There is something almost cruel about how good Nonsuch is, given that almost nobody heard it properly the first time.
XTC had spent the better part of a decade becoming one of the most sophisticated pop bands on earth — Andy Partridge writing these dense, ornate songs about mortality and desire and English gardens, Colin Moulding quietly contributing the kind of melodies that lodge in your sternum — and by 1992 they were essentially invisible to radio. Virgin Records didn’t know what to do with them. Neither did most record buyers. So Nonsuch arrived, sold modestly, and the band went on a hiatus that turned out to be permanent.
What they built in Chipping Norton
The album was recorded at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire, engineered by Nick Davis — who would go on to mix Genesis and work extensively with Peter Gabriel, which tells you something about the sonic ambition in the room. Dave Gregory was still present on guitar, precise and restrained in the way that only truly confident players manage to be. The rhythm section was largely handled by session players; Prairie Prince, who had drummed for the Tubes, anchors a number of tracks with a looseness that keeps the whole ornate edifice from feeling too precious.
Partridge and Moulding produced alongside Gus Dudgeon, who had made Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and knew exactly what to do with a string arrangement. That pairing matters. Dudgeon brought a kind of lavish confidence to the studio — the belief that a pop song could hold twenty things at once and not collapse — and XTC needed someone who wouldn’t flinch.
The album itself
“The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” opens the record and it is, without apology, one of the best opening tracks of the decade. Partridge wrote it as a martyrdom myth — a good man arrives, speaks truth, gets crucified — and the production is enormous without being loud.
“Wrapped in Grey” is the other peak. Partridge asks the listener to protect their sense of wonder against a world that wants it gone, and the strings swell exactly when they should, and if you have had a difficult few years you should probably not listen to it alone at volume.
Moulding’s contributions — “The Disappointed,” “Crocodile” — are lighter and more oblique, which is exactly what the record needs. He has always been the band’s pressure-release valve, writing songs that feel effortless while Partridge writes songs that feel earned. Both modes are necessary. Together they cover the full temperature range of what it means to be a thoughtful, skeptical, still-somehow-hopeful person in middle age.
The word that keeps coming back to me is considered. Every arrangement here has been thought about. The harpsichord on “Humble Daisy.” The acoustic guitar work throughout. The way “Omnibus” sounds like a children’s song written by someone who has read too much Blake. None of it is accidental, and none of it sounds labored.
This is the last proper XTC studio album where they were still a functioning unit, still capable of the creative friction that makes records like this possible. The hiatus began not long after. Partridge and Moulding had a falling out serious enough that the band never really recovered its momentum. They made Apple Venus Volume 1 and Wasp Star in the late nineties, fine records both, but something had changed.
Nonsuch sits at the end of a particular kind of possibility.
Put it on after the house is quiet. Give it the full runtime.