Todd Bernhardt: Let's talk about one of my favorites of yours -- "Towers of London."
Andy Partridge: Oy. Where to begin on this little monster?
TB: The second side of Black Sea, which is fantastic, starts with this song -- there's the "clang," and then who is that in the control booth talking?
AP: Actually, I wrote down some notes about this, because nobody's ever really explained what's going on. I think Terry's in the Stone Room, and you can hear a hit that's made of two things. I seem to remember it's Terry playing something like a fire extinguisher, and there may be a kitchen plate. If you listen, there are two clangs, mixed together.
Then he says, "Okay?" That's basically Terry saying, "I'm ready when you are." And then on the talk-back microphone, Steve Lillywhite comes on and says, facetiously, "Take a-hundred-and-three."
TB: Really? I always thought it was "Take number three" and then someone jokingly responds, "Take a-hundred-and-three."
AP: Well, it's not on the original version from Polygram Studios, on Coat of Many Cupboards -- I think that's just Colin laughing. But on the Black Sea version, it's Steve Lillywhite -- everything we recorded at that time, we had this running gag that each take was number one-hundred-and-three. So, he says that, then Terry repeats it, imitating our manager, Ian Reid, in his very pinched, nasal, upper-class voice. And then, on my vocal mic -- they'd left all this shit on the front of the tape -- I say, in an even more pinched, Ian Reid voice, "a hundred and three," and it catches a little bit of the echo that's on my voice. So there you go -- that's the cast of characters at the start.
But I'm not sure whether it's a fire extinguisher making that initial clank. It's certainly one in the fake "re-recording" that we did at the Manor studios -- you know, in that BBC film, "XTC at the Manor." I've got a funny feeling it may have been a dinner plate and something else on the actual version we recorded on Black Sea, at the Townhouse studios. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a dinner plate and something like the bottom of a heavy mic stand, or a section of pipe or girder or something. I think the fire extinguisher was the only thing laying around at the Manor that sounded vaguely right.
TB: Well, speaking of Coat of Many Cupboards, in his essay that went along with the set, what did Harrison call the band during this era? The "XTC of Broad Shoulders"? It was when you guys settled into the two-guitars-bass-and-drums line-up, and this song has always struck me as classic expression of that sound.
AP: It's that kind of song! It's very muscular -- the whole Black Sea album was just the touring machine at the peak of its "Don't fuck about, this is what you're going to get" period. "We've got guitars and we're going to turn 'em up and eat metal." [laughs]
TB: [laughs] You've mentioned to me that you think you and Dave together make one really great guitarist, and this is a great example of that. Because, except for when you get the bridge and Dave's obviously stepping out on his own, during the verses your two guitar parts are very intermeshed with each other.
AP: Yeah. I made a lot of notes for this track, but how can I answer this one? [pauses] I think I wanted to rewrite "Rain." Subconsciously. Musically. And I wanted clangorous guitars crashing together, and sort of droning. Because that's what they do -- they twiddle around on kind of a drone thing on "Rain." I think part of me wanted to go to that same place.
But I know what you mean -- I think this whole album is the "two guitars become one" thing. They're two barrels of a double-barreled shotgun. [laughs]
TB: Was that a conscious choice on your part? Was it something you were trying to take advantage of, because you were realizing what you could do with him in the band?
AP: I felt like I would be deceiving the public if, when you saw us live, it didn't sound like the record, and vice-versa. That's a funny mindset, I know, but it sounded pretty much like the record -- you know, the same arrangements, because everyone learned "the part," and we didn't deviate from that. We only had a couple of numbers where we gave ourselves some room to -- and I say it with inverted commas -- "improvise." But it wasn't true improvisation. It was kind of gently bungee-ing around with a few things -- like, for example, "Battery Brides."
TB: Or "Scissor Man."
AP: Right, where we had a whole dubby section at the end. But, you know, if you were to hear a recording of every night's performance of "Scissor Man," you'd hear the same motifs over and over. So, you were bungee-ing -- kind of bouncing up and down past similar struts of the bridge. Not exactly the same each time, but pretty similar.
I thought, around the time of Drums and Wires, and getting into Black Sea, that pretty much everything we did live had to sound like the record, or else I was somehow I was deceiving the record-buying public.
