XTC- White Music

“Gonna run you right through//with a stick of bamboo” – Neon Shuffle.

In this series, I’m hoping to write about albums I like with an element of my personal life intertwined. These albums have doubtless have been covered to death elsewhere online, but few include (or indeed, are permitted to include) the memories and explicit attitudes of the author – and the ways in which they link a person to a time, place or event. So that’s my M.O.. Enjoy!

It’s April 2005 and Dad is undergoing a spate of burning mix CDs off Limewire (remember that?), which would, for better or for worse, influence much of my early music taste. This particular CD included 5 tracks from ‘White Music’ – XTC’s somewhat maligned debut. I loved all of them instantly and unconditionally. 

XTC are a band that, truth be told, conjure up nothing but good memories. The infectious, staccato pop of their early years anchors me to several memories from my childhood and early teenage years. I remember saying to an ex-girlfriend that were I ever inconsolably sad; she should put on ‘New Town Animal in a Furnished Cage’, so as to prompt a full emotional reset. I still stand by this. It works.

Perhaps the only album ever to make me visibly grin (important to note the difference between ‘grin’ and ‘smile’ here), ‘White Music’ is an extremely enjoyable listen. Very few albums are capable of maintaining quality over nineteen tracks (albeit nearly all clock in at under 3 minutes), but XTC’s unrelenting joy and wit in the face of much of the rage accompanying the initial strains of British punk sounds fresh on every track. Perpetually taking twists and turns into dance tunes, hard-bop jazz and funk puts the band arguably at the forefront of British new-wave music. XTC were experimenting with augmenting frenetic punk energy with a much wider range of influences than many of their peers (bearing in mind that this, their debut, was released as early as January of 1978), and it’s this constant tinkering and wry nods to a myriad of influences that allows the band to sustain their momentum over a marathon 19 songs.

XTC fall into a particularly niche category: that of a band whose best known single is arguably their worst. The coy, eyebrows-raised, and tbqh, ‘twatty’, single ‘Making Plans For Nigel’ was the band’s biggest hit for reasons that utterly evade me. This is particularly surprising given the sheer volume of excellent pop fare present on White Music. From ‘Radios in Motion’ to ‘Statue of Liberty’ seemingly every chorus is a viciously barbed hook purpose-built to capture fans and keep them at an intimate proximity.

White Music also contains my all-time favourite cover version. XTC’s interpretation of Dylan-via-Hendrix’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is a real feat of reverse-engineering. Sacking the guitars (!) in favour of a devastatingly sparse syncopated rhythm section, punctuated with deranged harmonica, distorts the song seemingly beyond all recognition. The razor sharp minimalism of the drums and bass also allows Partridge’s barked vocals a platform that, were it not for the band’s overall discipline, could come across as unnecessarily ‘zany’.

By no means their most accomplished album (that honour is reserved for the likes of the beautifully layered folk of Skylarking) ‘White Music’ adopted a pioneering mix of styles with a verve that many later British bands garnered a much greater sense of appreciation. Such is the experimentation: one could be forgiven for assuming the band were from the hugely innovative New York scene of the time, rather than a somewhat nondescript suburb of Swindon. It’s really no surprise that keyboardist Barry Andrews from this incarnation of the band would go on to join Robert Fripp’s ‘League of Gentleman’, and subsequently form the excellent Shriekback (whose single ‘My Spine Is The Bassline’ is properly excellent).

The band’s lyrics were often tongue-in-cheek and no more so here. However, their fun exploration of both the mundane and surreal strikes a nerve with a great deal of immediacy here, unlike some of their later slower-burning/more pensive moments. The fact that lead single ‘Statue of Liberty’, was banned from the BBC for the supposed lewdness of the lyric “In my fantasy I sail beneath your skirt” beautifully encompasses this. ‘Into The Atom Age’ which can be interpreted as a pastiche of the then-embryonic consumerist culture that the 80s would usher in is equally odd. “She’s got a planet-shaped coffee table, and a matching settee” remains an all time fave lyric of mine.

Mainly though, they hugely affected an impressionable pre-teen me, who was otherwise ensconced in a love for ‘classic’ rock stalwarts and middling noughties indie fare. As such I’ll always be grateful that this album significantly broadened my horizons.