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2024 marks 40 years since Swindon’s steam punks XTC released THE BIG EXPRESS. HUW THOMAS chats to ANDY PARTRIDGE and COLIN MOULDING about the noisiest album of their career.
Air Studios, Oxford Street, London, 1983. XTC’s lead songwriter and head chatterbox Andy Partridge is hunkering down in a vocal booth at the mixing session for the band’s next single ‘Wonderland’, but something breaks his concentration. “I looked up and there’s George Martin sat at the mixing desk with Steve Nye, our producer. He’s fiddling around with a device, all Hammerite metal, real RAF, to get some sub-bass in the mix and I’m looking up and thinking ‘Fuck me, I’m a Beatle!”. Under the officer class glare of the Fifth Beatle, Partridge sketched out ‘Train Running Low on Soul Coal’, a feverish account of burnout and hopelessness; off the road and approaching thirty, he believed XTC were heading for the scrapheap.
The band had hardly stopped for breath since signing with Virgin in 1977. Five rapid-fire albums of fidgety guitar pop had earned them critical acclaim and top 20 hits in ‘Making Plans for Nigel’, ‘Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)’ and ‘Senses Working Overtime’. They’d even started to amass a fanbase in North America, where their hometown of Swindon sounded deliciously English. However, things began to unravel after Andy Partridge stopped taking the Valium pills he’d been prescribed since adolescence. He began experiencing panic attacks and memory loss over the band’s gruelling schedule. “I found an old tour itinerary of the States and there’s one day off in the whole tour,” says Andy today. “I wanted off this gravy train where we didn’t get any of the gravy.” The band’s first US tour as a headline act, scheduled for April 1982, was cancelled after one concert. XTC wouldn’t play before an audience again. Still, the train kept a-rollin’.
"We took it for what it was,” remembers Colin Moulding, singer-songwriter and bassist. “I didn't think it was possible that the band could carry on and be respected by the record company and the fans if they didn't tour. I was wrong. We survived and we prospered.” Andy’s guilt was assuaged as the band headed home. “Colin and I were snowed in at Chicago airport and he said to me ‘Look, I’m really glad you said we’re coming off the road because if you hadn’t have said it, I would’ve said it’.”
Freed from tour buses and hockey stadiums, Andy now envisioned XTC as meticulous composers working out of public view. “I liked the anonymity of it,” he says. “We were almost the Residents!” The first fruit from the new approach was 1983’s Mummer, a quilt of songs that feel more like musings from a sanatorium than the work of a rock band. ‘Love on a Farmboy’s Wages’ sees Andy liken his lot as a musician to the life of a farmer, while Colin’s ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’ was the first of his many songs about mortality. XTC had gone pastoral, though the album’s creation was hardly rolling hills - drummer Terry Chambers left early in the sessions (Andy: “I’d stopped Terry’s fun, visiting the bars of the world as our in-house John Bonham.”) and Virgin were unhappy with the material, forcing the band to record two new tracks and remix four others. “They wanted blood after English Settlement,” says Colin. “[Virgin A&R head] Jeremy Lascelles put us through an awful lot of torment to try and find a hit. There didn’t seem to be an obvious single, but with our records, there never is!” Mummer sank commercially. Andy feels Virgin all but withdrew support after its pilot singles flopped. “It was like ‘if they’re not going to tour, we’re not going to promote it’. It was pretty much rock bottom.”
XTC could’ve downed tools there and then. Some fans thought they had. Instead, they doubled down. The next album would be more unorthodox, more abrasive, more Swindon. Andy calls the band’s hometown “England’s joke town”, while Colin describes it as “a unique part of the country no one wants to come from”. “We don’t mind being parochial,” Colin says. “We’ve made it a virtue.” Before returning to the studio, the band were filmed in Swindon for Channel 4’s Play at Home series, whose title fit the band’s status quo perfectly. In the film, they’re seen commenting on Ken White’s ‘Swindon Personalities’, a mural featuring homegrown heroes including Diana Dors, Desmond Morris and, between Rick Davies of Supertramp and Justin Hayward, the members of XTC past and present. The band’s hometown monument is now lost to time.
