The aspiring rock star’s indispensable guide to surviving a life in music, with advice from those who know best. Andy Partridge is founding member and front man of Swindon’s finest export, new wave band XTC. Active for over twenty-five years, he’s seen the very highest and lowest parts of the record industry. Time for him to impart his rules…
Watch Out For Unexpected Pressures
The unexpected pressures are the kind of things like being great mates with everyone in the band to wanting to kill them if they blink like that again. You spend endless weeks in vans and you’re all day, every day with each other. It’s amazing how it can go from this brotherly love and being happy to die for them to actually wanting to kill them. That isn’t usually explained in the manual.
Sex, Drugs And Rock ‘N’ Roll Are Everywhere
It’s on a plate. But you’d think to yourself, ‘Do I want a souvenir of Sydney of a harbour bridge ashtray, or do I want to bring back AIDS or syphilis or whatever?’ I have brought back a few souvenirs, which gave me an itchy dick, but I’m not one that’s into dipping in and out of strangers. I was addicted to Valium from the age of thirteen to the age of twenty-six. Halfway through an American tour I just stopped, which was just foolish because over the next year my brain melted. Thirteen years is a long time to be taking handfuls of Valium. Coke and dope and everything were always pushed at me, but I would take perverse delight in turning them down, which made them think I was a bit weird and then that would make me feel kind of good.
Drugs Aren’t The Key To Great Music
I was pretty fucked up on Valium without knowing it and I saw so many dickheads on drugs I just thought that drugs made you a dickhead. You’re not creative on drugs. People who don’t know are the people who say that there’s been great music made on drugs. Those people are wrong. There has never been any great music made on drugs. People say that John Lennon recorded on acid. No he didn’t, he took some once and he felt so ill they had to take him home. When you’re stoned it sounds more interesting, but you can’t actually fucking make it when your hands are turning into lobster claws.
Look After Yourself
I think if I was twenty and touring around now, I would really knuckle down and look after my health. I would eat well and sleep a lot. That goes out of the window when you’re in a band. You eat shit. The sorts of strains and tension that you’re under when you’re touring – hardly sleeping and not seeing anyone all day other than those other three bastards and then getting kicked on stage in front of five thousand people is really perverse. It’s a lot of pressure on your mental and physical health. It’s like being an athlete.
Pay People On Net
Gross means they take the money before anything is spent on anything – before the album or a guitar or whatever. It means they take their money out of the great big pot. Pay them on NET, not GROSS. And tell yourself everyday that “I employ them”, not the other way round. You mentally get into this thing where they’re the boss and you click into this subservient role like the crappy job you had before you became a professional musician. You end up agreeing to a lot of stupid stuff that your manager will say because you think the manager is the boss. Never forget that they’re your worker.
“There has never been any great music made on drugs.”
Be Careful What You Sign
We signed a deal where they had all our recordings for perpetuity – forever. We managed to renegotiate some of them back, but back then we didn’t know what was what. We went to a local lawyer who knew more about farmers who’d had a cow stolen rather than the ins and outs of the pop industry. I signed that contract not understanding a word of it.
Stand Up For Yourself – They Haven’t Got A Clue
The label got me in the Virgin office once and told me they wanted me to be more like ZZ Top because they were selling bucketloads of records and we weren’t. So they’d ask me to grow a beard or how I’d feel about wearing a ten-gallon hat. Six months later they’d be asking us to be a bit more like The Police. Because they’ve got no imagination, they’d just look for whatever was big that week and ask if you could be more like that. The stupid thing is people never want The Big Thing 2, they always want The Big Thing 1. And to be the first to do something you have to put some people’s noses out of joint. Our management had prepared a long speech for us once after a gig and had put together their favourite images and wanted us to have them all at once. The manager wanted me to come on stage with a lightning flash painted down my face, a ten-gallon hat and punk clothes with safety pins on it. What a horrible combination that would have been – thank God he didn’t like Dolly Parton.
Interview by Josh Jones
