad, actually. I usually get this rep from people who have disagreed with how to give birth to a record, and therefore, they think I’m just a control freak. Actually, I’m not a control freak. I just want my music to come out how I hear it. And, if anybody has an idea that’s better than my idea, I’ll hear it, and if it’s better for the song, we’ll go with that. But if it’s not better for the song, I won’t allow them to use it because I feel it’s degrading the song. So, I suppose maybe you hear that from people who had crappier ideas than I do. Well, I think it is a result of it seeming like you have a full vision of the song ahead of time, probably because of the extensive demoing you do. It’s the demo process and the fact that you hear it kind of semi-formed in your head. So by the time you’ve squeezed it through the stage set, how the stage is going to be set during the demoing process, you have a pretty good idea of the play that you’ve finished up with. As I say, if people have better ideas, then they do get used, but that’s not always the case. Would you ever be willing to write a batch of songs and kind of hand them off and see what someone does with them? Um… I don’t think so, because I don’t trust anyone enough, because it’s life and death for me. It’s just a job for anyone else. I see. You know, Mr. Producer, "Oh, it’s just a job. They’re my next project." But for me, I have to stand by that record for the rest of my life. I have to believe in it a 1000 percent. I have to know that all the sounds and all the words and all the things were how I really wanted it to be, or else I couldn’t live with myself when I shut the bedroom door at the end of the day. Well, how did you feel about the "Testimonial Dinner" recordings in regards to having other people cover your music and re-interpret it. I was very flattered by sort of the idea of it. But I think only some of the tracks were any good. I especially liked "Dear God," by Sarah McLachlan and Ruben Blades’ "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul." I thought that was a great version. It makes me want to drive a car. And I don’t drive. I want to be cruising around the hills of Monaco in my open-top sports car. But I wouldn’t be my passenger if I were you. I’d have us over the cliff in seconds. I actually think that the Verve Pipe’s "Wake Up" had an idiocy that I liked. But, you know, some of the tracks worked, and some of them I thought, "Oh, why bother." Yeah, there have been so many of these tribute albums in the last 10 years. We get asked about once a month to do a tribute album. The latest one we’ve been asked to do is a McCartney one. And as nice as it would be, as nice as it would have been to do the Kinks one, or the The Bonzos one, or The Beach Boys one or whatever—as nice as it would be to do these things, you could do them and do nothing else. That’s all you’d be doing. If you were to do the McCartney one, what tune would you have gone after? That’s a tough one. For most people, the first choice would probably be between solo or Beatles. I think probably Beatles, because he had something to prove when he was a Beatle, and he had someone saying "No, I’ve got a better song than that and it goes like this." So only the cream of the cream I think got through. But on the solo stuff, you also got the clots as well as the cream. I mean some of those latter solo discs I can’t listen to. I have a fantasy that he’ll ring me up and say, "Look, I can’t write anymore. Please help me." He called Elvis Costello, didn’t he? (Laughter) So, tribute albums—they’re a nice idea, but it has to be said that if you’re paying tribute to somebody, you either have to do it exactly the same or so different that it can never be compared. And if you do it exactly the same, you do a carbon copy, what’s the point? Well, you’re (Captain Beefheart’s) "Ella Guru" was kind of a carbon copy. Exactly, and that’s kind of how I learned the lesson, because I couldn’t envisage it any more wonderful being any other way. I just thought, "Well, I’m going to have to try and un-pick this and make the same thing." And that became a personal piece of fun, to make it as close to the original as we could, given the drum machine and a reluctant bass player and another guitarist who didn’t want to be involved in the session. Then you find out that the only way is to do a carbon copy of it and then, ultimately, what’s the point? You might as well have the real thing and not denigrate it by having a second-generation copy. So tribute records are a no-win situation. I just wonder why there are so many of them these days. I think people do it for money reasons. Do those records sell, though? I have no idea. I don’t think I’ve seen any pieces of paper from Thirsty Ear, or whoever did that one. No, that wasn’t anything that was of interest to me. There are loads of unofficial tribute albums of ours, I can think of three volumes straight off. You know, people get together on the Internet and do these things, and they send me a copy. Some of those are more interesting. I think those are probably a little bit more fun. That’s true. One thing I was curious about, with the "Apple Venus" record, since it is sort of