Best XTC Songs: 20 Classics From Swindon’s Captains Of Industry

Even by rock n’ roll’s mercurial standards, XTC has a history best described as “eccentric.” Blessed with not one but two superb singer-songwriters in guitarist Andy Partridge and bassist Colin Moulding, this much-loved UK outfit sustained a career spanning almost 30 years and enjoyed widespread critical acclaim – yet the global stardom that often seemed theirs for the taking eluded them in the end.

Nonetheless, XTC left behind one of UK rock’s most enviable bodies of work. Having initially risen to prominence as punk mutated into new wave, landmark titles such as 1979’s Drums and Wires and 1980’s Black Sea brought them into mainstream contention while 1982’s ambitious double set English Settlement – featuring signature hit “Senses Working Overtime” – positioned the band for mass success.

Listen to the best XTC songs now.

Up to this period, XTC had also gigged heavily (often sharing stages with the likes of The Police and Talking Heads), yet after Andy Partridge suffered from acute stage fright on the aborted English Settlement tour, they quit touring and effectively became a studio-based band for the remainder of their career.

Label sponsors Virgin Records harbored doubts they could survive without playing live, yet XTC gradually proved them wrong. Indeed, the band’s influence only grew over time. They went on to create sublime albums such as 1986’s Skylarking and 1992’s Nonsuch with in-demand producers such as Todd Rundgren and Elton John acolyte Gus Dudgeon.

When Partridge and Moulding went their separate ways in 2006, their legacy was represented by 12 fantastic albums. This ensures that condensing it all down to a bespoke list of the 20 Best XTC songs presents something of a challenge – albeit one we hope we’ve risen to here.

Home is where the heart is

(“Meccanik Dancing (Oh We Go),” “The Everyday Story Of Smalltown,” “The Meeting Place,” “Chalkhills And Children”)

As XTC has freely admitted over the years, hailing from Swindon in the UK’s West Country was tantamount to the kiss of death when the band signed to Virgin Records in 1977. The area was far better known as the maintenance hub of the UK’s Great Western Railway than for its (almost total lack) of cultural significance.

Nonetheless, downtrodden Swindon frequently inspired XTC to write truly great songs over the years. For example, it was once customary for Andy Partridge’s parents to spend weekends socializing at the town’s Mechanics Institute, and the tradition was passed down to the teenage Partridge, inspiring him to pen “Meccanik Dancing (Oh We Go)” for XTC’s second album, Go 2. An early example of the clipped, minimal post-punk style XTC would make its own on Drums and Wires, the song made for the ideal curtain raiser for Go 2 and – with hindsight – probably should have been a single.

Penned by Colin Moulding, a later XTC track that did become a single, 1986’s delightful chiming pop song “The Meeting Place,” sampled the hooter that called workers to their shifts at Swindon’s Railway Works. The Works, the town’s principal employer from the 1850s until its closure in 1986, also inspired one of XTC’s best deep cuts, The Big Express’ “The Everyday Story Of Smalltown” – a rousing, Ray Davies-esque slice of reportage full of references to quintessential English staples such as the beef drink Oxo, the Salvation Army and “Tories and Reds” (the UK’s Conservative and Labour political parties).

It wasn’t just Swindon’s urban landscape that inspired XTC. The band chose a striking image of the nearby prehistoric hill figure, the Uffington White Horse, for the cover of its fifth album, English Settlement, while the same pastoral West Country landscape inspired Partridge to pen “Chalkhills And Children,” a deceptively mellow rumination on growing older and having children which brought XTC’s ninth album, Oranges And Lemons to a suitably haunting close.

Courting Controversy

(“Statue Of Liberty,” “Respectable Street,” “Dear God,” “Wrapped In Grey”)

XTC initially rose to prominence during punk, but in truth, they were ambivalent about the movement. They admired its energy, but less so its musical strictures, as all four band members were confirmed fans of 60s pop and rock. In fact, Andy Partridge described the band’s 1978 debut White Music as “Captain Beefheart meets The Archies” in a 1999 Mojo interview during which he also revealed XTC listened to everyone from The Beatles to Sun Ra and Atomic Rooster during the making of the album.

Nonetheless, while XTC spurned the Sex Pistols’ anti-establishment stance, the band still inadvertently courted controversy at different points during their career. For example, while it was actually a perfectly innocent reflection of the band’s first visit to New York, the brilliantly quirky White Music-era single “Statue Of Liberty” was banned by the BBC due to the lyric “In my fantasy, I sail beneath her skirt” – and it subsequently missed the charts altogether.

