"It's very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things"
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Partridge’s choice of “very schizophrenic” is doing the kind of work musicians often need language to do: dramatize a taste that refuses tidy genre boundaries. It’s an offhand, slightly provocative metaphor for a split appetite - the hooky immediacy of “straight pop” versus the heady disorientation of the avant-garde. He’s not confessing indecision so much as staking out a creative engine: contradiction as fuel.
Name-dropping Small Faces, the Stones, and the Kinks isn’t casual nostalgia; it’s a declaration of lineage. Those bands stand for punchy songwriting, attitude you can hum, and a British sensibility where craft hides inside swagger. By calling it “straight pop,” Partridge frames accessibility as a discipline, not a compromise. Then he pivots to the avant garde, a term that signals permission to break the rules those same heroes perfected. The subtext is that he doesn’t want to choose between the chorus and the experiment - he wants to smuggle one into the other.
In the context of late-70s/80s art-pop and post-punk cross-pollination, that stance reads less like eccentricity and more like strategy. Pop gives you an audience; the avant-garde gives you surprise, texture, and risk. Partridge is explaining how you make music that sounds catchy on first listen and restless on the fifth. The “schizophrenic” framing also hints at the tension artists feel between what sells and what fascinates - and his answer is: keep both voices in the room, make them sing together.
Name-dropping Small Faces, the Stones, and the Kinks isn’t casual nostalgia; it’s a declaration of lineage. Those bands stand for punchy songwriting, attitude you can hum, and a British sensibility where craft hides inside swagger. By calling it “straight pop,” Partridge frames accessibility as a discipline, not a compromise. Then he pivots to the avant garde, a term that signals permission to break the rules those same heroes perfected. The subtext is that he doesn’t want to choose between the chorus and the experiment - he wants to smuggle one into the other.
In the context of late-70s/80s art-pop and post-punk cross-pollination, that stance reads less like eccentricity and more like strategy. Pop gives you an audience; the avant-garde gives you surprise, texture, and risk. Partridge is explaining how you make music that sounds catchy on first listen and restless on the fifth. The “schizophrenic” framing also hints at the tension artists feel between what sells and what fascinates - and his answer is: keep both voices in the room, make them sing together.
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| Topic | Music |
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