Terry Chambers, founding drummer of the cult British rock band XTC, says that his XTC tribute band has the full blessing of his former bandmates. In fact, frontman and co-songwriter Andy Partridge named the new group.
“Andy said, ‘I don’t think you can call it anything but EXTC,” Chambers says. “He’s a clever guy. Obviously it’s a work on the original name but it’s not misleading. Everyone knows that it’s just me from the original group.”
EXTC will do something that the original XTC never did – perform in Virginia – as the trio is slated to hit the Tin Pan on May 22, one night after a gig in Virginia Beach at Elevation 27. “Forty odd years ago, we never ever played Virginia Beach or Richmond in Virginia. We played Washington, DC but that was as close as we got.”
In its revolving set list, EXTC performs songs from the entirety of XTC’s chameleonic career from the nervous new wave of “Making Plans For Nigel” to the power pop of “Senses Working Overdrive” to the pastoral psychedelia of “Grass,” many of them songs that fans have never heard in a live setting and that Chambers didn’t actually play on in the studio.
“We do sort of a power trio version of these songs and we touch most of the albums,” he says. “And that’s in fairness to the fans. Everybody who attends will have their preferred favorite album. Some people think ‘Orange and Lemons’ is the best album XTC ever did, ‘Skylarking’ another, and some of them think ‘Black Sea’ is the best. All of these people coming to the show, we want to give them as much of a taste of the catalog as we can.”
“XTC was one of the smartest – and catchiest – British pop bands to emerge from the punk and new wave explosion of the late ’70s,” wrote Stephen Thomas Erleine in the AllMusic Guide. “While popular success eluded them in both Britain and America, the group developed a devoted cult following in both countries that remains loyal decades after their first records.” As the band’s biographer Neville Farmer has written, the group’s music has been hugely influential on units as varied as They Might Be Giants, The Stone Roses and The Posies, while the name “XTC” inspired the monikers of hugely popular groups like U2, R.E.M. and INXS.
Chambers’ booming drum sound, achieved with producer/engineer Hugh Padgham, was later appropriated by Phil Collins and others to become an ’80s rock fixture. “That monster was created by Hugh and that particular room we recorded the drums in, the stone room in Townhouse studio. Prior to that, it was carpeted, very dead rooms with padded areas, Hugh really took the shackles off of all that. But you could put any drum kit in that room and it would sound like that.”
XTC famously stopped playing live in 1982 during a tour promoting their just-released album, “English Settlement,” when Partridge suffered a nervous breakdown onstage. They continued as a studio band, eventually scoring popular singles such as “Dear God” and “Mayor of Simpleton,” but that’s when Chambers took his leave and left the stool for studio drummers. Tellingly, the band never replaced him.
“XTC decided to no longer play live, and I thought that was one of the most important aspects of being in a band,” he says. “So I moved to Australia where I married my then-wife, who was Australian. She didn’t particularly like the English climate.” He drummed for a few Aussie bands “but it just wasn’t the same as playing with XTC.”
When Chambers divorced his wife, he moved back to the band’s hometown of Swindon. Seven years ago, he re-connected with XTC bassist Colin Moulding. “Colin was doing a solo project at the time that turned out to be the group, TC&I. We put a band together and did six live shows, and when it was over Colin decided that he didn’t particularly want to get back on the ol’ rock ‘n’ roll live gig merry-go-round again. It was all of his material really, except for ‘Statue of Library,’ which was a bit of a tip of the hand to Andy Partridge. Colin wanted to air his songs and hear what they sounded like in the live environment. Once his appetite was satisfied, he decided that he didn’t want to do it anymore.”
Once again, Chambers was left feeling unfulfilled. “I thought we’d put a lot of work into it, and I wanted to keep this project going in the live sense. It was blood in the water to me, playing live. I wanted more of it.” Joining the drummer in today’s EXTC are two stage veterans: guitarist Steve Hampton, who has previously played with Joe Jackson and the Vapors, and bassist Terry Lines, who has assumed the role of his idol Paul McCartney in several popular Beatles tribute bands.
The hardest part of the return, the 68-year-old drummer says, was getting back into shape to play this often demanding music (Chambers is well known for his thunderous, physical style of backbeat). “I spent a lot of time running and getting physically fit because it had been a long period of time and I hadn’t played live at all. Age never helps anything but wine,” he laughs. “I think, in general, my technique has changed slightly with my age. I’m not bashing and crashing quite so much.”
When he unveiled EXTC four years ago, touring the U.S. and U.K., Chambers found that audiences were hungry for the tribute band’s reenactments. “It’s the original fans and their children,” he says of the crowds. “The audience is mostly people from 45-70, but there are a lot of young people too, who just enjoy the music. I talked to a fan at our last gig who said he never had the chance to see XTC because he was 12 when we stopped performing live. I meet people like that all the time.”
In his youth, growing up in Swindon, Chambers’ preferred instrument was originally the piano, not the drums. “For me, it was the heavy metal music of the time … bands like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath from 1969, 1970, when I was 14 or 15. That’s when I thought, ‘this looks like a great way of living.’ And that’s what turned me on to it. I used to go to a local youth club and there were a couple of guys trying to put a group together, just a guitar player and a drummer. I was fascinated watching them. And then I saw this beautiful drum kit in a shop window. And that’s what sort of triggered me, really.”
Although he wasn’t quick to admit it in the original days of punk, which was supposed to be the scrappy antidote to corporate rock, Chambers’ main influences were stadium drummers like John Bonham of Led Zeppelin and Bill Bruford of Yes. “I tried to steal as much as I could from all of them and it’s what has made me who I am today,” he says, adding that he’s never had a music lesson; he learned from listening to records. “The only person in XTC who ever had a lesson, other than [guitarist] Dave Gregory, who was well trained because his mother was a music teacher, was Colin, who had a few lessons with a local bass player.” He laughs. “He apparently just wanted Colin to play ‘Bill Bailey’ over and over.”
Chambers suggests that this lack of training may be why XTC’s music has lasted for so long and seems so fresh today. While undeniably catchy, the group’s songs – from “Making Plans for Nigel” to “River of Orchids” – simply don’t sound like anyone else’s, utilizing strange chords, odd rhythms, offbeat arrangements. “It may be what makes Partridge’s songwriting so interesting. Musically correct or not, he always puts it in a different spin.”
Because those classic XTC songs can often seem “wrong,” from a technical standpoint, do his new bandmates ever have difficulty learning and playing them? “Wrong is the right word,” Chambers laughs. “It happens every day. They moan and complain and physically I can see them slouch onstage looking at the set list saying, ‘oh no, not this one.'”
EXTC: Terry Chambers & Friends will perform at the Tin Pan on May 22. 8 p.m. $27.50. https://tinpanrva.com