orchestral, do you have any classical composer in particular you enjoy? Do you have any influences in that realm? Or is it just your homespun orchestral music? Probably not so much classics as show tunes. If you were my age and you listened to radio as a kid, there wasn’t any such thing as rock ‘n’ roll radio in England or even pop radio until the mid-sixties. It was all light entertainment, and it was usually something orchestral, like songs from musicals or orchestral treatments of what you’d call "light music." Because I wasn’t really exposed to the classics until I was much older, I think what shaped me was hearing these things from shows, "light" entertainment … I suppose you’d call it easy listening. I think the era and the location you’re talking about has a real particular sound. I mean there wasn’t any pop radio in England until ‘67. When Radio One came along. Until then you might get the odd pop tune that’d creep through. But as a kid, the thing that I thought was the best thing on the radio was novelty songs. Yeah. Songs that would make me laugh or just have weird sounds on them. Any of those you remember? Stuff like "I Am A Mole" by The Overlanders, which had kind of a beatnik rock n’ roll thing. (Sings) "I’m not a rat or a cat or a bat/I’m not a gnu or a wee kangaroo/I’m not a fox or a lox" or a whatever and then he goes really reverb-y and he goes "I am a mole and I live in a hole." It’s kind of this bizarre sounding beatnik rock n’ roll thing, and I thought that was particularly spookily interesting. That and "Martian Hop" by The Randells. Stupid space-noise rock n’ roll, and those records by people like Vout Stainhouse, which is like this multitracked sped-up guitar. It sounded like Venusian pop music. I loved all that. If you ever find the Danny Kaye album "Mommy Give Me a Drink of Water," it’s all orchestral arrangements with Danny Kaye singing these kids songs and the orchestral arrangements are achingly beautiful. They really are good. I would have liked some of the stuff on "Apple Venus" to have been like that. Do you think you’re ever going to make the bubblegum record? No. That went on to the backburner for so long it’s just turned into goo. I think everyone needs a real fine version of "Bumper Cars," though. (Laughs) Well, I think when we do the demos the "Fuzzy Warbles" set that’s going to make an appearance on there. Well, it was listed as a track that was supposed to be on "Wasp Star" on the Internet for a while. Yeah, I got out-voted. Because when we were originally recording all this, it was supposed to be a double album, and we voted on everything. That one just didn’t get in. It seems like it would be a little odd. It might end up being the partner of "Standing in for Joe" then, as far as being the odd duck. It will come out on the "Fuzzy Warbles" set. That’s what you’re calling the demos, then? Yeah. I think the first stuff you let go demo-wise was "Find The Fox," "The Troubles" and "Terrorism." What inspired you to let go of that stuff without "proper" recording? I think the record company was pressuring us for more material, and we couldn’t afford to go in the studio. So we said, "Let’s use the demos." People seemed to like it. They didn’t mind that it was lo-fi. Oh no, I adored those. It’s a great testament to your songwriting that they work on that level. Did you ever hear those things on "Jules Verne's Sketchbook"? I’ve heard bits and pieces. Some of the stuff I got a hold of was totally different— weird collections of a lot of that same material. Some of your midi/solo instrumental music, stuff like "Do the Dwarf." Those are just jam sessions from the "Mummer" recording. Yeah, I don’t feel too bad about people hearing that stuff these days. ‘Cause nobody says, "Hey, it’s bad quality." Are you still using the four-track cassette very much? No, only to clean up these old recordings for the "Fuzzy Warbles" project. "Fuzzy Warbles" is a line in "A Clockwork Orange" that I thought was so good when I heard it. He’s trying to pick up the girls in the record shop, and he’s talking about the pop music that they like, and he refers to their pop music as "fuzzy warbles." I thought that was a fantastic phrase and I thought, "That is going to be an album title." So that’s going to be our demo project. Hopefully, it’ll be four albums worth or more. Released as one monster? No, four little monsters 'cause you can really lose a whole lot of money paying to make box sets. It cost us a fortune making the box sets for "Transistor Blast." Well, you guys want the nice packaging. Yeah, it costs. Now, you art direct a lot of that stuff, don’t you? Oh yeah, I insist. Do you do any visual art aside from that? I paint occasionally. I doodle more than anything else. But I do insist on packaging us for the rest of the world. It’s like choosing what the record's going to wear—to be seen forevermore. I think that’s important. All your covers have been really nice. I think especially some of the singles. I really like the "Push Once Button" picture for "This World Over." People think it’s an atomic bomb button. I did. It’s not. If you live in England, a very subtle, very well-known object is the bus stopping request button on