“Oh, Jesus. I'd never called my mother a cunt before." Andy Partridge, 2005

“I OVERDID CHRISTMAS”, says Andy Partridge by way of explanation. “Hence the bottles”.

The bottles in question are in a cardboard box in the front garden — or, rather, they were, until the box finally succumbed to last month's rain. As a result, the people whose job it is to collect the bottles haven't touched the XTC frontman's glass pile. “Come in, come in”, he says, striding back down the hallway. Possibly because you don't expect successful musicians to live in Edwardian two-up two-downs, Partridge assumes Gulliver-like proportions in his lean-to kitchen. “Tea?” he asks. He boils his water with a kettle that whistles, uses Provamel soya milk in his tea and seems surprised when you ask for sugar. Last night, curiosity compelled him to go online and look for a recent picture of Syd Barrett. “I so wanted to look like him as a teenager, and finally I achieved my ambition. There was a picture that someone took of him walking down the street and finally we have exactly the same hairline and physique! It only took me 50 years!”

What do you do when one famously reclusive musician invokes a self-deprecating comparison between himself and another famously reclusive musician? Like Syd Barrett, Partridge's apparent retreat into anonymity has made him less of a national treasure, more of a rarefied cult. Twenty-two years have elapsed since he fled for home hours before he was due to front a sold-out Hollywood show. With every passing year, the incentives to return to the stage get a little greater. “The last one”, he says, “was in the region of a million”. But there's only one stage that Partridge is willing to mount. At the bottom of the garden, his shed plays host to banks of recording equipment, an electric guitar and a computer. What can you do in a space as small as this? Well, quite a lot actually. It was here that Partridge demoed 1999's Apple Venus — the magnificent album that completed XTC's turbulent journey back from the cover of Smash Hits and pan-European pop to practitioners of baroque pastoral psychedelia.

To those in the know however, reclusiveness has done nothing to diminish Partridge's stock. He's up for collaborations on the proviso that you're willing to make the train journey from Paddington to Swindon. Recent day-return purchasers include songwriter du jour Cathy Dennis and Sophie Ellis-Bextor — both seemingly convinced that the man who sang “I don't know how to write a hit song” on 1988's Mayor Of Simpleton could do just that. None of the sessions, however, appear to have made it on to any CDs.

Partridge says that both Dennis and Bextor used him: “I wrote six songs with Cathy, and after that, she kept me hanging about for months and months. Then the same thing happened with Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Later I found out she already had the album sorted out, so maybe it was a vanity exercise by her then-boyfriend/manager who had been a big fan of the band. So, the upshot of all this is that I've recorded an album's worth of songs which may never see the light of day. Fancy hearing one?”

He leans over to a small hook on which hangs a single key. A refreshing spray of drizzle precedes the surreal experience of hearing the 50 year-old XTC frontman's take on Sophie Ellis-Bextor. For all the rough edges and primitive rhythm track, the bell-strewn I Defy Gravity manages to sound quintessentially Ellis-Bextory. And yet, with the chorus, “Isaac Newton's cross with me / 'Cause I defy gravity”, the latter observes a theme that has stayed constant in Partridge songs such as Helicopter and That's Really Super, Supergirl. Women hover above the ground, unbridled by the laws of physics, while men stay rooted to the spot, unable to reach them. All things considered, it seems incredible that she didn't use it.

“Well maybe she does, but if the record company want her to be this cocktail disco diva, then who's going to win?”

That Partridge's record company are happy with his records may have something to do with the fact that he owns it. Just out on his own Ape imprint is a remarkable collaboration with Peter Blegvad that took seven years from conception to execution.
Orpheus — The Lowdown draws from a sonic well that dramatically belies the cramped environs in which it was created. Blegvad's abstract narratives riff around the tale of Orpheus, creating surreal new fragments of myth. On one track, the heartbroken son of Apollo transports himself to Galveston believing it to be hell (he might find Eurydice there) but proceeds to drown his sorrows in a Galveston bowling alley. Here, the world Partridge creates for Orpheus is vast and unforgiving, helping to bring out the suggestion that love is the predicament we endure in exchange for living. If they ever get around to making a record about Icarus, you suspect that Partridge may conclude it with a loop of his own West Country burr, intoning, “I told you so”.

