The Big Express is the seventh studio album by the English rock band XTC, released on 15 October 1984 by Virgin Records. It is an autobiographical concept album inspired by the band's hometown of Swindon and its railway system, the Swindon Works. In comparison to its predecessor Mummer (1983), which had a modest, pastoral approach to production, the album features a bright, uptempo sound marked by studio experimentation and denser arrangements, setting a template that they further developed on subsequent albums.
XTC produced the album with Crescent Studios owner David Lord on a budget exceeding £75,000 (equivalent to £ in ). Like Mummer, the Glitter Band's Pete Phipps was hired as a session drummer for the band. They continued extending their use of exotic colors, incorporating instruments such as LinnDrum, euphonium, and E-mu Emulator for the first time in their work. Much of the album showcased the band's psychedelic influences through its reliance on Mellotron, a tape-based sampling keyboard popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and effects such as reverse echo and phasing. The title refers to express trains and artistic expression.
Lead single "All You Pretty Girls" peaked at number 55 on the UK Singles Chart and its music video cost £33,000 to produce. The Big Express received little critical notice and sold fewer copies than Mummer. It reached number 38 on the UK Albums Chart and number 178 on the US Billboard 200. Some critics suggested that its music suffered from overproduction and a lack of dynamics. In later years, the record has been described as "hugely influential". Japanese rock band Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her derived their name from the album track of similar title.
Background
XTC's previous album Mummer was their first work after resigning from live performances in 1982. It was released in August 1983 after several months of delays due to the band's creative difference with producer Steve Nye and Virgin Records and became the group's lowest-charting album to date. Virtually every contemporary review of the album accused the band of falling out of touch with the contemporary music climate. Bassist Colin Moulding thought that "when we came back from America after our aborted tour of 1982 ... people like Spandau Ballet had moved onto the scene; new groups were coming up and there was no place for us." Dissatisfied with the downturn in their career, drummer Terry Chambers quit the group early in the Mummer sessions to take care of his wife and newborn child in Australia.
In the meantime, guitarist and principal songwriter Andy Partridge produced Peter Blegvad's album The Naked Shakespeare (1983). Partridge said that his services were requested partly because Blegvad heard a rumour that he had died in 1982. He summarized his feelings at the time: "We're about to make another [album] that probably won't sell very well, and Virgin are getting fed up with us and starting to grumble about potentially not carrying on with us ... I was really confused about what I was supposed to be doing." Immediately after Mummer, he stated that he thought the next album would have a more contemporary R&B sound and that the band were "conscious of wanting to get away from the" style of their previous two studio albums, and said that "I don't think you'll hear any acoustic guitars this time, or any particularly multilayered things." Years later, he reflected that "Funk Pop a Roll" from Mummer could be considered "the first Big Express track".
In late 1983, XTC released the holiday single "Thanks for Christmas" under the pseudonym Three Wise Men. It was produced by David Lord, owner of Crescent Studios in Bath, who impressed the band with the story that he had turned down an offer to arrange the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home" (1967). He met Partridge while working as an engineer on The Naked Shakespeare. According to biographer Neville Farmer, Lord was "a world's away from XTC", having turned down the Beatles offer because he believed the Beatles were not serious musicians, and "made a deep impression on Andy. He hadn't had a musical guru before now. David Lord could hold his own in any musical conversation and piqued Andy's interests in unexplored musical areas." Moulding was not as effused and said he was unable to relate to Lord on a musical level. XTC subsequently negotiated a deal that allowed them to work as much as they want on their next album at his studio. In April 1984, about a month into the new album sessions, the group learned that ex-manager Ian Reid had incurred them an outstanding value-added tax bill of several hundred thousand pounds, and they immediately pursued litigation that would last for the next five years. David Lord adds: "This story about me turning down the Beatles as 'not serious musicians' is nonsense! I think it grew from something I told Andy once - as a music student in the days when 'Sgt. Pepper' was being recorded, a number of us were invited to be part of the cheering crowd at Abbey Road; sadly I was already committed elsewhere and couldn't make it! That's all!"
Concept and production
The intention for The Big Express was to "let the music have a more boisterous feel" and for the lyrics to be more worldly. For the album title, Partridge wanting something that was reminiscent of his hometown Swindon, which was well-known for its railway repair workshop, the Swindon Works. Working titles included Coalface, Head of Steam, Shaking Skin House, Bastard Son of Hard Blue Rayhead, The Known World, Bull with the Golden Guts, Mindless Sax and Violins, and Under the Rusting North Star. The Big Express was chosen for its double meaning, referring to express trains and artistic expression. Partridge envisioned the record as "industrial pop. We come from a railway town, and I was like, 'Well, let's wallow in that; in the imagery and the sounds. Let's make an album that's riveted together and a bit rusty around the edges and is sort of like broken Victorian massive machinery.'" He said that the record "might be a concept album by stealth" since most, if not all of the songs he and Moulding wrote were autobiographical to some extent. Two were of a political bent ("This World Over" and "Reign of Blows"). The majority of Partridge's songs were composed on an open E-tuned guitar with a broken E string.
