Pitchfork

Step right up for a yard sale four years in the making: Nine CDs of the long-bootlegged and highly collectible home recordings of XTC's Andy Partridge. And here's a sample of what you get: An answering machine message. Rejected demos for the film James and the Giant Peach (plus sniping at Randy Newman, who got the gig). A bunch of songs that use the circus as a metaphor for life. Five songs in a row about masturbation. Demos for dozens of songs you've already heard, some totally redundant ("Rook"), and some kinda funny (a skiffle version of "Dear God"). Some instrumentals. A handful of the best songs Partridge ever wrote. And another track of Partridge laughing, uncontrollably. In other words, a giant-- but engaging-- mess.

The material falls into two general phases. By the early 1980s, where the demos really kick in, XTC had quit the road and retreated to Swindon, where Partridge turned his attention to his family, his frustration with the music biz, and songs about his native England. He took up these themes in Mummer, Big Express, and Skylarking, but his home recordings fill in more of the gaps, like a sketchbook where you can see the rougher, uglier thoughts that were purged from the official record.

Check out "Happy Families": "Have you got Miss Carriage? She's the girl who wants a baby that she cannot find." Add this to the wasted England in "Motorcycle Landscape" ("there is a doll's arm floating in the scum"), and the maybe-is-"pedo," maybe-not "Young Cleopatra", and you're looking at his darker anxieties. And compared to the lush albums put out by the studio-bound XTC, these four-tracks are dominated by Partridge's gnashing guitar and frantic drum machine: They sound like a bicycle that has to go faster and faster or the wheels will come off.

By contrast, from the 90s on, Partridge upgraded his backyard studio, and these demos are cleaner and less agitated. Unfortunately, they're also less surprising. You'd think that the seven years between 1992's Nonsuch and 1999's Apple Venus, Pt. 1-- when the band were "on strike" from Virgin-- would be full of lost treasures, but it seems that Apple Venus and Wasp Star already grabbed the best songs: There are just a few must-hears, like the sunny "Dame Fortune" or the serene "Wonder Annual", which Partridge correctly thinks is one of the best of the bunch.

There's almost as much music on this set as in the whole XTC catalog. In fact, digging through it feels like finding tapes from an alternate universe, where Andy Partridge became the best bedroom musician nobody's ever heard of. And while Partridge has a financial interest in releasing this stuff-- he says he makes more off these Fuzzy Warbles albums than from his Virgin-controlled back catalog-- his enthusiasm for the project tells us a lot about his creative process.

From the beginning Partridge was an uncomfortable pop star, and for most of his career, he's stayed resolutely out of fashion and out of the limelight. Next to new wave contemporaries such as David Byrne or Elvis Costello, who still cultivate an image and spend a certain amount of time seeing and being seen, Partridge gladly talks about his daily routine of puttering around the backyard, sorting his mail, and fretting over what coffee does to his prostate.

The only time an outside producer had a major influence on an XTC album, it was Todd Rundgren and Skylarking, their most famous (but not their best) record. Thanks to Rundgren's extra polish and shimmer, it cut deeper into the hearts and spring memories of the fans than any of XTC's other nostalgia trips. But sure enough, Rundgren and Partridge clashed over the record: Like Richard Nixon refusing makeup before his first TV debate with John Kennedy, Partridge would rather go down looking like himself than sweeten and blur the image to fit the fans. And the tracks on Fuzzy Warbles are as unfiltered and unsweetened as it gets. Every single thing on here was recorded by Partridge, at home, when he felt like it, with fuck all interference from anybody-- just the way he likes it. This isn't his best work, but it's his happiest.