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Andy Partridge

Article from One Two Testing, February 1985

Andy Partridge tracks up


XTC leader unlocks brain compartment, reaches in, and heaves out five fave tracks. Tomorrow they'll be different, of course...

1 PHILIP GLASS

River Run

2 SLIM GAILLARD

Dunkin' Bagel

3 THE ROLLING STONES

Citadel

4 SMALL FACES

Afterglow

5 CHARLIE PARKER

Ornithology

1 "I didn't Know he existed until 1979, when we went to the States. It was Christmas time and I was in the Virgin office in New York, it was snowing and I was all alone. So I thought I'd put on this LP, 'North Star'. This track was amazing — I sat looking blankly out the window at the snow falling and it actually sounded like the snow that was falling. It was a marvellous musical description of what I was idly looking at, symmetrical blocks of flats with the snow coming down. Since then all his music reminds me of crystalline shapes, shapes that grow symmetrically."

2 He has his own language that he invented which he calls Vout. You can hear the remnants of it cropping up today, he sings a lot of his songs in it. A sort of Forties version of Magma. 'All reety all righty scoodly mcvouty vooto, root?' And the bass player will turn round and say, 'What's the mooty then?' Wonderful language. This song has a sense of essential beat fun, really."

3 "This is on what a lot of people consider to be their lowest point and their worst album, 'Their Satanic Majesties Request'. I think it's a masterpiece of psychedelic cack, because they tried too hard to be psychedelic. There's still some damn good songs: this one I always thought of as science fiction punk. Anyway, I discovered that the candlesticks on either end of our mantlepiece when struck together produced exactly the same note as one of the percussion effects on this track — this is when I was a teenager and it first came out. I had to stop because I cracked them and they ceased ringing; that was a cue to put them back after so many weeks of crashing them together. To this day my parents never knew who broke the candlesticks. Now it can be told."

4 "This is an incredibly beautiful slice of, well, pop music. When I heard the descending guitar line in this for the first time, it was just aural magic, I can't think of any other way of describing it. The single version of this has a false ending, the drums come back really loudly: I love that bit. The album doesn't have it on, they fade out before it happens, but the album version does have a false start, a lovely little cappella intro, really greasy. This single has the right combination of notes for me that plucks something internally."

5 "I love bebop, I keep retreating back into it to calm me down. That sounds ludicrous because the music is so frantic, but I actually find it has a soporific effect on me. It's so complex and violent it's like trying to stare at very ornate wallpaper and make sense of it. Your head gives up and just drowns in this enormous mass of scribbly pattern. Actually, Charlie Parker was responsible for me taking up the saxophone, but I couldn't make head nor tail of it. Pipes, tubes and valves — it's like having a North Sea oil platform jammed in your mouth and someone saying, 'OK, go!'"


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Previous Article in this issue

The Dumb Chums

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Smooth Operator


Publisher: One Two Testing - IPC Magazines Ltd, Northern & Shell Ltd.

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One Two Testing - Feb 1985

Artist:

Andy Partridge


Role:

Musician
Singer
Songwriter
Guitarist

Related Artists:

XTC


Feature

Previous article in this issue:

> The Dumb Chums

Next article in this issue:

> Smooth Operator


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