The Big Express

So as we were filming the wheel it was like, "Okay, I've got it ready. I'm gonna take [pregnant pause] - now." And just as he said "now" this little grasshopper hopped up on the wheel, in the lights. And it was bright green. And I don't think anyone noticed until the film was developed. ~ Andy Partridge
On September 12, 2002 ~ Andy and I talked about the cover of the Swindon-ist XTC album.

AP: So, where are we album wise? Hang on…

WL: The Big Express.

AP: The Big Express, right.

WL: The cricket on the wheel. Was it...

AP: The little cricket on the wheel. He was accidental.

WL: That's a wonderful accident.
Soul Coal not included.
AP: Yeah. We were up a railway siding at about three in the morning. Because there was a whole bunch of, sort of old Great Western stuff stored up there. You know, one of these preservation societies had all these big things like, just huge rusting wheels and stuff. And rusting bits of train up these sidings. And we got permission to go and film these. And so, to give us more control we went at night. So it was dark and we could take lights. You know, so we could control the lighting. I wanted this album to be called something industrial because I wanted to get away from the pastoral side of things, with Mummer. And so it was like the journey was going through the town this time. And I think
there's a lot of Swindon in that album. A lot of Swindon, and a lot of Great Western, which is why we went for the sort of railway-ania. [laughter] Or whatever you call it, all over it. But originally, one of the titles I wanted to call it was Coal Face.

WL: I've seen some of your sketches for that.

AP: Yeah. It was like, you were gonna look down on to the tender of a train, and the coal in the tender of a train was gonna be arranged so it was sort of a smiling contented face. And then I thought, "Well, that's stupid 'cause Swindon doesn't have anything to do with coal, and this is daft because what it has to do with is trains. You know, I put this coal in a tender of a train and I'm looking at
Andy's early sketch-ideas.
Click image & visit Swindon's Steam Museum.

the coal. I'm not looking at the train. And what Swindon was about, what made Swindon exist in the eyes of the country, was railways. That's what it was famous for. For building trains and repairing trains and building everything that went with trains and train workers. So I thought, "Well it's kind of time to honor that." So I decided, "What is more symbolic than a round train wheel?" And it's obviously a train wheel. There's no other wheel that looks like that.

WL: Sure.

AP: So, we find ourselves, three o'clock in the morning, up this siding with these lights, filming.

WL: Now when you say "we" that's, who?

AP: Uhh, a couple of photographers. I think Ken Ansel and Dave Dragon, or Ken Ansel and a photographer from Design Clinic, and myself. And I think Dave and Colin as well. And we're all trudging along these railway tracks in the dark. You know, falling over and swearing. "Where the fuck are these wheels? Where are these bits of carriage and stuff?" And we got there and set the lights up and I'm saying, "Well, let's shoot that wheel there. That's a great looking one. That nice piece of rusty what's-it there, can we shoot that?" So as we were filming the wheel it was like, "Okay, I've got it ready. I'm gonna take [pregnant pause] - now." And just as he said "now" this little grasshopper hopped up on the wheel, in the lights. And it was bright green. And I don't think anyone noticed until the film was developed.

WL: That's neat.

AP: And it was like, "There's this grasshopper on the wheel." And it was, "Wow, he's on

Use your legs, Mr. grasshopper begs.
Click image for Swindon's Heritage.

this entire planet!" You know, he's like a little person on the planet there. He was great. Unfortunately he tended to get nipped off of the circular sleeve, just because of the die cutting. You know, trying to fit the shape of the wheel.

WL: Well, it was either that or airbrush the beer out of the cricket's hand.

AP: [laughing] And if you look carefully, his fly's open. [laughter] Because he got dressed in that green suit a bit too quickly. Uh, not the first time that Colin's fly has been undone on a photo session, I must admit. But nobody noticed the little cricket until the film was

developed. And it was, "Oh look, there's one with a cricket, or two with a cricket. Let's use that one!" So you get to see the cricket on the square version, but because of the clumsy die cutting he was chopped off of the round one.

WL: That brings a little of the pastoral back into The Big Express I think.

AP: Yeah, and it kind of humanizes it. 'Cause there's this massive, big heavy iron industry and then this little living thing leaps up on top of it.

WL: That's wonderful.
Ye Olde Road Squasher?

AP: But the booklet inside... I said to Design Clinic that it would be nice if we use some railway type engravings. But unfortunately, most of the engravings they picked are to do with steam road rollers. You know, if you look at them they're like traction engines, these kind of roller type things for squashing roads.

WL: [laughing] Road squashing!

AP: Yeah, and you think, "Hang on a minute, this is wrong!" [and they respond] "Oh, sorry lads it's all printed now."

WL: It's close though.

AP: [chuckles] It'll do. Yeah, we still kind of suffer the clumsies occasionally.

Andy told me about some Big Express singles in December of 2002.
WL: What about "This World Over"?

AP: Oh, I love that one. I was so happy with that one. It came out just right. I think you probably know all the story behind that one though.

WL: I don't think I do.

AP: Well, you know the whole song is about wouldn't it be awful if you had to tell your children that there was a nuclear holocaust and there was a fantastic world, but we flattened it all.

WL: Drying odd numbered limbs. [lyrics from the song]
Andy's early sketch - click image to view in full.

