Complicated Game: Inside The Songs Of XTC by Andy Partridge & Todd Bernhardt

Author:Andy Partridge & Todd Bernhardt [Partridge, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jawbone Press
Published: 2016-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

[Dramatic voice] He killed them with his music!

He bored them to death! He sarcastic’d them to death! They couldn’t take it a day longer. [Laughs.] Anyway, when they started making the Mellotron in England, they were still using that American three-track head format. So the sounds that they recorded on to the tapes were split into three tracks. You could combine three instruments. We had things like brass, strings, and something else on one set of tapes; then we bought another set of tapes as we did 25 O’Clock that had flutes in it—because, if you’re going to be psychedelic, you have to have the ‘Strawberry Fields’ flutes, you know.

It was very, very inspiring to sit and struggle with this thing. And I found that I could actually manipulate three fingers at once! Two on one hand and one on the other hand—and I had a sort of a semblance of a song going!

For a long time, it remained a little instrumental thing. It was almost like my party piece—you know, when we’d get into a studio, I’d rush over to a keyboard, and say, ‘Hey! What do you reckon to this?’ And I’d play it, and it was, ‘Oh god, Partsy’s playing his party piece again.’ I think the melody was played with the left hand, which is not usually the case with melodies, but I’m not a keyboard player, so I didn’t know that, you know.

So I had this little dreamlike instrumental, basically, that reminded me of the seaside, because—although I think it’s a brass tape on the Mellotron—it has an organ-like on-and-off attack and release. And it has that memory of brass in it, if you see what I mean. So, over time, I started to flesh out lyrics to this little instrumental party piece. It grew from that.

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