Coat of Many Cupboards

And the idea was that most people think that we're dull. So I insisted on this black and white gray front, then with a little gold key you enter through the heart. And at the heart of the band are extremely colorful things, I.E. the music.

WL: How about Coat of Many Cupboards?

AP: Coat of Many Cupboards. Again, what the hell do you do with a bunch of non-related songs? Really the only thread running through them is that we're making a noise on them all. But they're not an album as a whole, or it's not a body of work from the same time or intended to flow together. For a time it was going to be called All the Colors of the Plectrum, but it wasn't quite right so I went for Coat of Many Cupboards. I thought that would suggest things from more disparate sources.

WL: That sort of evolved into your site a little bit, didn't it? [Idea]

AP: Kind of, yeah. In fact, it was the reject title All the Colors of the

Plectrum that gave me the idea for using multicolored plectrums on the Idea site.

WL: That's neat.

AP: A lot of people have got a concept that we're rather dull and boring, which we are [laughter] so I quite fancied a black and white cover. In fact, we were going to have it a black and white graphic cover for a while and it was going to be lifted from a really archaic old shirt advertisement. With just black and white stripes with hands and arms going across cutting, making all the black and white stripes interact. Which would also hark back to White Music and bring the whole Virgin career to full cycle. But we thought that that didn't tie in with the idea of a coat of cupboards, it was more like a shirt of many

stripes or something. And it didn't quite hang together. By this time I was working with Andrew Swainson [Cactus Design], who we still work with today.

WL: Yes, I've spoken with Andrew many times.

AP: He's a very nice fellow. [quickly] Very nice man - very nice man. So I said, "Can we actually, physically, photographically/computer-ishly make a coat of many cupboards?" And we tried lots of combinations of cupboards. You know, regular shaped cupboards. And a few cupboards, six cupboards, nine cupboards. Many cupboards of all different sizes. And that one we stuck with, lots of different sorts. And he had to sort of build that up in a

computer from pieces of photographs and stuff.

WL: Well, that's neat.

AP: And I think it was his hand on the original, but I said his hands were too fat and sausagey. [laughter] So he photographed his friend's hands, which were slightly less sausagey.

WL: Coat of Many Sausage Hands.

AP: [laughing] Coat of Many Sausages, yeah. And the idea was that most people think that we're dull. So I insisted on this black and white gray front, then with a little gold key you enter through the heart. And at the heart of the band are extremely colorful things, I.E. the music.

WL: That's great.

AP: So that's what you get when you open up the heart with the little gold key, inside are all the

colors you could require. It was very disturbing going through the Virgin photo archives to compile the booklet inside.

WL: [laughing] Why so?

AP: Well, the photo archives were actually two bloody great big cardboard boxes just full of endless sheets of negatives and contacts. And it was stuff that, you know, you haven't seen some of it for twenty years.

WL: [laughing] Photo archives sounds a little bit more sexy than two cardboard boxes.

AP: [laughing] Exactly!

WL: [in very droll tone] We're going to the photo archives.

AP: The Virgin - Oh shit, I've just spilled my coffee. Oh, damn it! I slipped and it's gone. Aw, fuck it! It's all over my trousers. What a senile old fool. Shall I call for a nurse? [hysterical laughter] Can I ring you straight back?

WL: [laughing] Yeah, sure.

AP: Okay, I've got to mop this all up. [upon calling me back] I'm out in my little studio shed. And I'm about two or three feet away from the demolition noises, so if you hear any frightening rumbles. You can hear the reversing trucks beeping and stuff. [a building behind Andy's garden was being demolished]

WL: Maybe you can work that into a song.

AP: And I have a wet crotch. [laughing] You really want to know that, don't you?

WL: [laughing] That's a bit more than I wanted to know.

AP: Yeah, I have a soaking wet coffee flavored crotch.

WL: The nurse help you with that?

AP: She just poured more on it. [in feminine tone] We might as well dye 'em a uniform color now Mr. Partridge.