IN FACT, THE ENORMITY of what's Out There has terrified and inspired Andy Partridge for longer than he cares to remember. On the opening lines of XTC's debut single Science Friction, he sings, “I look out of my window at night / I see the stars and I'm filled with fright”. When Partridge was a child he suffered from astrophobia — a fear of looking up at the stars. “I used to go to cubs on a winter's night and on the way back I would run all the way home, looking at the ground, sweating intensely. The vastness of the stars scared the fucking shirt off me. I remember we always used to come in through the coalhouse door — no-one ever used their front door — and I'd shut it behind me and start panting. Then I'd turn back and through the obscure glass with the wire in it, I could look back and see the glow of the stars”.

That inability to come to terms with his own cosmic tininess has never quite left Andy Partridge. Indeed, if you cast your eyes over XTC's back catalogue, you'll notice that it defines several of his finest moments. On Across This Antheap, only man's delusion elevates him above the scurrying insects who live out their repetitive existence: “And the screaming sky won't let me sleep / The stars are laughing at us / As we crawl across this antheap”. On The Wheel And The Maypole, the planets exist merely to feed the stars. Over four decades on, Partridge remains in thrall to cosmic forces. Tonight is a full moon and, as he explains, “I have terrible problems in the run up to a full moon. It happens every month without fail. I go to sleep for an hour and then I'm awake”. Last night, knowing that I would be visiting, Partridge left nothing to chance. He took a sleeping pill — from a “bootleg supply” belonging to his girlfriend Erica — and treated himself to his first decent night's sleep for four days. On top of this, there are the night terrors that have plagued him since childhood: "Those are with me twelve months a year”. He's come to live with these nocturnal panic attacks over the years, but their cumulative effect is a kind of weary fatalism: “You're out of bed again, scraping at the wallpaper, thinking you're going to die. It's very, very frightening”.
Does anyone know why they happen?

“Well, not really. They think it's something to do with dropping too deeply into sleep, so your body releases a surge of adrenalin because it thinks you're dying. It's a drag. In my early 20s, just after we started XTC, I would deal with it by simply not going to bed. I would just stay up all night and paint or draw. I'd go and rip up all the boxes in the flat and paint on them”.
It doesn't require too much imagination to work out what kind of a child the young Partridge must have been — at least not from this charmed vantage point of his kitchen table. The room adjoining his L-shaped kitchen is dominated by books on military history and old annuals — Topper, The Beezer. Every available display space has toy soldiers — most of them carefully painted in their authentic battle colours. In the front room sits an old toy fort built by a French company called Bon Dufort, whose employees later perished in the First World War. On the other side of the brick fireplace, is the television. “It's a new one”, explains Partridge, pre-empting my question “so the old Pollocks Toy Theatre façade no longer fits around it”.

That he was an only child, he says, explains his propensity for finding out how things work. “I'm one of those people who, if you give me something, I'm very tempted to take it apart. Hahaha! Give me a pet frog and I'm tempted to dissect it, I'm afraid!”
Compromise isn't something that only children have to learn, and Partridge was no exception. In Chris Twomey's 1992 XTC biography Chalkhills And Children, Partridge declares that he was “a brat. A terrible tantrum-thrower. I had to have my own way and be in control. If I didn't, I would throw the contents of the cutlery draw at my mother”. One occasion even saw poor Vera Partridge locked in her son's toy cupboard — freed only when a passing milkman heard her knocking.

Had he been born a little earlier, his childhood may have followed the template you see depicted in Picture Post images of the 1950s: one child with toy soldiers knelt beside pipe-chewing daddy and apron-clad mummy. By the time Partridge had reached puberty, his whole world was thrown into turmoil. His father John embarked on an extra-marital affair — causing Vera to have a nervous breakdown. With his mother briefly institutionalised, Partridge's own behaviour became erratic. At school, he needed to use the toilet every few minutes, a development which led the family GP to put him on Valium tablets. What remained of his childhood innocence was stolen by The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. He grew his hair long, which caused his mother to verbally disown him. He fantasised about murdering her, but wisely decided to buy a guitar and get a job in a record shop instead.

PARTRIDGE WASN'T THE ONLY song-writer in XTC, of course. Some of their most lovable tunes, especially on the dreamy psychedelic pop of 1985's Skylarking, were written by Colin Moulding. But they were always Partridge's band. He named them (the name came from a film in which Jimmy Durante finds the lost chord and exclaims, “Dat's it! I'm in X.T.C.!”); he designed the sleeves; he even attempted to take charge of their image, forcing Moulding to fall into line with post-punk sensibilities by cutting his hair.

