XTC have been invited by David Byrne, a fan, to support Talking Heads at a glittering New Year’s Eve show at New York’s Beacon Theatre. I meet up with the excited quartet, whose first trip to America this will be, at Heathrow, where our chaperone, loquacious Virgin PR, Al Clark, returns tight-lipped and ashen-faced from the Air India check-in desk. The bad news is that our flight has been delayed by up to six hours. He’s been given some Air India free meal vouchers, however, which he brandishes rather proudly, like they’re the tickets that have just won him first prize in a raffle. He suggests we go for something to eat.
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning, Al,” XTC drummer Terry Chambers points out. “I don’t want a fucking curry. Let’s find a bar and get some bastard beers in.”
Which we do, Chambers leading the way and getting merry in a hurry when we get there. Over rather more than several drinks in the hours to come, Chambers gives me a full account of XTC’s career to date and reduces me to helpless laughter with innumerable and outrageous stories about the so-called “Penhill Mutants” – these being the eccentric denizens of the Penhill Estate in Swindon, where three of the band are from, who sound like they would not be amiss among the depraved and lunatic cast of something like The Hills Have Eyes or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Hours later, we assemble again in front of the Air India desk, only to discover our flight has been further delayed.
“Is this it, then, Al?” Chambers wants to know. “Fucking marvellous. I’m glad I came. Is the whole of bastard America going to be like this?”
“I think I’m getting lounge lag,” Andy Partridge complains, sounding exhausted even though we haven’t actually been anywhere yet.
The next day, we’re in New York—driving out of it, actually, to Philadelphia, where XTC have a gig at somewhere called The Hot Club. Al Clark is besotted with the New York skyline – the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, the Empire State Building, all that. He suggests any one of these as an ideal location for a band photo-shoot.
“I should feel terribly cheap if we fell for that one, Al,” Andy Partridge says. “I mean, it’s a bit crass. Like, did The Dead Boys have their picture taken with Blackpool Tower in the background when they came to England. Don’t be fucking soft.”
We find The Hot Club in what appears to be a derelict part of town. The support band’s already here, a nasty bunch of yobs called Diamond Reo. XTC have a look at the hired equipment they’ll be using tonight. Chambers is distraught when he sees what passes for a drum kit.
“It’s a boy’s kit,” he moans. “It’s like the kit I had at school. It should have teddy bears and sheep painted on it.”
The group go through a half-hearted sound check which is quickly abandoned and, feeling pretty downcast, they retire, sulking, to their dressing room. I wander back out into the club to watch Diamond Reo’s opening set, which is pretty horrendous and notable only for their bass player banging his head against a wall and tearing off his clothes before lashing out at the small crowd with a microphone stand. “I’m gonna piss on you cuz you’re a dawg!” he screams at no one in particular, the crowd mainly ignoring him.
Backstage, XTC, are glumly considering their American debut, here at The Hot Club.
“Not exactly Shea Stadium, is it?” keyboard player Barry Andrews says, a little forlornly, casting an eye around their dressing room, a miserable place, the walls covered in graffiti, a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a sink half-torn from a wall, puddles on the floor, a few chairs, a rickety table and a plywood door that looks like someone’s kicked a hole in it, which now bursts open to reveal an inappropriately cheerful fellow.
“Howzit gowwwwin, guys?” he mugs, a messy individual with a greasy T-shirt pulled down over a spreading paunch. One of the club’s owners, apparently. “Hey,” he goes on, “we gotta great crowd in tonight and they’re gonna love the shit outta you guys.”
“Love the shit out of us?” Andy asks, incredulous.
“Beat the shit out of us, more likely,” Barry Andrews says as the band troop out of the dressing room to the stage.
An hour later, they’re back in the dressing room.
“We’re going to have to hire a plane to fly over Philadelphia with a streamer flying from the back of it apologising for that gig,” Partridge says. “It was terrible.”
“Worse than the first time we played London,” Barry Andrews agrees. “And we should have been shot after that one.”
“The next time you play here,” Al Clark, trying to be chipper, insists, “you’ll clean up.”
“Yeah,” Andrews replies morosely, “but only if we bring our own brooms.”