For the new album, XTC chose producer David Lord, a composer based in Bath who’d produced local boys the Korgis and Tears for Fears and who “knew his onions”, in Colin’s words. Lord’s Crescent Recording Studio (built on BBC jingle royalties and Avon speciality records) had the facilities and scenery Andy, Colin and guitarist Dave Gregory needed to recover from the failure of Mummer - and an easy commute. “We drove from Swindon every day. Dave and I took it in turns,” says Colin. “We’d live on takeouts." The band were intrigued by a tall tale about Lord turning down orchestrating ‘She’s Leaving Home’ (Lord maintains he was invited to be part of a cheering crowd for Sgt. Pepper, but was unable to make the recording), and trialled the producer on a festive single, “Thank for Christmas”, before commencing album sessions in March 1984.
Andy, writing furiously about brutality – bullying, dodgy management, nuclear destruction – wanted the new album to clang with industry. “It was a desire to recreate a little bit of Swindon. When I was a kid, I used to walk with my granny past the big walls of the Great Western (the Swindon Works, which employed thousands in its mid-century heyday) and hear all this crashing and booming coming from inside. I thought ‘what are they doing in there?’. Some of those sounds stayed with me.” The band mulled several album titles – Coal Face, Head of Steam, The Known World – before arriving at The Big Express, a title whose double meaning unites artistic freedom with the Great Western Railway. "There was always a Swindon theme in my head, you know, short of saying to the others ‘hey, let's all make a ballet about it!’ or whatever” says Andy. “It’s literally a Swindon concept album, the nearest we’ve ever been to a concept album.”
Glitter Band alumnus Pete Phipps, who’d replaced Terry Chambers on Mummer, returned to the drum stool to provide the “mechanical and violent” percussion Andy was looking for. Phipps had a newfangled gadget to contend with, as the band enlisted the caterpillar track sound of the LinnDrum. “I think when technology comes along, you use it,” says Colin of the drum machine that aligns The Big Express with both Heaven 17 and the Thomas the Tank Engine soundtrack. Andy is unrepentant. “It’s mostly real drums on that album, but we would have never found those Great Western sounds, the hissing steam crunch snare, with a conventional drum kit.” Andy also points out that ‘Reign of Blows’, a cacophonous rocker about the routine horrors of warfare, doesn’t feature the Linn. “That's real drums processed to sound like hell. We were accidentally inventing a whole new genre of music yet to come! I read a review of it online somewhere saying ‘I don’t like it because it’s just a LinnDrum.’ No it fucking isn’t, it’s Pete Phipps! Great drummer, lovely bloke and I think he’s a karate expert so don’t fuck about with him!”
Elsewhere, the band raided the Crescent cupboards. Andy says ‘Shake You Donkey Up’, a sort of Beefheart-does-feminism track that stations XTC in cowpunk country, features “whatever we could find in the kitchen. There’s a tea tray, maybe a biscuit tin, some saucepans”. For ship-shape singalong ‘All You Pretty Girls’, Andy tuned up the LinnDrum tom-toms to suggest “sailors banging metallic crockery on deck”. Andy wrote the song after “dicking around with some Hendrix” and discovering a sea shanty-type chord pattern: “I still had fantasies about being a sailor because my dad was one. It was either that or a policeman. Perverse really, imagine me as a copper or a sailor! I just don’t take orders well.”
A Mellotron features on the track, bought from some South Wales art rockers for Mummer. “We sent it through a palm-sized speaker, put it at the bottom of a metal waste bin and put a kitchen roll tube over the microphone,” says Andy. “I think Joe Meek would’ve approved.” Meek might’ve appreciated the doomy ‘This World Over’, too. Andy describes this deeply affecting lament over an imagined apocalypse as “a real nuclear paranoia song”. It fell into his lap when he played ‘Complicated Game’ (from 1979’s Drums and Wires) with his guitar tuned to open-E. “I blundered onto chords I never would have found. It fell out just right and it made me immensely sad when I finished it up. I had a few tears in my eyes. I don’t fret about nuclear war today. What do you think I'm going to do, catch it?”
As producer, David Lord encouraged XTC to fill their new songs with ear candy. “I think he drove Colin and Dave potty with his precision,” says Andy. "He wanted things just right. It was ‘let’s try this little xylophone out! Whaddya think Andy?’” Speaking to Neville Farmer in 1998, Dave Gregory recounted “We spent forever programming. I remember a whole afternoon spent trying to find the right hi-hat sound. It was stupid and the album lacks energy because of it!” ‘Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her’, a track so removed from XTC’s usual sound it features a Euphonium solo, caused friction during recording. “It was one of the few times Dave and I ever argued in the studio,’ recounts Andy. “We’re both English gents, you know? He didn’t like some of the chords, some of the rubs going on and he was very upset. I put my cloven hoof down and said ‘no, it’s got to be like this.’”