More to the point, it was Partridge whose mental decline consigned the group to the margins, with a series of increasingly troubled hymns to a terrifying world. Walk through Swindon's Old Town and songs like Red Brick Dream and The Everyday Story Of Smalltown seem to hang in the air. Partridge's Swindon is his muse and his iron lung. It may have somehow trapped him here, but it's also keeping him alive. To imagine him functioning away from here is like separating Philip Larkin from Hull.
If he's come to accept the fact now, he wasn't always blessed with the same self-awareness. Partridge formed a band so that he could travel the world with a gang of like-minded people. Look at early television appearances of XTC and, actually, they shine with the unstyled camaraderie of so many provincial new wavers. On a 1978 Old Grey Whistle Test singing Statue Of Liberty, they all — even Partridge — seem utterly without fear. By this stage, Partridge and Colin Moulding had been playing together for six years. As personalities, they couldn't seem more different. Moulding was phlegmatic, shy, and heartbreakingly pretty. His McCartneyesque melodies were accentuated by the fact that he could actually sing. Partridge the art-school dropout was uptight, dominating and extrovert. The quirkiness of his staccato melodies was accentuated by the fact that he tended to yelp them. If asked which one would be more suited to the paraphernalia of pop stardom, you'd have chosen the blond exhibitionist.
And yet, the first big hit was written and sung by the quiet one. Moulding's Making Plans For Nigel dryly depicted the grim future that its subject's parents had planned for their beloved son. Responding to the line, “He has his future in British Steel”, the yet-to-be-privatised utility arranged for four Nigels from its Sheffield plant to appear in Steel News, waxing about their career prospects.

Moulding's greater facility for melody and the success that followed impacted upon all of Partridge's insecurities. “He never said much”, remembers Partridge, “and yet he got all the shags. He was the Nureyev of the band”.

By the time Making Plans For Nigel had turned them into pop stars, Partridge and Moulding were respectively engaged and married — Moulding to his childhood sweetheart Carol, and Partridge to a local girl Marianne. For Partridge though, the prospect of marriage wasn't so much a grand gesture as an act of contrition. “I had an affair with a woman from Virgin Records, who was so stacked I can't tell you. It was my first time abroad, we were being lauded to the skies and I was intensely excited. It all went to my head. I was in Paris, this woman was paying me far too much attention and I was drinking out of my skull. Then we got to Brussels and the sexual tension was unbearable. Now, every time I see pictures of the Atomium there, the memories come flooding back. We spent an afternoon wandering around it together. Have you seen it? It's like a big molecule of atoms, a big silver thing. I think of those as my testes and the interconnecting walkways as the penis. I fell head over heels for her, but it ended at a gig in Reading when my girlfriend punched her lights out”.

With a world tour pencilled in to capitalise on Nigel's success, Marianne had good reason to feel insecure. Over the next few months, XTC very quickly got themselves a reputation — but it was one from which their chastened frontman thoroughly distanced himself. By the time they reached Australia, a pattern had begun to emerge: “I was always in bed by midnight reading Letters From A Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake, and then five hours later I'd be woken up by the sound of Colin creeping in. I'd say, ‘Colin, is that you?' And he'd whisper, ‘Yeah — she had fantastic tits'”.

Somewhere along the way, the once-reserved Moulding had embraced the excesses of the touring life. Partridge: “I think that was the point at which it became apparent that going on the road takes all your sense of perspective away. We always came back with a souvenir. I had my little Sydney Opera House ashtray, Terry [Chambers, the drummer] had two tobacco pouches made from kangaroo testicles, and Colin brought back an entire woman”.

A woman?

“She was a reporter from some newspaper. She gave up her home and her job on the promise that they would move into a flat together in London. It was a terrible shame actually. We went to Colin's house to pick him up one evening and found his missus smashing him around the head with an acoustic guitar. He came to his senses and this poor girl was left stranded in London”.

Appropriately, XTC's final Top Of The Pops appearance was with Senses Working Overtime. Everything you needed to know about Partridge's afflictions was laid bare in the song's peculiarly medieval air of foreboding. That he even managed to make it as far as the BBC studios was some achievement. When the band completed the accompanying English Settlement album, the idea of playing it on the road started to give him panic attacks. The rest of the group, he says, were unsympathetic. In the meantime, Partridge and his wife put down a deposit on a house. It took him several days to muster the courage to introduce himself to the neighbours. After Marianne flushed his Valium down the toilet, the mere act of reaching for the front door induced panic. A tour of theatres across Britain was cancelled, incurring colossal debts for the band. He at least made it on to the plane for the ensuing American tour. But hours before the Hollywood Palladium show — he found himself paralysed with fear. He bought a plane ticket and, fearful of reprisals, fled.

