The Alternative Number Ones: XTC’s “Mayor Of Simpleton”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

I've never been a musician, but when I was in sixth grade, I decided that I wanted to learn to play bass. I took a grand total of two lessons, and then my plan hit a brick wall: My parents didn't want to buy me a bass. Those two lessons, then, involved zero actual bass playing. Instead, it was me talking to my teacher, a floppy-haired guy who was either in high school or college, about how I wanted to play bass. I told him that I wanted to play like Billy Gould from Faith No More, a band who will eventually appear in this column. I probably wouldn't have been able to articulate this at the time, but I liked the idea of making an instrument sound like concrete slabs falling on your head. My teacher said Billy Gould was fine, but if I really wanted to become a bass master, I had to pay close attention to Colin Moulding from XTC.

This piece of instruction made zero sense to me. I'd heard XTC -- they were getting a lot of American alternative-rock radio burn well into the '90s -- but the bass never stood out to me. Nothing stood out to me. I didn't get their music at all. It sounded like hyperactive elves bouncing around. It sounded like music for Smurfs. XTC were the type of band who would come on the alternative-rock station and cause me to immediately lunge for the dial so I could see if something cool was playing on the hard-rock station instead. (In Baltimore, those two stations were right next to each other, which was convenient for those of us who didn't have digital radios with preset stations.)