Lord is sometimes described as XTC’s George Martin figure. Andy and Colin beg to differ. “We never actually had a George Martin, shamefully,” remembers Andy. “I longed to have a steady producer who could arrange. We had brilliant engineers, great vibes men, but the best outside arranger was probably Todd Rundgren. His bedside manner left a lot to be desired. I shall say no more!”
If The Big Express is a towering metal structure, Colin’s songwriting contributions sound like the work of the disconcerted everyman who lives in it. “I started writing more about the minutiae of life,” he says. “I used to read quite a bit of Betjeman and Larkin.” The gorgeous ‘I Remember the Sun’ is a heady remembrance of “pavements roasting.....burning the soles of your feet” and an unexpected diversion into jazz pop territory. “My demo was more a shuffle,” says Colin. “It didn’t go the full hog, but Pete Phipps has got this great jazz feel.” ‘Wake Up’ was inspired by a recurring dream about being first on the scene of an accident. “The guitars are like an alarm going off before you're faced with somebody prostrate on the ground bleeding and you're expected to do something.” Colin’s demo was relatively straightforward, but David Lord got the builders in, annexing a choir and strings. “It just got bigger and bigger,” says Colin. “He took it to the Albert Hall and back.” ‘Wake Up’ made a worthy album opener thanks in no small part to the ping-pong guitar intro Andy compared to “two arguing Jack Russells”.
Mummer dipped a toe into psychedelia, but it seeps in for good on The Big Express. Andy’s Beatles influence - downplayed on earlier records - is evident on the pounding piano chorus of ‘You’re the Wish You Are I Had’, a giddy love song that follows a musical dream logic. The spirit of ’67 similarly infuses ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’, a promenade through Swindon that Andy laced with “a dash of Kinks and a smattering of Teenage Opera”. It’s the closest thing XTC have to a ‘Penny Lane’ but its lyrics are genuine snapshots from life in Wiltshire’s “bloated village”, says Andy: “It’s very Swindon. ‘Drink my Oxo up and get away’, that’s the milkman. The ‘brand new catalogue nylon nightie’, that’s the sort of shit my mother used to wear. The ‘shiny grey-black snake of bikes’, that’s the Great Western workers at clocking-off time.” ‘Smalltown’ was decorated with thickets of overdubs including squawking kids and kazoos. When the band wanted brass samples, David Lord called Tears for Fears, then knee-deep in sessions for Songs from the Big Chair. A bleary-eyed Curt Smith arrived at Crescent with an E-mu Emulator and some floppy discs. Andy hasn’t forgotten this. “Tears for Fears saved our bacon!”
Digging up your backyard isn’t always so jolly. Andy’s ‘I Bought Myself a Liarbird’ is a swipe at Ian Reid, the band’s manager “who we feel was not totally honest with our financial situation, shall we say?”, says Andy, diplomatically. Reid, an ex-army officer and nightclub owner who’d blocked the band from naming their fourth album Work Under Pressure citing reputational risk, was in a legal battle over the band’s finances that would last many years. “We were desperately in debt, mainly because of the abortive tour of America and paying off creditors who wanted to skin us alive,” says Colin. “That legacy lasted for a long time. I don’t think we made any profit until – oh, god – until after Nonsuch [XTC’s last Virgin album, released 1992], I think! Musicians do it for the love of it, you see. As long as they can make a racket, that’s what they’re in it for.”
‘Train Running Low on Soul Coal’, written in the Air Studios vocal booth, is the album’s finale and densest production, all tangled metal and billowing steam. Andy, in his most impassioned vocal, sounds crushed by the wheels of industry. “You know that famous photo of the steam train that has crashed into the street? I thought ‘what would that sound like?’” Speaking in 1984, Dave Gregory described the song’s hurtling middle eight as “the best thing Andy’s ever written”. In the Play at Home documentary, Andy and Dave perform a skiffle-like early version on the stage of Swindon’s Town Gardens Bowl, an art deco amphitheatre resembling a dinky Hollywood Bowl. Their audience? Two kids sitting on the grass. It’s an image that sums up not just The Big Express, but XTC as a whole - the little pop group that could, making a racket in their hometown for anyone who’ll listen.
The Big Express was released in October 1984, with an inner sleeve featuring the band posing on a steam engine: "It was the only photo session I think we've ever done where nobody complained,” says Andy “I think they felt it was noble to be dressed as footplate men because we were all connected to that world, our families were. 'What, you want me to wear grubby, oily overalls? Great, let's get them on!’” The band played the promotional game, taping a BBC radio session for Bruno Brookes and giving away the kazoo from ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’ on Saturday Superstore. Andy even had a stint on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show as Agony Andy (his advice to a schoolkid excused from sex education? “Buy yourself a bike shed, that's the way I did it”). The public were not swayed; The Big Express was another commercial failure and lead single ‘All You Pretty Girls’ tanked despite a £33,000 music video.
