Some great bands create a signature sound and stay with it. Others follow unexpected musical avenues that challenge assumptions of what that band is and what it can do. Then there’s XTC, who somehow managed to take both routes at the same time with work that is both varied and unified, exploring number of musical modes and styles while always managing to sound like themselves. Over 14 albums, XTC seemed to move toward an artistic conclusion with every release. All the while, the individual albums and songs themselves continue to shine on their own as they make the journey, as troubled as that journey would be outside of the worlds they created in their music.
XTC is defined by the songwriting skills of guitarist and singer Andy Partridge, and bassist and singer Colin Moulding, with each of them supported by the artful sonic colours of multi-instrumentalist and arranger Dave Gregory. Drummer Terry Chambers, keyboardist Barry Andrews, and selection of studio collaborators helped them cut a path through the pop music wilderness and across several musical landscapes from their late-Seventies recording debut to their last record to date in 2000. To demonstrate their unique sound and adventurous spirit for fans and newbies alike, here are 20 great songs by XTC across their discography to delight you, and possibly either confound you or confirm for you as to why the term “cult band” applies to them so readily.
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This is Pop
XTC emerged at a time when punk was capturing headlines in Britain. But they weren’t really punk, even if punk forerunners The New York Dolls and The Stooges influenced their sound and energy levels. Sixties beat music also had enormous impact on how XTC approached writing and arranging songs, with this one even kicking off with an A Hard Day’s Night-style clang.
At a time when the music press and even fans themselves were putting labels on everything, “This is Pop” is a transistor blast of from XTC’s 1978 full-length debut White Music, a declaration of defiance from the band against the musical orthodoxies of the times. Through Andy Partridge’s yelp of a lead voice and the interlocked and mechanized drive of the band behind him, XTC make their earliest and most direct statement as a straight up pop band who would go on to borrow elements from whatever styles and eras that suited them as needed, with no further labels necessary.
Listen: This Is Pop
Statue of Liberty
America from the outside often seems alluring and all-consuming, complete with its own cultural iconography. This cut, which served as an early single for XTC and also appears on White Music, suggests that idea but in an absurdist and comic-book sort of way, with lyrics that border on the risqué as they apply to the American icon that stands as a symbol of a nation in New York harbour.
With a big pop chorus and verses full of push-me-pull-you call and response between Barry Andrews’ wheezy organ and Partridge’s whooping lead vocal, this tune is from a decidedly British point of view, looking at America from the outside, seeing it for the cultural whirlpool it is. This would be a key characteristic in XTC’s catalogue going forward, with their music always coloured by a distinctly British lens that made them key role models for Britpop two decades later.
Listen: Statue Of Liberty
Making Plans for Nigel
After one last record with Barry Andrews (1978’s Go2), XTC underwent a crucial lineup change when multi-instrumentalist Dave Gregory joined the fold. This allowed them to level up on 1979’s landmark record Drums & Wires, an album that serves as a kind of soft reboot for their sound. Colin Moulding’s tale of a working-class hero as he might appear on a propaganda poster was another sign that XTC had advanced. “Making Plans for Nigel” made significant inroads for the band outside of Britain, doing so with the most British of subjects; life in a society where knowing one’s place is a cardinal virtue.
Released at a time when radio was in a transitional period, this cut was completely unconventional in nearly every way, notable in Terry Chambers’ inverted drum pattern that contrasts a factory-floor metronomic bassline, strange lyrical and vocal hooks, and the song’s phased psychedelic feel. “Making Plans for Nigel” is one of their most recognizable hits, remaining a bold statement from a singular band with a unique sound.
Listen: Making Plans For Nigel
Ten Feet Tall
To contrast “…Nigel”, Colin Moulding’s “Ten Feet Tall” is driven by a warmer acoustic sound that ends up being just as unconventional as ever at a time when immediate, spiky electric guitars were more the order of the day for radio singles. The US single version mandated by their label is more along those lines, and would later reappear on compilations. The version on Drums & Wires takes its time a bit more, starting with punchy acoustic guitar chords that introduces a song that brims with the wondrous energy of young love while showing how tight the band is as a cohesive musical unit.