With the air of a man who has pored over the facts time and time again, Partridge says that he had to sabotage his career in order to save himself as an artist. Likening his role in the music industry to that of a serf in feudal times — “I was on fifty pounds a week” — he wrote Love On A Farmboy's Wages. The allegory appeared to be lost on his record company, who released the song as a single. In autumn 1983, the elderly convalescents who made up the studio audience of Pebble Mill At One were treated to the sight of Partridge bitterly miming the words, “Shilling for the fellow who brings the sheep in / Shilling for the fellow who milks the herd / Shilling for the fellow with a wife for keeping / How can we feed love on a farmboy's wages?”
“YOU CAN FLIP between thinking Andy's superb and wanting to kill him in a matter of minutes. Half the time, he doesn't realise the effect he's having on people”. That's what the late Gus Dudgeon had to say about Partridge after his work on XTC's 1991 set Nonsuch. Certainly, diplomacy isn't one of his stronger points. Asked to sum up the effect of his break-down on the rest of the band, he says he became “dogshit” in the eyes of Moulding and guitarist Dave Gregory. I put it to him that there must have been some sense of loyalty towards him. With another writer already in the band, they could conceivably have sacked him. “They didn't break free because they knew who their battery was. And, you know, they look at the person doing all the interviews and writing most of the material and designing the sleeves and they think, ‘No, we'll continue limpeting on to him'”.

What's revealing here is the way the rest of XTC's willingness to yield to Partridge is portrayed by him as a weakness. And yet thrown into a room with an equally strong personality, he is simply unable to function. It took him years to come round to the popularly held view that XTC's 1986 album is the group's masterpiece. With Todd Rundgren at the helm, the sessions saw Partridge's volatility increase to such extremes that Colin Moulding briefly left the band: “Todd's way of working was to be dominant in all matters. As long as you lay down on your back while he puts his foot on your stomach, you'll get along just fine. If you had the temerity to argue with him, he'd just go home and tell you to ‘dick around with it on your own until it doesn't work your way, and then I'll come back and we'll do it my way'”.

Partridge's predicament elicits little sympathy when relayed to The Lilac Time's Stephen Duffy, whose And Love For All album was produced by the XTC frontman. “When we started working together, the Todd experience was still fresh in Andy's mind. He would go on about what a controlling egomaniac Todd was, and then proceeded to do with us what Todd had done to him. He used his genius to push us into things we couldn't do, just so he could prove he could do them better. It was a little detrimental to the group's self-esteem”.

With his seemingly innate inability to compromise, it might just be that Andy Partridge should never: a) have been in a band; and b) have been signed to a major record label. The release of Nonsuch came on the back of renewed momentum for XTC. Skylarking and the two exercises in period psychedelia they released as The Dukes Of Stratosphear had found them a whole new audience in America, ensuring that 1988's Oranges And Lemons and Nonsuch sold in the hundreds of thousands. Incensed by what he saw as Virgin's “sabotage” of XTC's best ever album and their unwillingness to renegotiate the band's contract, he went on strike until his paymasters agreed to free him. For an artist teetering on the brink of paranoia, these were tough times. Virgin refused to relent; Partridge refused to supply them with any more material; Blur junked the sessions that he produced for their Modern Life Is Rubbish album. His life was on pause. Asked what he remembers most about this time and he cites two unlikely records: Sting's Fields Of Gold and REM's Automatic For The People. “My wife would just leave them to go round and round and round all day while we were trying to kill each other”.

Partridge's wife decided she wanted out, although he points out that, what with the sudden change of wardrobe, the new hair colours and the purchase of a motorbike, he knew that something was up. “Marianne had started to mourn the teenagehood she never had. She dumped me, but then I've always been the dumpee in relationships”.

He says he hoped it might be amicable, but when he went to the bank to get some money out and discovered she had withdrawn everything, he went spiralling into despair. Anyone hearing the extraordinary Your Dictionary from Apple Venus will know the impact that the incident had on Partridge: “H-A-T-E / Is that how you spell love in your dictionary?”

In an empty, childless house, locked in a war of attrition with his record company, Partridge had plenty of time to dwell on the circumstances of his solitude. In 1995, he and Peter Blegvad began work on their Orpheus project, but convinced that everyone was out to use him in some way, Partridge froze Blegvad out. Halfway through a phone conversation between the two, the line went dead. Blegvad attempted to get back in touch with Partridge, but to no avail. His grievance stemmed from the fact that Blegvad had erroneously left Partridge's name off the credits of an album on which he had guested. “That's where I was at back then”, he says, “and Peter, bless him, kept in touch. Or at least, tried. He sent me post-cards, presents, you name it. He never stopped”.