every bus, and if you really need to stop, it says "push once." And everyone in England knows this button. But because it’s red, and it says "push once" it seems final. There’s a great atomic paranoia about it. On the Chalkhills Web site, there’s a dictionary for all us yanks 'cause we don’t get half of your references, but it spoils it a little bit. It undoes the magic for you. Back to the music, it seems like you’ve done a fair bit of this midi/sequencing music. Not too much, but it has been very influential in latter years. Is there any idea about doing an instrumental record? Something akin to "Through The Hill"? I think I got that out of my system for a little bit with that, but I’d like to work with Harold again, I think he’s very inspirational. It’s a great record. It’s one of my favorites. Well, thank you. You know, I can’t listen to it, and I’ll tell you why. I was making it at a time where I was going through a divorce, and it plunges me back into a very dark state of mind when I listen to it. Although some of the music on there is kind of up, it does sort of a Pavlovian trick where I hear it, and I feel kind of depressed again. And that shouldn’t be the case because the music is blameless, but just for me personally. Yeah, I understand. Maybe with time. Yeah. I actually put it on the other day wondering if it would still have the same effect, and it did. Although, I prefer some things more than others. I think "Natural Track Through The Hill" is nice, and I like the one that goes (hums tune). It’s got lots of many multitracked buzzing guitars. It’s a great record. I was thinking about how you’d approached Brian Eno early on, and you did the "Andy Paints Brian" thing on "Battery Brides." So, have you any desire to still try and work with him. No, because I think from what I know of how he works, he tends to work with people who don’t have much idea of what the hell they want to do. Like U2? U2 and The Talking Heads and people that make stuff up from jams. He sits there and says, "Oh, that bit was good, what was that? Ok we’ll make that the verse." Then they jam for another 20 minutes, and he says "Oh, that bit was good. Okay, tone up and that can become the chorus." And for me that’s the antithesis of the very structured way I like to work. Well, some of the "Through The Hill" stuff... Yeah, they were largely improvised on little springboards, parts to jump off from, that we had worked out about three days before. I see. And we probably threw away half as much material again, thinking it didn’t work. Hmm. I really like it. It was a pleasure when it came out. Well, good man. Lastly, I hate to ask, but what about the rock opera. Tummy, The Arm-less, Leg-less Boy. He’s just a stomach. He’s a stomach that plays Cluedo. I see it now. "Tummy can you hear me," and then really loud rumbling noise. No, no rock operas. What a daft expression that is. But what about something with a big story behind it? I’d like to do a musical in the Hollywood tradition of the 40s and 50s. Some of the best music ever has been stuff written for musicals. So, I’d like to do that. But there are 101 things I’d like to do. The world’s for playing with, so let’s have some fun.
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ARTICLES
INTERVIEWS Andy Partridge/XTC |
Andy Partridge of XTC: The Wasp Star Interview
TapeOp #19 Sept/Oct 2000
I saw XTC live on Nov. 23, 1980, at the Masonic Temple Auditorium, Detroit, MI, USA opening for The Police. The only problem with the show was that I had no idea who XTC was. I remember a visually jarring slide show (or was it film?), Dave Gregory walking over to play keyboards once or twice, and two rabid fans begging us for our front row seats just to see the opener (the seats weren’t ours to give but we let them have them anyway.) This was my first concert. My folks had dropped us off and had dinner downtown while we endured and basked in the raw rock experience that was the Police in those days. My dad asked how the opener was and I said, "They were allright." Twelve months later, thanks to a late night, Sunday only, new-music program called "Radios in Motion," airing on the legendary WWWW radio station out of Detroit, I had become a huge fan of XTC. A couple years after that, I was lamenting that XTC had stopped touring when I realized that I had seen my heroes live and didn’t even know it! This is were I’d cash in my time travel tokens in a second. All that aside, I’ve remained a fan all these years, bought everything I could, scrounged a few bootlegs and evangelized their greatness to all who would listen (why do we force our likes onto other people?). Like many fans, I was very excited when "Apple Venus" was released in February 1999. Despite several years of record company battles and personal crisis, they had delivered another outstanding album. But I surely can’t be trusted to be objective. Now in May 2000, they’ve released their follow up (really volume two) to "Apple Venus," "Wasp Star." Where "Apple Venus" was orchestral and sweet, "Wasp Star" is guitar-driven and compelling. With parts of both albums being partially recorded at their home studio, I thought it’d be interesting to hear about their process.
