XTC - The Big Express (1984)

To promote their seventh album, 1984's The Big Express, XTC pieced together an episode of Channel 4's documentary series Play at Home, each instalment chronicling a separate band. Despite essentially being an extended interview with the odd music video, they wanted to show more of themselves than The Tube could pertain; you see Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory flaunt their passion projects in and outside the band and, per the title, explore their not particularly fashionable hometown of Swindon as it was going through the wars a bit. The railway town was to suffer a big loss when the Swindon Works, its historic steam train maintenance and repair centre, was given the call in '84 to shut down, and this sudden swipe at an identity that surrounded their community backlit the album. It's clear enough from the cover that, as with the emblazoned Uffington White Horse on 1982's English Settlement, they'll always think on the corner of England they're forever bound to, no matter how far they travel. As primary songwriter (Colin always contributing a few songs too), Andy envisioned the new record as one of 'industrial pop' in which to wallow in "the imagery and the sounds" of their old town. As he later explained, it's an album "that's riveted together and a bit rusty around the edges and is sort of like broken Victorian massive machinery." 

If using the fall of local industry as a launchpad for music seems like a 'folk' move, it wasn't a necessarily obscure one for Thatcher age pop; the week the album entered the charts at number 38, the new number one album was Big Country's Steeltown, which also takes "industrial music" rather literally and intimately, as a matter of heritage and pride and symbolic of decline, and again wears this on its (record) sleeve. But XTC had less communal factors at play too; they were stuck in their 'wilderness years', when their financial luck was down, the hits had run dry and Virgin Records were impatient for some sort of restart; the band were also still adjusting to their studio-based, rent-a-drummer set-up, live gigs firmly a thing of the past, and had not fully explored the advantages of what this could mean for their wildest dreams. So, with so much going on (in multiple senses), The Big Express sounds vital by necessity.

Hence, as what many consider their final post-punk move, it is coarse and abrasive, in that sense out of step with the Mummer and Skylarking around it but not unlike the later-day Oranges & Lemons in that its off-kilter production (David Lord) adds a dense intensity to what you know XTC albums are like. And so The Big Express continues their vigorous reworking of pop, a slightly cracked iron contraption of an album that (not unlike The The) makes fertile use of new sounds, every song at an abrupt relocation than the previous one until that wheel's circumference has been jaggedly circled (and guest drummer Pete Phipps, no stranger to beats that restarted pop, meshes with a steam engine Linndrum). Arguably it was just as much a break for Lord, whose productions were never so condensed (the closest thing, Peter Gabriel 4, still one of broad spaces). Yet they recorded at his former Crescent Studios in Walcot Street, Bath, a road I know very well and which is certainly no Swindon. So it was recorded on my doorstep, as startling a realisation as discovering a lot of old favourites were taped at The Wool Hall and Real World.

For me this closeness has always been there in a way it isn't with music from, say, Bristol, a closer place I know better than Swindon but which as a huge city feels relatively self-contained. Living less than an hour from Swindon in Wiltshire's county town, I'm the only fan I know who first discovered XTC because they were local. As a seven-year-old in the mid-00s obsessed with leucippotomy (as I still am) I spotted the English Settlement sleeve in a book of 1,000 record covers and couldn't believe it – my dad photocopied it, blew it up and used it to spraypaint the horse on the garden wall (it's still there). It would be years yet before, like Cardiacs, Blur, Disco Inferno and others, they became an important part in establishing my social life as it exists today (and in its longstanding role as my groupchat's icon, I have seen The Big Express' cover more than any other in my whole life, even if just in the corner of my eye), and it was surprising getting into the band properly to discover that where they're from wasn't a big deal to only me (it's not like, say, Crawley is deep in the Cure's legend). The way they turned their misunderstood town into an advantage inspires me as someone from a maybe more misunderstood one, and even if Swindon only makes a few direct appearances, this is music that shouts life at the world from our county. Yet this is just one facet of the album, so it feels most logical to individually consider where each song goes, or gets to. 