At 45, it would probably be unrealistic to expect someone to change the habits of a lifetime. But people can help themselves by creating favourable conditions for those habits. Released from their Virgin contract, XTC released two albums — Apple Venus and Wasp Star — through Cooking Vinyl. Contributions from Moulding and guitarist Dave Gregory (who left during the sessions) were minimal — an arrangement which apparently suits both parties perfectly well. Moulding opted not to join his colleague on his next project. Through his own Ape records, Partridge has so far released four albums in an eight-part series of unrecorded XTC material. Fuzzy Warbles may be only of interest to XTC diehards, but there are several thousands of those around the world. With almost all copies sold online, it doesn't take a genius to work out that Partridge has a few shillings in his bank account. The situation is set to improve next year when his theme tune to Wonderfalls — a US sitcom by the creators of Malcolm In The Middle — begins to air.

More importantly, for the first time in his life, there's no-one to answer to. He's got the control he always wanted.

IS HE HAPPY? Right now, he's happy enough to suggest we continue this conversation over lunch. Fusion cuisine never really made its mark on Swindon, although the chef at The King's Head takes it upon himself to serve the Thai Chicken Curry with a poppadum on the side. Partridge suggests a game in which we have to name three good things and three bad things about England. He has no trouble reeling off three complaints about this country: 1) our xenophobia; 2) the way no-one is expected to give an honest answer to the question “How are you?”; and 3) people don't get things fixed when they break.

You suspect that this list has been reeled off a few times before, possibly with a little help from Erica Wexler — a New York singer who terminated a liaison with pop artist Roy Lichtenstein in order to be with Partridge. When he relays this last coup, it's hard to conceal my amazement. “Roy had an open marriage with his wife Dorothy. He referred to Erica as one of his ‘young Tootsies'. In the end I gave her an ultimatum: ‘What's it to be? The millionaire and the flat in the East Village, or me?' I'm still pinching myself. From a city that never sleeps to one that never quite wakes up. Poor thing. She's still coming to terms with the culture shock. In New York, you can go for a Chadian meal at 1.30 am. In Swindon, the only thing you can get at 1.30 am is arrested”.

In fact, as Partridge discovered a couple of years ago, you can't even do that. He tells the sorry tale of Christmas 2001, when he invited his elderly parents over to enjoy a good old fashioned day of festive cheer. Full of good intentions, he hired a Santa costume for the day and attempted to ignore his inner Philip Larkin. “But you know, it's always difficult. I got so drunk, in fact, that I ended up letting my mother know exactly what I thought of her”.

Bad, was it?

“Oh, Jesus. I'd never called my mother a cunt before. That was a Christmas and a half. I just had too much cheap champagne and champagne is the worst thing to get drunk on. My mother just ended up pressing all the wrong psychological buttons, like they do. And that was when I unleashed this tirade”.

What does a paralytic 48 year-old Santa do when he's called his mother a cunt in front of his two children? He walks out into the night, looks up at the stars he was once so afraid of and begs them to swallow him up. Cries unheeded, Partridge made the short journey to the local town gardens and attempted to negotiate the gates. Unable to scale them, he walked on to a small children's playground, where he sank into the mud and wept — “dressed in my Santa suit, swearing at the stars with passing cars honking at me”.

Back at home, a panicking Erica called the police and reported her partner missing. Unsurprisingly, they didn't have too much trouble finding him: “It was exactly as you would have expected. It was all, ‘Come along now sir, I think your lady's worried about you'. They put me in the car and drove me home, but the damage was done. My kids had never seen me in a mess. And what a mess! The mess was Santa. It's terrible really. You love your parents to bits but mixed with it all is the pain from way back when”.

Card swiped, we commence the five minute walk back to Partridge's house. On the way back, he exchanges greetings with Tony, the Old Town barber — although it's been some years since he had cause to go there. “I can just run the clippers over my head and achieve the same effect”. Once again, the ghosts of Partridge past sing in the distance: “Chalkhills and children / Anchor my feet”. Does he ever think he'll leave here? Or is this it now?

He talks about how Erica would love to move to Bath — an idea that he's not averse to. “I've sworn to her that we will move. She finds it really depressing here, but I like this house. There's a great vibe in it. If I ever moved, I've got a good idea of the house where I'd like to live”.