We get back to New York at about six in the morning, with everyone in a bad mood. Over lunch the next day, at Virgin’s New York HQ on Perry Street where we’re staying, Terry is still complaining about last night’s gig, a pointless excursion in his much-repeated and rather more colourfully expressed opinion. He’s not especially thrilled, either, by the plans for tonight, which include dinner with David Byrne and Jerry Harrison from Talking Heads – Byrne due at Perry Street in a few hours to meet us and take us to the restaurant where Jerry will be waiting. The rest of XTC are flattered by Byrne’s affection for them, which seems genuine enough. Terry, on the other hand, thinks there’s something a little condescending about Byrne’s patronage. “It’s like he thinks we’re just these amusing yokels,” he complains. “Country fucking bumpkins, or something.” I get the impression there’s something about Byrne’s studied uptightness that makes Terry want to get far enough under his skin to make it pop.
Al’s worried enough about Terry’s mood to give him a bit of a talking to, with a final instruction, sternly made, that when Byrne arrives Terry should be on his best behaviour – Al stressing the virtues of a civil tongue, politeness, good manners, a lot less swearing, and not saying anything that might in any respect upset, disconcert or otherwise distress Byrne’s apparently fragile sensibilities. I don’t think Chambers takes much – if any – of this in. He just sits in front of the TV in an upstairs sitting room at Perry Street, simmering in front of a game show, its hostess a curvaceous blonde with big hair and plenty of cleavage on display who seems to have caught Terry’s dubious attention.
Chambers is still there, staring at the TV, when Byrne arrives, looking as pristine as a dashboard Jesus, slightly prim, everything about him unimaginably neat, well-pressed, crisp and rather buttoned-up. He perches on the edge of a couch next to the armchair in which Terry’s lolling, knees together, hands in his lap, straight-backed, like someone in a doctor’s waiting room, bracing himself for bad news. We sit there for a while in an increasingly uncomfortable silence, Al keeping a wary eye on Chambers, who unexpectedly turns to Byrne with a question.
“‘Ere, Dave,” he says, laying on the Wiltshire accent a bit thick, a piratical twang accompanied by some understated eyeball-rolling, pointing with his beer can at the game show hostess on the TV. “I wouldn’t mind coming my muck in ‘er mouth, what about you?”
I just about stop myself from spitting a mouthful of beer 12 feet across the room. Al Clark looks stricken, like someone who’s just lost a game of chess to someone in a black hood. Byrne replies with a cartoony chirrup and says he’ll meet us downstairs. Chambers watches him go, smirking.
Now, here’s Byrne, the next night, on stage at the Beacon Theatre, introducing his special guests.
“This band is XTC,” he tells the packed-out Beacon. “They’re very good and have two albums out. I love them.”
The show goes well and afterwards XTC are in splendid spirits. Al Clark tells them he thought Byrne’s introduction was a touching sign of his fondness for them.
“He was all right, but you couldn’t hear him,” Barry Andrews says.
“I thought he spoke clearly and fluently,” Al says.
“He’s not exactly Noddy Holder, though, is he?” Andrews says.
We’re invited to Talking Heads’ après-gig New Year’s Eve party at the Gramercy Park Hotel, but it’s a dull affair.
“The night is still young,” Al Clark quips, epigrammatically, “but I don’t think it’s going to get any older here.”
So we split, me, Terry and Al, fetching up hours later at a swanky club on Fifth Avenue. Byrne is there with Jerry Casale, Devo’s weasel-faced bass player and minister of propaganda. Byrne beckons us over.
“You’ll have to excuse us,” Chambers announces as we join them. “We’re all as pissed as arseholes.”
At some point over the next hour, it transpires we’ve accepted Casale’s invitation for XTC to join him the next day for lunch. Which brings us to a restaurant called Il Cortile in Little Italy, just down the road from Umberto’s Clam House, where New York mob boss Joey Gallo was gunned down between courses in a shoot-out later immortalised in a song by Bob Dylan. What we imagine will be a convivial snack turns into an uproarious little spat when Andy Partridge takes a serious dislike to Casale. To everyone’s surprise, the usually mild-mannered Partridge lays into the hapless Casale with the scathing venom of Lou Reed, flabbergasting the Devo man with a stream of outrageous anecdotes about our old friends, the Penhill Mutants, which climaxes with a long and extraordinarily detailed monologue about masturbation, a subject about which Partridge proves something of an expert, at which point Casale, reddening, makes his excuses and a rather graceless exit.
“Are we not yobs, or what?” Barry Andrews laughs, as Casale, clearly fuming, heads for the door.
“It was just a joust of egos,” Partridge says, when we follow a couple of bottles of wine later. “It was just my way of saying, ‘Look, pal, where we come from everybody’s Devo. You’re not so fucking special, stop making a circus out of it.”
“Come off it,” Chambers tell him. “You just didn’t like the little fucker.”
“Well,” says Partridge, stepping out into New Year sunshine, “there was that, too.”