Their abilities are well represented to deliver a straightforward pop melody while also giving the listener lots of textural variance and countermelodic paths to follow. The clean guitar breaks hint at their progressive chops that new wave bands at the end of the 1970s tended to shy away from — or didn’t have — that would only become more apparent later. Even in a seemingly conventional love song, XTC presents a departure that adds something extra that’s distinctly XTC.
Listen: Ten Feet Tall
Towers of London
Their second single from 1980’s Black Sea, “Towers of London” features jangling guitars that seem to shimmer with lysergic energy, the closest they’d get on record to their live sound at the time. Its beaming musical enthusiasm is tempered by Partridge’s lyrical ire aimed at the nation’s capitol where the sins of an Empire are most easily traced; “Victoria’s gem found in somebody’s hell”.
As much as Sixties guitar pop informs this cut — particularly 1966-era Beatles — that bright musical accompaniment against darker lyrical themes appears on many songs in their catalogue with a satirical bite that draws blood. Partridge’s “Respectable Street” and Moulding’s “Generals and Majors” on this same record are great examples of XTC as social commentators from the ground level looking up. As a band with funny accents from the provinces, “Towers of London” is strangely much in the same vein as “Statue of Liberty”, with London’s towers casting equally long shadows.
Listen: Towers of London
Senses Working Overtime
This cut was the first single from 1982’s milestone English Settlement record and their highest chart entry at the time, full of tonal shifts and unexpected turns that demonstrate Partridge’s advancement as a songwriter and as a singer. “Senses Working Overtime” is characterized by ringing 12-string guitars, Pete Townshend-style power chords, and a generally warmer acoustic vibe that moves toward a more pastoral space that helps to redefine the band, and yet clarifies their existing identity at the same time.
Lyrically, it might suggest the pressures of being a touring musician, of being overindulged and overwhelmed. Yet it seems to go beyond that, too, infused with a kind of sensual ecstasy (no pun intended) in being alive, which is just as overwhelming in an ultimately more life-affirming way. There’s a spiritual quality about this tune that makes it one of Partridge’s most compelling compositions, written during a time of career uncertainty, yet expressed with such vitality as to transcend those circumstances.
Listen: Senses Working Overtime
No Thugs in Our House
Like The Kinks before them and as evidenced on a few key cuts listed here, XTC were primarily interested in writing pop songs from their own British point of view. In the early 1980s, that meant addressing pervasive and weaponized white supremacism, with various groups of thugs perpetrating violence against immigrants, and poisoning the wells of national discourse.
A key track off of English Settlement, this is Andy Partridge’s most vivid tale about how seemingly banal middle-class life contributes to virulent political and social movements that cause real harm, often papered over by classism, privilege, and — worst of all — denial. It’s helped along by a joyous and punchy chorus that subversively works against its sobering themes. Most of all, it’s utterly direct while also not being a sermon, yet another vital ingredient they brought to the musical landscape at the time. Unfortunately, this tune is all too relevant today and all over the world, too.
Listen: No Thugs In Our House
Love on a Farmboy’s Wages
After they laid down English Settlement, Andy Partridge was no longer able to play live due to advanced anxiety and related health issues. This kicked off a new phase for XTC as a studio-bound entity and trio. Drummer Terry Chambers left the band while Partridge doubled down on his interest in more pastoral themes and ambitious textures on 1983’s Mummer album.
“Love on a Farmboy’s Wages” is one of his most artful and elegant statements in that vein, written in parallel to the band’s strained finances at the time, exacerbated by a lack of touring, but mainly driven by the twin demons of corrupt management and a badly negotiated royalty rate with the label. This cut obliquely references some of that, but ultimately rises above it, too. It’s full of melancholy, but also with palpable affection for the aesthetics on which it so vividly draws, rooted firmly in the values of rural simplicity. The acoustic guitar lines are sublime, evoking a ride in the country far away from worrisome urban machinations that just weigh down the spirit.
Listen: Love On A Farmboy’s Wages
This World Over
XTC distinguish themselves in the field of Cold War pop on this song from 1984’s The Big Express. That record sees them revisit their tight, mechanized pop style in an updated form. Saying that, “This World Over” is loose and spacious, a response to the jingoistic political rhetoric of the time. It matches a reggae-influenced pulse to a story about parents in a ruined world trying to account for the state of things for their children’s sake with only the most absurd reasons from which to draw their answers.
