Making Plans For Nigel Generals And Majors Dear God XTC

Making Plans For Nigel Album: Drums & Wires (1979)
Generals And Majors Album: Black Sea (1980)
Dear God Album: Skylarking (1986)
by XTC

Making Plans For Nigel was XTC's breakthrough single. It was written by bassist Colin Moulding, who shared vocal and songwriting duties with guitarist Andy Partridge.

Moulding: "Partly biographical, this one. My dad prompted me to write it. He wanted a university future for me and was very overpowering in trying to persuade me to get my hair cut and stay on at school. It got to the point where he almost tried to drag me down the barber's shop by my hair. I know the song tells of a slightly different situation, but it all boils down to the same thing - parental domination."

Partridge: "Quite early on it had been decided that Making Plans For Nigel was going to be the single. We spent five times longer messing with that song than any of my tracks. At one point I was fuming because my songs were being ignored."
The Rembrandts, Primus and Robbie Williams all covered this.

Making Plans For Nigel was covered by Nouvelle Vague, a bossa group, and included on a chillout compilation album known as Breakfast Club: Milan. >>
Colin Moulding recalled to Uncut magazine March 2014: There were no Nigels at school. I wasn't bullied, but I think I had a natural empathy for people that were. 'Nigel' was my song for the bullied, I suppose."

He added: "British Steel was just a bit of naughtiness. What I hadn't bargained on was the union boss later ringing me up and asking me to join the cause! I had the devil of a job to convince him it was an organisation I chose at random."

Andy Partridge told Uncut: "The things that sound like sheets of metal being struck, that's a white noise patch on a monophonic Korg synth we had. We decided to do it with this industrial sound and glories, so it hinted that British Steel, which is where Nigel works."

The first 20,000 pressings of Making Plans For Nigel came with a bonus fold-out board game called Chutes And Ladders, built around Nigel's mundane and mapped-out life. There were two versions of the game board, one to be played by Nigel and the other to be played by his parents.

"Generals and Majors" was released as the first single from their 1980 album Black Sea. Moulding accordingly wrote the song as a satirical take on the phrase "oh, what a lovely war". The song charted in the UK single chart at No. 32 and No. 104 on the US singles chart, while reaching No. 28 on Billboard's Album Rock Tracks chart. It was the first XTC single to chart in the U.S., and it also had chart success in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The track was initially released as a double 7" single with a gatefold sleeve, limited to 15,000 copies. The additional record featured Moulding's "Smokeless Zone" and Partridge's "The Somnambulist".

Generals and Majors music video shows the band playing servers and a group of men in military uniforms; one of them is Richard Branson, driving a Go-kart and jumping on a bouncy castle. According to Andy Partridge, Branson appeared "because he's a complete publicity hog. He decided he was gonna turn up and keep suggesting that he be in the video. That is the worst video ever made by man."

Dear God was inspired by a series of books with the same title, which lead singer Andy Partridge saw as an exploitation of children. The song is essentially a letter to God asking about his existence.

The opening verse is sung by a friend's eight-year-old daughter, Jasmine Veillette, but was later lip-synched in the video by a young boy.

Originally released as a B-Side to the song "Grass," Dear God was not included with the original pressing of Skylarking. After DJ's across America picked-up on the song, Geffen Records decided to replace the track "Mermaid Smiles" with "Dear God."

XTC has not toured in more than 15 years. They have done only a handful of radio station promotions, but performed this live during the 1986 CASBY award show (A Canadian Music awards show).

Todd Rundgren produced the Skylarking album; he cites the experience as one of the most unpleasant of his career. According to Rundgren, Andy Partridge wanted to produce the album himself, but XTC's record company insisted on bringing in Todd. The process dragged on... and on. As Rundgren tells it, Partridge hated performing, so he would spend as much time in the studio as he could. Rundgren was a big XTC fan when he started the project, but says he couldn't listen to them after.

Dear God was used in the 2012 movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower, starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, and Ezra Miller.

Partridge would eventually become an atheist, but explained he was "wrestling with the tail end of my belief" when he wrote this. He said in an interview with SFGate: "As a kid, I was really... I got myself worked into such a sweat over religion. I remember that, about the age of eight or nine, one afternoon I had visions in the sky of clouds parting, and there was God on His throne, surrounded by angels, talking to me and grinning at me. I mean, if I lived in a Catholic community, I could've milked that and made myself a fortune! But, no, I think it happened because I was in such a hysterical state about religion as a child, and about the existence of God and that sort of thing. Religion is a source of a lot of problems, and if there is a God, he would hate Christianity, he would hate Islam, he would hate Buddhism, he would hate everything that's done in His name, because nobody behaves in a way that you're supposed to behave."