He unlocks the front door, and walks into the kitchen where he keeps a book of sketches and notes. “Here — let me show it to you”. Partridge produces a detailed pencil drawing of his ideal home: “I'd like a walled garden, with these little circular bits in each corner to keep my garden tools and implements. And look, this bit is two storeys. I'd like red brick with white trim. I think I could maybe get it built for half a million. What do you reckon?”

In Bath, the plot alone would cost about half a million.

“No! Look! All these bits here are single storey. And it's only one room deep”.

Well it looks great, I say.

“I'll probably never do it. But it's a scheme I've thought about many a time”. #

"The story of a big, brilliant, gay genius. And his three slightly dim mates." We Will Rock You, 2002

If it looked good to you on telly you've no idea what it was like to be there. You didn't have to sit through endless turns by Sade, Paul Young and Bryan Ferry. And even if you'd chosen to watch it at home, at least you weren't vying with 72,000 other people to go to the toilet during the satellite transmissions of George Thorogood and The Destroyers' set. Until that point, Live Aid was the dullest giig I'd ever been to in my life. But when Queen came on, it turned into the best one ever. All my inhibitions vanished in an instant. I air-soloed along with BrIan May on We Are The Champions. I joined in with the Radio Ga Ga Nuremberg clap. I went "DAAAAAAAAYO!" when Freddie made us all go "DAAAAAAAAYO!" No rock star has ever understood what they're there for as well as Queen did on that day. But then that was Freddie all over. A man who understood the simultaneous absurdity and clearly seriousness of his job. Deep down In their hearts even the most right on indie curmdgeon knows that there will never be a better rock star than Freddie Mercury. Even Kurt Cobain, in his suicide note, seemed to suggest that he killed himself because he'd never be as good as Freddie.
This week sees the premiere of Ben Elton's Queen musical - and it must be said there's very little that is recognisably Freddie. We Will Rock You is a futuristic fantasy set on Planet Mall (because this planet is turning into a big mall, do you see?) And in that world dancing and music are controlled by the evil Globalsoft, whose ruler the Killer Queen wants to banish any dissenters who "want to break free" to the seven seas of Rye. Are you following this? However, out there in the disued subways and wastelands of Mall be the Bohemians. Their leader Galileo Figaro bears rhapsodies in his head. Do you get it? Problem is, the Killer Queen's on his trail and Galileo - along with his girlfriend Scaramouche - has to find The Living Rock (in which a guitar is buried) and tell the brainwashed kids of Mall about a golden age before manufactured pop and boy bands, when we weren't "caught in a landslide of marketing... (with) no escape from (this) reality." Do you s.. oh, never mind.
I can't say I wasn't angry when I attended a peview and saw how Ben Elton brushed Queen's songs under the shadow of his huge ego. I was livid, but not for myself or for the fans, who remained conspicuous by their apparent disinternest in storming the stage mob handed and setting fire to it. I was livid that Ben Elton had done this to Brian May.
You see, I've been watching Brian May trying to get his life back together following Freddie's death. And he basically seems like an all-right bloke, albeit with too much time on his hands. The solo career seems to have dried up. There are no more recordings of Freddie singing in the shower that the rest of Queen can tart up and release "posthumously". And there are only so many times that Never Mind The Buzzcocks will invite you back.
Like those peculiar middle-aged widows who get befriended by animal rights activists and before long seem to spend their days outside Huntingdon Life Sciences shouting "murderers!", Brian's fallen in with a crowd who don't necessarily have his best interests at heart - in this case Ben Elton and the musical's major backer Robert De Niro.
Brian wants to keep Freddie's name alive. Ben Elton must have assured him that a musical was a good way to do this. But We Will Rock You isn't a musical about Freddie Mercury. It's a muscical about how Ben Elton thinks the world is becoming corporatised by, um, boy bands and um... the internet. Does it matter that, had it not been for the internet, the anti capitalism riots wouldn't have happened? Um, apparently not. Would it be churlish to point out that May didn't seem too bothered about boy bands two years ago when he appeared on Top Of The Pops with Five for their version of We Will Rock You?
In fact, We Will Rock You, the musical is a very symptom of the world that Elton piously purports to rally against. Freddie may be dead but the Queen brand is very much alive, just like the Abba band is very much alive. This is why the Abba musicial Mamma Mia! is three years into its West End run, and it's why We Will Rock You - and, over in New York, a Springsteen-based musical, Drive All Night - will probably do the same. It's why when the artists finally expire, the musicals of Elton John and Oasis songs will also clean up. It's capitalism stripped to its cut-throat basics - the exploitation of consumer goodwill towards an established brand.
But what might make sound business sense makes for a lousy musical, because - and sorry if this seems to be stating the obvious - Queen's songs weren't written as part of a narrative about the evils of globalisaioon. They're not even close, Ben! Have you listened to the words of I Want It All and One Vision? Sounds to me as though Freddie rather liked the idea of it. And sorry if this comes as something of a shock, but Abba's greatest hits weren't written to form part of a story about a super trouper called Fernando who takes a chance on a dancing queen and appears on TV quiz show The Winner Takes It All, but then ends up losing all his money money money to a man after midnight at Waterloo station. Or whatever the plot of Mamma Mia! happens to be.
In all the great musicals the songs push the plot along without you even noticing. In My Fair Lady, we see Eliza Doolittle reluctantly taking an elocution lesson from Professor Higgins. During the course of The Rain In Spain though, her reluctance turns into excitement at all the possibilities that her posh new voice has opened her up to. By oscillating defly between John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John's accounts of their courtship, Summer Nights effortlessly fills you in on an entire back=story in Grease.
Ben Elton knows better than most that it's not an easy thing to do. In Andrew Lloyd-Webber's flop footy musical, The Beautiful Game, Elton's lyrics were so dismal that even Parky winced when Elton had the temerity to sing them on his chat show. Perhaps that explains why he's moved on to an already existing body of work and moulded it in his own image.
It's a shame really, because there is actually one fantastic plot very clearly suggested by Queen's back catalogue. In fact, it's a story that has everything. The story of Farookh Bulsara - the awkward, buck-toothed Tanzanian boy whose family were forced to flee their homeland for the leafy environs of Feltham in Middlsex. Increasingly aware that he ain't like all the other boys, the adolescent public-school dandy discovers Hendrix, goes to art college and finds decadence and depravity he couldn't havd dreamed of. He becomes Freddie Mercury and hooks up wth three straight science students and together they form a band. He calls them Queen - an in joke that his three colleagues and most of his fans take some time to cotton on to. He holds parties where dwarves pour endless quantities of champagne and drag queens mud-wrestle. He proceeds too slut his way through the 1970s and 1980s, unaware that, as his guitarist later put it, Too Much Love Will Kill You In The End. Which, obviously, it does.
The moral of the story? There isn't one, of course. This is Freddie Mercury we're talking about. The man who took the popular playground taunt "Nyerrr nyer nyer nyerr-nyer" and turned it into a song called We Are The Champions. The man whose preposterous One Vision was turned into a quasi-Nazi anthem by East European pranksters Lalbach[?]. That's the story of Queen. The story of a big, brilliant, gay genius. And his three slightly dim mates.

