Contemporary Note:

This interview took place at Virgin Records’ London HQ during the height of the year-long miner’s strike (led by the National Union of Miners’ high-profile leader Arthur Scargill), one of the defining events of 1980s Britain.

Just before the interview began, a Virgin employee poked his head around the door to ask if Andy and the band would like to do a benefit for the miners. Andy said no, looked at me and started talking almost non-stop for the next hour or so, guided only by some very gentle steering on my part.

"... We won't be doing a miner's benefit. We don't do gigs anyway but I don't like violence. I don't think the way to win friends and influence people is to attack them and that is what Scargill seems to be advocating. I think the miners are being used as an excuse. I can see so much of the personality thing going on, big ’earted Arthur trying to get himself into the history books.

“It stinks of me, me, me and not us. The fundamental mistake was not balloting the miners in the first place It went downhill from there. It’s a democratic union being operated at a sort of fascist level where you’re told what to do an not given a choice.

"We did a Rock Against Racism gig. It suddenly struck me that it was a bloody great cause but we might as well have done a National Front benefit for old people. It’s a great cause but all the money goes into potentially extreme pockets.

“I’m disgustingly moderate, you see. I find extreme left and extreme right very worrying. It can be a great cause but look whose behind it with the tin cup. Nowadays you’ve got to be young and socialist with an enormous fringe. It’s horrible, It’s like having to have The Kit. ‘Let’s get the fringe. Let’s get the socialist connections’, it stinks of fashion and fashion is horrible in any case.

“I've always been repulsively moderate. We did RAR because people said if you do that then people will really Iook up to you, so we though we’d better do it, not realising who was behind it. It was left to extreme left – and which is better, extreme left or extreme right? They all meet up around the back, it melts into the same thing. Exactly the same tactics, exactly the same aims, a dictatorship by any other name. People under the heel being told they’ve been liberated. It’s all the same...

“...The best bands write songs that you could term political because they go deeper than 'I love you, you love me'. The best lyrics are not saying a specific political thing but mention life in general, people politics. Politics is frequently about personalities in high offices and countries invading one another. It puts people aside and becomes are wrestling among personalities, which is what the miners thing is. Scargill wants his willie to look bigger than MacGregor's and vice versa...

"... When punk kicked down the door in 1977 we just waltzed in. We had the energy of a punk band. I didn't like what I saw as empty sloganeering. That was stuff that we'd got out of our systems earlier in the 70s when we were imitating the Stooges and the New York Dolls.

"We were such snots that we wouldn't do Dolls songs but alternatively titled similar songs. Instead of 'Jet Boy' we'd do 'Jet Shoes' in praise of platform boots. We couldn't play and were into bouffing our hair up, basically we looked like Hanoi Rocks do now. We'd get on stage turn everything up to 10, get violently drunk and scare people away. It was the get pissed, destroy attitude that became more marketable when the time was right and people were more ready to accept it.

“Punk took the blinkers off people and they looked for new groups. We had the fun energy thing and we just said 'do you want some of this?'. I always felt like a sidecar attached to the punk motorbike – I can't think of a more degrading form of transport. I never felt like a punk, by 1976 we were sobering up...

"... Punk was necessary and another big bang is necessary now. To clear away the likes of, well, us I suppose, although I never felt that we got onto the pedestal. I still feel we're struggling. Virgin aren't going to advertise this album and it's going to sell less than a lot of independent albums. I still feel we've got a lot to achieve. I'm young in the head but decaying in the flesh. Our goals have got different, I don't want to be famous these days, I can't think of anything more banal.

“I used to want to breeze down the street and have everybody fall at my feet, climb into the Rolls and zoom off into the mansion, but after seven years we’re still living in terraced houses with enormous mortgages. The Mrs has just saved up and bought a Fiesta.

“I get embarrassed if people recognise me in the street. I hide behind the settee when Swedes turn up at the front door with rucksacks. ‘We have come all this way to meet with Andy...’ – I’ve got all the neighbours trained to day I don’t live there.

