“Feel free if you wanna have a drink,” says Andy Partridge over Zoom, lounging on his couch with an unplugged electric guitar and a glass of evening wine. “I know it’s early in the day [for you], but the French do that kind of thing at lunchtime.”
It’s a laid-back atmosphere fitting for a nostalgic look back—but also an amusing contrast with the song we’re here to discuss: “Respectable Street,” the edgy and satirical power-pop classic from XTC’s 1980 LP, Black Sea. Partridge wrote the track while living with his then-wife on Bowood Road in Swindon, England—reacting to what he viewed as a kind of two-faced “hypocrisy,” with buttoned-up neighbors masking their true selves with status-symbol bullshit. (“Sunday church and they look fetching,” he sings. “Saturday night, saw him retching over our fence.”)
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But as Partridge notes, the social commentary wouldn’t have clicked without the right musical structure—in this case, a reliably quirky sprint of dissonant guitars, barked vocals with “woo-ooh” backings, and pounded tom-tom rhythms. “If the stage isn’t set, anything the actors say isn’t going to chime,” he observes, even demonstrating how to play the oddly fretted “mystery chord” from the verses. (“It’s a car horn of a chord,” he says. “I wanted neighbors slamming car doors.”)
With “Respectable Street,” like all great XTC songs, the balance is pure. “We’re all products of our influences,” he says. “It’s where the Beatles and the Stones and the Monkees smash into Sun Ra and Captain Beefheart and people like that.”
The Real “Respectable Street”
My first wife and I were given our first house to live in—really, it was the top floor of a two-story house. Her mother owned it, so she didn’t charge us rent. The woman next door, we used to call her “Mrs. Washing” because she washed everything. Every day there’d be stuff on the line, and it would get more and more unusual. It would go from pants, shirts, and socks to shoes—and then it would be…not kitchen implements, but really odd things.
If we played any music—it doesn’t matter what volume, and we couldn’t play too loud because we didn’t have a stereo set up—she’d be banging on the wall and yelling to turn down. Her and her husband and kids would have ferocious rows where they were a lot louder than we were. It was this terrible hypocrisy. If Mrs. Washing is out there reading this now, [the song] was inspired by your hypocrisy and the fact that the house we lived in overlooked a house going up a hill, where everything seems laid out to see, almost like a model set or something. I’d say almost every other garden had a camper van or a trailer—we call them a “caravan” in England. They’d just leave them there. Maybe one week a year they’d move somewhere. They were just left there as a status symbol, and all these houses were trying to out-status each other.
It was the ludicrosity of status symbols, the fact that these upright people behaved shamefully—you’d see people in their suits going somewhere, and you’d think [sarcastically], “They’re respectable.” Then later on at night, they’d come by throwing up over your wall. I thought, “I’ve gotta comment on this hypocrisy.” There’s a big dash of the Kinks in that song.
Andy Partridge during a show with XTC, opening a 1980 show for the Police in Belgium. (Photo credit: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images)
Unrespectable Ban
We were very shocked when Virgin said, “This is gonna be a single,” but they said, “You’re gonna have problems with those lyrics.” I can’t remember if they gave us a list of “problem lyrics” or if we sat down and worked it out, but it was all the things like “abortion” and “contraception” where we said, “That may create a problem on mainstream daytime radio in Britain.” We took an instrumental mix of the track, went in the studio, redid the vocal with “cleaned-up” phrases. “Abortion” I changed to “absorption” because it could be a sanitary towel ad or something.
We changed about half a dozen lyrics in there, but the BBC said, “No, we’re still not playing it.” We said, “Why? Why won’t you play it?” They said, “There’s still the problem with the lyrics.” We couldn’t figure out what the fuck they meant. There’s another Kinks tie-in here—years later, someone who worked for the BBC said, “That song of yours, ‘Respectable Street,’ it got banned. I know why they wouldn’t play it.” I said, “What was the lyric that banned it?” He said, “Sony Entertainment Center.” Why didn’t somebody say that? It’s very much like the Kinks because he had to get rid of “Coca-Cola” in “Lola.” They were doing something in the United States, and [Ray Davies] flew from America to get in a recording studio to substitute the word “cherry” for “Coca.”
Sonic Secrets
I was very pleased with the sound of the drums on that album generally. When we first worked with [producer] Steve Lillywhite and [engineer] Hugh Padgham, I remember saying, “I want the drums to sound like Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock.’” It was obviously cut in a big room—you can hear the natural reverb of the room ringing out.
The kind of Noel Coward-esque introduction on the piano, with the very narrow EQ—I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if it sounded like an old 78?” It was a case of [nasally, cupping his hands] “I’ll sing it like this and we’ll narrow the EQ,” and Dave [Gregory] played the piano, but it still sounded too clean. I said, “Can we get some scratches?” Steve Lillywhite said, “The test pressing for the new Peter Gabriel album [his third solo LP] just arrived today!” I said, “Is there somewhere on it we can scratch?” He said, “I’ve only just heard it once!” I said, “How about the run-out groove?” So we fucked up the run-out groove on the test pressing of the Peter Gabriel album to make the [crackle noise]. That’s what that sound is. It’s the only vinyl we had to mess up.
Terry Chambers, at the start of the last verse of the song, thought he’d fucked up the drumming, so he yells—”Ahhhhhhh!” He’s thinking, “Now we’ve got to do another take.” But his yell in agony achieved the pitch of the song, so we kept it in the track and turned up the overhead mics at that point. So Terry Chambers is inadvertently doing backing vocals, but it’s his pure agony and anguish that he thinks he’s got to do yet another take. It’s like those things on Beatles records where you think, “Did I just hear somebody swearing there?”
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