"Our brains are too complicated to be still all the time." Fleet Foxes, 2008

“Have I ever [ital] what [ital]?” Robin Pecknold, frontman with Seattle four-piece Fleet Foxes, smiles to conceal his embarrassment that I might even think him capable of such a thing. He heard me perfectly the first time, but I nonetheless repeat the question. Has he ever used his music to make himself more attractive to a woman? Finally, he gathers his thoughts. “No, no… I mean, I’m the wrong guy to ask that question to. That’s the last thing I would ever do. In the big debate about what music is and how it evolved, some people reduce it to a mating call – just like a bird has a mating call. You know, I’ve heard that a couple of times. Me, personally? I think music happens because our brains are too complicated to be still all the time, you know?”

Some half an hour after coming off stage to a rapturous ovation at Brighton’s Audio club, the bearded, blue-eyed Pecknold is too distracted to appreciate the irony of his utterances. Outside the venue, as he faces the lights of the pier, two young Japanese Fleet Foxes fans stare at him with an air of respectful adoration. If truth be told, it’s a reaction that isn’t restricted to the other sex. It’s hard to recall the last time a recorded noise elicited the sort of praise reserved for Fleet Foxes’ celestial four part harmonies. You must know you’re onto something pretty special when the worst reviews elicited by your eponymous debut album stop short of meting out a fifth star.

And yet the nearest Fleet Foxes get to arrogance comes during the actual show itself, when the freewheeling backwoods canter of Ragged Wood comes to an end and bassist Christian Wargo and drummer Joshua Tillman exchange high-fives. While they, along with Pecknold’s childhood friend and guitarist Skye Skjelset retreat to another corner of the bar, Pecknold points out that, often Fleet Foxes, are no less startled by their vocal chemistry – Crosby Stills Nash and Young quietly rejoicing at the bottom of a well barely begins to do it justice – than the rest of us are. Only twelve months have elapsed since Pecknold wrote Quiet Houses – the song that prompted him to junk everything they had previously worked on and start again. What changed, exactly?