“Oh, it happens a lot, About two or three times a week. Sometimes they don’t even bother knocking. They just stand at the window trying to look in. You see people standing outside the window mesmerised because they’ve seen you watching the news, putting a record on or wrestling with the dog on the carpet. It’s embarrassing.

“I don’t live the rock and roll lifestyle so I don’t expect people to treat me as through I do. They turn up expecting an audience and for me to blurt out The Truth...

"...Around the time of ‘English Settlement’ something clicked and I though ‘I really don’t want to take this music on the road’. For one thing, it was acoustic guitars which are impossible to reproduce in ice-rinks and I was really fed up with half-assed attempting to be famous. Touring seemed to be crushing me mentally and physically. I had two nervous breakdowns. One in Paris when I collapsed at what was a really important gig that was being televised, a few chords into the first song I just blacked out.

“In the States in 1979, we did a really long tour and we got stuck in the snow somewhere in a little van., I hadn’t slept for two days and just couldn’t stand it any longer. I opened the van door and walked out into the waist-high snow. I’d forgotten my name, I didn’t know who I was or where I was or why I was there and I was crying my eyes out. It was like my brain had just gone and it petrified me.

“The thought of touring and going out in front of anything up to 25,000 people – it just isn’t me. The gigs we did we run on pure fear. I’d turn off at a gig if I could. In the back of my head there would be someone in a little Mastermind chair looking at this sweaty frightened thing who’d left his glasses in the changing room so he couldn’t see the audience.

“I’d be strumming along ther songs autmatically. In the back of my head I’d be thinking, ‘hmmm, must paint the bedroom ceiling’. It was really weird. Like, ‘I dreamed I was playing in front of 15,000 coked-out kids in Calgary and I woke up and I was!’ – that sort of thing.

“The Americans go an make a whole series of TV programmes and feature films about the very thing that I'm not interested in. Fame. Light up the sky with my name but how are you going to buy next week's groceries? It should be 'Dough! I'm gonna spend forever'...

"... I think I've stayed so level headed you could stand a plant pot on me. I can't think of anything dafter than going out to nightclubs to be seen. I'd rather get a Party Four and watch World At War or something. I'm not interested in this glitterati thing. I might have been when I was 17 and living forcibly on valium from the doctor. By my own hand I spent most of my teenage years drunk...

"... I've met Boy George a couple of times. I was most impressed by the size of him. He’s like a side of bacon. He’s enormous and he would insist on singing to me to me which I found particularly embarrassing because grannies do that sort thing. I’ve got a soft spot for the Cults though. Their manager used to manage us. Or at least he did for about three weeks in 1974...

“... I’ve got no idea what XTC have achieved. I suppose we’ve given people five minutes of fun. Ha, ha. It sounds like a prostitute. Five minute of fun and here we are still on the street with our legs out. The people who do like us get stupidly passionate about it. We get sackfuls of mail. Nineteen out of 20 will be from the States. People whose elder brothers listen to daring stuff like Styx or Boston and they discover us in a bargain bin or on college radio.

“We’re not on MTV all the time, we’ve got a very low visual profile... it’s bloody Neanderthal. We’re like a West Country Residents. They think they’ve found a precious stone among all that shit their mates listen to. There's a 50-year-old Mexican artists of his paintings, he likes us...

“About two weeks ago I made my first profit from XTC. I’ve got to some carpet and have one of the bedrooms done out. I found that out two weeks ago as well. Fate decreed that I would move out my guitar and synth and spend the money on bunny rabbit wallpaper for when we put the kid in there...

“...I want our music to be famous but not us. It’s a bit of a spazzy way of going about things but I can’t do anything else but make records. I can’t go into films or modelling or anything like that. I'm Mister Potato Head, not your run of the mill pop star. I've probably got more in common with the Spinners than the Sex Pistols."