So this record ("Wasp Star") was done at home? It was actually done in our own studio. Volume 1 was done in a mixture of all sorts of places. It was done in kind of a converted stable that Haydn Bendall had, then we did some in Abbey road and finished it off in Colin’s living room. And this one … I think that we realized that recording in Colin’s living room had great results. You know, as long as you have nice quality gear, you can just about work anywhere. So having decided that, it was just a case of "Well, look at that big double garage out there that you don’t use. It’s just full of junk. And look at the room next to it that you just store coal in. Why don’t we get converting. So this is the first album that we’ve recorded in our own studio, which was Colin’s double garage. That’s great. What kind of gear do you have in there? We have a Radar. A Radar? (Laughs) Do you know Radar? No, I don’t. Oh, you don’t know Radar. Well, it’s hard-disk recording, 24 track. Oh, okay. I thought you were making a joke. (Laughs) So we can detect people coming up the drive there. Well, you were saying earlier about recording at Colin’s house and being afraid someone would come in the front door. I think we’ve got over a lot of problems like that now because it’s kind of a dedicated studio space. It’s not actually his house. Before he had to give over the front half of his house, and we had a mixing desk and some bits and pieces in one room and a mic stand in another room or in his hallway. But this time, we had a dedicated space to do it in. It’s a great luxury. It’s better than throwing a thousand pounds a day at somebody else’s studio. And you can work in your jammies. Exactly. You can sit there in your slippers picking your nose. It’s a luxury not to have a clock on the wall that’s going "100 pounds, 200 pounds, 300 pounds, 400 pounds." It seems like the record is a simpler record. I knew you were recording at home so I was thinking we might have another "The Big Express" on our hands, as far as a lot of stuff in the production. No, we wanted to make a more stripped sort of record. So there’s a lot of single guitar rather than two-part guitar stuff. What happens is people say. "Oh, that’s nice stereo guitar." But, actually, a lot of the tracks where you think there is one guitar, it’s an electric guitar with a microphone on the solid body, so you have just the sound of the strings coming out. Then you take a DI and treat that and that becomes the other channel, so you have a wide, schizophrenic sound. In one channel, you have this very thin, ultra-present sound, which you can’t get down pick-ups, and that becomes, say, the left channel, for example. And over on the right channel, you have a kind of fuzzy, deep, electrified sound, which is the DI part of it treated. Then you blend them together, and you can sort of put your head inside a four-dimensional guitar sound. Did you have any trouble with time alignment on that thing? No, because it’s all happening as is. The DI is pretty instantaneous. By the time it comes down the mic, it’s the same time it takes to come down the DI. So I don’t think we were changing phase or anything like that. You guys recorded guitars like that first with the song "Beating of Hearts." Yeah, that’s right. That was also weird tuning on that one. That was every string tuned to the note of E. But yeah, we mess around with guitars a little bit. There’s a really great variety of guitar tones on this record, and I was wondering if you have a bevy of amps at your disposal or… No, I’m afraid it’s a bevy of Pod, it’s a brace of Pod we have at our disposal. Uh, it’s probably the Pod then going out through my little Sessionette 70, which is a pretty crappy Solid State amp. Or through Colin's bass equipment. Sometimes, if we want it with a little extra deep poke, we put it through his Gallien-Krueger bass setup. But it’s usually Pod and, as I say, a lot of the guitar tones have this mic’d up-close, dead sound in there as well for ultra-presence. But yeah, I think we have to thank Pod for a lot of those tones. It’s highly recommended. I think everyone whose tried one out has bought one. We also put a lot of stuff in the mix through it as well. A lot of drums went through it. Any keyboard things we probably put through it. Vocals went through it, guitars all went through it, bass went through it—you name it, it was going in there. "Stupidly Happy," the devil voice is singing through the Pod. Plus, we used a little bit of Pod on some of the mixes to give it just a very little bit of very smooth tube-y distortion on some of the vocals. "I’m the Man Who Murdered Love" I think had a little bit of that. So Pod, I think, is one of those beautiful things that you can just about flatter anything when you use it. So the whole CD was tracked to disc. Yeah, we recorded everything to Radar and we planned to use two Radars in the mix. So we started recording on Nick's, filled up what we needed to fill up, sometimes we only used one. But as we got near the maximum of the 24-track Radar, we said "Well, we’re going to get one of our own in any case," so we bought one of our own second-hand. Just ran the two of these together, giving us 48 tracks. Is this a stand-alone or do you need a computer. It’s all self-dedicated. It’s excellent quality, and in practice, it works like a tape machine so you really don’t have to read the manual. You can sit at it and away you go. Do you know what the recording resolution on that is? Sheesh. No. You’re going to have to look that up. That’s out of my depth there. It sounds great. I was wondering if it was tape or not, because this morning I was doing a shuffle with "Nonsuch," "Apple Venus" and "Wasp Star," trying to see how well they went together, and the sound quality is different, but it’s all very contemporary feeling. Yeah, it is different. A lot of that has to do with the engineering, as well. I mean, "Nonsuch" is possibly—it’s a bit of a toss up between that and "Oranges and Lemons"—the best engineered record we ever had. That was Barry Hammond at Chipping Norton Studios. Unfortunately, he doesn’t engineer anymore. He gave it all up for