XTC bassist Colin Moulding shares Want It Bad, his second solo single

Colin Moulding has put out Want It Bad (The Pep Talks And Playing Fields Of Old England), and the notable thing about it is how rarely he does this. Stereogum counts it as the second solo release of a career that began when XTC formed in 1972, which works out to roughly one every quarter century.

Moulding is not the frontman of XTC. Andy Partridge is, and that has shaped how the band's catalogue gets talked about, with Partridge treated as the writer and Moulding as the rhythm section. The split does not survive contact with the singles.

Two of the songs most people can name are his. Making Plans For Nigel and Generals And Majors were both written by Moulding, and both are among the handful of XTC tracks that reached beyond the band's core audience. He also sang lead on them, which is the part of his role that tends to get lost.

He has not been idle outside the band, but he has mostly stayed inside its orbit. The Dukes of Stratosphear, XTC's psychedelic alter ego, and TC&I, his duo with the XTC drummer Terry Chambers, are both extensions of the same group rather than departures from it.

That is what makes a solo release from him unusual enough to report. A bassist who has spent five decades writing hits for somebody else's band and has released almost nothing under his own name is making a different kind of statement than an artist putting out a single because the calendar says so.

The title is doing some of that work too. Want It Bad (The Pep Talks And Playing Fields Of Old England) is a long, deliberately English subtitle of the sort XTC built a career on, and it reads as a signal about what the song is rather than an attempt to travel well.

Stereogum gives no label and no follow-up plans, so whether this is a one-off or the start of something is open. It joins the autumn's other rock singles on the release calendar, and the name XTC has turned up on this site recently for an unrelated reason, in the New York club that took the name.