All part of decency's jigsaw

Some thoughts on "Respectable Street," XTC's masterpiece from 1980

There are some dated moments within XTC’s terrific run of albums in the 1980s (Black Sea, English Settlement, Mummer, The Big Express, Skylarking, and Oranges & Lemons) where the studio-finessed, contrived productions can sound fussily splashy. But great XTC songs transcend the origins of their composition, to paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates. Songs like “Generals and Majors,” “Senses Working Overtime,” “Love on a Farmboy's Wages,” “Earn Enough for Us,” “Dear God,” and “Mayor of Simpleton” have, to my ears, outlived their era with their tunefulness, timeless preoccupations, and pop urgency.

“Respectable Street” is one such song, and is among Andy Partridge’s greatest, a witty, bitingly satirical take on middle-class suburbia, as relevant now as it was over forty years ago. A “hinge album,” the vibrant Black Sea has one ear cocked to the band’s early, nervy-jerky sound, and one ear to the future, where more considered and intricate arrangements would become the band’s norm. “Respectable Street” was its lead track and was also released as a single, the fourth off the album, with a new mix, in 1981. The band’s label, Virgin Records, loved the tune, but blanched at the lyrics, with their references to abortions, contraception, and Sony Entertainment Center (the latter of which, once broadcasted over the air, would trespass on trademarking). In the event, Partridge rewrote the song for the single release, defanging the lyrics for BBC consumption.

No matter, the song still took delicious, chewy bites out of middle-class hypocrisy. In a wonderful series of conversations with Todd Bernhardt in the late-aughts, Partridge discussed dozens of his songs in great detail. “Respectable Street” was written, like so many of Partridge’s songs during this era, in a Victorian house where he was living in Swindon, Wiltshire, a couple hours west of London. “‘Respectable Street’ is actually a street in Swindon called Bowood Road that was diagonally opposite where I lived when I wrote the song,” Partridge revealed. “I used to stand in the front room of the two-room flat where we lived at the time, which had a lot of heavy traffic going by.” (A clearly inspired, and inspiring, perch, as Partridge composed the sublime “Senses Working Overtime” in the same spot.) “And at the time, while I was living in these really wretched little flats, the sort of normal middle-aged life in those sort of houses seemed a thousand miles, a million miles away from me.”

Partridge, then in his mid-20s, felt moodily distant from such complacency, yet unnerved by its nearness to him. Agitated, he reached for his guitar and sketched out the angry chords that would open the song. “I’d found a nice, rather kind of jagged chord change—the opening B, and then the really strange-sounding G-flat 7,” he remarked. And in too-close proximity, further inspiration would arrive. “I was working on this song, and I was kind of annoyed that the woman who lived next door to us [he and his then-wife Marianne Wyborn] at the time was always banging on the wall if I had my stereo system on, just even barely audible.”

It really annoyed me, because we weren’t a noisy pair. We called this woman “Mrs. Washing,” because she washed everything. You know, you’d look out on the clothes line, and you’d see shirts, and then you’d see mats, and then you’d see shoes. We said, “One of these days it's going to be small pieces of furniture, or the dog.”

Hypocritical blandness out his window, pesky annoyances next door, a songwriter’s urgency of expression inside of him: the song’s landscape and its local characters swiftly fell into place. “The song grew out of the annoyance with her, and the million-miles-away respectable people living on Bowood Street opposite, and the hypocrisy, the veneer of respectability, of the ‘curtain twitchers,’ as they’re called. They get behind the lace curtains and have a look—down their nose—at what’s going on…. and people were decidedly looking down their nose at me. [jive voice] I was poor, man!”

