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Tue. January 05.1999 3:01 AM EST |
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XTC End Silence With New Label Deal And Box SetTransistor Blast is the group's first album since 1992's Nonsuch. by Correspondent Jeff Niesel |
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XTC stopped touring because of Andy Partridge's stage fright. |
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Plenty of rock bands have had disputes with their record labels. Few have ever gone on
strike. That's what singer/guitarist Andy Partridge and singer/bassist Colin Moulding of British pop band XTC did when their U.K. label, Virgin
"[Virgin] wouldn't make our deal any better and they wouldn't let us go," Partridge said during his and Moulding's recent New York visit. "They just snickered and then kept ringing us up every month to ask us when we were going into the studio. The only way to get out of the deal was to withhold our labor. With the help of a bully of a lawyer, we managed to get out of [the contract]." XTC, which had been with Virgin UK since 1977, haven't released any new material since 1992's Nonsuch. The drought will end soon -- XTC plan to release two albums in 1999 on TVT Records: Apple Venus, Vol. 1, due in February, is in the same orchestral pop vein as Nonsuch. In the fall, XTC will ditch the orchestrations for an album of what Partridge called "cranked-up noise." The band signed with TVT in the summer, and TVT released a live XTC box set, Transistor Blast, on Dec. 8. Three of the box's four discs feature performances recorded for the BBC in 1977 and 1989; the fourth captures a 1980 performance at London's Hammersmith Palais. XTC's dispute with Virgin is documented in Neville Farmer's book, "XTC: Song Stories" (1998). "Andy is by no means a good businessman and his stubbornness had much to do with their problems," Farmer, a contributing writer to Billboard, wrote in a recent e-mail. "He doesn't understand why a label, with all its staff and overheads and investment costs, should get more than its artists." Farmer also said the band's refusal to tour created a hostile relationship with Virgin. The band stopped touring in 1982 because of Partridge's stage fright. Partridge said he has found no cure for his stage fright and the group has no plans to resume touring. "We make records and people really need to wake up to that. Get over it," he said. "When people stop asking us, maybe we'll tour." Partridge also said artists shouldn't have to tour just to validate their records. "It's like the record industry thinks you're not real unless you tour," he said. "The industry-approved hamster has to be on his wheel a certain amount of the day, and then he has to make his nest in the sawdust at a certain time of the day. They won't just let him do something else. If he's not on the wheel, they think he can't be a hamster. We're hamsters, too. Just because we don't want to get on the wheel doesn't mean that we're less of a hamster. We don't make great concerts, anyway. I got that out of my system in my late 20s." The live music compiled on Transistor Blast represents "songs we did from '77 to '89 and it was the best of the stuff they didn't erase," Partridge said. "They're not too different from the record[s], although they're played with a bit more fire." XTC were formed in 1977 in Swindon, an industrial town in the southwest of England. They grew out of the Helium Kidz, a band for which Partridge was the principal songwriter. The group emerged during the punk revolution but played quirky pop, bridging the gap between punk and pop. "We were one of the stools in the great bowel movement that was punk," Partridge said. It remained prolific through the '80s. XTC's six studio albums in the '80s spawned such singles as "Senses Working Overtime" from English Settlement (1982), "Dear God" (RealAudio excerpt) from Skylarking (1986) and "The Mayor of Simpleton" from Oranges and Lemons (1989). As for the upcoming Apple Venus, Farmer said it's "quite wonderful. Although Andy was worried that everything he'd written was either depressing or downbeat and that Colin's two songs were jolly, I find that Andy's songs run the gamut of emotions. 'I'd Like That' is whimsical but happy. 'Harvest Festival,' with its images of a school assembly, chairs shuffling, recorders playing, just takes me straight back to my childhood. 'Green Man' is lush and rich and overwhelming." Partridge, for his part, said he couldn't care less what fans might think of the new records. "I'm not interested in winning back old fans," he said. "I don't care if the devil is stoking their asses in hell. I'm just interested in making music. I suppose I'll panic if nobody buys it. But if people like it, they like it. I'm not going to ram it down anybody's throat." |
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