It’s a shame about Andy Partridge. He could so easily have been one of the songwriting greats of all time, a charismatic leading man in the theatre of pop. Instead, he settled for a walk-on part, a Dickensian comic cameo with a suitably bucolic accent and a penchant for ‘I’m not bald really’ eccentric headgear. For almost thirty years, Partridge and his erstwhile band, the artist formerly known as XTC, have been missing from the arena of live music, and more than ten years have elapsed since the band’s last studio album. There is, of course, a very good reason for this lack of activity. In fact, there are ten reasons, and they’re all called Fuzzy Warbles.
Back in the mid 90s, Andy became aware of a voracious trade in XTC demos which had somehow sidled out of his garden shed and into the public domain. Deciding, quite rightly, that he’d like a piece of that fanboy action for himself, he set up his own label and embarked on a series of legitimate releases. Instantly, the previously traded bootlegs would be kicked into touch by these ‘as good as it gets’ remastered versions, all of which have been polished up as far as the originals would allow. All very good for business, and it would keep the fans happy until the next ‘proper’ album came along. Only, it didn’t.
Fuzzy Warbles might have kept a few fans happy, but the demo series also seems to have spelled the end for any new Partridge studio albums. Other projects have, of course, taken up some of the last decade, but the dearth of new material has begun to suggest that we’re down to the very last dregs in Albert Brown’s keg of Red Barrel. The continual reissuing and repackaging of XTC and Dukes material is another sign that Partridge may have thrown in the songwriting towel and Fuzzy Warbles may prove to have been his last hoorah.
Although Partridge is without doubt an extremely adroit musical craftsman, he is also a mischevious magpie, dipping into genres and swapping voices as the fancy takes him. Fuzzy Warbles reveals this playfulness, but also suggests at something lacking in the Partridge canon: a certainty about his true musical identity. Is he Sir John Johns, the clock-melting psychedeliasmith, or a vegetarian Captain Beefheart? Which is the real Andy Partridge? The Macca-by-numbers tunesmith or the mellotron noodler? They’re all here, ladies and gentlemen, so decide for yourselves.
What Warbles also reveals is Andy’s dogged pursuit of musical perversity, often at the expense of melody and harmony (Volume One’s Wonder Annual being a prime example of this propensity). His other failing, rather charmingly, is a sort of solipsism that has slowly engulfed the man over the past decade or so. Partridge has become the custodian of his own peculiar dusty museum of musical relics. Via the internet and occasional jottings on record sleeves, Andy has analysed, criticised, interpreted, punned and pontificated on his recorded output (and it pains me to have to say this) to the point of tedium. He’s become the classic pub bore, a Mastermind contestant whose specialist subject is himself.
At first, this analysis was revealing, and Partridge in full flow can be a very amusing raconteur, his mind continually tripping over itself in the search for the next tenuous pun or piece of wordplay. But, like dear old Macca with his ‘Yesterday was originally called Scrambled Eggs’ story, there are only so many times we can or indeed want to hear, in forensic detail, the circumstances surrounding the recording of ‘Easter Theatre.’
The problem here is one of perspective: the musician can’t be the critic of his own work – he’s too close to it to be able to offer a truly objective judgement. Hence, some of Andy’s most beloved tracks turn out to be the least rewarding to the listener: Obscene Procession (on Volume 2) is just unpleasant listening, a tacky gameshow theme tune rendered barely tolerable by Andy’s multi-speeded layered vocals. One can only give thanks that it never made it onto a legitimate XTC album. Warbles’ biggest failing is that it presents the listener with anything and everything left in Andy’s musical locker, the good, the bad and the indifferent, without the usual filtering process of record label, producer and bandmates’ opinions. This is good if you’re an uncritical fanboy, but the long term effect is diminishing to the Partridge mystique.
These ten CDs are evidence of this trend towards self-absorption and self-analysis. Their contents could helpfully have been whittled down to a single CD ‘best of’. What they remind us is how much XTC needed producers (Andy’s demos tend to have a dry and processed sound, often devoid of reverb or any kind of room ambience). They also remind us what a vital contribution was made by fellow band members Colin Moulding, Dave Gregory and, yes, even Terry (And the Lovemen) Chambers. Recent internet rumour suggests that the trio are talking to each other after an estrangement of several years, so there may yet be an Indian summer for XTC. But with Partridge and his fellow members already well into their fifties, the time for new music is running out.
When all’s said and done, Andy has probably been his own worst enemy. He was courted (indulged, even) by one of the biggest record labels of its day, and in the end fell out with them because they refused to go on letting him do things his way. There are two sides to this story, of course. In some parallel dimension, XTC are U2 and Andy is churning out music by numbers to satisfy a global audience. What we got instead, through whatever Quantum accident dictated Partridge’s musical pathway, was a decade or so of shiny pop artefacts that couldn’t have come from anywhere else on the planet. By the end of XTC’s recording career, there were still many more such nuggets lurking in the primeval West Country slime, and with Fuzzy Warbles, Andy has left no stone unturned. Sometimes he reveals only a few woodlice and some decaying leaves. Occasionally, it’s something sparkly.
In the final analysis, the Fuzzy Warbles series have provided a charming, if exhaustive stroll along the byways of Andy’s musical landscape. There are songs here that hint, frustratingly, at albums that might have been. There are, equally, plenty of jottings that should not have been allowed out in public. If Andy Partridge still nutures any musical ambition beyond tending his own back pages, then it’s time to come out of the shed, lock up the demo tapes and get working on some new material. The world needs another fully realised Partridge meisterwerke. Scraps from the master’s table will no longer suffice.
