Andy Partridge is discovering absence does make the heart grow fonder.
The leader of British pop group XTC has been spending the past few weeks in North America, talking to the press and meeting fans in order to promote his first new album in seven years, Apple Venus Vol. 1.
"It's very humbling," he says over the phone.
"Meeting these people in stores, they are so affectionate, like you're their long-lost uncle.
"Some of the things these people say cuts straight to the heart and I feel choked up sometimes. And then you have 500 of them telling you this and, by the end of the evening, you're totally, emotionally wrecked."
Something Partridge, 45, knows a thing or two about.
XTC hasn't been on holiday since the release of its last studio album, Nonsuch, in 1992. In a nutshell, Partridge went through an acrimonious divorce (the inspiration behind the spiteful new song Your Dictionary); fell in love; suffered through some health problems (a bad prostate, an inner-ear infection); went on a five-year "strike" in an effort to free XTC from a bad record deal; and dealt with the not-at-all-amiable departure of longtime guitarist Dave Gregory.
Making Apple Venus Vol. 1 was no picnic either.
Yet it arrived in stores last week and it's a sumptuous, wondrous work on which Partridge and his bandmate Colin Moulding, 43, drape their songs of love, domesticity and nature in elegant, finely detailed orchestral arrangements. No one is making music like this nowadays, though Brian Wilson would like to.
A song like River of Orchids, with its cyclical, classical arrangement, sounds like a watershed moment.
"That excited me immensely because it's not like any song structure we've ever done," Partridge says.
"It doesn't have any of the ingredients we normally associate with a pop song. Also the shape of it -- it's like a dream of two or three nursery rhymes colliding together. I was immensely excited by that."
Instead of wallowing in the personal and professional problems of the past seven years, Partridge says he was inspired by them -- which you tend to believe, considering the joyous feel of most of the new songs.
"I perversely seem to thrive under adversity," he says.
He's had to. Recording since 1977, XTC's commercial fortunes went into a tailspin in 1982 when Partridge announced the band would stop touring, a result of his debilitating stage fright. Though some albums have sold reasonably well since then -- notably 1986's Skylarking and 1989's Oranges and Lemons -- XTC's formidable canon of music has been one of pop's greatest secrets, thanks to the songwriting of Partridge and Moulding.
"You know, when I hear stuff that (Colin) brings up, I'm frequently inspired to grab a guitar and say, 'I gotta beat this!' It's a good sense of competition. And I secretly sense it's the same for him."
Partridge says he and his longtime bandmate have become "oddly a little more brotherly" since Gregory quit the band a year ago.
"He still knows I can be a bit of a bully and I think he can be a bit of a bass player at times. But we do seem a little more mutually supportive of each other. It's like we're in cahoots to get our art to the world."
Still, XTC is Andy's band and, if Moulding left, Partridge says he'd continue under the XTC banner (although he admits he has a fantasy of finding a drummer and "becoming a whole unit again").
Next up: An "idiotic" electric-guitar album, Apple Venus Vol. 2, that XTC hopes to release early next year.