The record starts like mechanics at work on the railway tracks, Gregory's metallic chugs of guitar panning rapidly like sparks off an angle grinder, threatening to chuck you in the deep end after the relatively soft Mummer – XTC loved let-your-ears-adjust album openings, and this one was jolting enough for Cardiacs to pay homage with "Fiery Gun Hand". Thereafter, Moulding spends "Wake Up" warning you against, as the Manics later put it, living life like a comatose. As someone who hasn't much of a life myself I struggle with songs that tell you to sort yourself out like it's just so easy (Floyd's "Time", not so much the Cure's more jubilant "Gone!"), but "Wake Up" is much more engaged with its own advice as we learn that our Ernold Same figure has gone so far he "might be dead" now – a man in the street could be fighting for life but he'd stay detached from proceedings, the Greek chorus of "Who cares!" underlining how this is a choice for him. But even then it is never too late; Annie Huchrak, a local Bathonian drafted in by Lord, softly whispers in your ear to "wake up" (Hounds of Love a year ahead of schedule?), and it's almost a tug of war with Moulding echoing both the hopeful and the hopeless phrases (hence also the indecisive, on-off rhythm section). But does he wake up? The thought is left hanging, to be picked up later perhaps. The big iron wheel needs to roll a bit first as, for XTC, there are a few thousand things to be getting on with; this is truly an eclectic pop record in the Pepper it-all-sticks sense.

We first hear Partridge's voice on "All You Pretty Girls", casting rays of clarity through a Mellotron fog (not quite "Watcher of the Skies", but I note Gregory was and is very fond of Foxtrot). A sea shanty that hints at mid-80s Madness-meets-The Mollusk but which could only be *this* band, its subject of sailors thinking of loved ones as a sign of shared optimism on choppy seas is Andy in bijou mode. It's unlike his other songs about women (say a "Down in the Cockpit" or an "Omnibus"), existing more as a playful way of continuing the band's ever-expanding penchant for the scenic – I note it's the first of two consecutive songs based on folk idioms, so it's down to the Linndrum, echoey keyboards (just as ice-rink as they are Celtic) and layered fade-out to bring out the required rough edges (perhaps too much so for the public, peaking as its lead single at number 55 despite its memorably literal video).

But those edges are very honed on "Shake Your Donkey Up", which puts the West Country into country-and-western and constantly teeters on the edge of disaster. Ostensibly about a deservedly dumped "jackass", its arguably the final in a particular strand of fast and jerky XTC avant-pop that goes back to "Cross Wires", a crooked hoedown where Phipps whacks buckets and scrap metal, bruised fiddles do their thing at odd angles and a demented Partridge howls with excitement and cracks a whip as wildly as Dave Dee on "The Legend of Xanadu" (the lineage of Moonraker art-pop madness is there if you want it, and note how "Xanadu" itself was a spaghetti western in a series of singles that constantly looked for styles to chew up and spit out in lovably skewed ways). The song's central breakdown is particularly high on invention – industrial yes, sounding like a diseased, intricate drum workout trying to invent breakcore, while Gregory decides now is the time to play like Nile Rodgers. I note how Meat Beat Manifesto would form in Swindon a few years later, and this is one moment on The Big Express (among others to come) that unexpectedly anticipates some of their Storm the Studio-era industrial-funk-breakbeat collages. What with the end of 1980's "Living Through Another Cuba" resembling an Aphex Twin record played underwater, the group's casual knack for predicting these kind of futures is underexplored.

The experimentation works so well because they instinctively know pop, what can make it move, and the seaside-postcard-gone-wrong "Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her", perhaps (perhaps) their greatest song up to this point (Partridge himself thought as much, and given that his later favourite XTC songs were "Rook", "Wrapped in Grey" and "Easter Theatre", he is a rare artist who knows what his best work is), is so sublimely executed you seldom consider how all that happens is a boy on the beach compliments his crush's coat and she thanks him. It's all about the madness playing out in his head, the constant hesitation and anxiety as he's heckled and prompted to make a move by impatient waves, seagulls and anything else in his eyeline, or so he thinks. He's pressured by the band too – it was among the first signs that their repressed love for psychedelia had grown too big to contain (you saw it in flashes beforehand, like the phasing in "Jason and the Argonauts"); its stiff, plonky (and almost bitonal) Mellotron motif makes the song – for 1984 – come across like inverted synthpop, an earthy euphonium part among the few things in the mix that aren't prickling the boy, with Tchaikovsky cannonballs (!) the chief culprit among those that are. All the while, the rhythm – always peeling and fastening up again – is his every almost kiss before he pulls back. But her sweetness is rewarding enough, so his surroundings can go back to just surrounding.

They're reinventing the insecure love song in a distinctly sideward way (in '84 terms think also of Prefab Sprout's "Cruel") and it's as brash as it is unavoidably pretty (Partridge is one of the pop melodists for all time, and knows a turn of phrase). No doubt it's clear by now that I consider The Big Express an album of great newness, a realignment of pop whose many routes and ideas were plotted as possible ways forward but which have not always been taken up by anyone else; something like "Seagulls", its imagination unceasing, could source another band's whole aesthetic (he says well aware an American-Japanese band are named after it). And like 1986's "Another Satellite", which similarly masks its worries with metaphors, what Partridge was really describing his attempts to resist being with his future wife.