“Prior to that, there were a few songs we were working on that were very much focused on the lead vocal, you know?” He almost baulks at the apparent gaucheness of such a conceit. “And I wanted to do a song that was the extreme opposite of that – where the vocals were just part of the music, and not just a platform for this guy, you know?” Not for Pecknold then, the ego-massaging benefits of lead-singerdom, the license to be just that little bit more cocksure than the rest of us? Fleet Foxes’, well… let’s call him their primary songwriter finds himself getting embarrassed “very quickly” by the mildest of misunderstandings. At some length, he relates a story about a show in Oklahoma with bucolic freak-folkers Blitzen Trapper, in which the venue owner’s wife served up separate meals for both bands. Pecknold asked if there might be any vegan food available, and when he returned to eat it, he recalls that “some guy who looked like me had been given the food.” At this point, all parties realised what had happened. Not a major faux, pas you would think – but Pecknold recalls feeling so embarrassed, he had to run back and hide in the van. It’s a tendency, he says, that his girlfriend finds exasperating at times. “If I order a coffee and they give me the wrong one, I would rather throw it away and buy a new one,” he smiles, “It drives her nuts.”

If the tics and traits of an “inward looking” childhood, remain mostly intact, it’s perhaps not so surprising. “By the time I was dressing myself,” says Pecknold, “I was uncomfortably overweight to the point where I would want to wear a t-shirt in the water when I was a kid.” It was by deciding to cut animal and dairy products from his diet at the age of 14 that the pounds started to fall off. “I went on a big bicycle trip – like, a summer camp thing – and decided I didn’t want t eat all the crappy food that everyone else had. At the same time, I had just heard about what a vegan was, so I told everyone that I was a vegan so I could eat special food.”

By the end of the summer, Pecknold returned home 30lb lighter. In keeping with what we already know about him, he says he’s thankful that his parents withheld from making a big deal of the transformation. “I think they knew to not make a big stink about it, so it’s not like you feel that they’re suddenly into you now. You know that they love you no matter what, you know?”

By this time, Pecknold – whose father builds boats and guitars for a living – was writing his own songs. Despite growing up in the town where grunge took off, Pecknold – just seven when Kurt Cobain did – found his inspirations elsewhere. His obsession with Bob Dylan made the life of a lone troubadour seem like a viable vocation. “The first time I heard Boots of Spanish Leather,” recalled his older sister Aja (yes, as in the Steely Dan album) “it was as if all of the oxygen had been drained from the room, suddenly replaced with the wavering golden longing of this one song. “Only it wasn’t Dylan singing, it was my 14 year-old brother.”

Written shortly after his return from that momentous camp expedition, his first song Sarah Jane was “just some story about a girl whose dad hated her and kicked her out, so she had to become a prostitute, then she became pregnant. A sob story, basically.” Looking back, Pecknold characterizes his early songs as attempts to write songs like his other musical role model Elliott Smith – “to see how he does it, you know?”

Perhaps a touch facetiously, I suggest that having a massive heroin problem seemed to help in that particular instance. Pecknold remembers being desperate to go and see Smith on his last ever Seattle show, but being too young to go. “That was the last chance I could have seen him, and I heard that tour was terrible. He could barely remember the words to his songs.”

Any worries that Pecknold may seek to lubricate the cogs of creativity in a similar way are without foundation on the basis of tonight’s encounter. Supping water from a polystyrene cup, he responds to a question about sharing drugs with his baby boomer dad by saying, “That has never come up. I don’t smoke weed. And I don’t think he does, either… although maybe he did at some point. Besides, having a drug habit implies you have money to spend on drugs. As it is, I might have to take a job when I get back to Seattle. I was a cook in a restaurant kitchen, so I’ll probably go back to doing that.” Having made the most unanimously feted album of 2008, it seems incredible that this even constitutes a possibility – but Pecknold says his band wouldn’t even be here in Europe had their label not advanced them £20,000 to finance these shows.

Far from complaining, however, Pecknold’s tone, in fact, is one more of gratitude that someone advanced his band the money in the first place. As if to mitigate any accidental negativity, he adds, “Maybe I’ll just be able to do get part-time work when I return. But hey, I don’t want to sound like a grouch. There’s nothing I really long for right now.” He pauses briefly. “Well, maybe nothing except for a list of countries where it’s acceptable to tip taxi drivers… because that’s another source of continual awkwardness.”