A future in British appeal awaits XTC as they make their presence felt with their third album…
Making Plans For Nigel
A busy 1978 had seen tentative steps towards chart reward for XTC. The early part of the year brought the frenzied new wave punk of White Music, which appeared at Number 38 in the UK album charts. The more experimental Go2 did a bit better that Autumn, charting in the UK at Number 21.
By 1979, keyboardist Barry Andrews was out and guitarist Dave Gregory was in. And while Drums And Wires only charted at a should-have-been-higher 34, it did at least put the band on the map around the world, attaining Top 20 positions in New Zealand and Canada (achieving the band’s first gold disc status).
What XTC had lacked, however, was a hit 45. Two great singles from White Music – Statue Of Liberty and This Is Pop – went ignored, and while the brilliantly retro Life Begins At The Hop made a dent on the UK charts in Spring 1979, it could only reach Number 54.
Enter Making Plans For Nigel. It was released as a single in Autumn 1979, and while it deserved to chart much higher, it did at least prove to be XTC’s UK Top 20 debut. Like much of Drums And Wires, it spotlights frustration with the tedium of the modern world (which is probably why I like the LP so much – I could spend weeks boring you into submission with my modern world pet hates, but I won’t). The tale is told from the points of view of expectant parents who expect their Nigel to be a good boy, and to stick with school and education in order to get a good, well-paid job with British Steel. A good number of songs deal with the frustration of parental expectations and the desire to see kids in a dead-end job, but very few express as well as Making Plans For Nigel.
What makes it work is the clever way in which the music matches the cold, dispassionate feel of the lyrics. In the XTC biography Chalkhills And Children, drummer Terry Chambers recalled eschewing the temptation to beat the rhythm on the hi-hat, instead using the hi-hat on the accents and playing the rhythm on a floor tom. Chambers also remembered the use of the keyboard “to make a smashing sound, like an anvil in a foundry” to replicate that grinding production factory feel.
Like much of XTC’s output, the devil is in the details. Andy Partridge’s offbeat, high-pitched coos could have been an unwelcome nuisance, but they somehow fit in well and make a good contrast with the strident beats – he recalled wanting to create a kind of retro Beach Boys sound, while also remembering with less satisfaction that out of the five weeks spent on recording the album, a whole seven days were spent on getting Making Plans For Nigel in the can.
As far as album headliners go though, you couldn’t wish for a better one than Making Plans For Nigel, which sums up the quirky but accessible new wave pop of XTC to a fault. Mind you, the steel industry might not have seen it that way, since shortly after the single’s release, apparently 100,000 steel workers went on strike…
Helicopter
Having bought Black Sea on CD in the best-forgotten days of university life in early 1995, I was hungry for more XTC. That April, I snapped up a copy of Drums And Wires, again on shiny disc. I was wondering whether the quality of Black Sea was a fluke, but luckily Drums And Wires was just as good as their 1980 offering.
A large part of its appeal is its childlike approach on tracks like Helicopter, which is said to have been inspired by Eagle comic artist Frank Hampson’s advert for Lego. Hampson depicted a couple of kids flying over an entire city made out of Lego, and that image stuck with Andy Partridge, who took this as the foundation for Helicopter.
The music is again on the same wavelength as the words. Terry Chambers’ furiously rhythmic drum thrashing has been treated and phased to make it sound like the whirling blades of a helicopter. Partridge also recalled in an interview with the Chalkhills website that he used a Korg keyboard, a monophonic piece of kit, to also add to that choppy ambience.
Day In Day Out
I sometimes still have nightmares about working in a shop. In my second year of university, I started working in a well-known and now defunct department store: initially at weekends and holidays, and then during that tricky post-uni year while I frantically searched for a journalism course. It did pay enough for exorbitant train fees and daily living, but hoo boy, was it tough. The endless drudge of serving surly customers (including a diva-ish one-time Big Breakfast presenter, who came stomping in at about five minutes to closing time, expecting royal treatment). Having to offer each customer a special cuddly toy as part of an ongoing promotion. 4am deliveries. Frequent stock takes. Et cetera.
With that in mind, I think I related to Day In Day Out the most on this album. Colin Moulding had this genius in depicting the monotonous drudge of everyday work life with such clarity. The lyrics are few, but they still sum up the torment of shop work. The opening salvo is “Clock in my head, clock on the wall, and the two of them don’t agree at all” whereas later he’s wishing that his girl was with him in the shop so that together, they could “count the dots on the wall”.