computer. And this one is Nick Davis who—god, this sounds terribly insulting, but it’s not meant to be—but I don’t think he’s as good an engineer as Barry, but he’s certainly a fantastic mixer, so … it’s got a different sound. It’s a harder, more wasp-y sound, damn it. So did you do any of the engineering? How involved are you in the whole recording process? Pretty total. For example, mostly it will be Nick, but occasionally we brought in Alan Douglas, who’s a well-known engineer in England, to do things like the drum tracks. He also did the string quartet and oboe on "The Wheel and The Maypole." So that’s a real horn on that? Oh yeah, that’s Kate St. John playing oboe. And it’s a string quartet tracked up twice, I think, so it’s an eight-piece thing, two violins, viola and cello. But most of the engineering was Nick. A little bit was by Alan Douglas, a few bits and pieces were left over from the original sketching out sessions with Haydn Bendall, and a couple of bits were recorded by Barry Hammond. I think Barry was responsible for recording most of "My Brown Guitar," because we initially started a whole lot of these songs in one session because it was supposed to be a double album. But we just ran out of time and money and had to divide it up into two discs. So imagine it as a double album with a year between finding the other disc at the back of the package. That was part of the reason that I threw those three records in at the same time, 'cause I think some of the variety that you’ve broken up between the two new discs is kind of on one disc with "Nonsuch." Yeah, see "Nonsuch" was a bit schizophrenic, and I think that if it has a fault it’s schizophrenia. Oh, I don’t think so. Really? Not at all. Oh, good man. Well, it also contains some of our better material, so I’m pleased with "Nonsuch" as far as songwriting goes. But I don’t know whether it suffers from its schizophrenia. I don’t know whether stuff like "Rook" and "Wrapped In Gray" and "Bungalow" sit well with things like "Ugly Underneath" and "Peter Pumpkin Head." Yeah, well I think "Bungalow," that one definitely sticks out a little bit, but I think if you go back through all your records there’s always the song or two like that, where people are going to be distracted by it. Like on "Mummer" … Probably the odd one on Mummer was "Funk Pop a Roll," which was sort of the first song that was written for "The Big Express," if you see what I mean. You could see where I wanted to go with that one. Yeah. I was thinking that I’ve listened to this music so much that I don’t question it anymore. If there is something that sticks out, after a while it’s just part of the record. You absorb it and take it as a whole. Right. I can’t think of an album, anybody’s album, that doesn’t have a stick-out track on it, whether you’re Captain Beefheart or Joni Mitchell or The Beatles. I mean, there’s always at least one track that doesn’t feel like it belongs with the bunch. And it’s usually the last tune. Hidden. (Laughter) It’s usually the George Harrison one. But no, there’s usually something that even on the kind of most joyfully banal records like "The Stooges Funhouse," I mean, "L.A. Blues" is just four minutes of feedback and screaming—it doesn’t even have a structure. On the new one then, what do you feel is the odd duck? Uh, hmm… You can change your opinion later. Probably—it’s either "Standing In For Joe," because I know—that’s cheating really—I know that it wasn’t written with this album in mind. That’s an older tune, right? It was actually written for the bubblegum project. Colin didn’t want to throw it away, and I can’t blame him 'cause I think it’s a good song. We just kind of did it in the way that it demanded to be done, without doing a bubblegum pastiche or anything. We just kind of did it. It’s either that or "The Wheel and The Maypole," but that’s cheating, really, cause it’s two songs that are glued together. Are you playing harmonica on "In Another Life"? It’s not me. It’s actually Colin. There’s a little story behind that. Colin did a demo of that, and I think he was playing two harmonicas, either two harmonicas at once or he dubbed one into the other one. He did it on a four-track cassette machine. He either lost or broke one of the harmonicas. It was like a cheap Chinese one. It was probably 99 pence. It probably had the name "Dung Collector for the Commune Harmonica" on it or whatever. It had this great rasping, wheezy, punctured sound, and he either busted or lost the thing, and we could not get that sound again when we went to do it for real. And we said, "Look, I don’t suppose there’s anyway we could take this cassette demo, take the harmonica off of it." And Nick did it, by putting it into Radar and chopping it up. I think we changed the tempo a little bit, but he just edited it so that it fit the track. And everything else was brand new, apart from the harmonica which was, I think, a combination of a blues vamper and this cheap Chinese harmonica, which was on a cassette demo. So since you’ve got the home studio, you’re probably not going to be demoing as much anymore. No, I will, 'cause that’s how I get to know a song, I have to. Really? I have to demo it because that’s how I get inside the song and can put it on and can wear it. I know my demos have been getting very polished over the years, but that’s the process of finding out what works. And I don’t think I can do it in front of a room full of people. I think I have to be on my own, making a lot of mistakes and making decisions that—it’s part of the writing process. I can’t leave demoing alone. It’s built into writing a song, I think. You discover what works or what doesn’t work in that stage of the song. So are their earlier versions of demos then … No, they probably get worked out on a mono cassette, you know, structurally, so it works with one guitar and me stamping my foot and yelling into a cassette machine. Then when it feels good like that, it then goes on to "Does this work on electric guitar? Should it be on piano? Should it be on acoustic guitar? If it’s on acoustic guitar, should it be on electric guitar? Or a keyboard or an organ sound? What