AP: Yeah, exactly. And I started thinking, "What would nuclear destroyed cities look like?" Well, they'd all look like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The same mess. You might have the street plan left and it would just be endless piles of rubble. And, so I thought well, again, how to do the juxtaposition thing? How to do life goes on after a nuclear holocaust? Somebody might send a postcard from a city. You know, sort of San Francisco or I'm having a great time here in Rome, or whatever. You'd have a postcard fake blue sky, and the picture would always be the same. The Nagasaki or Hiroshima street plan, just rubble. And so the whole thing of postcards, you'd have greetings from New York, greetings from Rome. Wherever it was around the world it would always be the same nuclear wasteland.

WL: That's a great idea.

AP: And we attached them to the front of the sleeve and then on the back we had the big red button, which you only have to push once.

WL: If you want to achieve this.

AP: Yeah, press this. [laughing] Very naughty. Jeez, what's wrong with me today? The phone's just fallen on the floor. [laughter] Hang on. Christ. The demolition is freaking me out. It's too close to my house. [Andy was talking to me from his shed, watching a building behind his house being demolished]

WL: Must be the vibrations.

AP: The red button on the back is very naughty because it actually comes from London transport. It's a request stop button. If you're on a bus, and as a kid I used to see them everyday because I used to travel everywhere on busses, if you wanted to stop the bus, because you'd missed your stop or if you wanted it to stop at the next stop for you, you'd have this big red button on the wall of the bus inside and it would just say "press once." And I always thought this button was kind of sinister because it seemed like more of a powerful button than just sending a buzzer off to tell the driver to stop at the next stop. I always used to think "Wow, I wonder if that's like the nuclear war button. You know, and if I press this…" As a kid I was petrified to press this button. I thought, "Will it do more than just stop the driver? Will I be in terrible trouble?" [laughter] And that's where we got the photograph from. It's actually, I think London Transport supplied it. And it's a photograph from inside of one of their busses. It's that button you push to stop the bus. Ironically, had it been a nuclear button it really would have stopped the bus. It would have stopped the whole bus for everyone.

WL: That had to be a fairly expensive sleeve then. Was that one of your more expensive single sleeves?

AP: Yeah, I think it was. Because we had to get all the cards made up and printed up and then stuck to the front, and then a conventional card type sleeve. Yep, I'm sure it all helped to take us into a long period of still being in the red with Virgin.

WL: Tell me about the cover of "All You Pretty Girls"...

AP: Again, I did a lot of designs for that before we settled on the sailor's chest. The favorite before that was... I always liked single sleeves that did things you see. I liked them to have, like an inner bag that moved

against the outer. Or I liked to have flaps you could undo and look inside. As a kid I always liked those books that did loads of stuff. Like fold-out ones, or 3D standup books or that had little cutout people hidden in pockets inside, and stuff like that.

WL: My son [Hank] loves those.

AP: I did, I never got over them. I think they're fantastic.

WL: Books with the little flip-up flaps. He'll look at the same one forever.

AP: Yeah, in fact my kids had a few good ones. Did they have... Was it Robot, by Jan Pienkowski?

WL: I don't know that.

AP: Oh, it's a great one. If you can find that one get it. What age is he?

WL: He's seventeen months, so he's still young.

AP: Oh, right. Well, buy Robot by Jan Pienkowski. [spelling] J - a - n [pause] you spell the rest. [laughing] Make up the rest. But it's called

Click above to learn more...
Robot. And my kids loved that. I liked it too. You could really play with that one. But I liked books that did that as a kid myself. You know, with the chance to get to make single and LP sleeves I always wanted them to do something if I could arrange that. And with "All You Pretty Girls" I liked the idea of it being... First of all I thought of it being a photograph of just a sailor in bed, but with a ship's figure head. A female figure head in bed. Which was probably from me going to too many pubs late night and getting involved in rugby song type sing-alongs [singing] "It was on the good ship Venus - By God you should've seen us - The figure head was a nude in bed - Sucking a dead man's penis." [laughter] You know, that sort of thing. I scrapped that, it wasn't good enough. It didn't do enough. And then I had the idea that it should basically look like a single sleeve except around the hole it should be a porthole, and on the label of the disc you should have the sea printed and however you popped it in was an indication of how rough the sea was. [laughing] So you looked
through the porthole and if the sea was at thirty-three degrees that could be pretty rough. If it was at the correct angle there, with the little battleship in the distance it was a calm sea. And then I came up with the idea of it just being the sailor's chest with the woman tattooed on the chest. And it's obviously not, because no male model was willing to have his chest tattooed with an XTC mermaid and our name and stuff.

WL: I'm sure you could've found a fan willing to pose for the cover.

AP: [laughing] Maybe, actually. But we got a chest model, you know, one of those kind of things and it was just done in makeup. The little mermaid was just a makeup job. But I quite liked the idea of it having this tromp l'oel thing of the actual open sailor's jerkin on top was the outer sleeve.
Andy's sketches - click above to view in full.
On June 16, 2003, I spoke with Colin, who put in his two cents on the "This World Over" cover.

WL: Can you think of any of the art that you had some say in, or that you wanted to change?

CM: There was definitely my input on "This World Over", the "press once" bell on the back was my suggestion. That's actually a bus bell. But I thought it was a good motif, press once and only press once for annihilation.

WL: Andy told me a story, that when he was a child he used to see that bell and worry that it may have more power than to simply stop the bus. [laughing]

CM: We had a similar sort of childhood. I have to vouch that it was my idea. These things tend to get lost in the mists of time. [laughing]