One year a pastoral, modest-sounding album, the next a bright, fast, studio-packed record: XTC never made the same move twice. The Big Express, the seventh studio album by the English group XTC, arrived on 15 October 1984 as a deliberate break from the gentler Mummer of 1983.
Swindon, railways and industrial pop
The record was conceived as an autobiographical concept project inspired by the band's home town of Swindon and its railway works, Swindon Works. Andy Partridge described the idea as "industrial pop" and wanted the album to sound like a riveted, slightly rusty Victorian machine. The title itself had a double meaning, pointing both to express trains and to artistic self-expression.
Andy Partridge described the idea as "industrial pop" and wanted the album to sound like a riveted, slightly rusty Victorian machine.
That machine was expensive to build. The recording budget passed 75,000 pounds, and for the first time the group used a LinnDrum, a euphonium and an E-mu Emulator. A large part of the album leans on the Mellotron, the tape-sampler keyboard popular in the 1960s and 1970s, while reverse echo and phasing effects added to the dense arrangements.
Sea shanties and bucket drums
The songs turned ordinary Swindon life into strange, vivid theatre. "All You Pretty Girls" was imagined as a sea shanty about women, with almost every drum part played on a LinnDrum and the choir sounds taken from a Mellotron sample played through a speaker inside a fire bucket. On "Shake You Donkey Up", a hoedown about a jilted lover, session drummer Pete Phipps played an improvised kit made of buckets and trays.
Not everything on the album was playful. "This World Over" was written as a protest against the use of nuclear weapons, shaped by Ronald Reagan's speeches, and Virgin Records opposed the inclusion of "Reign of Blows", possibly because the lyric was read as anti-American. The label's doubts did not stop the band from keeping the song on the record.
Legal trouble and a departing producer
The sessions themselves were troubled. About a month after recording began, the group learned that former manager Ian Reid owed several hundred thousand pounds in VAT, beginning a legal process that lasted five years. Producer David Lord left the project a month before the mix was finished, and Phil Thornalley completed the album at RAK Studio Two. Among the working titles were Coalface, Head of Steam and Bastard Son of Hard Blue Rayhead.
When The Big Express came out, the response was muted. The lead single "All You Pretty Girls" stopped at 55 in the UK Singles Chart, the album reached 38 on the UK Albums Chart and 178 on the US Billboard 200, and it sold worse than Mummer. Some reviewers felt the music suffered from overproduction and a lack of dynamics; Colin Moulding called it "the LinnDrum album" and said the group stopped playing together because of the reliance on overdubs, while Dave Gregory remembered spending a whole day searching for the right hi-hat sound and believed the album lost energy as a result.
Partridge later joked that parts of the record were the only time the group gave in to stereotypical 1980s production. Yet the psychedelic influences kept leaking through the Mellotron, the phasing and the reverse effects, and a song written at the time, "Your Gold Dress", pointed toward the 1960s-style side project Dukes of Stratosphear. In later years The Big Express was called "hugely influential", and the Japanese rock group Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her took its name from a song on the album.