Todd Bernhardt: Let's talk about "No Thugs in Our House." This strikes me as a very angry song.
Andy Partridge: I don't know if it is, actually! I think it's more of a genteel morality play. It's a real Threepenny Opera, but delivered over some Rock-n-Roll. To me, it's almost Dickensian in its morality, with ironic little twists.
TB: [mock snort] Dickens? Twist? I get it!
AP: [laughs] Oh, ho ho ho! "Do you like Dickens?" "I don't know, I've never been to one."
But yeah, it is rather archaic in its structure...
TB: Sure. It's got three acts -- four, if you count the bridge.
AP: Right. That bridge is like an interlude. Funnily enough, I was looking through some notebooks yesterday evening, and I found one I didn't even know I had! There wasn't much in it, but I'd jotted down, around the time of English Settlement, lots of ideas and connections and bits and pieces. I'd had a video idea for this, which eventually became the sleeve to the single -- that is, to make it like a toy theatre. So, I was obviously seeing as the sort of play you'd put on in a Victorian toy theatre -- you know, a penny-plain or tuppence-colored kind of thing.
TB: You say you don't think it's angry, but for me, it comes across as very angry. I mean -- guitar and drums, bang-bang-bang-bang, and then you go "Rwarrrrr!"
AP: [laughs] Well, that's my Johnny Winter yell you're hearing there. It was one of the things we'd do in the dressing room -- I was always being provoked, because I had, like, the loudest yell in the known universe. It'd be, "Oh, c'mon, Partsy, do your Johnny Winter yell. Give us all a laugh." So I'd yell like a wounded mountain gorilla or something, which would cause great mirth and merriment amongst all company gathered therein. I thought, "Well, I've got to throw this into a song somewhere," you know.
TB: You set the stage very well that way. To me, anyway, it sounds like you're about to sing about something you're indignant about, or angry about.
AP: Well, I could never stand parents who didn't bring their kids up properly.
TB: Was there a particular situation for you that brought this to mind? What prompted the writing of this song?
AP: I think it just was a desire to write this rather old-fashioned-slash-modern morality tale -- you know, to bring it up to date. At the time it was written, there was an awful lot of awareness of the National Front in England -- we'd done at least one Rock Against Racism festival by that time -- and at that point in England, there was an awful lot of anti-Right kind of feeling, because it seemed like they were growing in prominence. It was probably more to do with the paranoia of the time rather than their actual prominence, if you know what I mean.
So I decided to make up this character, who basically is asleep all through the story! Because he's out drinking all night...
TB: And beating up Asians.
AP: Exactly. So, you never even get to meet the main character in the story. He's offstage. He's ob-scene. I thought that was quite a nice mechanism.
TB: Because it's just all a reflection of his actions, rather than actually looking directly at them.
AP: Right. It's the young policeman reporting his actions, or his parents saying, "Oh, our little angel couldn't possibly have done this!" And there are a lot of word games in there, obviously.
TB: Let's talk about that -- there are some phrases I'd like to ask about, because I've always wondered about them. Why is it an "insect-headed worker wife"?
AP: Well, we lived next door to this woman whom we dubbed -- we never knew her name -- "Mrs. Washing." She would wash everything, and one day she was hanging out underwear that could best be described as "waspies."
TB: Why?
AP: They were corset-type things -- to give you a wasp waist.
TB: Ah, okay.
AP: So, she was hanging these out one day, and it was like, "Oh, she's hung out her waspies, I see, so she's like a worker in a wasp hive or something." It was that kind of word play -- who would hang out waspies? Well, it'd an insect-headed worker wife -- there's that alliteration. It's a little word circle thing there, something that sounds [chuckle] very surreal. People think she's a normal person, but why does she have an insect head? It's just so that the word circle feels complete.
TB: "The husband burns his paper, sucks his pipe while studying their cushion floor."
AP: Yeah, that cushion floor was sort of a [salesman voice] luxury vinyl flooring that, to my parents' generation, was the height of success. If you had cushion floor -- and I think it was probably spelled "Cushionflor" [chuckles] -- if you had that, you really had made it. I think we even had that in our kitchen for a while when I was growing up, and you know, my parents felt like they were royalty. Just because of this padded linoleum.
