Fact #88569

ANDY PARTRIDGE OF XTC TALKS TO JOHNNY BLACK ABOUT TROUT MASK REPLICA BY CAPTAIN BEEFHEART (MAY 2000)

What was your path to Trout Mask Replica?rnThere was no known path to Trout Mask Replica. My concept of pop music up til that time was British pop bands - The Beatles, The Stones, The Small Faces, The Kinks - it was that self-contained very melodic British pop music, the sort of stuff that seems timeless. I don't know how that will work out in a thousand years, but right now it feels timeless.

And it was from the same background of American r'n'b and American rock'n'roll smashed upwith music hall and variety show, the inherent English naffness. There's only one country in the world that can do naffness, and that's us.

But it was still better than what we were doing before The Beatles...
Oh, yes, apart from the entire 90s, I don't think there's been a year lower in musical esteem than 1962. That had to be the very pit ... you couldn't get any lower ... but there was no way of knowing I was going to blunder into Beefheart. My entire life was set by those records. Of course, there was also the music my parents listened to. As soon as I hear the accordian run that leads into the sig tune of Sing Something Simple, I can still smell my shirt being ironed, school next morning, the sound of the bath running upstairs. Parents music was about war and death and friends and the good old days.

My idea of young persons' music was ... I didn't hear the first Beefheart album. I heard it coming out of the bedroom door of the older brother of my best school friend Clive Endersby. This older brother wore drainpipe trousers and had slightly longer hair. You'd go round there and blasting out of his brother's bedroom on his Dansette would be Safe As Milk and I thought, "eeeeeyuch!" What horrible music. They're not in tune. They're not as good as The Beatles... so I wasn't on the path to Trout Mask Replica at all.

A friend of mine who responsible for standing my entire world on its head, with a lot of musical and cultural things, his name was Michael Taylor and everyone called him Spud - he used to forcibly loan me albums. He was a year older than me and he would say, "You listen to this album because it's the best thing on earth." He was subsequently responsible for making me listen to Coltrane and Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, and he would order William Burroughs books for me.

I would try to reciprocate by lending him Sgt Pepper's and More Of The Monkees, and he had no compunction, he'd just strap them on the back of his motor bike and go and sell them. Then he'd come back and say to me, "How you gettin' on with Trout Mask Replica?" and I'd say, "Well, I don't like it. they're all out of tune and they just muckin' about and you can't hear the words and he's just growling and there's no songs. Can I have my Sgt Pepper's back please?"

He'd say, "Well, can I keep it a bit longer? I'm playing it to a friend of mine." Actually he was just selling them, but I didn't cotton on for ages. I didn't cotton on until ... he was a cultural facist. He used to regard anything I'd loaned him as crap, immediately. If I'd loaned it to him, ergo, it was crap. So in my best interest he'd sell my books and my records, and buy all these weird imports from New York, or obscure Swedes playing bits of cars with mallets .... Anyway, I didn't find out he'd been selling my stuff until he had an accident on his bike, and gave me back half a dozen albums where all the sleeves were ripped to shreds, and the records had long, lateral scratches, and the inner bags had gravel in them. I said, "What have you done?" And he said, "Well, I had them strapped on my bike and I had an accident and they went skimming upthe road." So I said, "Where were you going with my albums bungied to the back of your bike?" And he said, "Well, actually, I was going to sell 'em."

That's how I found out he was selling my albums. He was probably strapped for cash. One of those blokes whoalways had just enough money for beer and fags and to import these strange underground albums.

But anyway, it was Spud who loaned me Trout Mask Replica. I was apalled by it. I thought it was just people messing about. And he said, "Look, stick with it, and I promise you'll get into it." So, out of sheer bloddy-mindedness, I kept playing it and I was getting more and more frustrated with it, because I knew this wasn't music. Just two discs of mucking about. Then suddenly, I've never known quite why, the dam burst, whoooof! And all this stuff started getting though, and it was unbelievable. I suddenly realised that they weren't mucking about. This stuff was rehearsed.