should it be?" And then you can start that process of finding out how to wear the song properly. But it’s got to work in idiot-form on a cassette machine for me first. That makes sense. But all the demos of yours that I’ve heard don’t sound much different to me from what’s on the record. No, well that’s the process. Finding out what works. Then when you’ve found out what works, you don’t have to go so much further when you get into a proper studio. But now we have a proper studio. I don’t know. It might change. It might make me lazier, I don’t know. I don’t want it to. I want to stay vigilant. But the demo process, I think, is very precious for almost psychiatrically understanding how the song should be. I see. So you’re not concerned with losing the demo charm? No. That’s its own world. It’s kind of trapped in that world. I don’t think too much when I’m doing the demos, it’s just lazy engineering and lots of sloppy playing. You get to know that, whatever, a fuzzy sound will work there, a keyboard will work there—whatever it takes—you get to know a trumpet is needed there. That’s the sort of thing you can suss out on your own time without other people sitting around playing with their thumbs. I think it’s a habit from being in expensive studios in the past. You know, I want to find out what works before I bring it along to everyone else. It’s economics. It will be interesting to see if the luxury changes the process. Mm-hmm. What’s in the works now? Do you have any ideas for the next project? I think the next project from us is going to be a lot of demos that were never released. You know, fans have got bootlegs of this stuff, and it sounds pretty awful by the time they get it. So, I thought it would be quite nice to let them have better-quality things, or slightly better-quality things. But as far as the next official recording, I honestly don’t know, which is frightening and exciting. It really is a blank sheet now, because "Apple Venus" and "Wasp Star" were a long time in writing, a long time in putting together. And, initially, it should have been a double album. But finance, and the speed of certain people and personality problems, contributed to not making it a double disc in the first place. I think this kind of rectifies it now. We’ve recorded the other disc that is part of the package. What are you going to be doing to support it, as they say? Well, for my part, it’s just going to be talking. But to be truthful, I’m finding it tricky to talk about this record because it’s just a bunch of songs. They have no deep inner significance. And it’s not like a comeback record or a record made on unusual instruments. It’s just a real solid, honest-to-goodness Sunday dinner. Well the last two records, since they were such a long time coming, seem like very solid XTC-type records, in the regard that they don’t have the pastoral setting of "English Settlement" or the hyped-up machinery of "Oranges and Lemons." They’re more just kind of like you guys, to me. Yeah, I know what you mean, but then again, I could certainly explain the atmosphere of any of the albums, and why the circumstances made any album have that certain atmosphere. For example, "English Settlement," to me, part of the charm of it was the fact that it felt sort of sprawling and unfinished. And that was the first time we’d worked without a producer as such. We just had Hugh Padgham—"No, record this, Hugh." So hardly any editing went on. It was also that we wanted to broaden the palette. And you can hear that. Acoustic instruments start creeping in, keyboards start creeping in… And the fretless bass … Yeah, and then the fact that I didn’t want to take the thing on the road kind of literally released me from having to make an album that could then be shoved in the faces of an audience and that it would sound similar to the record. You guys ended up performing some of that, though. Yeah, but I wasn’t happy with it, and it never sounded right. So, I can take any album and say why it sounded like it did. It’s not a mystery to me. The circumstances and the personalities involved at the time and the instrumental choice and whatever’s the flavor-of-the-minute instrument-wise. I mean stuff like "The Big Express," I wanted to make a noisy record. Most of the songs were written on open-E tuning so they have sort of a blues-y edge. We just bought ourselves a Linn Drum, so you can see this already starting to form a picture. It’s going to have a harder, blues-y edge, with a blues kind of tuning. There are mechanical drums for the first time. They’re tougher, simpler songs, but they’re done with a producer who had a thing for orchestral arranging. So, you throw all these ingredients in and that’s the sound of "The Big Express." I know that you’re legendary as a controller … I’m not too bad, actually. I usually get this rep from people who have disagreed with how to give birth to a record, and therefore, they think I’m just a control freak. Actually, I’m not a control freak. I just want my music to come out how I hear it. And, if anybody has an idea that’s better than my idea, I’ll hear it, and if it’s better for the song, we’ll go with that. But if it’s not better for the song, I won’t allow them to use it because I feel it’s degrading the song. So, I suppose maybe you hear that from people who had crappier ideas than I do. Well, I think it is a result of it seeming like you have a full vision of the song ahead of time, probably because of the extensive demoing you do. It’s the demo process and the fact that you hear it kind of semi-formed in your head. So by the time you’ve squeezed it through the stage set, how the stage is going to be set during the demoing process, you have a pretty good idea of the play that you’ve finished up with. As I say, if people have better ideas, then they do get used, but that’s not always the case. Would you ever be willing to write a batch of songs and kind of hand them off and see what someone does with them? Um… I don’t think so, because I don’t trust anyone enough, because it’s life and death for me. It’s just a job for anyone else. I see. You know, Mr. Producer, "Oh, it’s just a