Partridge’s lead vocal scales the heights from the ground up on this cut, standing as one of his best performances as a singer able to fully express the emotional quotient of his material. Colin Moulding distinguishes himself again by creating supportive low-end underpinnings that always offer melodic value of their own. Like “No Thugs in Our House”, this song remains sadly relevant today in an age of self-inflicted climate crises to which the powers that be have seemingly become resigned rather than responsive.
Listen: This World Over
Grass
Pressured to make a hit album to appeal to the US market, XTC’s label matched them with American producer and recording artist in his own right, Todd Rundgren. The sessions were purportedly tense with such strong personalities in the room together. But 1986’s Skylarking sold well and remains an enduring fan favourite. Not quite a concept record, it served as their most sonically unified effort yet, bound by thematic threads that touch on childhood innocence, mythical summertime landscapes, and the cyclical nature of life and death — all to be revisited on later records.
“Grass” is the most celebratory of the lot, written and sung by Colin Moulding as its lead single and vividly evoking summer holiday memories, young lust, and simple pleasures. Irresistible affection just spills from this tune, being one of those rare songs that evoked nostalgic longing even when it was new. Along with the rest of the album, it helped XTC establish their focus, leading them further into the warmer, richer musical territory that sees them reach new levels of artistry.
Listen: Grass
Dear God
Starting its life as non-album B-side on the “Grass” single in the UK, “Dear God” gained both renown and infamy when American college DJs began playing import copies. That meant a call from the label to initiate pressings of Skylarking to include it, and provoked other calls besides that were far less welcoming of its content. Despite that, “Dear God” elevates Partridge’s direct approach to big themes on this song that’s reductively become an atheist’s anthem.
But “Dear God” is more complex than that, wrapped in a paradox of a non-believer speaking to the object of his non-belief. In this, it’s defined by the pain of lost innocence and betrayed idealism as much as by skepticism in a personal god. With its satisfying jangly electric guitar contrasted with folky acoustic lines, a child’s lead voice matched with Partridge’s adult one, its ornamental strings, and Moulding’s stalwart countermelodic basslines, “Dear God” is immensely rewarding on a musical level, too. It sure helped XTC sell records at a crucial point in their career. Would it be too much to call that providence?
Listen: Dear God
Brainiac’s Daughter
After 1984’s The Big Express album that is arguably their most Eighties-production blighted record, XTC wanted to explore their roots as teenage music fans. That meant Electric Prunes and Syd Barrett-style psychedelic pop under a band pseudonym — The Dukes of Stratosphear. This cut is from the second of two releases from The Dukes, both of those later to appear on the Chips from the Chocolate Fireball compilation. “Braniac’s Daughter” is a standout track that mixes Partridge’s love of Magical Mystery Tour-era Beatles and the Superman comics of the 1960s.
It therefore includes the requisite surreal imagery, bouncy upright piano lines, an ocarina solo, Yellow Submarine style bubbles, and liberal Kryptonian references all rolled into one, as you’d expect. Most importantly, the track displays a defiantly non-1980s approach to production and to pretty much every other aspect of making pop records at the time. With the two Dukes releases bookending Skylarking, the two personas of the band began to converge to help show XTC the right road to their evolving sound.
Listen: Brainiac’s daughter
Mayor of Simpleton
XTC repaired to Los Angeles for sessions for their next album, 1989’s Oranges & Lemons. The label put more pressure on them to produce something to build on the commercial momentum they’d gained on Skylarking. That meant straightforward pop hits, with this track being one of their most ebullient. “Mayor of Simpleton” gleams with aural sunshine, a tale about a man with a deep capacity for love who lacks the intellect and sophistication to match it. This single is just plain sweet, deceptively complex (listen to that bassline!) while also full of the very affection it references.
The line about not knowing “how to write a big hit song” sounds like a cheeky shot at the label’s expectations and a wink at their audience as they subtly spike the punch. Even without that angle, “Mayor of Simpleton” is a legitimately affecting and effusive pop confection that makes a thought-provoking point about the value of smarts compared to a that of a loving heart. And ironically, this was a hit song — number 15 on the Billboard mainstream rock chart, and number one on the US alternative chart to be precise.