My friend over the road had a stereo and, when I put it on there, I could get the balance control and hear that there were two different guitars playing different chords at different times. What I thought was just a horrble noise was actually planned. Once you start to unravel what is initially a roll of aural barbed wire, you can see that the parts going into it are like really ornate parts of a fancy orrery - one of those clockwork models of the solar system - there are all these interlocking parts, and they're moving and changing all the time, but there's actually a very strict logic to it all.

It wasn't til much later that I discovered Beefhart would sit at a piano and write all of the parts, this spastic chopped-up avant-garde jazz, and the drummer, who was the only one who could write musical notation, would transcribe it all on sheet music. The poor guitarists were having to break their wrists to play this stuff. He would even write the drum parts on the piano.

But not only was the music unlike anything I'd ever heard - and still unlike anything I've ever heard - despite loads of imitators - I also sensed in it this incredible optimism that it was pop music of at least a hundred years into the future. I don't think we've reached that level of complexity, of taking pop music towards another art form. It was sculpture with rock instruments. I found that idea so exciting. It hit me at an age when I needed to open up, and this was a great big crowbar to open me up and let things in.

About the same time, Spud loaned me the novel Soft Machine, by Burroughs. From that I went on to buy and read Ticket That Exploded, also by Burroughs, in hospital when I was recovering from having my tonsils taken out. I was recovering from the anaesthetic and reading Burroughs and, strangely, it was making sense. They only way to read it.

Anyway, I felt that Trout Mask Replica was music of the future that had somehow fallen down through a wormhole in time and came out in 1969.

I was also of the opinion that the few lyrics I could actually make out were like the best American you could get. It summons up the feeling of America even better than Steinbeck or even Kerouac. It sums up the essence of American-ness, the big dusty bit in the middle.

I had a little red hard-backed notebook and I used to sit down for hours on end playing the album over and over to get the lyrics. I got most of it right, but when I got the CD re-issue with the lyrics printed out, I was going "Jesus, so that's what he's saying! He's got his Spidel wrist round his honey. A Spidel is a brand of watch, but I didn't know that at the time. I thought it was something to do with spiders.

The next thing was that the few people who actually got into this music, started to get into the humour of it. A very sort of stoner humour, all that "Fast'n'bulbous" stuff. "Uh, you gotta wait until I say, 'Also a tin teardrop.'"

The humour in it was so powerful, and made even more powerful by being back to back with things that were really scary. Dachau Blues was just frightening. In the form of a two minute, free blues format, it managed to sum up a concentration camp. How the hell did he do that? It was the choice of words, the tone of voice, the way this barbed-wire minds grinds together. The bass clarinet in there sounds so horrible and doomy. I'd put that song on and it would frighten the pants off me.

I really admired how he made these stage sets out of the words and what appeared to be these chunks of driftwood, but they're not really driftwood, they're carefully carved so they fit together.

rnThere's this whole legend that's grown up about the making of the album.The fact that they practised playing it for nine months, because it is such complex stuff. When I was learning to play guitar, I had started learning to play guitar and I had a grasp of, like, idiot pop forms on half a dozen chords, then WHAM! I ran into Trout Mask Replica.

I would sit and try to work out why my guitar parts never sounded like theirs did, but it was because it was two guitars colliding, playing different chords, different pieces. You have to know exactly what you're doing to make it work.

They hired a house and moved into it for nine months. Sometimes they'd rehearse eighteen hours at a stretch. They weren't eating properly because they had no money for food, so they'd go out and shoplift food, get thrown in prison, Zappa's the producer and he has to bail them out.

Zappa was only the producer in the sense that he allowed the project to happen. He never actually appeared.they would just sit there every day in this little wooden shack, rehearsing this stuff over and over, until finally Zappa came down with an engineer and an eight track recorder and they recorded the musical parts as a live performance over the period of two days - one side, then the other side.

Then it took weeks and weeks to get the vocals done, one reason being that Beefheart refused to wear headphones. He had to stand in one room, and he'd hear the music spilling out through the cracks in the door of the next room, and then he'd start. As a result, he would often overshoot the music. there's one where he overshoots by one line. They're supposed to end together and you hear him saying, "Oh shit, I don't know how I'm ever going to get that in there."