The sparse, monotonous soundscape of Day In Day Out should bore, but it doesn’t, instead offering a hypnotic, addictive snapshot of how so many of us had – or have – to make ends meet in order to make some cash.
When You’re Near Me I Have Difficulty
When I started this blog a couple of years ago, I wanted to write about telly and music that began on a certain day. I do this all the time on Twitter, so it seemed like a good hook for my website. In the Summer months, new TV pickings are slim, as telly companies saved all the debuts for the Autumn and Winter seasons, so you’ll find a higher proportion of music blog entries between June and August.
Each day is unpredictable, and can throw up albums that when placed side by side, are polar opposites. So having just blogged about the by-the-numbers phone-in of Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing, XTC’s Drums And Wires is a massive contrast. When You’re Near Me I Have Difficulty alone has so much to offer in terms of unpredictable music surprises. More so than a million Atlantic Crossings could ever provide.
I’ll rattle some of these off as quickly as I can. The goofy relatability of that awkward new crush – in this case, it’s said to be about Partridge’s schoolboy crush on a girl called Vanessa Kearley. The way in which the jerky, jumpy rhythm evokes those weak-at-the-knees nerves of falling for that special someone. Terry Chambers’ unusual double hit drum choice. The stereo mix which has Partridge playing his guitar in one speaker, and Dave Gregory playing his in the other. The phased, ghosted vocals of Partridge in the “I used to be an iceman” middle bit. And to cap it all off, the overlapping vocal-bass-guitar clangs of the fadeout. Every time I hear When You’re Near Me I Have Difficulty, I come across something brand new, which is testament to Partridge’s songwriting skills and XTC’s overall talent for highly creative soundscapes. A work of wonder.
Ten Feet Tall
An out-and-out love song that’s comparatively simple to the previous cut, but no less potent. A straightforward acoustic strum, it’s a superb few minutes of pop that could well have been a hit.
Moulding was coming into his own as a songwriter on Drums And Wires. While maybe not as experimental in approach as Partridge, he still knew the mechanics of what makes a good record inside out and backwards. The hooks on Ten Feet Tall and its charmingly goofy lyrics (eg: “The way that I bubble, there’s something in the make, yeah”) are surefire signs of a major talent.
Roads Girdle The Globe
The title of Drums And Wires is said to have an unusual connection with my comic of choice as a kid, The Beano. It’s said that XTC saw a picture of Dennis The Menace’s dog Gnasher behind a drum kit, with the accompanying caption “BOOM BADA BOOM”. Alas, the band never used that picture as the front cover for this album – its title best exemplified on the amusing Side One closer, Roads Girdle The Globe.
A dizzy fusion of both heavy drumming (Chambers earning bonus pay packets for his ear-thumping pounding here) and clanging guitar chords, Roads Girdle The Globe still makes me chuckle – especially in the wake of stuff like Top Gear. Partridge thought it would be a good wheeze to write about car fanatics, and the way in which they treat their motor as a kind of religion. You can imagine them prostrating themselves at the wheels of their car while intoning “Hail mother motor! Hail piston rotor! Hail wheel!”
While it’s funny on the one hand, Roads Girdle The Globe does have that discordant, sinister air about it. Partridge’s off-kilter vocals err on the side of off-key at times, and for years, I thought he was simply muttering/shouting “Steering… And I’m steering…” in that middle bit, when it’s actually a loop of “Steer me, Anna”.
The other ominous facet of Roads Girdle The Globe is – oh no, another bloody choir. In this case, the “Vernon Yard Male Voice Choir” is merely the band, producer Hugh Padgham, plus a couple of roadies and A&R men, which were then apparently double-tracked to heighten the effect. But for the second time this month, the addition of a choir does work in context. In this instance, Partridge wanted the extra sound of a crowd that sounded “moronic” and the Vernon Yard lot do add that horrible kind of out-of-tune roar noise, culminating in the repeated mantra to the car to add that last bit of threat. “They’re killing machines!” said Partridge of cars on the Chalkhills website. “They’re destroying the planet!”
Real By Reel
Like my copy of Black Sea, the CD version of Drums And Wires takes a pause in the middle before the album resumes again. Three bonus tracks are on here. The aforementioned Life Begins At The Hop, which is three minutes of undiluted retro pop genius. Plus, at the time, initial copies of Drums And Wires came with a bonus single that comprised the new wave twist of Chain Of Command and another shoulda-beena-hit in the making, Limelight.