But if there's any autobiographic sentiment to "The Everyday Story of Smalltown" (yes, I'm jumping a song, but it'll make sense this way) or if it's all observation is probably irrelevant. By tapping into the heart of daily Swindon it is a sequel of sorts to 1980's "Respectable Street", but where that song gossiped on individuals and showed how many stories can be explored in one tiny place (knowing how to move a Ray Davies influence sideways, even in a literal geographic sense), "Smalltown" considers how the town as a whole is the composite of its minutiae. It chugs through Wiltshire's biggest settlement – trust me, with a 222k population, it is the polar opposite of a small town. I'm from Trowbridge and I consider us to be pretty big – at varying speeds as it veers on both its reliable and unreliable inhabitants. Yet the central line, as you'd expect, is the rejoinder of "Who would pull down Smalltown?"; the undercurrent, that the Swindon Works was the livelihoods of many, is between the lines. Think also of 1982's "Ball and Chain", where Moulding peered his eyes on the destruction of houses in Westlecott Place and celebrated that one resident who wouldn't move out. Swindon won't go down without a fight.

It's a needed riposte to Gilbert O'Sullivan's "I'm Leaving", in which his apparently barren childhood town can only thwart his horizons. Unlike Gilbert, XTC were always here and as Partridge himself says in Play at Home on the matter of never leaving, "I like the place and everyone's got to have roots." The use of bandstand brass (now that's pretty Gilbert) accentuates the sense of home in an industrial town – otherwise, the song (again like "Respectable Street") is (kazoos aside) like what they played as ambitious upstarts in this sleepy old place, necessitating the relative respite of "I Bought Myself a Liarbird". You suspect David Lord felt most in his comfort zone here (lest you forget he produced "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime"), and any unpleasantness that could arise from it being a 'pesky ex-manager' song (cf. Queen's "Death on Two Legs") is offset by its careful versatility and engaging oddness – they almost resemble a (very cardboard-sounding) skiffle or jugband reprising their work song on a street corner, yet the hazy guitars partly recall the George Harrison of "Your Love is Forever", and all this space shows the dub in them is still kicking – but more typical is the chorus' lateral glance to somewhere dreamy (a way out?), a la 1992's "The Ugly Underneath", and an ending as happily resolved as 1999's "Your Dictionary" (which again dispels any inherent spite by making all the right moves). Already a future is being planned.

The titular pun (lyrebird/liar bird) presages Andy's jolting of language on "You're the Wish You Are I Had". It's there in the broken name, in the way he falls into falsetto to deliver a melismatic "had" like he's spiralling away ("haaAaAaAd!") and in the flexible word "wish", halting each chorus by repeating it like an oscillator or – just like a helicopter – propeller ("wishwishwish"), or acting as a crash cymbal in the outro. All this 10cc-type linguistic mischief is because he's infatuated and can't get it across joyously enough. Brassy synths slope behind determined snares in the verses, his world turned upside down, and overall (and unlike his own re-recordings on the following week's Give My Regards boondoggle), the influence of 1967 Paul McCartney is put to new and inspiring use, his new muse (same as on "Seagulls") encouraging him to pull out all the stops, to keep scaling higher. Even the brief guitar solo is a big atonal shard of something (as with the middle-eight of 1979's "Day In Day Out", squint and it's Fred Frith).

For his second and final song, "I Remember the Sun", Moulding changes tack to sweetly reflect on his own North Wilts childhood. The aura is jazzy and a little dozy, perhaps reflecting – but largely outdoing – the New Jazz or "British jazz revival" sophisti-pop of '84 (Café Bleu, Matt Bianco, Everything But the Girl etc.), and in that sense pointing forwards to the likes of "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul" and "Miniature Sun". Actually, it's arguably the exact changing of Colin's guard – the start of the album was the last time his social or socio-economic comment songs were his focus (there will be more to come, but as anomalies) and here is the start of his emphasis on introspective, serene numbers, often rhapsodising the joys of his own youth or even younger (say "Grass" or "Bungalow"), or looking at where he is now and smiling (like "My Bird Performs" and "Ridiculous Tonight"). By the time we get to Apple Venus Volume 1, the band nail the art of evoking the Marlborough Downs or the Vale of Pewsey to me, places I love, but "I Remember the Sun" doesn't make me think so much of anywhere I know and veils some murky uncertainty – the key change is a little alarming, Gregory's guitar is anguished but gets stifled by the superficial lightness, there is a brief dentist drill drone and the final chord is a tad menacing. Bear in mind he sings "Most of all I remember the sun," as if it wasn't shining so much anymore.

