“WHEN we finish talking, my wife’s going to say, ‘You weren’t negative, were you?’” says Andy Partridge, sitting in his Swindon home in front of his favourite antique tapestry. “But I never had the boastful gene. I’ve got a few gold and silver records but I keep them behind the sofa. I don’t like the fame thing because it’s hollow: if you like the music, great, but don’t come looking for me or treat me like I’m some god. I’m not. I’m just a fat fuck who farts a lot and has got bad eyesight and is balding.”
Despite his disappointment that XTC “didn’t get to the Beatle level”, there’s in fact a fair bit that Partridge is happy about. To spend a couple of hours in his company is to be regaled with streams of one-liners, quips and general delightful silliness. There are stories about their fateful final Top Of The Pops performance, recollections of meeting Brian Eno and a tale of how the young Partridge could almost have found himself a member of the New York Dolls.
“My dream job would have been being Johnny Thunders,” he explains. “I actually penned a letter to them saying ‘I’d love to join your group, please’, but I never sent it. Things could have been so different. My pseudonym would have been ‘Lord Andrew English’. I just loved the Dolls, and at that time I had very long hair. I had five minutes where I was young and beautiful – now I just look like an angry egg.”
On the contrary, Partridge looks slim and well, having been on a health kick after a mild stroke and a heart operation laid him low in the last few years. “I have to be a bit careful with my drinking these days, but I’m still alive,” he says, before raising his fist to the ceiling. “You ain’t got me yet, despite that fucking song…”
He’s referring to 1986’s “Dear God”, of course, a clever atheist’s, 1986’s and the penultimate orchestral glory of (1999). From early post-punk fame in Europe, they gradually attained a committed cult following in America and around the world.