Listen: Mayor of Simpleton
Chalkhills & Children
Andy Partridge’s sunny-with-a chance-of-cloud pop song that closes the Oranges & Lemons record is certainly reminiscent of Surf’s Up-era Beach Boys, with its atmospheric arrangement and intertwining choral vocal lines. Yet “Chalkhills & Children” is also inspired by an enduring element that informed the band’s approach all along, and here very overtly — XTC’s hometown of Swindon, surrounded by the chalk hills referenced in the song’s title.
To keep him grounded, and from floating away on the currents of music industry demands and promises of fame, Partridge wrote this song about what’s important, and what is real — his children and his home. In doing so, he crafted one of his dreamiest, most ethereal melodies that takes the modern sound of the time and melds it to the classic pop records that inspired him to become a musician in the first place. The result is a restful and comforting meditation that helps listeners anchor our own feet to what’s important in our own lives.
Listen: Chalkhills & Children
Rook
A self-admitted “banana fingers” keyboardist, Andy Partridge wrote and initially demoed “Rook” on guitar. He later took to the piano for a more fleshed out demo version for this hauntingly beautiful track, eventually appearing in its completed form on 1992’s Nonsuch album. The song purportedly helped him to break out of a period of writer’s block, taking him by surprise in doing so. From there and perhaps between guitar and piano demo versions, Partridge seems to take a lateral compositional approach to finding chords and connecting progressions that pack an emotional punch, clashing at times in a way that shouldn’t work, but marvellously do anyway.
The effect is almost overwhelming when matched with his plaintive vocal, elevating the whole on a cinematically sweeping scale and with lyrics that evoke some of the big questions that’s preoccupied him in the past — the cycles of nature, mortality, death, spirituality. All by itself, “Rook” manifests or perhaps just clarifies a whole new facet of the XTC sound that they would continue to develop later in the decade to glorious effect.
Listen: Rook
Wrapped in Grey
One of the most startlingly beautiful and poignant songs that Partridge has ever written, this track was a single from the Nonsuch record — briefly. At a certain point, their label pulled it without the band’s consent, kicking off a work stoppage period that saw XTC come to the end of their tether where continual label interference was concerned. That drama aside, it almost goes without saying that “Wrapped in Grey” is the culmination of everything the band is good at, full of aural sweetness that contains just a hint of sorrow, elegantly arranged, melodically complex-but-accessible, and with lyrics that evoke guileless childhood innocence.
The circumstances and furor around its release is certainly ironic, given that the song is all about the joy of expressing oneself as freely, colourfully, and without care as one may in a dull monochrome adult world. Like “Rook” and other songs on this record, it helped set XTC on a course further into the musical territory that would yield their best ever work.
Listen: Wrapped In Grey
River of Orchids
After a seven-year gap between releases, XTC came back with their most complex and musically rewarding effort yet in 1999’s Apple Venus, Vol. 1. The birth was difficult, with Partridge’s ambitions outweighing their budget at times, not to mention bandmate Dave Gregory’s patience that contributed to his exit during the making of the record. Despite everything, the album is an artistic triumph, kicking off with this organic mélange of orchestral samples and effects that make up the ostinato rhythms and patterns from impossibly staccato woodwinds, strings, and brass.
“River of Orchids” is the sound of growing things popping out of the earth one by one, each new bud and blade slowly consuming the remnants of a fallen civilization. Partridge’s voice soars above its avant garde orchestral dreamscape, reveling in visions of natural beauty, decay, and new life. As stylistically off-the-map as it may be, “River of Orchids” is an expression of a theme hinted at throughout the band’s career particularly since Skylarking; that of birth coming out of death as part of a wondrous cycle.
Listen: River of Orchids
Easter Theatre
To explore that very same theme even further on the Apple Venus, vol. 1 record, “Easter Theatre” evokes pagan Britain and the theatrical rituals that reflect this very same central concepts of birth, growing things, and decay. The music is in the same orchestral milieu although decidedly still pop, with ecstatic lyrics wrapped in spiritual imagery of a Goddess dressed in yellow yolk, and a Pre-Christian reference to Odin hanging from the World Tree to establish the original context of the titular holiday — death, and out of that, new life.