XTC were no closer to climbing out of a commercial and financial hole, but Andy sees the bigger picture today. “You’re always disappointed when your kids don’t go out into the world and make a big success of themselves, but failure was fantastic for the band in the long run. It was ‘okay, if the bastards don’t like this one, the next one’s going to be world-beating!’” The band masqueraded as the Dukes of Stratosphear for their next project, classic mini-LP 25 O’Clock, before US distributor Geffen hooked them up with Todd Rundgren for their eighth mainline album. Skylarking (1986) would be all but disowned by both XTC and Rundgren by its completion, but it was a breakthrough in the States and remains a critical high spot. “The Big Express was the last of our English career,” reflects Colin. “Had we gone on to make another record that sold in equal proportions, I think Virgin would have pulled the plug. Maybe Todd Rundgren saved our career! There's a statement for you.”
Dave Gregory took the Mellotron with him when he left XTC in 1999 (Andy: “our carriage clock to Dave, ‘here, have a Mellotron to put on the mantelpiece’”). Andy and Colin continued before retiring to the sidings in 2006. “People think I've cut them out over the years but I haven't,” says Andy of his former bandmates. “They were totally essential. Everything they did.” Since 2013, the band have overseen a lavish reissue series, the latest of which is an expanded edition of The Big Express containing new mixes by Steven Wilson in Dolby Atmos. A listening session in London allowed Dave Gregory, never completely onboard with the album, to reevaluate it.
In 2024, XTC are less perpetual underdogs, more folk heroes. Terry Chambers currently tours the back catalogue in EXTC. Swindon hosts fan conventions and now boasts two public murals dedicated to the band. “When we made The Big Express, we couldn’t get arrested,” says Colin. “We’ve never been cool, put it that way, but interest has exploded in the last ten to fifteen years. A lot of young people have cottoned on to what we did.” Andy agrees “The sick thing is we are more recognised now. I’m just happy new people are finding the music. We wanna jump the generations! Old people, middle aged people, foetuses!” Andy, Colin and Dave have never left Swindon. Could a reunion ever happen? “Well, I was 30 feet away from Colin the other day when I was in the Co-op.” says Andy. Small town.
PULLS:
The Big Express expanded CD + blu-ray edition is available now from Burning Shed
“It just got bigger and bigger. David Lord took it to the Albert Hall and back!” - Colin Moulding
“We sent a Mellotron through a palm-sized speaker, put it at the bottom of a metal waste bin and put a kitchen roll tube over the microphone. I think Joe Meek would’ve approved.” - Andy Partridge
RAG AND BONE BUFFET
Some of the finest songs that missed The Big Express.
Red Brick Dream (B-side, ‘All You Pretty Girls’ 12”)
This shimmering acoustic requiem was hidden away as a B-side. Andy: “My observations about my grandfather working at the Great Western. This wasn’t officially recorded for the album, it was recorded for a TV documentary about Swindon, but this is the very spinal column of The Big Express. Nobody said ‘yeah, that’s got to go on the album’ and I thought ‘oh shit, that’s the thread holding all the bits of cloth together to make the suit’. We used to chuck all the songs in a hat. It was a democratic process, damnit!”
Washaway (B-side, “All You Pretty Girls” 7”)
Colin Moulding’s catchy soap opera about life on the Penhill council estate. Colin: “I was donking on this cronky old piano at home. I didn’t think it was a serious contender, but Dave took the bones of my piece and we worked it up. The pressure wasn’t on me to write, with Andy being as prolific as he was and is. I’d have five songs on one album and two on another.” During recording, XTC were visited by Andrew Stafford, a 19-year-old fan who'd travelled to Bath; Stafford later wrote Breathing the Same Air, a memoir recalling his meetings with his heroes.
Now We All Dead (It Doesn’t Matter) [demo]
A zippy demo by Andy that presents an addendum to a ‘This World Over’ scenario. Andy: “On Bath Abbey, you've got two ladders with angels going up. I was imagining angels getting halfway up, resting on a cloud and saying to eachother ‘well it doesn’t matter now we’re dead, none of this fussing and fighting’. It would be nice to realise that while we’re alive, wouldn’t it?”