Indeed, even after XTC had broken into the listings, they still had problems with the powers that be. The band’s fourth album Black Sea was a UK Top 20 success, a feat repeated by the record’s third single, “Sgt. Rock (Is Going To Help Me),” ensuring expectations were high for the band’s next 45, the muscular “Respectable Street.” A magnificent, Partridge-penned snapshot of the inverted snobbery inherent in British suburban life (“It’s in the order of the hedgerows/It’s in the way the curtains open and close/It’s in the looks they give you down their nose”), the album version also included several lyrics which could easily have inflamed the BBC. Anticipating this, Partridge recorded a new vocal for the single version (replacing phrases such as “abortion” and “sex position” with “absorption” and “proposition”) yet still “Respectable Street” was banned and one of XTC’s best songs missed the Top 40. Years later, the band discovered this was because of the phrase “Sony Entertainment Centres” – which the BBC refused to condone on the grounds of “corporate sponsorship.”

Ironically, while XTC was sometimes sunk by the BBC, another controversial classic significantly raised the band’s profile in North America. Andy Partridge wrote the somber, emotive “Dear God” from the point of view of a struggling agnostic writing a letter to God challenging his existence and initially agreed with the decision not to include it on XTC’s eighth album, the acclaimed, Todd Rundgren-produced Skylarking as it was felt it may upset American audiences. That supposition later proved correct in that Partridge later received hate mail, yet the divisive “Dear God” did great business for XTC. Originally released as the flipside of “Grass,” it received such widespread play on US college radio, it was re-released as bona fide A-side and entered the Billboard Mainstream Rock Top 40 under its own steam.

Sadly, though, the controversy surrounding an underrated classic from XTC’s later career negatively impacted the band’s twilight years. One of many highlights from XTC’s sublime tenth album Nonsuch, the sweeping orchestral ballad “Wrapped In Grey” was initially chosen as the album’s third single by Virgin, who – for reasons still unspecified – changed its mind, even though up to 5,000 copies are believed to have been prepared for release. Virgin’s decision to withdraw it had extraordinary consequences: XTC effectively went on strike and refused to record any new material until the label released them in 1998.

What’s In A Name?

(“Making Plans For Nigel,” “No Thugs In Our House,” “The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead,” “Standing In For Joe”)

Understandably, XTC is usually known as Andy Partridge’s band as he wrote the lion’s share of their catalog. However, Colin Moulding’s contribution should never be underestimated. The bassist wrote a significant selection of XTC’s most resonant songs. Moulding wrote a handful of tunes for both White Music and Go 2, yet he really came into his own circa the band’s third album, Drums and Wires. Prior to the record’s release, Moulding penned the agreeably angular stand-alone single “Life Begins At The Hop,” but he then provided XTC with its breakthrough hit, the infectiously catchy post-punk pop anthem “Making Plans For Nigel.” Having known a boy called Nigel at school, Moulding chose the name for the protagonist in his loosely autobiographical song about overbearing parents who have already decided their son will work for British Steel and that “his future is as good as sealed.” Aligning a radio-friendly tune with a theme that chimed with teenagers the world over, “Nigel” provided XTC’s breakthrough UK Top 20 hit in the fall of 1979.

Andy Partridge wrote the next of XTC’s great “name” songs, though he reputedly chose the protagonist’s name – Graham – as it was also Moulding’s reclusive brother’s Graham. The Graham in “No Thugs In Our House” doesn’t feature in the song’s title, but he’s a sinister presence in a song about a typical English suburban family wherein the blinkered parents worship their son and refuse to believe he harbors a proclivity for violence and racism (“We made little Graham promise us he’d be a good boy.”) Also featuring storming performances from drummer Terry Chambers and lead guitarist Dave Gregory, the urgent “No Thugs In Our House” was only a minor hit, but it’s still one of English Settlement’s key songs and its anti-violence message remains every bit as relevant today.

If Graham from “No Thugs In Our House” isn’t what he seems, then the central figure in Andy Partridge’s “The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead” is also misunderstood – albeit in a different way. In the song, the genial, Messiah-like titular hero is concerned with feeding and clothing the poor, yet despite his success, his altruism sets him up against the authorities (“he made too many enemies of the people who would keep us on our knees”), who proceed to wreak a dreadful revenge. A strident rocker ably supported by blasts of harmonica, “The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead” made for the ideal opener for XTC’s tenth album Nonsuch, and it had legs. It later became a Top 5 hit in Canada when Crash Test Dummies covered the song for the 1995 Dumb & Dumber soundtrack.