There's one where they apparently phoned the vocals in. The Blimp, where you hear Zappa saying, "OK, take off." It's a sort of surreal musical version of the radio announcer panicking at the crash of the Hindenberg airship. The commentator is getting all emotional about this burning debris raining down on the crowd, and Antenna Jimmy Siemens is screeching down the phone about the daughters running their hands over this fat blimp. The humour is so weird. It's a Marmite thing. It either clicks with you or it doesn't. For me, it clicked in such a big way.

It did affect me greatly, because of the fact that it made sculptures in the air and suddenly music got a lot more three dimensional for me. After that album, it was as if I'd had the blindfolds taken off, and I felt like I had x-ray eyes and I could see into songs. The fact that music didn't have to sound like all those classic 60s British bands. The fact that it could sound like it came from Jupiter. The fact that you could make an incredible atmosphere with what is, to all intents and purposes, poetry over music.

Where and when did you buy your own copy of Trout Mask Replica?rnI bought my own copy about six months afterwards. An English copy with no lyrics. I got it in a local record store, Kempsters, I think, which sold instruments upstairs and records downstairs. It was a double album, so it was quite expensive. I think I used a combination of record tokens and money saved up from my paper round. I remember it being on the Straight label.

Talk me through some favourite tracks...
I feel very close to Ella Guru because in 1988 we did a cover for a tribute album called Fast'n'Bulbous, we were asked to do a version. So I thought, well let's make this easy on ourselves. I decided to go for one of the easier cuts on Trout Mask Replica, so I went for Ella Guru,

I felt that it was so idiosyncratic that there was no point in trying to interpret it. Where would you even start? You would lose everything that made it so great. So I went for doing a Xerox, and it was like a fun exercise for me.

So I sat down and really tried to unpick it so I could replay everything. I programmed all the drum parts into a drum machine, so we did a very quantized version. It was a pretty close approximation of the sound, and I loved having the chance to do a vocal impersonation of Beefheart.

It wasn't til later that I noticed that all the other bands chosen all the real easy bluesy stuff from earlier or later, but nobody went near the Trout Mask Replica stuff.

Dachau Blues also impressed me. As a kid, I was haunted by the whole concentration camp thing. Every Sunday afternoon, my dad or my grandad would sit me down in front of the tv to watch a war movie or a documentary, and you'd see all this harrowing stuff about the concentration camps, "You watch this! You make sure this never happens again." It used to give me nightmares, all that stuff. Couldn't put my feet down the end of the bed because I thought they were going to go into a pit of emaciated bodies,and touch all these emaciated bodies.That was purely from being force-fed all this stuff. England was just starting to get to grips with the war, and after fifteen years people were finally able to talk about it. So Dachau Blues really hit me, amazingly powerful.

I also liked some of the plain talking ones. Of course, they're really ppo quality, and there's strange distorted clunk between each one, sounds like an old 78 record coming off, made it sound like an old blues record. I later discovered that Beefheart used to carry a Dictaphone around with him. He'd wander out in the fields outside the house and think up these lines. He'd say a line, then turn it off. Then another line a few minutes later, and turn it off. So the clunks weren't scratchs, they were the on/off switch on the Dictaphone. And the poor quality was because it was such a tiny machine. For years, in my mind, I'd made it into 78 records, but it wasn't. It was a Dictaphone.

I bought the Beefheart Box Set, Grow Thin, I think it's called, but I took it back to the shop in disgust because it was such a rip-off. It was supposed to be recordings from the Trout Mask Replica era, and I rushed home and put it on, very excited, and there were things like, well, a track of cars going by for seven minutes. They were obviously sitting around waiting to do a take and the machine was switched on for seven minutes.

There was a track called Herb, and I thought, 'Wow, I've never heard that.' But what it is, is the neighbour from next door. She's come in while they were recording, they've left the dictaphone running, and she's saying, 'Well, my favourite is Herb Alpert