Buds will laugh and burst racing to be first seem like a callback to “River of Orchids”, but these buds are in another context and form — that of a play put on by children in colourful costumes at a church fete in provincial Britain — stage left, stage right, stand up. Partridge constructs a tune about the thin line between spirit and nature that also becomes an ode of that very same rural simplicity he’s explored since “Love on a Farmboy’s Wages” and “Chalkhills & Children”. In this, “Easter Theatre” is another affectionate celebration of home and of childhood innocence in growing up there.
Listen: Easter Theatre
Harvest Festival
As a kind of internal sequel to “Easter Theatre”, and to further explore the concept of cycles and growing up, “Harvest Festival” is a continuing rumination on life in provincial Britain, steeped in ancient agriculturally-derived religious rituals as they meet mundane small town routines so as to blur the lines between them. This cut is about memories of school days in that world, with images of assemblies, exams, furtive glances and longing looks across the aisles, and ultimately leaving to pursue an adult life somewhere else.
This is a whole novel contained in a sumptuous pop song, evoking the heady concoction of youthful insecurity and the excitement of discovery, doing so with great precision. With its sparkling piano lines and Brian Wilson-meets-McCartney melody, all supported by marching band percussion and lyrical recorder, Partridge goes all in with wistful, hazy memories of youth in a small town in one of the most affecting pieces of music he’s ever written. On this next-to-last album from XTC, hindsight lends this song even more power, literally bringing it all back home so near the end.
Listen: Harvest Festival
The Wheel & the Maypole
XTC’s next record in 2000 was Wasp Star (aka Apple Venus, Vol. 2), an excellent collection of songs that suffers from one fatal flaw — it fails to be Apple Venus, Vol. 1. Arguably too, it misses Dave Gregory’s sense of ornate musical detail, brought to their material since 1979. Still, the masterful songwriting of Partridge and Moulding is very much in place on Wasp Star, with “The Wheel and the Maypole” being the most Apple Venus of the bunch.
As a continuation of recurring themes on that previous record, the focus here is on our material commonality with the stars and with the clay of the land alike, temporarily fashioned as we are into containers of life and love, only for that material to return to the earth and to the stars again as everything must. With such a grandiose theme, “The Wheel & The Maypole” doesn’t forget to rock out one last time musically speaking, and in retrospect seems to tell the story of the band at the end of their road, with this being a parting piece of wisdom before bowing out with a tip of their hats.
Listen: The Wheel & The Maypole
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Runners up and bubbling under:
- “Radios in Motion”
- “Are You Receiving Me?”
- “Life Begins at the Hop”
- “When You’re Near Me I Have Difficulty”
- “Scissor Man”
- “Ball & Chain”
- “Jason & the Argonauts”
- “Yacht Dance”
- “Wonderland”
- “Great Fire”
- “Mermaid Smiled”
- “Sacrificial Bonfire”
- “The Meeting Place”
- “Vanishing Girl”
- “King for a Day”
- “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead”
- “Green Man”
- “The Last Balloon”
- “I’m the Man Who Murdered Love”
- “Stupidly Happy”
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In retrospect, the journey XTC took together seems as if it was cultivated and even planned with meticulous precision, seamlessly evolving their sound while retaining their identity the whole way. It certainly was not that. But it is amazing to consider that the nervy guitar clatter and clank of the late Seventies, the pastoral pop of the Eighties and Nineties, and the lush and orchestral pop pursuits at the end of the century is the work of a single group. In that alone, XTC stand out as unique, while also in a similar vein of their classic influences, Beatles-inclusive.
As found in recurring themes in their songs about the cycles of life, the band seemed to naturally become what it was meant to be before unweaving itself into artistic threads for others to follow. In this, XTC are also unique in that they seemed to reach a logical thematic conclusion by the end, despite a career also spent suffering the all-too common indignities of corrupt managers, label interference, and low royalty rates. For all the joy they put into the world, they deserved far better. Yet today, those records are beloved and cited by peers, heirs, and fans alike as singular treasures, adorning the personal soundtracks to lives that are as reflectively episodic and as varied and unique as their music is.
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Listen to this episode of the Deeper Cuts podcast that includes this article’s author Rob Jones’ discussions with co-hosts about XTC’s Apple Venus, Vol. 1.
Also, learn more about XTC by listening to author Mark Fisher’s excellent podcast named after his book of the same name, “What Do You Call That Noise?” .