But I did get frustrated with that. By the end of that Black Sea tour -- or tours, plural -- it was like, "Ooh, right, I want to grow now, and use other textures, and how the hell are we going to do it live?" You know, I wanted to use keyboards more, I wanted to use some strings, for god's sake, and horns and stuff like that.
But yeah, this was recorded at the height of the touring machine, and this was the muscular XTC, I think.
TB: So, how does the interplay of guitars plug into your notion of wanting to sound like the record? Your parts were pretty inseparable at this point.
AP: Yeah, they were worked out. They're like part of a -- you know, you break the chord up, and give each other certain parts. But that's arranging -- I don't know if we knew we were doing it. I don't think I knew I was doing it, consciously, but it's certainly a naïve way of arranging something, you know? I mean, you pull a chord apart, and some bits would be Dave, and some bits would be me, or we'd find syncopated rhythms that would sort of grind against each other, and things like that.
In fact, on this album, there are a lot of examples of things like that -- "Living Through Another Cuba" or "Love at First Sight," where I'm playing an octave away from Dave and I'm playing little grind-y things, where the notes grind against the big, open D that he does on that.
So, we were very conscious of making this big, muscular, clockwork machine for every song. [effeminate voice] It was just what we were into. [laughs] I was into muscular. And buff! We were alarmingly buff and well-oiled.
TB: Let's pick apart the different parts -- besides the guitar interplay, I wanted to ask about the bass line on this, because it's a very important part of the song.
AP: It is. I like the idiocy of it. It just sits on that bass drum. It's an industrial counterpart to the clang of the metalware, which is meant to be like hammers and things -- they're building Victorian London, they're building the underground, the sewage, the big Gothic piles, the big Houses of Parliament, the railway system -- they're putting together London.
TB: Right. At the same time, wasn't the City of London really blossoming during the time you were writing this song, with those big glass and steel towers going up around the Tower of London? Were you writing about that, too?
AP: Well, actually, to be truthful, the original song was written as "Tower of London." All the lyrics I've got left are, "The Tower of London / Spreading high and wide / People speak a hundred tongues / But never get inside" -- I think that's what it says, I've actually crossed it out. I think I was actually trying to comment on the Tower of Babel thing, about the growing cosmopolitan side of London, and how international it had become.
At the time, I was conscious of wanting to write a song about London -- I think I was rather jealous of "Waterloo Sunset." I thought, "I want to write a song as good as that, and I guess it's got to be about London, because that's our capital, right?" So I started this thing, and I just sort of went off the rails with it. I thought, "No, it doesn't mean anything to me."
Then I saw an engraving of workmen building something under London -- I'm not sure what -- but they were in this huge underground corridor, with a hole in the top where the sunlight was coming in, and there was a pit pony down there, with a half-dozen Navvies. And I thought, "I'm going to write a song about London, but I'm going to write it from the point of view of the people who actually built it" -- the "Navigators," or canal builders. They were people who dug the canals, people who dug the Undergrounds -- basically the laborers of the Victorian era, who were known as Navvies. A lot of them were Irish, or people from the West Country, or from up north in England, so they were considered to be stupid yokels, generally, and they were looked down on, largely, by the population. You know, "expendable" types.
When I started to mess around with that idea, I felt so much more at home with that. I thought, rather than take the title "Tower of London" -- which has just the connotation of the Tower of London, and that's not what the song's about -- I changed it to "Towers of London," because of the amount London was expanding at the time, and I was thinking, "Does anyone think of the people who built London, and how are still building London now?"
So, it was a paean to the working man, the laborer, who built and was still building London. That felt right to me. It felt like a good thing to write a song about.
TB: Did you personally relate to it?
AP: I think I got a couple of library books out -- it was during the years where I still really couldn't afford books, and still went to the library -- I was reading something about putting together Victorian London. Reading about the amount of people who died while they were constructing this stuff made me think, "Well, I should put them in a song."
TB: I was thinking, too, in terms of your political songs, that this is one of the more subtle and successful. Would you consider it a political song?
AP: I don't know if it's political. To me, it's a kind of warm song -- warm, as in a tribute to the people who died building Victorian London. It was a way of saying, "Good on you, for your sacrifice to help this great place come into existence." I've got a book of Doré engravings of London -- I was looking through that today to try to find the picture that was the big spark for writing this song, but couldn't find it, so as far as I know it's not a Doré engraving -- but his engravings of London in the mid-Victorian era are shocking, they're frightening -- they depict third-world conditions in a society that's striving to reach the 20 century as fast as it can.
