HELLO GOODBYE
They met over a bluesy jam. The end finally came after “the longest goodbye in history.”
From Swindon to the world and back: Colin Moulding recalls the beginning and end of XTC.
HELLO NOVEMBER 1972
Kempster’s music store was the place to go in Swindon on a Saturday morning – you’d hear somebody thumping out Smoke On The Water or something as you climbed the stairs. [Owner] Jeff Kempster was an all-round good egg.
On this day, I was quite surprised to see Andy [Partridge] in there, taking guitars off the wall – very expensive guitars, I might add, Rickenbackers and Gibsons, and playing them quite competently. I knew Andy because we used to go to the same school. So, I just pulled up a stool beside him and picked a bass guitar off the wall and we started playing along together, just a general bluesy jam, I think.
Then [Partridge manager] Dave Bennett and Andy came to the caretaker’s bungalow at Headlands School where I was living, and asked if I wanted to come to a jam session in somebody’s garage. How could I turn down that invitation, on a cold winter’s night? This local character called Martin Church, who had a van, it was his parents’ garage on Church Walk North. We probably played some early stuff of Andy’s, you know, he was writing even then, and maybe a few Stones covers.
Andy had a word in my ear and said that he wasn’t particularly happy with the arrangement he was in [with bandmates Nervous Steve and Paul Wilson], and would
I be interested in starting something up? I knew Terry [Chambers, drums], so the nucleus of XTC was born right at that moment.
You know, Andy was the writer and he’s got a sort of a dictatorial kind of way of going on, and me and Terry kind of went along with it. It didn’t feel like a big break or anything, and little did I know I had five very dispiriting years ahead of me. We started off as Star Park, then became the Helium Kidz, and then I think for a short time, The Snakes. Then punk confused the hell out of record companies and they pretty much signed everybody, us included! So I think the moment of arrival was when we walked in on our first recording session at Abbey Road [in April 1977]. In the foyer there was all these pictures of The Beatles, almost like a shrine, you know. It was very exciting and very frightening. Fear, confused with a thrill.
GOODBYE SUMMER 2006
It was perhaps the longest goodbye in history, because nothing really happens. It was a slow kind of estrangement after [2000’s
Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2)]. I wasn’t sure whether Andy wanted to make another record. I certainly did. I suppose the turning point came two or three years later, when he said, “I want to release all my demos, do you want to release yours?” I got the impression he was going for broke, and I really didn’t want to do that [eight volumes of Partridge’s
Fuzzy Warbles were released from 2002-06].
We’d lost Dave [Gregory, guitar] by then, remember. There was something about the dynamic with the three of us that I think was cohesive. Once Dave left, I almost became Andy’s adversary, I think. I’d felt that he was perhaps becoming slightly more dictatorial than he otherwise had been.
A few years went by. We were trundling along, distributing the remains of the studio. I think I took some gear round to Andy’s house, part of the patchbay, and it was pretty much, “Well, here it is old boy, have fun,” you know? One of those conversations. One doesn’t talk about one’s estrangement, that’s why we were estranged.
The words “I quit” hadn’t been uttered by anybody. The final axe fell when we had arguments over money. It got pretty petty, really. That was the basis of the argument that split XTC really, though there was no official announcement. I remember for two years after, I watched TV and contemplated my future. Later, I started to do sessions for Billy Sherwood, who’s the bass player of Yes now, so I owe everything to him for getting me back into it.
[Andy and I] didn’t speak for a long time, except about business, and then it was quite terse. But we’re quite cordial with each other now, it’s probably as good as it’s been for quite some time. Would we do XTC again?
(laughs) I don’t think we would, because I’m not sure whether I could put up with his dictatorial ways any more, or whether he could put up with me.
I am beginning to make music again. I’m too old to make albums, they take a long time, [but] whatever material I have, the public can have it if they wish. As told to Ian Harrison
Colin Moulding’s The Hardest Battle EP is out now on Burning Shed.
“I almost became Andy’s adversary, I think.” COLIN MOULDING