The British quartet XTC around the songwriter team Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding is still a legend twenty years after their last album - at least among initiates. The group's sound is unique: melodiousness meets experimental sounds, sixties nostalgia meets new wave aesthetics. And each of their records offers its own unique approach to their sound universe. But XTC also stand for an unorthodox band history, determined by strange voltes.
Andy Partridge was scared. He was sick, everything spun. He no longer knew who he was or where he was. After he had left a concert of his band XTC in a hurry, he wandered alone through San Diego and thought to die. After this experience on April 3, 1982, the mastermind of XTC realized that he could not enter a stage anymore. Only: His band was on their way to the top with their latest album "English Settlement". His comrades-in-arms dreamed of becoming rock stars. Partridge underwent therapy. When he didn't respond to them, he finally pulled the plug. The band never played live again. What would have happened to XTC if they had gone on tour and not become a pure studio project? "We could have been as big as U2 or R.E.M.," Partridge said years later.
So it's not only musically understandable that XTC are often referred to as the "Beatles of New Wave". Finally the Liverpoolers also stopped their live activities at some point, albeit for other reasons (see also box). It was only from this moment on that they became the studio visionaries she knows pop history as today.
The quartet from Swindon in the southwest of England went a similar way in 1982. Patridge: "I conceived 'Mummer' [the successor to 'English Settlement' published in 1983] in such a way that it could not actually be reproduced on stage, but I demanded that exactly this should happen. So I wanted to get the others not to want to perform anymore." And so the XTC albums became more and more adventurous, more detailed, more colourful and more tricky, without the band ever giving up their secret weapon: the wonderful melodies that soar to bright heights between Beach Boys harmonies and Beatles melancholy.
