I worry sometimes about the state of music these days because of that dynamic. Everyone’s too busy mining some specific era, like “Here come the guys who sound like the Stooges and MC5” or “Here comes the skinny tie brigade.” They miss the chance to do something unique with their influences rather than just ape them.
I long for young kids to come up with some stuff that’s really going to upset me. But you know what, nobody does. They all want a little piece of the corporate cake, they’re all too stale, playing it safe and calm. I want a band who make their own instruments out of cardboard, play four-hour songs about urinating. I want stuff that’s really out there, because everything else has been done to death, and then redone, and then recycled and redone, and even recycling redone has been recycled and redone. Is it too much to ask for something new, for god’s sake? It sort of started in a big way in the ’90s, this sort of regurgitating; and now it seems like the circles are getting smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter.

To the point where kids now will say something like “back in the day” and they’re talking about two years ago. That’s not nostalgia. That’s just two years ago.
Most bands need like a five-year runup, or at least they used to, in order to do what they were going to do. So I do long for truly new music—not just something that sounds like it’s been teleported in from 1979. It’s no good me doing it, because it’s just going to be, “Oh, it’s that crazy old freak, doing something a bit wacky so everyone will look at him and he can kickstart his career again.” I want some young kids who’ve never done it before to pull some stuff out the bag that’s just never been heard before. But you know what, a lot of it is down to the choice of instruments. Take up instruments you don’t hear anymore. Let’s hear four kids playing xylophones through fuzzboxes! Or make up your own! Do stuff where we’re playing tea chests with gravel in them—gah! It really frustrates me and gets me to the point where I can’t talk about it anymore without my brain knotting up in anger. [Laughs]

Let’s switch topics, then. I hear you are an avid collector and builder of toy soldiers.
You’re right, I’m quite obsessed with them, actually. I’ve been asked this before, and in the past I’ve said, “I saw them in a junk shop in 1980, and they were nice and so I bought them, and then the floodgates opened.” But I’ve since gone back and rationalized and had to think about this. I now think that it’s because back when I was a kid, all my toys were constantly being thrown away. Because it made the place look messy. I had one of those obsessive/compulsive mothers. “Mum, where did my toys go?” “Oh, I gave them to the kids next door or threw them out.” Every few weeks, this would happen. So I honestly think I started collecting in the early ’80s to kind of rebuild that, but then I got into the folk-art side of it. I dislike toy soldiers that look like models—anything on a plinth, I’m not interested in. I don’t like them if they’re mass produced, or factory painted. I’m not interested in massive acts of nationwide violence. Who needs that, you know?

It makes me think that there must be some parallel between the miniaturized perfection of a toy soldier and the granular, almost miniaturized way in which you’ve written songs over the years.
I guess so. Music is more akin to something like architecture. The nearest I can get it to anything in the toy world is a mechanical toy. My favorite mechanical toy as a child in the ’50s was called the Honeymoon Express. It’s a little round metal dish with a countryside printed on it, a couple of tunnels and a little train that goes around the little dish. And in the center is a stick with a little airplane following it—I’ve been looking for these on the Internet. Of course, they’re now hundreds and hundreds of dollars and don’t always come with the plane, either. But mechanical toys are the best analogy for songwriting I can think of. You get these little surprising and delightful, hopefully, miniature worlds that have an element of joy inside them. And hopefully you can listen to them over and over—just like I watched the Honeymoon Express go round and round for hours—and see something different each time it came around.

The song of yours I love the best and that has that sense of surprise in it is “Dear God.” It feels very prescient given what’s happening in the world right now.
I agree, and especially like the idea that it was a paradox. You’re writing a letter or addressing somebody you don’t believe in, but you’re still conversing with them very passionately and trying to find out what sort of individual this non-existent thing is. What their personality is like, why they’d do that, why this non-existent entity would be so cruel and stupid. It got me into a lot of shit, that song. The worst hate mail I’ve ever had, by a long shot.

How ironic that one of John Lennon’s most loved songs, “Imagine,” is essentially saying the same things in slightly different language.
Oh yeah, he says, “Wouldn’t it be great if we all woke up and thought about this religion crap for a bit?” No heaven, no hell, only us.

You get hate mail, and Lennon gets canonized. What a deal.
Well, he got the bullets as well, you have to remember that. I guess he deserves the canonization. I’m gonna get caramelized—it’s a much nicer sensation, I think. [Laughs] I think religion is the way very cynical, power-hungry people manipulate the softer, gentler, “questing” side of human beings. If I was going to start a religion, I wouldn’t build a church, I wouldn’t want you to send me your money, I certainly wouldn’t want you to idolize me or anybody else. I’d give you very few rules and I wouldn’t pretend they came from something up in outer space, or written on the back of golden Formica tables in the bowling alley of foreverness. It’s just obviously people who wish to have power over poor, old human beings who are daft enough to think that they must be special, therefore somebody must have made them special. It’s all vanity: You’re not special, you’re just a human being, another mammal on the planet, enjoy your life, help other people to enjoy theirs, have a nice death. Drive through, please.