Lennon-esque in its bitter humor, Davies-esque in its narrative details, “Respectable Street” allows Partridge to carry the torch forward in the great English pop tradition of class analysis. The opening chords’ graphic irritability is joined three and a-half bars in by a bubbling bass line from Colin Moulding, witty counterpoint from guitarist Dave Gregory, and an emphatic, prowling tom-and-snare groove from drummer Terry Chambers, giving Partridge and his acidic observations the propulsion he needs to head out and down the street. The sneering chorus—

Heard the neighbor slam his car door
Don’t he realize this is Respectable Street?
What d’you think he bought that car for?
‘Cause he realized this is Respectable Street

—presents the matter at hand, the singer howling, his disgust palpable. Classic Partridgian verses lay waste to local frauds and their duplicitous behavior—

Now they talk about abortions
In cosmopolitan proportions to their daughters
As they speak of contraception
And immaculate receptions on their portable
Sony Entertainment Centers

I love XTC in ironic-acerbic mode: the way the melody sweetens to suburban saccharine capped with vintage Beach Boys’ “oooh-wee-oohs,” the way Moulding’s eighth-note lines keep things peppy and on the up-and-up, and how Partridge’s internal rhyming, and punch-line delivery of “portable Sony Entertainment Centers,” inject astute humor, sending everything up. The second verse is just as brilliantly observed, and just as funny: the rhymes of “diseases,” “which sex position pleases best her old man,” the Avon lady filling in “the creases” if she can only manage to “squeeze in” past the caravans cluttering nearly every front garden on the block. The whole milieu’s savaged with hilarious, cutting, sing-song keenness. Meanwhile, the band’s cooking.

August 2023: looking east and west on Bowood Road, Swindon, England. “Don’t he realize this is Respectable Street?” (Via Google Maps)

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“Respectable Street,” of course, technically begins with a prelude. Partridge explained to Bernhardt: “I decided it should have kind of a Noel Coward-esque intro. [veddy posh voice] You know, short of me actually singing it like Noel! [laughs] I can’t remember what they used to call it—it had a name in old musical terms—I think it was known as the verse. Where it was the actual funny little bit of the song that is sort of the preamble to the real song. It was very common at one time.”

Partridge, a consummate songwriter, is always looking for amusing angles on and inventive ways to enliven his subject matter. Here he warbles over a upright piano, as scratchy-record noises sound behind him—Partridge and producer Steve Lillywhite were going for a “messed up, telephonic-sounding, old-78” vibe—his voice filtered as if it’s arriving from decades earlier:

It’s in the order of their hedgerows
It’s in the way their curtains open and close
It’s in the look they give you down their nose
All part of decency’s jigsaw, I suppose

The passage is effectively droll: the song is happening both “now” (at the onset of the Thatcher Era) and “then”—a timeless cycle of starchy, high-minded judgement and bigotry enacted in a three and a-half minute pop song. When Partridge later repurposes the introduction for the bridge (“a trick I’ve used a lot since,” he acknowledged), a transparency of sorts is laid on top. That “Noel Coward-esque” voice is now Andy’s voice, as he looks down his nose at those who look down their noses.

Great stuff. Yet I take issue with a comment Partridge made to Bernhardt. “Once I wrote [“Respectable Street”],” he remarked, “I remember thinking, ‘This is kind of English. It couldn’t be any other nation I’m talking about here’.” I was surprised when I read this, and I beg to differ: what accounts for my intense identification with “Respectable Street” when I heard it deep in the American suburbs in my late-teens? Partridge claimed affection for the opening “because of its Englishness,” later reiterating that the bit was a “good way of easing people into the Englishness of [the song].”

Perhaps. And of course Partridge was filtering his disdain for the middle class through the very particular view from his window on Bowood Road, Swindon, Wiltshire. But I looked out my bedroom window on Amherst Avenue, Wheaton, Maryland and I saw the same things. I attended Our Lady of Good Counsel high school, which drew a large proportion of students from Potomac and Bethesda, Maryland, highly wealthy and privileged communities; I felt keenly the distinctions between the homes and affluence of some of my friends and my family’s middle class trappings. And I sometimes felt, or anyway imagined, their mild snobbishness. And the images in the third verse of folks looking “fetching” at Sunday church, while the night before we see a poor soul “retching over our fence”—was Partridge undercover in Wheaton? That same (awfully) graphic memory is etched in my recollection of adolescence. I could name the church, and I could ID my older brother’s friend whom I saw vomiting from his bedroom window along an otherwise serene Amherst Avenue, but what would be the point? We’re all silhouettes.

Were I ever to be fortunate enough to grab a pint or three with Partridge, I’d love to bond with him over all of this, the way a pop song can transcend its origins, the way one man’s road is another man’s avenue.