After that interlude comes Real By Reel, which still rings true in 2026, never mind 1979. A paranoid, guitar jangle (and Dave Gregory supplies some excellent guitar work on this) about the government keeping tabs on you. Lyrics like “They can film you in bed or when you take a bath, they can tape every cry, they can tape every laugh” may have shaded echoes of Orwell’s 1984 47 years ago, but today – in this day and age of TikTok and everyone whipping out their iPhone cameras at every opportunity – the words are even closer to the truth.
Millions
While Drums And Wires plays fast and loose with new wave pop and rock, at times, it branches out into more unusual territory.
Millions is a strange, hypnotic oddity that relies on mood-building to create a foreboding soundscape. Chambers’ repeated drum thump is accompanied by a cavalcade of percussion, and the constant fast-strum guitar motif is the glue that holds it all together. It’s more a collision of prog rock and fusion jazz, but Millions does show signs of the different genre dabblings that XTC would attempt on future records. A successful experiment.
That Is The Way
The last Colin Moulding tune of the four on Drums And Wires, and one of his most fascinating. What it does is to bring the themes of Making Plans For Nigel and Day In Day Out together to create the repetitious tedium of strict parental expectation.
The constant vocal background telling off of “Do this, Do that” is an inspired attention-grabber, as the precise Chambers drum rhythm piles on the relentless misery heaped upon the poor kid. Kiss your auntie… wear a suit… hold your cutlery properly… it’s like being parented by Hyacinth Bucket.
That Is The Way is an exercise in economy. The lyrics are short, sharp but to the point, and are echoed to a tee in the minimalistic, no-nonsense atmosphere. The clinching downer is Dick Cuthell’s sobbing flugelhorn. It almost sounds like that poor kid blubbing into his pillow after being sent to bed on the dot of eight at his miserably futile existence.
Outside World
More in keeping with the White Music period, Outside World barrels along in its own environment of proto-punk. The fast thrash seams well with the lyrics about blotting out the horrors of the outside world.
Like its successor, Burning With Optimism’s Flames, Partridge has said that Outside World is almost autobiographical in that he would do everything he could to block out modern society – again, I relate to this. I actually have a “Bloody Modern World” jar instead of a swear jar at home, and it’s currently full enough to buy a new house from scratch.
Batty lyrics, but then stuff like “she has 11 lions laughing at her lakeside” is alliterative wordplay along the lines of The 12 Days Of Christmas, according to Partridge. Alas, the men in their pigpen “selling guns to simpletons to shoot ’em in the abdomen” still exist today, adding a hefty dose of grit to these clever tongue-twisters.
Scissor Man
While much of Drums And Wires has that childlike approach, sometimes, it can veer into darker waters.
On the surface, Scissor Man is a new wavey nursery rhyme, but the lyrics plummet into the abyss of grim. Apparently, the track is based on Heinrich Hoffman’s 1845 tome, Struwwelpeter, a dark fairy tale about a terrifying character that cuts naughty kids’ thumbs off. On the Chalkhills website, Partridge claimed that he wanted to make this into an adult morality tale, where naughty grown-ups were in danger of suffering the same fate.
Like all good scares, Scissor Man doesn’t have to chew the scenery to make its point. One of the quieter tracks on Drums And Wires, it’s all the better for not yelling at the top of its voice, as Andy sneers his way through his thumb-nosed warnings to “all self-made bad boys”.
Complicated Game
What better way to bid adieu to Drums And Wires than a spot of existential pondering?
Like all the other tracks on this fabulous album, Complicated Game gains from a well-considered arrangement. It’s a coiled spring of a closer, beginning on a whisper and ending on a roar, as Partridge’s thoughts get bigger and more grandiose. Initially, a simple debate of whether to put his finger to the left or the right, Andy practically whispers this is a barely audible mutter. And by the finish, when wondering should God put his world to the left or the right, he’s screaming the words in a frantic gabble. All the while, the rest of the band gradually crank up the background wall of sound from a lone hum to an equally crazed blare.
It’s the way of the world. No matter what you do, it won’t make a scrap of difference. No definitive right or wrong, just impenetrable murk.
I wasn’t let down when I bought Drums And Wires over 30 years ago, and I’m still not today. It still gets a fair bit of play at Bensalhia Towers. Along with Black Sea and English Settlement (I’ll hopefully get round to reviewing that one next year), Drums And Wires comfortably lodges in my Top 3 XTC pile.
(Cover design credited to Jill Mumford)
If you liked this article, you might like some of my other books which are available to buy at Amazon:
Amazon.co.uk: JOHN BENSALHIA: books, biography, latest update