job. They’re my next project." But for me, I have to stand by that record for the rest of my life. I have to believe in it a 1000 percent. I have to know that all the sounds and all the words and all the things were how I really wanted it to be, or else I couldn’t live with myself when I shut the bedroom door at the end of the day. Well, how did you feel about the "Testimonial Dinner" recordings in regards to having other people cover your music and re-interpret it. I was very flattered by sort of the idea of it. But I think only some of the tracks were any good. I especially liked "Dear God," by Sarah McLachlan and Ruben Blades’ "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul." I thought that was a great version. It makes me want to drive a car. And I don’t drive. I want to be cruising around the hills of Monaco in my open-top sports car. But I wouldn’t be my passenger if I were you. I’d have us over the cliff in seconds. I actually think that the Verve Pipe’s "Wake Up" had an idiocy that I liked. But, you know, some of the tracks worked, and some of them I thought, "Oh, why bother." Yeah, there have been so many of these tribute albums in the last 10 years. We get asked about once a month to do a tribute album. The latest one we’ve been asked to do is a McCartney one. And as nice as it would be, as nice as it would have been to do the Kinks one, or the The Bonzos one, or The Beach Boys one or whatever—as nice as it would be to do these things, you could do them and do nothing else. That’s all you’d be doing. If you were to do the McCartney one, what tune would you have gone after? That’s a tough one. For most people, the first choice would probably be between solo or Beatles. I think probably Beatles, because he had something to prove when he was a Beatle, and he had someone saying "No, I’ve got a better song than that and it goes like this." So only the cream of the cream I think got through. But on the solo stuff, you also got the clots as well as the cream. I mean some of those latter solo discs I can’t listen to. I have a fantasy that he’ll ring me up and say, "Look, I can’t write anymore. Please help me." He called Elvis Costello, didn’t he? (Laughter) So, tribute albums—they’re a nice idea, but it has to be said that if you’re paying tribute to somebody, you either have to do it exactly the same or so different that it can never be compared. And if you do it exactly the same, you do a carbon copy, what’s the point? Well, you’re (Captain Beefheart’s) "Ella Guru" was kind of a carbon copy. Exactly, and that’s kind of how I learned the lesson, because I couldn’t envisage it any more wonderful being any other way. I just thought, "Well, I’m going to have to try and un-pick this and make the same thing." And that became a personal piece of fun, to make it as close to the original as we could, given the drum machine and a reluctant bass player and another guitarist who didn’t want to be involved in the session. Then you find out that the only way is to do a carbon copy of it and then, ultimately, what’s the point? You might as well have the real thing and not denigrate it by having a second-generation copy. So tribute records are a no-win situation. I just wonder why there are so many of them these days. I think people do it for money reasons. Do those records sell, though? I have no idea. I don’t think I’ve seen any pieces of paper from Thirsty Ear, or whoever did that one. No, that wasn’t anything that was of interest to me. There are loads of unofficial tribute albums of ours, I can think of three volumes straight off. You know, people get together on the Internet and do these things, and they send me a copy. Some of those are more interesting. I think those are probably a little bit more fun. That’s true. One thing I was curious about, with the "Apple Venus" record, since it is sort of orchestral, do you have any classical composer in particular you enjoy? Do you have any influences in that realm? Or is it just your homespun orchestral music? Probably not so much classics as show tunes. If you were my age and you listened to radio as a kid, there wasn’t any such thing as rock ‘n’ roll radio in England or even pop radio until the mid-sixties. It was all light entertainment, and it was usually something orchestral, like songs from musicals or orchestral treatments of what you’d call "light music." Because I wasn’t really exposed to the classics until I was much older, I think what shaped me was hearing these things from shows, "light" entertainment … I suppose you’d call it easy listening. I think the era and the location you’re talking about has a real particular sound. I mean there wasn’t any pop radio in England until ‘67. When Radio One came along. Until then you might get the odd pop tune that’d creep through. But as a kid, the thing that I thought was the best thing on the radio was novelty songs. Yeah. Songs that would make me laugh or just have weird sounds on them. Any of those you remember? Stuff like "I Am A Mole" by The Overlanders, which had kind of a beatnik rock n’ roll thing. (Sings) "I’m not a rat or a cat or a bat/I’m not a gnu or a wee kangaroo/I’m not a fox or a lox" or a whatever and then he goes really reverb-y and he goes "I am a mole and I live in a hole." It’s kind of this bizarre sounding beatnik rock n’ roll thing, and I thought that was particularly spookily interesting. That and "Martian Hop" by The Randells. Stupid space-noise rock n’ roll, and those records by people like Vout Stainhouse, which is like this multitracked sped-up guitar. It sounded like Venusian pop music. I loved all that. If you ever find the Danny Kaye album "Mommy Give Me a Drink of Water," it’s all orchestral arrangements with Danny Kaye singing these kids songs and the orchestral arrangements are achingly beautiful. They really are good. I would have liked some of the stuff on "Apple Venus" to have been like that. Do you think you’re ever going to make the bubblegum record? No. That went on to the backburner for so long it’s just turned into goo. I think everyone needs a real fine version of "Bumper Cars," though. (Laughs) Well, I think when we do the