And yeah, he's got his pipe at the kitchen table, and he's reading his paper and absentmindedly setting fire to his paper with his pipe -- I'm just trying to set the scene here. A little poetic license.
TB: "His viscous poly-paste breath comes out."
AP: Oh yeah, it's the sort of a breath that a lot of that generation seem to have, which is like wallpaper paste. It kind of smells of wallpaper paste. It also symbolizes a kind of claustrophobia, where you feel the entire world is wallpapered over. All of their world is covered in wallpaper and Cushionflor, and so it's natural that his stinky breath would be reminiscent of wallpaper paste.
TB: Right, and of course that makes sense when you're talking about "their wallpaper world." Which is a great image, because at first glance, wallpaper could look like some solid barrier, but there could be nothing behind it.
AP: Right, there's nothing to it. You can poke your finger through it, because it's all surface.
At the time, I detested wallpaper. For me, it symbolized an older, dead generation. But now I actually have a grudging respect for it. I really like French pictorial wallpaper of the 1800s -- in fact, I treated myself a couple of years back to a large-format book called French Scenic Wallpaper, 1795 to 1865." The wallpaper in it is beautifully printed, sort of classical scenes. So, I've grown a grudging respect for wallpaper, but hopefully my breath doesn't smell of poly-paste!
TB: [laughing] And then, "A boy in blue is busy banging out a headache on the kitchen door." So, you're setting that up...
AP: Yeah, and the snare drum is reinforcing it! Bang-bang-bang-bang.
TB: "And all the while, Graham slept on."
AP: Graham is offstage there snoozing. You never see him, you only hear about him.
TB: So, then the second act opens, after you've set the scene...
AP: Yeah, you pull off your little cardboard characters and get your next set of characters ready...
TB: "The young policeman who just can't grow a mustache." I've always loved that line -- why did you write it that way?
AP: Because young policemen always try to grow mustaches -- [deep voice] to give themselves authority! -- and they never can! It's like three or four wisps, and it's blond and ineffectual, and you want to walk up to them and say, "Look -- for christ's sake, shave that off, because the very fact that you've brought that out into the open air says to people, 'I'm so concerned that you might not take me seriously that I've grown a mustache! Look! Respect it.' Can't you see how stupid you're making yourself look?" So, young policemen should never attempt to grow mustaches.
TB: [laughing] We'll add that to the Partridgean Book of Rules.
AP: Exactly. Like Confucius:
TB: [laughing] This second act is a little more straightforward -- you're not as surreal in your imagery. It's the conversation between the policeman and the parents.
AP: Yeah, I need to tell some story. It's that device in film [laughing] where they cram in all the story -- you know, you've had all the action, and then 40 minutes in, you need to have two people at a table talking -- in essence, telling you what the film's all about. That's the equivalent of this in the song.
TB: Then the bridge, as you said, is a bit of an interlude. The narrator steps in to talk about what the parents have overlooked.
AP: Yes, this is the point where the spotlight turns to the narrator in a separate box off the side of the stage. He's filling in anything that you haven't grasped so far. It hints that there's something sinister in the lad, because his parents think it's a boy's club badge he's wearing. But it's not, of course. It from one of these right-wing groups.
TB: And then, in the last verse, you bring things around full circle. She's out there hanging her waspies on the line again, but now everything's okay. I wanted to ask you about one thing -- years ago there was an argument on Chalkhills about who "Dad" was -- is it Graham's dad who's a judge, or is it the worker wife's dad?
AP: Well, I can settle that argument, because it's Richard Branson's dad! His father was an extremely high-powered judge, and got his son off of a very serious charge. The young Richard Branson, in the very early days of Virgin Records, had a scam where he was claiming that records were for export to Europe and getting them marked up as such. Then the lorry, instead of driving onto the boat at Dover, would turn around and come back to London, and they'd sell these discs that didn't have tax on them, in their shop and by mail order. Branson would pocket the tax.
This was an offense that could have led to jail time for him, but his father, who was a judge -- and who knew exactly what the job of judging's all about! -- stepped in and sort of, [posh voice] "Well, now -- look here." So he got off, completely scot-free! So, that's a cameo in the song.
From: http://chalkhills.org/articles/XTCFans20080824.html