TB: So much of the progressive social movement of the time was driven by artists who depicted the real working conditions then -- Dickens also comes to mind.
AP: It's true, it's true. He was enormous in getting people to think about their social conscience.
TB: And I guess that's the reason why I was thinking that you might consider this a political song.
AP: No, because the deaths I'm talking about happened more than a hundred years before that song was written. So I guess it's a historical fantasy thank-you, or something.
And also, there were some songs that I had in my head that I wanted to squeeze the juice from, that sound nothing like this song, but I wanted to squeeze the same juice. One of them is "Sebastian," by Cockney Rebel. Now, I don't know what the hell it's about, but that song sounds Dickensian to me. It sounds like those Doré engravings of London, and I can't tell you why. I wanted to take that song and squeeze out the essence of Victorian London, and put it in my song. But we had to make do with that big, kind of jackhammer-sounding bass, and the pinging away at the girders on the backbeat -- that was how we tried to make the industrial Victorian landscape.
TB: Going back to the bass line, you have that simple part...
AP: Yeah, and it's just on the bass drum, it's on the down beat. Because it's not fancy, it's not really playing really melodic, it makes me think of a big, wooden machine, or a big steam hammer dropping. It's not a musical experience -- it's closer to [laughs] Steampunk. Do you know what I mean? It's a riveted bass line.
TB: Though at the same time, it does get more active in different parts of the song -- there's the [sings ascending and descending line that bass plays between lines during chorus].
AP: Oh yeah! I think it's a good bass line. But the essence of it is that sort of steam-hammer thing just going along on the 1 and the 3.
TB: Is this a case where you told Colin what exactly you wanted?
AP: Do you know, I can't remember. I think in those days, we used to just kick songs around. This was before I had multi-track demos. If anything, I'd just sit in the rehearsal studio with a guitar around my neck, and say, "Okay, it kind of goes like this," and then try to explain as best I could what I heard in my head. It was only in '83 -- when I got into being able to record multi-track demos, four-tracks, at home -- that I could sketch out more what I was hearing. But before that it was just a matter of trying to blunder and explain to others what was in your head.
TB: So this was probably Colin and Terry working very closely together.
AP: Yeah. By the way, I love that drum stuff that Terry does in the middle sections. That thing with the tom-toms is really good. I'd forgotten about that until today.
TB: Yeah, the way he uses the tom-toms and hi-hat during the bridge is great. And he matches the bass very closely throughout the song -- I've always loved playing along with this, because it's such a fantastic example of what a clear and generous drummer he was. You guys were lucky to have somebody who was willing to do just do what was needed for the song.
AP: He did what was needed, but he'd also bring this thrilling primitivism to it.
TB: Right. Let's talk about Dave's guitar, especially in the bridge and the solo.
AP: Well, Dave was doing the stuff he really likes to do, which is that kind of school of British Blues, digging in and wailing. He got to play his Gibson, and crank it up, and wail.
TB: Yeah, I wanted to ask what guitar he was playing on that.
AP: I think it's a Gibson, I'm pretty sure it's a Gibson.
TB: What kind?
AP: I'd have to ask him. I mean, he could tell you what guitar it was, and what the amplifier settings were. Because he made notes on all that, for every song he recorded, along with what effects he was using, and what they were set at, and so on. He could give you the spec, and you could actually get the sound yourself!
TB: I love the tone he gets in the bridge -- that biting tone during the call-and-response with the vocals.
AP: Yeah, that's right up Dave's alley. That's the amplifier working hard, the Gibson guitar working hard, and him digging and wailing for Britain, you know? [laughs] Because I think Dave would have given his right arm to have been Danny Kerwan, the little blond, moptop guitarist in the original Fleetwood Mac. I think Dave felt a huge empathy for him -- he had the technique and style, and kind of the look -- he actually looked like Dave, and vice-versa. Dave, at the tender age of, whatever he was, 14 or 15, probably saw Danny Kerwan and Fleetwood Mac -- looking about 14 as well! -- and thought, "Hey, that should have been me!"
Dave loves that kind of Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck stuff -- the school of British Blues players.
From:
http://chalkhills.org/articles/XTCFans20071209.html 