demos the "Fuzzy Warbles" set that’s going to make an appearance on there. Well, it was listed as a track that was supposed to be on "Wasp Star" on the Internet for a while. Yeah, I got out-voted. Because when we were originally recording all this, it was supposed to be a double album, and we voted on everything. That one just didn’t get in. It seems like it would be a little odd. It might end up being the partner of "Standing in for Joe" then, as far as being the odd duck. It will come out on the "Fuzzy Warbles" set. That’s what you’re calling the demos, then? Yeah. I think the first stuff you let go demo-wise was "Find The Fox," "The Troubles" and "Terrorism." What inspired you to let go of that stuff without "proper" recording? I think the record company was pressuring us for more material, and we couldn’t afford to go in the studio. So we said, "Let’s use the demos." People seemed to like it. They didn’t mind that it was lo-fi. Oh no, I adored those. It’s a great testament to your songwriting that they work on that level. Did you ever hear those things on "Jules Verne's Sketchbook"? I’ve heard bits and pieces. Some of the stuff I got a hold of was totally different— weird collections of a lot of that same material. Some of your midi/solo instrumental music, stuff like "Do the Dwarf." Those are just jam sessions from the "Mummer" recording. Yeah, I don’t feel too bad about people hearing that stuff these days. ‘Cause nobody says, "Hey, it’s bad quality." Are you still using the four-track cassette very much? No, only to clean up these old recordings for the "Fuzzy Warbles" project. "Fuzzy Warbles" is a line in "A Clockwork Orange" that I thought was so good when I heard it. He’s trying to pick up the girls in the record shop, and he’s talking about the pop music that they like, and he refers to their pop music as "fuzzy warbles." I thought that was a fantastic phrase and I thought, "That is going to be an album title." So that’s going to be our demo project. Hopefully, it’ll be four albums worth or more. Released as one monster? No, four little monsters 'cause you can really lose a whole lot of money paying to make box sets. It cost us a fortune making the box sets for "Transistor Blast." Well, you guys want the nice packaging. Yeah, it costs. Now, you art direct a lot of that stuff, don’t you? Oh yeah, I insist. Do you do any visual art aside from that? I paint occasionally. I doodle more than anything else. But I do insist on packaging us for the rest of the world. It’s like choosing what the record's going to wear—to be seen forevermore. I think that’s important. All your covers have been really nice. I think especially some of the singles. I really like the "Push Once Button" picture for "This World Over." People think it’s an atomic bomb button. I did. It’s not. If you live in England, a very subtle, very well-known object is the bus stopping request button on every bus, and if you really need to stop, it says "push once." And everyone in England knows this button. But because it’s red, and it says "push once" it seems final. There’s a great atomic paranoia about it. On the Chalkhills Web site, there’s a dictionary for all us yanks 'cause we don’t get half of your references, but it spoils it a little bit. It undoes the magic for you. Back to the music, it seems like you’ve done a fair bit of this midi/sequencing music. Not too much, but it has been very influential in latter years. Is there any idea about doing an instrumental record? Something akin to "Through The Hill"? I think I got that out of my system for a little bit with that, but I’d like to work with Harold again, I think he’s very inspirational. It’s a great record. It’s one of my favorites. Well, thank you. You know, I can’t listen to it, and I’ll tell you why. I was making it at a time where I was going through a divorce, and it plunges me back into a very dark state of mind when I listen to it. Although some of the music on there is kind of up, it does sort of a Pavlovian trick where I hear it, and I feel kind of depressed again. And that shouldn’t be the case because the music is blameless, but just for me personally. Yeah, I understand. Maybe with time. Yeah. I actually put it on the other day wondering if it would still have the same effect, and it did. Although, I prefer some things more than others. I think "Natural Track Through The Hill" is nice, and I like the one that goes (hums tune). It’s got lots of many multitracked buzzing guitars. It’s a great record. I was thinking about how you’d approached Brian Eno early on, and you did the "Andy Paints Brian" thing on "Battery Brides." So, have you any desire to still try and work with him. No, because I think from what I know of how he works, he tends to work with people who don’t have much idea of what the hell they want to do. Like U2? U2 and The Talking Heads and people that make stuff up from jams. He sits there and says, "Oh, that bit was good, what was that? Ok we’ll make that the verse." Then they jam for another 20 minutes, and he says "Oh, that bit was good. Okay, tone up and that can become the chorus." And for me that’s the antithesis of the very structured way I like to work. Well, some of the "Through The Hill" stuff... Yeah, they were largely improvised on little springboards, parts to jump off from, that we had worked out about three days before. I see. And we probably threw away half as much material again, thinking it didn’t work. Hmm. I really like it. It was a pleasure when it came out. Well, good man. Lastly, I hate to ask, but what about the rock opera. Tummy, The Arm-less, Leg-less Boy. He’s just a stomach. He’s a stomach that plays Cluedo. I see it now. "Tummy can you hear me," and then really loud rumbling noise. No, no rock operas. What a daft expression that is. But what about something with a big story behind it? I’d like to do a musical in the Hollywood tradition of the 40s and 50s. Some of the best music ever has been stuff written for musicals. So, I’d like to do that. But there are 101 things I’d like to do. The world’s for playing with, so let’s have some fun.
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