A deeper dive into XTC’s catalog also reveals further excellent “name”-related songs, including Nonsuch duo “Dear Madam Barnum” and “Humble Daisy,” yet when it comes to the absolute essential XTC, Colin Moulding’s “Standing In For Joe” must be mentioned. Effectively a tale of misguided friendship, this winning, glam-flavored pop song from XTC’s final album, Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2) has a sting in the tail. Indeed, much to his chagrin, the titular Joe puts far too much faith in his friend’s ability to not just check up on his girlfriend, but also to keep things platonic with her while he’s out of town (“Who could resist her tender charms?/So the story goes, the actor he plays all the parts”) in this wonderfully-observed vignette.

War: what is it good for?

(“Living Through Another Cuba,” “Melt The Guns,” “This World Over,” “War Dance”)

War is a recurring theme in XTC’s catalog. The band’s pacifist stance meant that Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding returned to the subject numerous times throughout their career. The band first seriously tackled it on 1980’s Black Sea, recorded when relations between the global superpowers, the USA and USSR were frequently on a knife edge. “Living Through Another Cuba” is a lean and spiky live favorite which, as Partridge later told XTC fan site Chalkhills, was the result of “total nuclear-war paranoia – that and the uselessness of England, this completely and utterly useless little country whose significance in the world ended at the First World War.”

Partridge next returned to the subject on “Melt The Guns” on XTC’s fifth album, English Settlement. This sparse and brittle protest song found him railing against both North America’s gun laws and the media’s glorification of violence (“As long as your killers are heroes/ And all the media/ Will fiddle while Rome burns/ Acting like modern-time Neros”) before arriving at a repetitively simple chorus (“Melt the guns and never more to fire them”) which made his feelings brutally plain.

He adopted a more resigned tone, however, on “This World Over,” one of the key tracks from 1984’s The Big Express. This glorious, almost hymnal song was inspired by recent speeches by then-US president Ronald Reagan, which again instigated Partridge’s fears of impending nuclear doom – not least because he was about to become a father for the first time. As a result, he wrote “This World Over” from a post-Armageddon view of the world, adding further poignancy to an already emotive subject. By this time, Colin Moulding had also written his own anti-war diatribe “War Dance,” in response to the UK’s brief, but devastating war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, but XTC held it back and later recorded his brooding, pensive song for 1992’s Nonsuch, when it again seemed timely in the wake of the first Gulf War.

All Creatures Great and Small

(“Senses Working Overtime,” “Ladybird,” “Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her, Kiss Her,” “My Bird Performs”)

Even before XTC officially quit touring in 1982, Andy Partridge was keen to move away from the heavier, stage-ready electric rock music his band perfected on Drums and Wires and Black Sea. Indeed, the group significantly broadened its palette of sounds on its fifth album, English Settlement, with acoustic textures and subtler songs, arguably best exemplified by the record’s signature hit “Senses Working Overtime,” a thoughtful pop song stuffed with imagery relating to the wonder of the world. Not surprisingly, the song was a substantial UK hit (peaking at No. 10), while English Settlement rewarded the band with a career-best chart peak of No. 5.

Taking XTC’s career as a whole, it’s too simplistic to say the band eschewed rock’ n’ roll from then on. There are still dazzling guitar-driven pop songs on all their later albums, with the exception of the heavily orchestrated Apple Venus (Vol.1). However, after XTC came off the road, both Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding’s songs often had a tendency to follow a more pastoral path, with both penning songs rife with imagery involving nature and the animal world. A case in point is Partridge’s “Ladybird” from XTC’s underrated sixth album Mummer. One of the band’s least heralded songs, this delightfully jazzy stroll was performed with a lightness of touch that sets it apart – both then and now.

Also circa Mummer, XTC acquired a Mellotron, which shaped the sound of several of its best songs. This legendary proto-sampling keyboard made its presence felt on Mummer highlights such as “Beating Of Hearts” and “Deliver Us From The Elements,” but it also provided the backbone for one of XTC’s very best songs “Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her, Kiss Her” from 1984’s The Big Express. Composed on the Mellotron by Andy Partridge – using only three fingers – the song’s dreamy, but disorienting atmosphere and its slightly queasy fairground/seaside feel immediately make it stand out (as does the euphonium solo) and it remains one of the most adventurous set pieces in the XTC canon.

Indeed, avian references abound in many of their best songs, from “Senses Working Overtime” to “Summer’s Cauldron” from Skylarking. Andy Partridge’s excellent “Rook” could also easily have made this list. Ultimately, though, Colin Moulding’s “My Bird Performs” fills the final slot in our round-up of the best XTC songs. Like all of his band’ finest latter-career songs, this Nonsuch-era classic yearns for the simpler life (“Fine art never moved my soul, no vintage wine or designer clothes/ But my world shakes for me when my bird sings sweetly”) and like all the selections here, it displays all the hallmarks of timelessness.

Listen to the best XTC songs now.