The Big Express was recorded on a budget of £75,000 or £90,000 (equivalent to £ or £ in ) and on 24-track tape. Sessions began in March 1984. As was the case for Mummer, the Glitter Band's Pete Phipps was hired as a session drummer for the band, and the group continued making more use of exotic instrumentation, such as the Mellotron they had purchased for that album. Other keyboard instruments included a Prophet-5, a Yamaha CP-80, and a Roland JX-3P owned by guitarist Dave Gregory. Some of The Big Express was recorded using a Linn LM-1 Drum Computer and extensive time was spent on its programming. Moulding played a Wal bass that was one of the first guitars built with an active circuit, a component which boosts treble at the cost of bass, which was popular among 1980s musicians. He used the bass on about four tracks and said that it provided a "middley, borpy sound I was after." Tears for Fears, who were recording Songs from the Big Chair (1985) at a nearby studio in the area, loaned the group an E-mu Emulator. Session musician Stuart Gordon was brought in as violinist. Some overdubs were recorded at Odyssey Studios in London. Mixing was completed in early August by producer Phil Thornalley at RAK Studio Two; Lord left the project a month earlier to fulfill a contract with the Europeans, a British band.
The end result returned the group to a brighter and uptempo sound with arrangements denser than on any previous XTC album. Gregory reflected: "we were thinking, 'What else can we put on this track' - even if it didn't need anything adding. David Lord was as bad as Andy for tarting things up when they didn't need tarting up." He remembered "a whole afternoon I spent trying to find the right hi-hat sound. It was stupid and the album lacks energy because of it!" Moulding felt the recording was not an enjoyable experience: "It was just too analytical. Andy tends to analyse down to the minutest detail. We'd be listening to bass drums all fuckin' day to see if they had any feel!" He described it as "the LinnDrum album" and added they had stopped "playing as a band" due to the reliance on overdubs. Partridge jokingly referred to some parts of the album as the only time the group were befallen with stereotypical 1980s-style production.
In Partridge's view, the group's psychedelic influences were "leaking out" through the use of Mellotron, phasing, and "backwards so-and-so". One of the songs he wrote around this time was "Your Gold Dress", something he felt could possibly be worked into a 1960s psychedelic style, an idea that XTC would soon explore with the Dukes of Stratosphear side project. Moulding offered the song "Shiny Cage", but it was rejected by the band, Partridge said, "because it was too stupidly Beatley - it was everything from Revolver all smashed into one song."
Songs Side one
"Wake Up" Partridge wrote all the songs on The Big Express, except for "Wake Up" and "I Remember the Sun", which were written by Moulding. "Wake Up" opens the album with guitars and piano followed by a chorus lyric that proclaims "who cares, you might be dead". Dave Gregory commented: "We love confusing intros: records that start with a naked riff with no drum beat. And then when the drums come in, or the band comes in, it throws you completely." To write the song, Moulding started with a three-note piano figure, which he then overdubbed with two guitar riffs: "The track didn't really happen until David Lord got hold of it. A local girl came in and sang the 'choir', tracked up a load of times."
"All You Pretty Girls" "All You Pretty Girls" is a kind of sea shanty centred on females. According to Partridge, the song came about while he was "dicking around, playing some [Jimi] Hendrix. ... I was just playing this little two-note, quasi-Hendrix thing, and I liked the inherent melody in it. It felt like a really archaic old folk melody." With the exception of the opening, all the drum sounds in the recording were made with the LinnDrum, while the choir sounds were a Mellotron sample played out of a speaker inside a fire bucket. Of the song's lyrics, he said that although they were "not quite autobiographical, it's me fantasizing about being my father, about being in the Navy."
"Shake You Donkey Up" "Shake You Donkey Up" is a hoedown whose narrator is portrayed as a jilted lover. Although the lyrics appear nonsensical, they are an autobiographical rumination on "unenlightened attitudes about women ... as mothers to be bullied or girlfriends who are going to get drunk and attack you." Partridge instructed Moulding to have the bass sound like the 1972 Jimmy Castor Bunch song "Troglodyte (Cave Man)", "a great crunching bass line. So it's a homage to Jimmy, a sort of memory lift." He also cited Captain Beefheart's "Sure 'Nuff 'n' Yes I Do" (1967) as an influence. Phipps played a drum kit consisting of buckets and trays.
"Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her"