Which naturally takes me back to that spinning iron wheel, asking us to wake up. I have held back three songs because they bear the record's sharpest blades. Starting urgently at side one's end, before "Seagulls" has even fully faded, "This World Over" is Partridge's most brutal masterpiece. "Oh well, that's this world over," he mourns to himself before the music – sounding somewhat like the Police – fires in on a snare gunshot. The apocalypse has been and gone, life remains but at what cost? Children can't imagine what this "sea of rubble" marked London once was. This was not the first time that very 80s fear of nuclear wipeout clouded Andy's mind, but where earlier efforts like "Living Through Another Cuba" strutted nervously in the face of it (as did "Two Tribes", still in its nine-week stay number one when the album sessions were wrapped up), the aftermath and debris of "This World Over" – in the year of Threads – are chilling, especially coming from someone who was now a father (and boy does the piano, introduced at just the right point mid-way through and which sounds like its playing itself, make me Feel Things). The rhythm's subtle evocation of reggae (a final reminder that it was once among Partridge's biggest influences in writing XTC's drum parts) is undercut by Phipps punching holes in the song, whilst the permeating ambient drift is more the contaminated air of this radioactive New Britain.

And little in the band's catalogue sounds as contaminated as the super discordant "Reign of Blows", which grinds its teeth on regimes (the US invasion of Grenada was on his mind) and couldn't sound more violent short of being, say, the Wildhearts of "Anthem"; a few years later, Bono would tell the Edge to put El Salvador "through an amplifier", but here the idea is to put everything, even Andy himself, through barbaric distortion, to turn its almost every bone and ligament to white noise. I wonder if it was partly an attempt to mould their experimental 1983 B-side "Procession Towards Learning Land", an almost microtonal exercise, into something more pop-shaped. But ultimately it is just as inaccessible – as much a challenging listen on a 1984 pop album as Soft Cell's "Slave to This" – and its piercing harmonicas are its harshest weapon ("people have no place in their solution, so torture raises its hand").

All this severity has to atomise in one of the finest of all closing songs, an abrupt return to the days when their albums abruptly ended with loud, agitated avant-rockers like "Complicated Game" and "Travels in Nihilon". Partridge was aiming for "industrial pop" throughout but the terrifying "Train Running Low on Soul Coal", dissonant firebolts on pylons, is that in every sense, with bludgeoning beats that could easily be Tackhead or Test Dept. There is no smothering abandon with hopeless memories of reconstructed 'cheeriness' (the way More Specials, Combat Rock and The Great Escape all sinisterly end); instead (and as with "Nihilon") Patridge painfully tries accosting the dreaded end of his creative usefulness to those higher up, paralleling it with Swindon's engines being dashed at the wall in a double dose of turmoil, the 'soft' parts of the song only adding to the overall delirium. Just hear those shrieks masquerading as verse against those mechanised huffs and puffs, as he fears all is heading towards a brick wall and then extinction. And consolidating on what hid in "I Remember the Sun", an upfront 'guitar solo' spits like broken electric wires. Do they expect to get out of this?

As his helpless distress signal of a head voice ('actual' singing by now a blurred memory) reaches its final minute, the tempo slows, the train dies, its components fall off one by one. "Next stop, bad dreamsville", crash... But the very first thing you hear on the very next proper XTC album is the sound of crickets on a sunny morning. That was the album that some would say – especially if they want to draw such a line in the sand with this band – 'saved' their career. In death comes rebirth.

And what of old Smalltown? At the start of their Play at Home, Andy and Dave make it clear that "Soul Coal" is, essentially, folk music, despite its disjointed melody, by playing it on two droning acoustics (there is the precedent of Martin Carthy, who knows a thing about scary folk music). This is happening on a bandstand in Swindon and is intercut with scenes of where the town is now at. Clock the "Welcome to Swindon" floral display, cranes in action, scenes both sunny and grey (sometimes at once, the town's two proper skyscrapers sunlit as rainclouds pass) and the many murals still holding strong. You feel a sense of optimism, and I think of all the redevelopment projects in the town in the 80s and 90s, even the small ones (say for instance the West Swindon Sculpture Trail) and I think of how the only Swindon I've ever known is a lovely place. In 2019, I saw Colin reunited with Terry Chambers on stage for the first time in 37 years. It was the opening night of TC&I's short residency at the Swindon Arts Centre. Outside the entrance there is a sculpture, Mark Amis' Applause, two hands, one person praising the show, but you can see it as one's hand holding another's. The band and the town will help each other through.