Album: Andy Partridge

ANDY PARTRIDGE

Helplessly – or stubbornly, depending on your viewpoint – sitting out their Virgin contract with seven years of silence after the company's indifferent promotion of theirNonsuch LP, XTC presumably found time hanging heavily on their hands between 1992 and 1999, when they finally released the splendid Apple Venus and Wasp Star albums through the more small-scale and sympathetic Cooking Vinyl.

Andy Partridge certainly did, judging by Fuzzy Warbles 1 & 2, the first couple of a projected 10-album series of out-takes, demos and oddments accumulated during XTC's long and benighted history. As he relates in his droll annotations to the tracks, many a day was whiled away in his home studio as he noodled and doodled away at ideas, with no schedule and no pressure to come up with a hit single. Hence the reggae-style answerphone message, "No One Here Available", and the various avant-garde/ambient improvisations bearing acronymic titles such as "MOGO" and "EPNS", and the bluesy pastiche "Howlin' Burston", a jingle written for a local Wiltshire Radio DJ.

Hence, too, the blizzard of different styles and sounds attempted with varying degrees of seriousness, from twinkly soukous guitars to jazzy keyboard abstrusions to pastoral mellotron instrumentals, and inevitably to several psychedelic pastiches.The overwhelming impression these albums convey is of a boundless musical imagination that seeks release in whatever form comes to hand.

It's noticeable how Partridge's humorous temperament has developed a salty patina of disillusioned cynicism over the years, with "Young Marrieds" offering a gloomy prognosis of wedded bliss – "Stay at home, watch a video/ Chocolate Fingers, stir the tea", and "Obscene Procession" advising animals to watch out for treacherous humans. What depths of misanthropy are plumbed by lines such as "It's called talking/ It's how they betray their friends and more"? More painful, personal matters of the heart are dealt with openly in tracks such as "Everything" ("Everything you say you felt for me, is it all dust and denial, as lifeless as some lunar sea?"), compared to the allegorical manner in which business treacheries are covered in "I Bought Myself a Liarbird" and "Ship Trapped in the Ice", the latter a clear metaphor for his band's tenure with Virgin Records.

Partridge's main failing, ironically, is his intelligence, rarely a prized commodity in pop. He just can't play dumber than he is, a characteristic that leads him to sabotage the lumpen boogie-rocker "Merely A Man" with self-consciously clever lyricism, and that once led Cathy Dennis to decline to cover one of his songs due to its wordiness. But at this point in music history, intelligence is probably the only thing that might save pop from itself.