I’m sure you’ve been asked about the potential for an XTC reunion now that you and Barry are making music again, and you and Dave are on friendly terms. Would you be willing to at least come together to make records again?
Too many things against it, not the least of which is my non-desire to be on stage. I’m not interested in that. I just don’t like seeing old pop stars. I hate it! 99.9 percent of them reach a certain age—30, let’s say—and then they become shit. I don’t know why that is. You know what, some of it is because they got what they wanted quickly, and then all their drive goes. Or that they never were all that great to begin with, it was all hype and then people wake up and say, “Hey, this was all hype, they were always crap!” Or that the trend or fashion they were associated with goes off the boil and everyone thinks they’re stale because they’re forever locked in that fad or fashion in the eyes of the public.

Or perhaps worst of all, they start writing about the life of a pop star, which is the most egregious, boring way to kill your career.
Oh, that’s the worst of the worst of the worst, you’re right. I have to be honest, the only reason we had such a long career, maybe 30 years, is through failure. There is no better motivator than failure! You think you’re doing the world’s best music and no bastard’s buying it, it makes you more righteous and angry: “The next one’s gonna be even better!” So you do that and still nobody buys it, and you hear, “Oh they just come from that stupid town of Swindon, they’re not cool, their trousers are awful, their haircuts are dreadful! One of them wears glasses, ha ha ha ha!” And then you’re, “OK, this one will be even better!” And that’s what we did. The more we failed, the better I wanted to get. I’ll tell you, failure was fantastic to us: more bands should try it! [Laughs] You know, if bands get what they want straight away, some funny things happen. With their brand of undeveloped shit hitting right off, as a survival instinct, you start righteously thinking, “Hey, because our first album of undeveloped shit sold well, let’s stay in that place for the next five to 10 years, peddling the same juvenile, undeveloped shit!” That one will kill you off straight away.

Or the situation where fans latch onto the undeveloped shit and the band wakes up one day and says, “Hey, that’s crap, what about this?” And the fans can’t stand it.
Or they do their jazz odyssey, which I think me, Barry and Martyn Barker are doing now. “We hope you like our new direction!” [Laughs] No, failure’s been so good to me. Like the Duracell Bunny—it’s been the best gold-top battery you could’ve shoved up my ass to keep me running, because you really want to get so good. There are plenty who learned the failure lesson in a different way: David Bowie said that after Let’s Dance, which had been number one in every country for weeks on end, he felt that was the peak of the mountain and that it was all downhill from there. And you know what? He was right!

You’ve certainly written about the world being football-shaped. Have you followed the fortunes of your local football club, Swindon?
I’ve never been to a football match in my life, actually.

I read somewhere that Swindon fought bravely in the FA Cup recently but lost in the third round.
Oh, we’re way down there. Swindon Town, there’s the old joke, they put 11 traffic cones on the field for practice, and the cones won, four-nil. [Laughs] All those gags apply to Swindon.

So what kind of crazy, “rock-star life” question should I have asked you? Was the groupie sex all it was tarted up to be?
I wasn’t a groupie sex man, actually. I was very, very well behaved. Barry Andrews and Colin (Moulding) partook in some pretty heavy-duty stuff. But Colin’s a bass player, what do you expect? [Laughs] There was all sorts of talk of girls being accommodating to most of the band, roadies, lighting men all at once, and, “Oh dear, she’s had her period, it’s all over the walls. Oh dear.”

Or the Led Zeppelin shark story or some such.
Right, although the nearest I could get was my rubber shark story. That was my notorious way of not being unfaithful when I was on tour.

Come again?
It was the best blow job I ever had! I bought it at a Woolworth’s in Melbourne, Australia, on tour. I was thinking, “How am I gonna be good?” I had an afternoon off, wandering around, and was amazed that they had a load of stuff in this store that you just couldn’t get anymore, like a time capsule or something. I saw this soft, rubber shark about a foot long and I thought, “Wow, if I stuck my dick in that, it’d feel really good, and I could be faithful and not tempted by all these women now that I’m married!” So I thought, “I’m gonna buy this rubber shark and fuck it!” I bought the shark, and it felt great. You’d get some suction going, a vacuum effect, just terrific. I used to wedge it under a cushion or a chair and I’d fuck this rubber shark. My suitcase was full at the time, so I had to buy an extra box to take it around. I had this blue fiber-board suitcase, and I’d keep this rubber shark in there. I remember going through New Zealand with it and the customs agent asking me, “What’s in the case, mate?” And I said, “Well, it’s a rubber shark.” “Wise guy.” Then he’d open it up and it’d be a rubber shark! It was great.

Did it have a name, this shark?
Not really a name. Sharky. [Laughs] Although after a while that stopped because then I’d think of Feargal Sharkey, and the last thing—literally—you want to be thinking of when you’re blowing your wad is the lead singer of the Undertones.

Did you ever write a song about the shark?
Never did, although I guess I should slip him in somewhere there, no pun intended. [Laughs] I once went for a dinner in Hamburg with Julian Lennon; he wanted to write some songs with me. We got rather drunk and ended up talking about masturbation technique. And he was trying to top me, and while I’m not going to tell you his stories, he couldn’t top me. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a front-loading washing machine full of warm liver, or something.

Well, now there’ll be a run on rubber sharks on eBay.
Well, I did go and try to look for one, but they make them out of denser, harder rubber now, with a kind of squeaker in the mouth. And that just won’t do now, will it?